Substrate is a platform designed for building compound AI systems by providing simple abstractions that facilitate the creation of complex workflows. It enables users to connect modular components called nodes and streamline the development of AI workloads.

Key features include a compute engine optimized for multi-step processes, a vector database for efficient data handling, and a code interpreter for dynamic task execution. Substrate offers automatic workload tuning to enhance performance through maximum parallelism while minimizing round trips.