AI Pipelines Overview

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In a nutshell

• Pipelines are one or more inference tasks (e.g. Whisper, style transfer, detection) run in sequence on video frames.
• Gateways route jobs to compatible Orchestrators and workers; the protocol handles payment and coordination.
• BYOC (Bring Your Own Compute) and ComfyStream are two ways to run or extend pipelines with your own models and nodes.

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Use cases

• Speech-to-text (Whisper)
• Style transfer or filters (Stable Diffusion)
• Object tracking and detection (YOLO)
• Video segmentation (segment-anything)
• Face redaction or blurring
• BYOC (Bring Your Own Compute)

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What is a pipeline?

• Modify the video (e.g. add overlays)
• Generate metadata (e.g. transcript, bounding boxes)
• Relay results to another node

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Architecture

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Gateway and workers

• Orchestrators queue inference jobs and run (or delegate to) workers.
• Workers subscribe to task types (e.g. whisper-transcribe) and execute them.
• Gateways route jobs from clients to compatible nodes. This is off-chain; the protocol (Arbitrum) handles payments and rewards.

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Worker types

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Pipeline definition format

{
  "streamId": "abc123",
  "task": "custom-pipeline",
  "pipeline": [
    { "task": "whisper-transcribe", "lang": "en" },
    { "task": "segment-blur", "target": "faces" }
  ]
}

• JSON-formatted tasks via the Gateway
• Frame-by-frame gRPC (low latency)
• Result upload via webhook

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Bring your own compute (BYOC)

1. Clone ComfyStream or implement the processing API.
2. Add plugins for Whisper, ControlNet, or other models.
3. Register your node with the gateway (and optionally on-chain).

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See also

• BYOC — Run your own AI workers and register with the network
• ComfyStream — ComfyUI-based pipelines and Gateway integration
• Livepeer AI (overview) — Product overview and use cases
• Network technical architecture — Gateway, Orchestrator, and protocol

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Resources

• ComfyStream GitHub
• Livepeer Studio AI docs
• Forum: example pipelines
• Explorer — Network and node stats