Ray and the Anyscale platform aim to simplify the development of distributed applications, making them accessible to every developer. The current serverless platforms fall short in providing a general platform for distributed applications due to limitations such as lack of portability, stateless computation, and limited support for GPUs and TPUs. Anyscale's goal is to enable developers to build distributed applications with ease, similar to developing on their laptops, by providing a cloud-native platform that abstracts away clusters and allows users to run individual functions. The platform provides a laptop-like experience with the power of the cloud, supports stateful computation, enables direct communication between actors and tasks, and has no runtime limits, making it an attractive solution for developers who want to build distributed applications without requiring deep distributed systems expertise.