Introducing MaiA
MaiA: API platform for Point Address, and on a mission to Make AI Accessible for everyone.
tl;dr: Today we’re announcing our API platform MaiA (https://maia.rest) .
Why create API Platform?
APIs for Point Address and Announce
MaiA is a by-product of our other consumer products including Announce and Point Address. To make Point Address eligible for integration, we had to enable an API plaform for it. MaiA will host all of Milkie Way APIs.
If needed, we can easily expose Announce data via API on MaiA platform.
Solving for everyone
To create content platforms for everyone, we have had to set up Content guidelines that avoid NSFW content on Announce and Point Address. Doing this is tricky, because bad actors can post not just NSFW text, but also images and URLs!
Some of the MaiA APIs include:
Point Address API
Point Address lookup can be easily accessed using API on MaiA Platform. The request calls are not just cheap, but very simple to integrate. Link to the API.
Adult URL Classifier
When we thought of allowing users to add URLs in Announce, we tried to find existing solutions that classify the URL as adult or not adult. Even after extensive search, we couldn’t really find an API or a product that does it. We had no choice but to build it from scratch on our own. Once we had it ready we decided to make it available for all developers and not just us.
NSFW Images
While Google Cloud Vision is really good, we decided to build the NSFW image classifier in house, because models with slightly lower accuracy are available in the open source community for much lower price.
Other APIs
There are several simple APIs that we’ve added in round one. As we grow we’ll continue to add more APIs.
Making AI Accessible
MaiA gets its name and logo color from the Maia star.
It’s also an acronym for its mission: “Make AI Accessible” and so it made perfect sense for us to choose Maia as the platform for Milkie Way :).
What does making AI Accessible mean?
If you’re tuned into AI Research community and ecosystem, you already know that there are at least a dozen research papers published everyday with highly complex models that take many iterations to build and deploy.
In simpler words, while all the hype around AI and ML is justified, building and deploying models to solve real world problems isn’t as straight forward as it can be.
Given a research paper, one can easily recreate (train) the model, but it’s a non-trivial process. Not to mention that the Devs need powerful GPUs; days, in fact weeks to retrain and deploy the model. The process is not just time consuming, it’s very resource intensive.
In order to make a simple addition such as a ‘URL field’ to a public platform, teams can easily lose their way researching, building and deploying a model to stop NSFW URLs making their way into the platform.
Everytime we at Milkie Way will solve a problem for ourselves, we would like to solve the problem for everyone at the most economical price. If you were to host the models on your own, just serving cost would cost the same as our pricing itself.
Yes that’s a URL. Check it out and see if the current APIs help you.
If there’s another API to a known problem that you wish existed, share it with us at contact@tomilkieway.com , and we will get on it immediately.
Originally published at https://blog.tomilkieway.com.
