Lightning AI’s AI Hub shows AI app marketplaces are the next enterprise game-changer

The last mile problem in generative AI refers to the ability of companies to implement applications on production.

For many companies, the answer is to market places, which can browse companies and developers to applications related to the Apple App Store and can download new programs on their phones. Providers such as AWS -rock And Hug Have started building market places and offer ready-made applications from partners that can integrate customers into their stack.

The newest participant in the AI ​​Marketplace space is Lightning aiThe company that manages the open-source Python Library Pytorch Lightning. Nowadays the AI ​​Hub, a marketplace for both AI models and applications. However, what distinguishes the distinguishing from other market places is that Lightning states to enable developers to actually do implementation – and also enjoy business security.

Lightning AI CEO William Falcon told Venturebeat in an exclusive interview that enables AI Hub companies to find the application they want without all the other platforms needed to perform it.

Falcon noted that previously companies had to find hardware providers that could perform and host models. The next step was to find a way to implement that model and make something useful out of it.

“But then you need those models to do something, and that is where the last mile problem is, that is the end of companies use, and most of them from independent companies offering an app,” he said. “They bought all these tools, did a number of experiments and then could not use it or really bring them to that last mile.”

Falcon added that AI Hub “removes the need for specialized platforms”. Enterprises can find any type of AI application that they want in one place. This helps organizations in the prototype phase to move faster to use.

Ai Hub as App Store

AI HUB organizes more than 50 APIs in the launch, with a mix of foundation models and applications. It organizes many popular models, including Deepseek-R1.

Enterprises have access to AI Hub and find applications built using the Lightning flagship product, Lightning AI Studio or by other developers. They can then perform this on the cloud or private tenter prize cloud environments of Lightning. Organizations can link their AWS or Google Cloud authorities and store data in the virtual private cloud of their company. Falcon said that this offers the control of companies about the implementation.

The AI ​​Hub from Lightning AI can work with most cloud providers. Although the open-source models host, Falcon said that the apps that are not the hosts are open source, which means that users cannot change their code.

Lightning AI offers AI HUB free for current customers, with 15 monthly credits to perform applications. It offers various price strokes for companies that want to connect to their private clouds.

Falcon said that AI Hub accelerates the use of AI applications within an organization, because everything they need is on the platform.

“In the end, as a platform, what we offer companies is iteration and speed,” he said. “I will give you an example: we have a large Fortune 100 Pharma Company customer customer. Within a few days from when Deepseek came out, they already had it in production. “

More AI marketplaces

The AI ​​Hub from Lightning AI is not the first AI app market market, but the launch indicates how quickly the Enterprise AI space has been moved since the launch of Chatgpt, which has driven a generative AI -boom in Enterprise Technology. API marketplaces still offer tons of SaaS applications to companies, and more companies are starting to offer access to AI-driven applications such as Apple’s App Store to implement them more easily.

AWS, for example, announced the AWS Borock Marketplace For specialized foundation models and Buy with AWS – contains those services of AWS partners – during Re: inventing in December.

Hugging on his part has been launched SpacesAn AI app directory with which developers can search for and try out new apps for general availability. Hug Face CEO Clement Delangue Posted on X Those spaces “has quietly become the largest AI App Store, with 400,000 total apps, 2,000 new apps made every day, visited 2.5 meters times a week!” He added that the launch of spaces shows how “the future of AI will be distributed.”

Even the GPT store of OpenAi in Chatgpt functions technically as a marketplace for people to try out custom GPTs.

This is HUGE

The AI App store is here

Ask anything you want to do with AI

With ~400k Apps, this is the best place to find the AI apps you need

developers can build apps, users can try them out and find new apps with AI search pic.twitter.com/oDKDRTZvQP

— AK (@_akhaliq) February 4, 2025

Falcon noted that most technologies are offered in a market, especially to reach many potential customers. In fact, this is not the first time that Lightning AI has launched an AI marketplace. Lightning AI Studio, announced for the first time in December 2023, has Enterprises AI platforms made using pre-built templates.

“Every technology ends up here,” said Falcon. “Because of the evolution of every technology, you will end in something like this. The iPhone is a good example. You went from point solutions to calculators. flashlights and notebooks. Something like Slack did the same where you previously had an app to send files or photos, but now it’s all in one. That has not really been for AI because it is still a bit new. “

However, Lightning AI is confronted with heavy competition, especially against cuddling. Cuddling face has long been a repository of models and applications and is widely used by developers. Falcon said what makes AI Hub different, is that users not only have access to the art applications with powerful models, but it enables them to start their AI implementation in the platform and to concentrate on Enterprise protection.

“I can touch the implementation here. As a company they can point out their AWS or Google Cloud and the application runs in their private cloud. No data leaks or security problems, it’s all in your firewall, “he said.