SPEAKER_00: If you look at the shape of the music industry, right, back in 85 versus today, how it's been flattened out, talent can come from anywhere, it's about making great music less than it's about knowing the right people.

SPEAKER_01: Like all those things I think is going to come to the tech industry as well, right? We've seen some of that over the last five years, but I think as the kind of art of coding becomes more accessible, it's like, you know what, why couldn't you be this eight person company sitting somewhere in, you know, Norway or Denmark or something like that and create something absolutely amazing.

SPEAKER_04: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world. And Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams, and they just introduced an AI-powered assistant to take the busy out of the work. Sign up to use Coda AI today at coda.io slash twist. And LinkedIn marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com slash next unicorn.

SPEAKER_06: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this Week in Startups. Big, big surprise for you.

SPEAKER_08: Today is the start of the fifth season of a series we call The Next Unicorns. And what is The Next Unicorns?

SPEAKER_09: This is where we find companies that have raised their Series B round. Let's say they've got some really great traction. Maybe they have market pull. And we just think, as an editorial team, the producers here, some of the investment team might make suggestions. This company's got a shot at becoming a unicorn. What's a unicorn? In Silicon Valley, it's a company that's worth over a billion dollars. Now, you probably heard that we went a little crazy during the boom period of 2019, 2020, and 2021, and just gave a lot of companies very high valuations.

SPEAKER_10: And some of them are now zombie corns, uh, as we've talked about on the all in podcast a couple times, maybe, uh, the companies didn't actually have product market fit.

SPEAKER_11: In other words, the product and the customers, uh, were in sync, and there was a market for this product or a market pull. When customers are searching to get themselves a Tesla and Uber or an Airbnb, because they heard about it from their friends and the product is so good that you have market pull.

SPEAKER_10: In other words, you don't even have to do marketing, people are just calling you up and you're taking orders as a company, putting all that aside. I'm really excited about today's guest because he's been working on, um, making virtual AI based versions of humans. You know, you could cynically call it deep fakes, uh, that is the negative framing of this, or you could say these are alternative versions of yourself and there's a ton of upside. And we're going to get into the downsides, the upsides in, uh, this dual use technology could be used, a dual use technology could be used for good or bad. Just like humans can choose the path of darkness, the path of light. You could be Darth Vader. You could be Luke Skywalker. You could be a super villain, Lex Luthor. You could be Superman. Uh, and, uh, the technology of AI is no different. It is a dual use dual fate technology, if you will. And so we, uh, have a great guest. Victor Ripperbelly is on the program. He's the co-founder and CEO of Synthesia spelled S N Y T H E S I A. Welcome to the program. Victor.

SPEAKER_20: Thank you, Jason. Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_21: Uh, Synthesia is how it's pronounced. Correct. Synthesia. Synthesia. Okay.

SPEAKER_09: And, uh, paradoxically, we invite you on the program to come on the next unicorns. And then, uh, you of course make us one for one this season, uh, cause we like to track how we do.

SPEAKER_24: It is our fifth season. You can see all of the episodes at this week in startups.com slash next unicorns, uh, this

SPEAKER_10: week in startups.com slash next unicorns to see the, the other four seasons, but you're the first guest on the fifth season.

SPEAKER_09: And since we invited you, you actually closed around at a billion dollar valuation, $90 million series C at a $1 billion valuation. Congratulations on that. Who led the round?

SPEAKER_28: Thank you. Excel led the round with participation from NVIDIA.

SPEAKER_30: Oh, okay. So NVIDIA, uh, is investing in startups that are in the AI space because, uh, they're making

SPEAKER_31: the chips. They're making the infrastructure. Do you need to buy these chips yourself or are you able to just use a cloud provider who has those chips?

SPEAKER_32: I'm curious.

SPEAKER_33: No, we definitely use cloud providers. I don't think for us as a business, it makes sense to, to go that deep into stack.

SPEAKER_00: Um, and video is a great partner. I think most people think of NVIDIA as the ones that make the GPUs and the chips, which of course is their main line of business for sure, I think what's less well known is actually that NVIDIA does a lot of fundamental research, especially around like media technologies. So generative video speech, text for that matter. And they have one of the world's best research teams, um, and a big part of motivation for us to get closer to NVIDIA is actually less on just like the GPU and the chips, but these

SPEAKER_35: guys doing really amazing fundamental work in a lot of the technologies that we're also developing. Right? So, um, I think, I think that's one of the big angles for us to get closer to NVIDIA.

SPEAKER_09: And so you started this back in March of 2017 and, uh, the business was, I believe in the early days, your goal was to make a virtual avatar, not necessarily of a real person, but,

SPEAKER_11: um, in order to do maybe say customer support. So you go to a website or you go to a kiosk, is that correct? Is that where you started?

SPEAKER_19: Was that the first use case?

SPEAKER_01: Well, sort of, I think, I think just, we started the company back in, in 2017. Right. And, um, I think we kind of did what you're supposed to not do.

SPEAKER_00: We started with the technology and then we tried to find, you know, what we could solve with this technology. This is very, very early in what's now called Genitive AI. Right. But the key idea was the same as it is today. We want to make it easy for people to make video content, not by making smaller cameras, not by making slightly better video editing apps, but by actually building technology to eventually replace the entire physical production process. Right.

SPEAKER_01: So that's sort of like, that's the vision, that's where we want to go, goes much further than just the avatars we have today. Um, the first three years of the company, I'd say it's like the wilderness period. We're kind of building the tech, figuring out if it worked or not. We kind of got into the service business of doing AI dubbing.

SPEAKER_00: So some of those who've known us for a while may have seen the David Beckham thing, the Snoop Dogg thing we did, where we made essentially celebrities speak in different languages. And this was a great learning path for us. But what we figured out was that that was a service business, it was a visual effects type of tool, but was actually much more interesting than selling to Hollywood and creative people.

SPEAKER_01: But like there's billions of people in the world who are desperate to make video content, but they can't today. Right. They don't have the skills. They don't have the budget for it. And all these people, they're actually okay with the quality threshold going down a little

SPEAKER_44: bit from a real camera. If it's a thousand times easier and a thousand times more affordable. Right.

SPEAKER_00: And that sort of that insight is what led us to then launch our self-service text to video platform that we operate today with the world's biggest, we launched that in the summer of 2020. And since then, it's just been an absolute fairy tale of going really quickly and just delivering tons of value to our customers.

SPEAKER_01: And again, it's less about this sort of video as you know it is actually more about replacing text for our customers. Right.

SPEAKER_35: That's what they primarily uses for.

SPEAKER_09: So, uh, in that case, it's not necessarily to make, uh, you know, a young Indiana Jones

SPEAKER_11: or Luke Skywalker and have them do a new adventure. You're not trying to compete with Disney. The goal here is, Hey, I was going to write some materials here, some training materials,

SPEAKER_09: or I was a professor doing a lecture or I'm, uh, writing some, um, message to all of the, I don't know, uh, franchisees in my Jiffy Lube franchise network and I can type it in text, but have a human, a synthetic human, uh, a replicant speak to the people on the other end. So if I was in the manager and the franchisee of this Jiffy Lube and you said, Hey, here's

SPEAKER_26: our new pricing, instead of just sending them a text document, they could, they could watch it. Is that the customer base? Those kinds of applications that I described a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_51: That's very enterprise focused. We work with 36% of fortune 100 today and give you two very real examples, right?

SPEAKER_01: So let's say you're one of the world's largest fast food companies. You're onboarding and training millions of people to work in your restaurants every single year. What they used to do, they'd have a 40 page handbook. You'd send that to the employee that sort of attempt to read it. Remember absolutely nothing and be much less prepared to go into that job where they actually hit a restaurant. Now they can do is they can make that into a video, which is in the native language of whoever's watching that video. Oh, that, so it works in 120 different languages. So that in itself is a massive unlock. But then the really, really big unlock.

SPEAKER_44: That's kind of the false multiplier is that our product is extremely easy to use, right? So if you know how to make a PowerPoint slide, you'll be able to use it easier. So now the same people who used to write that 40 page handbook, they can make the videos, right?

SPEAKER_56: So you don't need a video editor.

SPEAKER_09: So just if we just pause there for a second, because what you said is profound, I am this, you know, uh, international fast food company and, uh, I got people in France. I got people in Japan and, uh, if I was gonna make this 40 page training manual, I would then send it to a company that would translate it, make a local copy of it. And then people would pretend to read it and then the French fries, uh, or the milkshakes would come out terrible because people didn't pick up those points. Exactly. Instead, you can take that manual. The same person can write a script and the CEO of that company or the founder even could come on and speak to the person. And then there's all kinds of technology to make sure there's compliance that people are

SPEAKER_11: watching. If they open another window, I know this, like if you ever took a driver's test or any kind of test, I recently went through this for like, um, joining, um, scouts previously known as boy scouts of America, I had to do background, um, tests and it was like a three hour course. And if you, at one point I accidentally put another browser window on top deposit. So here you have an enterprise thing where any new person can hear directly from the CEO why it's important to get the fries, right? And how to do that. And you can make sure there's compliance and that's one person's job.

SPEAKER_64: Exactly.

SPEAKER_11: Reaches millions of people. I mean, that's just insane when you think of the leverage there that would normally have cost them. God, it would have to cost them 10 tens of thousands of dollars per region across 40 languages.

SPEAKER_65: You'd be talking about a couple million bucks and now it's going to cost $10,000.

SPEAKER_40: And let me give you, I think one, one of the really core insights we had early on with

SPEAKER_01: this was that what you just described here is called the front end of producing content, right? It's like cameras, actors, studios, executives who don't know how to perform in front of a camera, all that stuff in itself is incredibly time consuming and expensive, right? But then what we figured out is actually all to that. Okay. So let's say you actually did that, right? You want to make this into a video because you know it's much more effective. Then what happens in every single business is two months later, there's a business policy that changes, the pricing changes.

SPEAKER_44: You change your POS system, something like that. Now you're screwed, right? Because all your video material is completely out of date. What's beautiful about this type of video production, right? Is that you could just open up the file again, edit it, change the script, and you can, you know, feed that into all the other languages. So I really think that it's very early, right?

SPEAKER_01: But this is as profound as going from using a typewriter where you're producing something that's sort of hard-coded, hard-baked, like you would with a camera or a microphone into something that's more like a Word document, right? Open it up, edit it, duplicate it, send it to someone else. Our platform is collaborative. So we have real-time collaborations coming out next month or so, Teams, workspaces, kind of like using PowerPoint or like using Myra or something like that, but the output is just

SPEAKER_00: video, right? I think that's what we're seeing is just that the value in the enterprise is just like through the roof. I'll give you another cool example. Let's say you're one of the world's biggest software companies.

SPEAKER_35: We have 4,000 AEs all around the world, you need to keep these folks updated on...

SPEAKER_70: Account executives, salespeople, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Salespeople, exactly, right? You have to keep these folks updated on like what's happening with the product, what's happening with the competitors' product, pricing, so on.

SPEAKER_44: Let's say you have one minute to talk to these people every single day about these things. You send them a document or something that they have to read on Slack. Most of them will skim it, they'll forget it, right? What you can do instead is like you can make a one-minute video. We know that information retention is like six, seven, eight times as high when you're

SPEAKER_01: watching videos compared to when you read something. So if you take just a simple use case like this, right? The sales enablement team creates video content instead of only written materials for these folks and you do this for 4,000 AEs, you really just imagine like just how much value that it has, right? Because you get a much better informed, much better trained sales force. And I think we're still early in these kind of use cases, but this is really just what's... I think that's the reason we've grown so fast over the last three years.

SPEAKER_73: All right.

SPEAKER_72: We all know the one thing that separates great startups from the good ones is product velocity. What does it mean?

SPEAKER_75: Product velocity. Fancy term, right? You've got your product and your velocity. Speed. The speed in which your product improves. So can you ship updates? Can you release new features? Can you do bug fixes? Can you iterate on the interface? Can you solve problems for your customers? And can you do it quickly? Because you're not alone. You have competitors and your customers have choices. They may solve their problems by writing their own custom code, or they might use your solution. This is what startups are about. How fast can you get that product velocity going? And so, you know, how do you supercharge it? Everybody says, okay, yeah, we want to go faster, but you got to go faster intelligently. And Crowdbotics is going to help you do that. They're your CTO as a service. Basically, they provide you with the most optimal architecture to get your product to market as fast as possible. You'll have access to an on-demand product manager and developer talent, and they will help get your app into production 10 times faster than conventional development. Crowdbotics can work with your in-house dev team, or you can just have them work independently. And you own all the IP. You own all the source code. Let the folks at Crowdbotics supercharge your product velocity today. No more waiting. Get a free build plan at Crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's a 499 value just for the twist listeners. You get that for free. That's C-R-O-W-D-B-O-T-I-C-S dot com slash twist for a free build plan.

SPEAKER_09: So just to recap there, you've eliminated the need to hire a media training person. That costs $10,000, $20,000 a pop to train the host. You've eliminated the host.

SPEAKER_11: That costs $10,000, $20,000 to hire some person. You've hired the lighting, the camera operators, and the set. That's another $50,000 to $100,000 in my estimation. Uh, cause you gotta have a location to shoot in as well. It's another $10,000 a day, $5,000 a day. You got rid of all the translators.

SPEAKER_09: And you got rid of reshoots while increasing compliance and retention. And you've only given up.

SPEAKER_11: Perhaps if this was done in a really, really by a very high quality team that spent the quarter million dollars to do it that I just described. That's what I would put this kind of shoot at.

SPEAKER_31: Uh, if it was, I'm talking about like a full employee handbook, you know, a couple of hours of content, maybe 40 segments or something. One per page.

SPEAKER_09: All you've given up is a little bit of polish on the edges, uh, of a great host.

SPEAKER_11: Uh, that might be slightly more compelling. Um, I wonder in this, do you have the ability to, do you make the full tool of like, here's the quizzes and compliance and making sure that people watch the video?

SPEAKER_65: Or do you use like third party educational tools and they just export their videos into those?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So at this point in time, we're not, uh, we're not like doing the kind of last mile delivery. Uh, which also means you don't do the quizzes. You put that in LMS system or something like that.

SPEAKER_90: A learning management system, LMS learning management system. Exactly.

SPEAKER_86: So yeah, that's incredible. Can you imagine like Microsoft or Salesforce having all these salespeople around the world and every day they just get a video.

SPEAKER_11: And then it, you know, the learning management system just knows if everybody watched it, if people didn't watch it, they can't, uh, do work the next day. And their manager gets an email. Hey, this person still hasn't watched the video. This person's three videos behind. That's incredible. Exactly. That's incredible. And, um, what do you, what would you charge in this situation if without mentioning a specific client, but if you did have that at scale use case, tens of thousands of AEs, how do you charge? How much do you charge?

SPEAKER_09: What does this cost to do this 40 page manual? If you were running, you know, a burger or a fast food chain or something.

SPEAKER_94: So really our thesis revolves around the idea that, you know, in the future, we're going to be reading much less and we're going to watch.

SPEAKER_01: We're going to listen way more, right? And we're basically building our product and pricing structure around that. This is, as I said before, this is really about replacing text and enterprise. So the way we can price the product is proceeds.

SPEAKER_00: We really view this as having so many analogies, but something like PowerPoint in the early days, right?

SPEAKER_44: So it's seed based, um, that of course depends on like how many seats that you decide to buy.

SPEAKER_97: Like on enterprise plans on the person creating it or seats on the people receiving it.

SPEAKER_01: So right now it's one type of seed, um, that you buy. So basically it's kind of like a model, you know, from like Miro or Figma or things like that, right? And go in, you have a workspace together. You can invite your colleagues. You can leave comments on the videos and all that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_09: So if you had 20 people in the training organization, hey, you know, you, you, you pay what? $300 a year, $400 a year per person, something like that. 25 bucks a month.

SPEAKER_104: A bit more than that. I think probably landed around 40, 50 K dollars a year.

SPEAKER_11: Oh, okay. Great. So it's a couple thousand per person. So this is high end software in the, in like the Salesforce category, a couple thousand per person per year.

SPEAKER_09: Uh, so for 40, 50, whatever for 50 K a year, you can not have to do all these shoots and everything. All right.

SPEAKER_107: Let's do a demo here. Let's do a demo here. Let's do it.

SPEAKER_09: Let's do it. And just to not scare people off. If you had the personal plan, uh, on the website says 30 bucks a month, 270 years. So I'm assuming.

SPEAKER_110: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So sort of left that out. Right. So it's a traditional kind of, you know, product led motion. So you can go in, you can even make a video for free on the website, uh, or you can sign up for a $30 plan, which you'll kind of get to get familiar with, um, with the platform. And then it's a price offers a bunch of, of other features.

SPEAKER_09: So here we are. We're looking at like a PowerPoint dish notion ish interface with a bunch of projects and templates that you can pick from an office interior and inspirational talk, whatever it is. And I see you have, uh, a couple of this week in startups videos you've created. Oh no. Oh no. Exactly.

SPEAKER_116: I'm coming. Uh oh. So what you're seeing here is like, is the homepage has Jason just described it. It's a traditional greater tools.

SPEAKER_01: As people who probably have seen it before, I'm going to go to the, the avatars out here in the left hand side. And what we're seeing now is a mosaic of all the different avatars that you can use to create your videos.

SPEAKER_35: Um, so if I scroll down here, there's around 150 avatars. They come in all different, um, ages, genders, ethnicities.

SPEAKER_111: Are these computer generated or are they, um, made by, uh, like having, uh, partly computer generated.

SPEAKER_123: They're based on real actors, but, but, but they are sort of AI generated. Um, and there's, there's.

SPEAKER_125: There you got a hipster. You got a four person, not a four man.

SPEAKER_09: We have to use gender neutral language. Uh, I can see you have like a construction worker, uh, you know, a police officer type thing. Doctors.

SPEAKER_11: Or a fitness person. And you got all the colors of the rainbow genders, body sizes.

SPEAKER_09: So you can be super woke or super diverse here. You can pick whatever you like, or you can actually do it. I'm assuming by region.

SPEAKER_125: So, uh, you know, not to, uh, make light of it, but it might actually, the information might

SPEAKER_11: be received better by somebody who's wearing clothes or has the accent of a Japanese person

SPEAKER_86: in Japan rather, or an Indian person, India. Correct.

SPEAKER_35: It's funny you say that because, uh, we have a lot of customers in Japan. We work with a very high percentage of like the hundred biggest companies there. And actually what a lot of those, they use it for is to create partner materials for English

SPEAKER_44: speaking or other countries speak different languages. It's a huge line of business for them, right? Because it really just breaks down the communication barriers.

SPEAKER_35: And that goes both ways. We also work with North American companies who want to produce materials for the Japanese market. Um, and this comes in really handy, not just on like the avatar appearance, of course, but also with, you know, the 120 languages.

SPEAKER_139: That's, uh, I mean, this actually makes a lot of sense. English is the world's language now, or the language of international business.

SPEAKER_21: Uh, and I'm not saying American, I'm saying English, right? Uh, Queens English here.

SPEAKER_09: And so if you're a Japanese company and you want to reach the maximum number of partners, if it's in English and the person is localized. Yeah. That's going to be a lot better than perhaps a Japanese person with English as a second language. Who's a rep locally in that market, uh, whose English might be whatever.

SPEAKER_11: An eight at 0.5 out of 10 here. You're going to have 10 out of 10. Exactly. And that's fantastic. My Japanese, by the way, is a zero out of 10.

SPEAKER_86: Yeah.

SPEAKER_116: But what we also see with this, right?

SPEAKER_01: It's like, you know, let's say you have a lot of technology. Let's say you have a lot of technical documentation integration videos, which can be a lot of screen recordings and voiceovers and things like that. Right. It's again, just like, and it's so moldable because you just make it in Japanese and then you could go back and edit it every time. You don't have to go through the whole voiceover actor kind of process. Right. But if we're out to make a video here, let's say I pick Alex, got a click on her. She's one of our most popular avatars. You've probably seen her before. Then we get sent into the video creation screen here, which is where the magic happens. So what I'm seeing here is a thumbnail of Alex, who's our avatar. Yep. And then under her, there's the script box. And the script box is really where you just type in the script in your video, right? It's kind of like that easy. So let me just try and type in something here. I'll type in, hello, Jason. This is a test from Alex. And what you'll see here is that we automatically detect that you're typing in English. So there's this little drop down here, which says English, US professional. I can click on this drop down and then I'll get a bunch of different types of voices. That could just be the style, but it's also different accents. So let's say you want a British voice or Irish, Australian, whatever. You can select whatever you prefer. And so that's sort of like how that works. But then the magic here is that you can type in any language, right? So I'm Danish originally for anyone wondering where my accent is from. Let me type in, I am now Alex. As you'll see here, it just automatically detects that I'm typing in Danish. Yeah, sure. Now the flag has changed to Danish and so on and so forth, right? So you just put in whatever language that you want the video to come out in. And that's really as simple as it is. Now in this text box, we can do a bunch of other things as well. If I want to have a different gesture, for example, let's say at some point in the video, I want the avatar to hit not yes or raise the eyebrows.

SPEAKER_123: I can put that in with this little kind of build.

SPEAKER_149: How many gestures are there?

SPEAKER_123: There's five right now. Right now it's a little bit of feature, but but we're adding a lot in the comments.

SPEAKER_86: Are the gestures made by computer or did you have the actors actually make the gesture? And then they're made by computers.

SPEAKER_35: And so that's a big part of the fundamental tech platform. And that we're switching into is essentially that the avatars become much more live, right?

SPEAKER_152: They look much more realistic. They can do much more things disappointed in there.

SPEAKER_125: Like to just a completely, I'm just completely disappointed in you. You didn't get the answer.

David Friedberg: Correct. You can have a lot of fun with the gestures. Like putting like your hand on your, what is that?

SPEAKER_09: Like facepalm is just a total facepalm. Oh my God. And, and this is just not to be dystopian, but in a black mirror episode, this is how you'll be laid off tech layoffs personalized.

SPEAKER_159: Cause I assume you could personalize these too.

SPEAKER_09: Like I could put in, you know, percentage, first name percentage and have like a custom one made for each employee I'm laying off or giving a raise to. Exactly.

SPEAKER_110: So I just put in an arrival here for those who can't see, I just put it like first name. You'll be familiar with this from like mail merge and similar styles of things. Right. I'm creating a template.

SPEAKER_01: We can also switch out the background images, videos and all that sort of stuff. And, but what happens from here on is like, I've typed in some text. That's great. That's scripted my video. But then, you know, one of the big unlocks and the thing that we discovered early on

SPEAKER_44: was for this to really be something that could be used by anyone. You have to be able to make a video end to end in there. Right?

SPEAKER_01: So we have this sort of tool that sits around it.

SPEAKER_101: And it'll be, you know, something like a PowerPoint or a camera. I'm just going to open up a template. You can put in, you know, your text, you can upload your own custom funds. Right?

SPEAKER_125: Yeah. So you can have the host on the left and then just right behind them. Like they're a weather caster or, you know, a weather person.

SPEAKER_167: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_11: You could have the video behind them. You know, saying, Hey, welcome to your first day at Stripe.

SPEAKER_09: Uh, today we're going to go over our, uh, HR policies. Here's what you need to know. And the HR policies could be done here. And like you're saying, Hey, you know, we have a new HR policy.

SPEAKER_11: We're going to add June 19th as a holiday. And we're going to take away one of the floating holidays. And instead of having two floating holidays, you now have one. Boom. Put it in there. Every new person understands that. And you could send that just that one slide to everybody in the company announcing like we did. Hey, June 19th is now our, you know, whatever ninth official holiday of the year. You have one floating holiday to choose from.

SPEAKER_170: Exactly.

SPEAKER_172: For many knowledge workers, over 50% of their day, it's filled with doing tedious, repeatable tasks.

SPEAKER_174: We all know this. They're technically working, right? But are they being productive? Are they driving the business forward in any way? Or is it busy work? Imagine if you recaptured 50% of that person's time. Think about all the things you could redeploy and all the projects you could finish. Well, now you can. With Coda. Coda is the all-in-one platform that changes how your teams work together. And they just introduced an AI-powered assistant. That is brilliant. It will take the busy out of work. With Coda, your workflows and content, they're already living in one place, right? But Coda AI, this will help your team focus on the highest priority work, even as your priorities shift. Which in startups and dynamic bigger companies, they always do. This is going to empower you to prioritize work that's long-term and strategic. That pays off massively. That's what we should be doing with AI. And you need to get your entire team on Coda and using Coda AI every single day like me. If you're watching the video right now, just look at this powerful and awesome jtrading.com website. This was built to track all my stock trades. And I am crushing it. I was able to do this and track all these stock prices live and build tables and formulas all in Coda. Get a competitive advantage if you want an assistant that lets you get back to work and does all the busy work. Get started with Coda AI today for free. How's that for a price?

SPEAKER_177: Head over to Coda.io slash twist. Coda.io slash twist to get started for free.

SPEAKER_40: So you have like all the creative tools that you need here that you could ever have in PowerPoint or canvas and like that. You can record your screen.

SPEAKER_01: You can use Shutterstock assets, do different shapes, all this sort of stuff. Love it. Where I think this is interesting, right? So I think up until now, this is like video, as you know, right? It's a smarter way of training video. But what's exciting for me about not just AI video, but any kind of like generative AI tech right now is it opens up an entirely new world, right?

SPEAKER_44: And we're just dipping our feet in this. Right now, I think all these technologies are kind of like the first websites. They look like newspapers on the screen. That's kind of what people could imagine back then, right? Today, websites are very different. They have links. There's audio video content. We have news feeds that are personalized to everyone.

SPEAKER_01: A website is very different than a paper magazine today. Our bet is that the same thing is going to happen to AI video. So right now, we just understand there's like an MP4 file, right? But we've eliminated the camera from the equation.

SPEAKER_44: But really, this is going to be an entirely new kind of media object moving forward. Maybe we won't even call it video in a few years.

SPEAKER_01: And a lot of what that I think is about is like the UX of how you create these things. So I'll give you a very simple example of how when you work with AI and you don't work with camera footage, you can do cool things. So let's say you have my script here. So it says this is the same title screen layout. In here, I want to have an animation. I want to have this like title text element in my video come in right here. What I'll do here is just add a marker. This is marker one here. I'm going to click on my text element on the canvas. I'm going to scroll down. And I'm just going to tell the app that I want this particular element to fade in at marker number one. Pretty simple. But when I didn't play the video, then what's going to happen is that this text title in my video is going to come in at the point in the script that I wanted to come in.

SPEAKER_44: That in itself is, of course, I mean, that's cool. That's easier than doing it in Adobe Premiere.

SPEAKER_01: We have to sit with different layers and a timeline and things like that. But where this becomes really interesting, right, is if I type something in front of this, then it'll just move down. So it's completely responsive. Right. Right. Now imagine that you're translating the video, which is a massive headache today. Right. Then French is 20% longer than German, which is a bit shorter than Japanese. So it's all automatically. Yeah. Exactly. All of this stuff, you just translate the text. It just works in a different language. You don't really have to do anything else in the future. You know, all this stuff I think will be much more personalized. Maybe it's interactive. You can talk to the avatar.

SPEAKER_44: I really think we're just dipping our feet in this stuff, but we're really building for a new type of media format. We're not just building to make kind of a better tool for making MP4s. Right.

SPEAKER_105: We're dipping our feet in here. I think this industry is just so early.

SPEAKER_77: When you generate this, it just generates you an MP4 and then you would copy this into your learning management system or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_44: Exactly. But our bet is that over time will be something different.

SPEAKER_01: Right. And I'll probably also require a new video infrastructure where every single video might be personalized where I was watching it. Maybe you can just ask the avatar. Hey, sorry, I didn't really understand that. Could you explain it in a different manner? We have all these amazing technologies that are false multipliers. GPT is an obvious one here. Right. That can help you write the script. We also have that functionality. Stable diffusion can generate the images for you. I think when you think of all these tools sort of working together in the next three to four or five years, I think it's going to be.

SPEAKER_35: It's going to be absolutely amazing to things that we can. We can.

SPEAKER_125: You will not need to export these videos. Eventually, they'll just live at a URL on your service or a white label URL.

SPEAKER_09: And then you don't need to export it because that then leads to all kinds of problems. If you're having to upload it to another system and then compliance, maybe you forgot to upload something. It just puts a human into the process.

SPEAKER_125: And I guess your idea here is if you had all 40 of the lessons to be an employee at a fast food restaurant, you could then ask a questions and just you could have this on an iPad or somewhere in the, you know, at the workstation and say, hey, remind me how to make a big Mac.

SPEAKER_09: Or do you know how does a what is a double double animal style and it'll just be like, oh, yeah, double double animal style and just play the video. We know how to make a double double animal style and the person doesn't have to feel bad about not remembering and the chat GPT interface will be able to interpret what they're asking.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just your salesperson, you're on a call after the call, you just get a two or three minute long kind of feedback video, right? Because the transcript has been taken out.

SPEAKER_01: GPT for whatever, maybe a different tool than us has analyzed, you know, what can you do better talk a bit less, remember to disobjection faces in this way, like there's so many things you can do with this.

SPEAKER_00: And I think it's just kind of really exciting to see what people will build once we have an API today, a bunch of users using that but I think as the technology evolves, we'll really see a lot of various use cases evolve, they'll just fundamentally be very different from like video as we know video today.

SPEAKER_65: If you think about this, a great demo, by the way, anything else you want to show in the demo, and for folks who are listening, you can go to youtube.com slash this weekend, and you can find the demo of this.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure. I mean, maybe just give you a cool real life example. This is one of our amazing customers go cartless, right? They've built the entire university using Synthesia videos.

SPEAKER_00: So what you're seeing on screen here is sort of their hub for learning how to use go cartless as one of their customers.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's all the kind of this entire value prop we've talked about already, right? Like, video is a much better way to communicate with people in 2023.

SPEAKER_00: With these videos, they just go back in, edit it, all these are created entirely in the platform, right?

SPEAKER_137: And then they're served by Wistia, probably or something.

SPEAKER_206: Exactly, exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_11: That's interesting thing. If you look at Wistia's business, which I love, they do really great compliance things where you can stop for a prompt or a question or capture an email address, you know, whatever. And so I think there's some great API uses there. Amazing job. Let's sort of then level up this discussion. Uh, I know the company's high growth, the tripling revenue year over year, you raised about 100, just over 150 million at 200 employees doing this or so. Um, and so let me ask you a question about how you think about running your own company. I have noticed I'm forcing my employees to use chat GPT for every day, barred, et cetera. I'd say about 60%. I got over the line. The other 40%, uh, basically got the summer to get their butts in gear. If they don't, they're out. I'm dead serious. Like if you can't use chat GPT for effectively can't work for me starting September 1st. So for people hearing this, I've been pretty gentle about it, but now it's gonna be a mandate. I'm gonna start having people tested on their chat GPT for ability. Why?

SPEAKER_169: Because once people start using it, what I'm finding is they become maybe between 1% and 10% more effective at their job every month.

SPEAKER_11: If you compound those numbers at, but let's call it, I don't know, 3%. That means, uh, in every 3% divided, let's just say 2%. That means every 36 months, you'd be twice as good at your job. Um, and that means I don't ever have to hire anybody because the pace of our growth, um, if everybody just commits to being 5% better at their job every month, they become twice as good at their job every 14 months. So do you think you can just keep growing your company without hiring people and just making the existing team more effective through using these tools?

SPEAKER_220: I mean, we use GPT everywhere. I'm, I think I'm, I'm very aligned with you.

SPEAKER_01: It's, it's something that I was, I don't think there's any function that can't use GPT. We use it in the most random of tasks. Like, like if you just want fun example, right? But when you have to record your avatar, that's like a four or five minute process. You speak to the camera. We want to get like a nice variation of things that you say. We use GPT 4 to just generate infinite amount of scripts, right? Otherwise someone would have to sit down, write a different script for every single person. Now we get a great variety of what people are reading out to the camera, which is great for our algorithms. I think for us, I mean, we'll continue to grow the team.

SPEAKER_00: I think people still want to talk to a salesperson. I think in our case, R&D, we do very fundamental R&D here, right? So we publish papers. We have a team around 40, 45 primarily PhDs solving some really hard things here. And we'll need more headcounts with that. GPT 4 is not going to do that yet. I really see it more as just kind of like up leveling everyone. I don't think we'll stop hiring people because of GPT 4, but I definitely think it changes the shape of a lot of functions.

SPEAKER_223: Right.

SPEAKER_169: And when you think about it, if you have 40 people in the development team, how much better are your developers yet?

SPEAKER_11: You have how many developers, how many engineers you got ballpark? 80, I think.

SPEAKER_227: Okay.

SPEAKER_11: So we've got 80 engineers. How much better did they get this year using co-pilot? Would you guess if you had to guess on average, how much more effective are they at writing code?

SPEAKER_229: Probably 20, 30%. Okay. We'll go with 20.

SPEAKER_09: It means you hired eight. That means 20% of 80, you hired 16 people.

SPEAKER_231: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_169: I mean, and then do you think this is accelerating, staying the same or slowing down? Do you think the gains in 2024 will be faster? Or do you think it would be 20% in 2024? Do you think it would be 40% or 10% if you had to guess one of those three numbers? 10, 20 or 30. I think it would be 30, I think. Exactly.

SPEAKER_234: I mean, there's no doubt that all the technologies are just still incredibly early, right? So they're accelerating.

SPEAKER_11: So that means next year, you got a, whatever it is, 96, we'll round it up to 100 developers.

SPEAKER_169: And you think it's gonna get 30%. That means you're hiring 30 new developers next year without having them. This is the profound thing. When I walk people through this and I reflect back to founders, what they're telling me. I think the obvious thing to do is to focus on the productivity of the existing team. Because when you add people, it doesn't make an organization faster. It actually slows it down because you got to onboard those people at culture, this and that. I think companies, the really great companies are going to focus on individual performance, getting those 30% gains, 10%, 20% gains, whatever it is consistently for the next three or four years and not add headcount.

SPEAKER_11: And it's completely doable. Um, and it just requires a brain shift of writing a job rec versus and doing a search. What does that typically take? 30 days, 60 days, you know, probably 60 days worth of time and probably four weeks of effort. Right. Uh, that's a lot more than making a, just, you know, doing some professional development with existing people in my mind.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure. I think the way we think about it is I think we've always been very conservative on hiring.

SPEAKER_00: So we run a very, very sustainable business and I'm obsessed with how much revenue do we bring in per employee as a metric for like how, how much are we leaning forward into growth?

SPEAKER_35: And I think especially if you compare that kind of number to what's the average salary for me, that's, that's a great benchmark for like how out of touch with reality you are.

SPEAKER_00: Um, when we started the company, we found the company who always run the company like a business. Um, I think there's a big problem in Silicon Valley with people, but like over hiring. I think obviously now that that story is very different, but in 2021, right? It was just, it was just crazy. I mean, looking back at companies hiring 600 engineers in one year and thinking that that's going to make you more productive. You're probably way better off just sticking with 30 people. Right. So I think, I think the productivity question is, is very good. I think there's the best companies got to be the ones who utilize these tools, not just as developers, but in customer support in content marketing and every single facet of the business. I mean, that's what you're doing.

SPEAKER_08: Your, your literal, the purpose of your tool is to not have to hire an AV production company. Uh, and the fact is, you know, people used to hire a production company to do even the most, you know, short video. And now this, you literally had to have a studio in your office.

SPEAKER_09: Like people would build a broadcast studio for a quarter million dollars at Yahoo. Yeah. They actually, they had probably a $10 million broadcast studio so that their CEO. So Marissa or before her, whoever could then address the entire company. And they said, yeah, you know, we have this $10 million studio. We do Yahoo finance every day. The, the CEO or whoever can use this to talk to a thousand people to 10,000 people. And now it's like, or they could turn on zoom.

SPEAKER_247: And for $19.95 a month, they could talk to everybody.

SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you, I think if you, one of the stories we talk a lot about in, uh, in St.

SPEAKER_01: DJ writers, we go even further back, let's say we go back to like the 1960s, 70s, something like that. Right. Producing text was literally someone's job. Most people did not go to work. Copywriters. And typed out a lot of things. Right. You would have a secretary who would like write all things. You had copywriters. And if you look at today, like writing is a part of every single white collar job. Right. There's not a job where you're not like doing some sort of writing. And that's just normal now. We don't really think about that because you know, why would you not? I think it's going to be the same for video content, right? In 10 years, I think just as everyone today writes things all the time. Everybody will creating video content all the time.

SPEAKER_00: The reason we're writing is because it's the only really truly scalable way of communicating with one another, right? It's really easy writing on a keyboard. But as it becomes as easy to create audio, video, maybe imagery, I think we'll just really see a lift in how we communicate. We already see this to some extent, right? Look at TikTok, for example.

SPEAKER_44: It's like the interface is almost only video. You're literally just scrolling through videos.

SPEAKER_00: There's almost no text left in the interface, which is very different from like a Facebook, right? Where it's all about text and Instagram is maybe halfway text, halfway images. I think if you just look at history and kind of, you know, the trajectory of how we communicate,

SPEAKER_01: it's always about being more visual, more interactive. And these technologies are going to be the things that truly unlock this at scale. And I think that's the really exciting part for me, right?

SPEAKER_251: It's just, you know, 10 years, everyone will be creating video as part of whatever job that they're in.

SPEAKER_37: Yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_174: When you're selling to B2B buyers, you really need to get your pitch in front of decision makers, the people who control the purse strings out of business. Why? The upper level execs. They're the ones who eventually make the purchasing decision. At some point, you need to have the CFO, the VP of Ops, the CTO, the CEO, the president themselves approving any kind of big spend. But here's a problem. How do you find those people, especially on social media? You don't, unless you use LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is about to hit a billion users, 930 million members. In that 930 million members are 180 million senior level executives. And they don't want you to know this, but there's 10 million C level executives like me on there. Those are the ones you need to build consensus with to get your product integrated into these companies. They have the purchasing power and LinkedIn ads is specifically meant for B2B marketers. No other platform can offer you these people and all the data inside of LinkedIn exists only there and nowhere else. You want to be where business is done. LinkedIn equals business, business equals LinkedIn. It's that simple. Whenever we post content on LinkedIn, we get really thoughtful responses from business people. Make B2B marketing everything it can be. And get a hundy $100 credit on your next campaign from your pal J Cal and the fine people over at LinkedIn. Go to linkedin.com slash next unicorn to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash next unicorn. Terms and conditions apply because hey, they're giving you a hundy.

SPEAKER_09: I'm curious when you look at this technology as a technologist who's been grinding at this for, you know, getting close to a decade. Um, and I mentioned at the top of the show, it's, uh, it's a dual fate technology. There's a group of people who believe this could, uh, lead to massive job destruction at a pace in which we will not replace jobs. Uh, you and I just had this conversation about how efficient, more efficient humans can be. We both put it at 30% a year. I'm, I think we're exactly in sync. And when I had Aaron Levy, Brian Chesky and Reid Hoffman, I asked him how much on average are people becoming, uh, more efficient already.

SPEAKER_11: They actually put the number at 20 to 40%, either 20, 30 or 40. I think they, two of them picked 30 and one of them picked 20, uh, and you and I just picked 20 or 30 and I picked 30. So let's put the number at 30% a year. Uh, that means everybody doubles their productivity every two years. So are you in the camp that let's just start with jobs, not terminator. And it's the end of humanity. Let's just talk about jobs in the, and you're in Europe. I'm in the United States. Europe's got a very protectionist attitude towards, uh, employment, pretty hard to fire people. And, uh, EU's, you know, really concerned about AI. Jobs are going to, uh, be eliminated at a massive rate. Your technology eliminates the need for camera operators, um, a studio, a location, uh, translators. I mean, dozens. And I mean, if you're, if you keep succeeding at this rate, you will eliminate millions of jobs just with your own piece of software. So do you, are you concerned that those jobs will not get refilled? Are you in the camp of we will have universal basic income? This is going to be a tragedy. Uh, and in the dual fate, uh, this is going to be, uh, cause riots in the street because people are going to be 30% unemployed. Or are you in the camp of humans, uh, are creative beings and just like podcasting and being an influencer, uh, or, uh, being a podcast producer, whatever jobs didn't exist previously will now exist.

SPEAKER_65: And so humans will find something to do with their time. Where do you land?

SPEAKER_277: I'm definitely long-winded questions. That's great. I'm definitely the latter camp.

SPEAKER_105: I think in 10 years being a camera operator is, is, is probably not like, um, you know, the most desirable industry or job to be in.

SPEAKER_00: But I think what can easily be missed here is also the kind of expectations of what, what, uh, in, in my world of communications. Right. So it's like, okay, all these people who are doing all this, this content today, they'll be disrupted to some extent. But I think, you know, the expectation would just be that everything is video in 10 years. So we will all need to be able to produce video content.

SPEAKER_40: Um, I also think that there's going to be, I think human creativity, I think the absolute best films, uh, music, like whatever in the creative sphere that you're kind of doing.

SPEAKER_00: Right. I think that's not just about production. That's very much what we are focused on. I think a lot of these tools are today. Um, there's already lots of people who make video content. There's already lots of people who make music. Right. But it's still only like a very small percentage of those people really make it to, to the top. And I don't think that's because they have better production tools. I think that's about creativity, understanding cultural trends, um, remixing things that haven't been remixed before. I think that's like the pace of AI right now.

SPEAKER_35: It's, it's, it's hard to claim that it's never going to be like as creative as humans will be.

SPEAKER_00: But, um, I definitely think that, uh, this is about lifting all boats and ultimately, um, making everyone more productive. But of course there's gotta be job disruption. It would be, you know, we don't have, we're not people making, uh, we don't have that many blacksmiths anymore after horses got replaced by cars. The typing pool you referenced earlier is gone, uh, there's also no more horses and buggies.

SPEAKER_283: And we don't have the people who clean up the horse behind the horses and buggies, which was a job for humans in New York.

SPEAKER_08: Exactly. You literally had people with shovels who shoveled horse , uh, for a living.

SPEAKER_01: People had to walk with a big red flag in front of a car, right? When they were driving in the beginning, in the early days of, of cars. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_09: So let's go to the next one, which, uh, you, uh, have to own a bit of, which is defix. Um, how do, and I'm asking just for the audience's sake, if there's any mids in the audience, when I ask a dumb question or seemingly dumb basic question, I'm doing it to have a open-minded conversation about that conversation. Not because I don't have my own views on the answer. So here's the question. Um, deep fakes are gonna be confusing to people. Uh, there was just an example of a fake person on Twitter writing all kinds of racist stuff to create, uh, animosity in the United States.

SPEAKER_11: With our original sin and the most painful part of our history here in America, slavery and race relations. It's the wound that, you know, keeps getting ripped open. And guess what? People want to keep ripping it open.

SPEAKER_169: So they make fake videos, uh, and, uh, they incite racial divide or they incite divide, uh, with fake videos, your tool, perfect tool to create those. Uh, so what is your responsibility as the CEO of a company that allows you to create fake avatars, uh, or synthetic avatars? Uh, in combating this, or do you have any responsibility? And is the responsibility on the individual to not trust everything they see, uh, and to be questioning? How do you look at this issue?

SPEAKER_296: I think we absolutely have a responsibility and, and, and we do a lot.

SPEAKER_00: Um, I think as with anything, there's no one, one single answer to like, what could we do to alleviate this problem? Um, I'd say I view this primarily through two lenses. One for me as, as the CEO of Synthesia, how do I make sure that people are not misusing our tool? I'll talk a bit more about that.

SPEAKER_01: And secondly, I also spend a lot of my time with NGOs, governments, media organizations, and like, what can we as society do to alleviate the misuse of these tools, right?

SPEAKER_00: Because no matter what I do, there's a lot of, got to be a lot of open source stuff. There'll be a lot of other players who may have less ethical standards than we do. Um, and I think a big part of this is going to be about education as, as you, uh, propose yourself in terms of what we're doing. So for us, AI safety is incredibly important. We found the company on like an ethical framework, consent, control, collaboration. Uh, I think the first one consent is fairly obvious.

SPEAKER_01: You can't make an avatar of someone without the explicit consent. All right. So you can't just go in and upload a video of like a politician, something like that. It goes through like a KYC style process when you actually make an avatar.

SPEAKER_00: On top of that, we do very, very heavy content moderation. So we, we definitely have a view on what kind of videos you can create and what kind of videos you can't create. We have an entire team who sits with that. It's a mix of algorithms trying to figure out content that we don't want to generate. And also human moderators looking through content. Um, it's really hard and we're not perfect. Um, I know you've been involved with the Twitter team. So you know that moderation at scale is a very, very difficult task. And we are creating a lot of videos every single day. For us, I think what's interesting is that we have like what we call red content,

SPEAKER_01: which is a country you obviously don't want, right? So like hate speech, uh, you know, swear words, things like that. Those things are actually sort of fairly easy to detect. Uh, where it gets much harder is in the kind of gray area content. So let's say you're creating content about cryptocurrencies, for example, right? Are you explaining how blockchain works?

SPEAKER_00: Are you trying to get me to throw all my savings into a get rich cake scheme? That ultimately is going to lose me all my money. Are you creating health content that's about a great diet?

SPEAKER_01: Are you trying to sell me pills that promise that I'll lose 10 kilos in a week? Whatever. Oh, my Lord. That's what gets a lot more difficult.

SPEAKER_31: Do you feel as the platform, it's your job to police that?

SPEAKER_01: 100%. So we produce that very heavily. Yeah, very heavily. So if you try to create content, even news content, we've also, uh, you can only create news content.

SPEAKER_00: If we, if you're an enterprise client and we know who you are basically, right?

SPEAKER_44: So if you just sign up a third dollar plan and you try to create content around politicians, for example, that's not going to make it through content moderation.

SPEAKER_09: I have to say that's really, um, that you're really taking it seriously, because if nobody in their right mind would expect Microsoft Office or Google Doc suite or Zoho, whatever suite of office and any office suite, nobody would expect them to police the output of PowerPoint. If somebody, some Nazi group in the United States wanted to create a Nazi PowerPoint, there's no way Microsoft or Google slides is going. You know what? We need to have somebody looking at the output here.

SPEAKER_08: And when the keyword Nazi comes up or white power comes up, we need to get in there and stop them from using it. So kudos to you. I mean, I think some people might. Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01: I love you made that connection because that's, that's what we always talk about. It's what I usually explain to people, right? Is that because these content creation tools, and I think what's happening right now

SPEAKER_00: is that content moderation sort of traditionally has been very much at the point of distribution, right? So as you said, you make a PowerPoint about something horrible, or maybe not a PowerPoint video about something horrible. And then it's up to YouTube to figure that out and take it down or Twitter or whatever. And I think what's going to happen with more and more of these AI tools is that at the

SPEAKER_01: point of creation, we're going to monitor like what kind of content you're creating and

SPEAKER_00: making sure that people are creating horrible content. Every business will, of course, be different. We've decided to take a very forward leaning approach to this. And, you know, we work with the fortune 100. And I have no incentive to have someone pay me $30 a month to make questionable content. And I also really think that's what's right for the world, right? We can't keep this back forever. But I think right now we're clearly technically way ahead of our competitors.

SPEAKER_01: And I think it's probably a good thing that we wrote it outside in this way. And then, you know, down the line, once open source libraries become good enough, people have

SPEAKER_110: kind of seen avatar videos before, and hopefully, we'll be kind of like more on guard, right? But it's a really difficult question. It's going to be a problem. There's no doubt about that.

SPEAKER_08: I think Victor, you're, you're, you're taking it seriously. Um, I think most people would say, Hey, we're just a tool.

SPEAKER_09: If people want to rob a bank with a Volvo or a Tesla or a BMW, that's their choice. Uh, it's not BMW or Volvo's, uh, you know, concern. Uh, it's not their responsibility, but you kind of fall more into, Hey, this is a powerful tool. This is not an average tool. Therefore it would be as if a gun manufacturer said, Hey, we know in, I don't know, whatever, Texas, you can just walk up and buy a gun. But since our guns are pretty darn powerful, uh, we're gonna ask that, uh, we have your

SPEAKER_11: name and, uh, you register your gun and you get insurance for it. And, uh, you sign off on this code of conduct. Now in America, that would be unconstitutional, but I'm giving an example here that if you do

SPEAKER_08: sell to the public, you do have a choice of who you sell to. And you might not want to, the gun manufacturers have a religious crazy thing here in America

SPEAKER_11: America where they believe everybody should be able to trade these things. Like, you know, uh, they're trading old comic books and they have gun shows where people just trade these things willy nilly. But, um, you know, it'd be quite refreshing if, you know, the person who sold the AR 15 or the most popular assault rifle said, Hey, uh, we're only gonna sell in these states, uh, under these circumstances. And we want everybody registered and, uh, you're licensing the gun from us for 50 years.

SPEAKER_267: And if you transfer it, we want to know who you sold it to and they could actually build

SPEAKER_11: those laws. You probably get fought, but I do think being thoughtful is important.

SPEAKER_01: And I actually think that like, I find that in this industry, like most companies, I think along those lines, like open AI, of course, also doing quite a lot of moderation, like

SPEAKER_00: what you can make for say, which can be annoying as a user. Sometimes the trade-off is UX, right? Like, and it also is for us. Like also have users who complain that their videos is coding content moderation, but ultimately it's like, it's, it's a trade-off, right?

SPEAKER_35: And I'm really happy to see that at least the most powerful technologies right now are being kind of somewhat, uh, safeguarded. I think that's good for the world.

SPEAKER_09: Did you see the open AI, uh, did you see the open AI lawsuit last week by chance?

SPEAKER_251: I saw that. And that's gonna be very interesting to see how this is gonna pan out.

SPEAKER_09: Just to give the audience a little refresher here. Open AI, um, has been sued by a group of anonymous plaintiffs, individuals. Lawsuit alleges open AI violated privacy laws by secretly scraping 300 billion words from the internet from quote books, articles, websites, and posts, including personal information obtained without consent. The lawsuit is seeking 3 billion in potential damages based on a category of harmed individuals estimated to be in the millions. Plaintiffs are anonymous, but some online information about their backgrounds revealed. It's, uh, all of the maps, social workers, minors, uh, all Chatship D users, 16 total plaintiffs. Uh, you know, they're across the thing. The training data is important here. Uh, it's very important. How do you look at what would be a logical and pragmatic and fair, uh, way for people building language models, uh, to get permission, um, and for people whose content is being used to

SPEAKER_11: to get compensation or to be able to opt in or opt out? What's your solution? Victor?

SPEAKER_00: I think it's a really hard question. Um, it's been, uh, it's been a theme for, uh, many years. Right. But the kind of the emergence of these very, very large models, I think have changed a little bit. So if you kind of go back one year, one and a half year, whatever, let's say before ChatGPT was released and had, we had the big cultural moment around that. A lot of companies including ourselves were like, should we scrape data online? Should we not do it for us? We've always stayed within what we know is definitely okay. We're just getting permission to every single video that we use to train our algorithms. Right. That's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of time to get that instead of just scraping it off the internet, because we believe that that's the right thing to do. I still think that's fundamentally my kind of belief, but I think what has changed now is that these very large models, GPT style, um, uh, you know, technologies. The thing with them is that they're literally impossible to create if you don't train an internet scale data. And if you train an internet scale data, it is almost like, you know, it's just going to be impossible to get consent from everyone. Like if you need to get permission from every single author of a tweet or a Facebook update or a blog post of that, that's not not going to be feasible. Right. I don't think I have. I don't have the answer as like how, what should happen here.

SPEAKER_35: I can tell you that from our perspective, um, we care a lot about having clean data. Um, and, uh, I hope that's not going to make us make it harder for us to compete in

SPEAKER_00: the future because we're staying within those boundaries right now. We definitely have some set of companies who say, you know what, we'll ask for forgiveness down the line and just, you know, scrape the internet, train our models on whatever data we can get our hands off. There's other companies who are saying, you know, we'll actually stay within the kind of boundaries where we definitely know is okay and do the hard work to get the data, both in time and money. For me, the most important thing as the founder of Synthesia is just clarity, right? Right now, nobody has any idea of what's okay, what's not okay.

SPEAKER_01: And I hope that, um, that, uh, that governments around the world will unite around some sort of guidance on what should you and what should you not do, right? But it's a really hard question. I don't have the answer for it.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I think, um, we, as an industry, uh, should get ahead of this and a very simple solution I have is robots.txt, uh, is how Google decides if they're going to scrape your site

SPEAKER_08: or I should say scrape. Yeah, they are scraping it. They, they scrape your site and index it. You get the benefit of getting traffic from Google. Uh, but you also have the choice to opt out. There needs to be something that's not, uh, binary on or off. It should be. You can scrape the site with permission. Please ask first or two.

SPEAKER_09: You can scrape the site, uh, for a minimum of $1 million per year.

SPEAKER_11: Or, uh, you can scrape the site for $1 million a year. Or you can scrape the site for $1 million a year for $500,000 a year.

SPEAKER_08: If you send $500,000 in referral traffic back at a minimum, uh, et cetera, et cetera. You can, you know, you can come up with all kinds of licensing arrangements. And those licensing should be since we have smart contract technology easily to enforce. And so what open AI could do, or let's say Twitter and Reddit, Twitter could say in order to do this, you have to go through our API and get permission. Reddit could say, you know what? You simply have to pass $1 per user of your system per year with a minimum of a $1, $1 million commitment.

SPEAKER_11: Uh, and, uh, it's paid by buying these tokens here, put in your credit card and then put in your, you know, uh, hash.

SPEAKER_236: Uh, so there you have it.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah, I agree. I think, I think this is one of the areas where crypto is actually a really interesting, uh, solution. Um, where we could, I think it's a great way for computers to transact with computers, right? I think that there's, there's a lot of, of, um, of interesting things you could do with that. It's also like, I mean, I'm in a lot of the, you know, I spent a lot of time with regulators and I'm in evolve both the, the, the EU AI Act, which is, which is very, very restrictive. And also in the UK, uh, legislation. And one thing that's interesting, right?

SPEAKER_00: Is that there's this sort of debate around, and of course this is by the AI companies who say, look, we shouldn't, we shouldn't moderate what you use to train your models. We should moderate the outcome of those models.

SPEAKER_01: Right? So now let's think of this as like, you could train all the world's images, but you have to make sure that if you have an image generator, for example, if you type in, you know, create me this image in the style of Andy Warhol, for example.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you can, at a prompt level, you could block and say, Andy Warhol does not want to have anyone prompt. Yes.

SPEAKER_105: Images in his style.

SPEAKER_340: Brilliant. Good punch up.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, I think that was really, oh, you know what, just to build on yours.

SPEAKER_09: If you typed in Andy world, say Andy Warhol photos need to be cleared, uh, for, uh, you know, non commercial use at $100 per image for commercial use, uh, click here for your license options and it could just be automatic where you could go buy tokens. Uh, API calls essentially. And open AI has this, uh, you buy a bunch of calls. You say, Hey, listen, for this number of, you know, call searches, whatever, you know, just load up on your, uh, Andy Warhol tokens or your Marvel tokens or your Disney tokens.

SPEAKER_11: And it's all for non commercial, but yeah, if you want to make Disney characters, yeah, just buy $100 worth of tokens or 50 bucks worth of tokens and have at it.

SPEAKER_169: Exactly.

SPEAKER_08: Really an idea. So get at the prompt level, anything that is IP protected. We can make an IP, this is such a good idea.

SPEAKER_169: Is it, are you the first person to, did you hear this from somebody else or did you just come up with this?

SPEAKER_01: Oh, I think I, I came up with it in one of these meetings. I think it's just the most, I think it's the most pragmatic way to ensure that. What, cause a lot of the concern from people like artists today, right? Which the world that I'm in is like, someone can just create, you know, a hundred thousand different images in the style of Banksy or Andy Warhol or whatever. And this is what people are concerned about. And I think rightly so. And this to me is a very practical way that could be implemented tomorrow. I mean, open AI is already to some extent doing this, right?

SPEAKER_00: Like if you ask it about specific people, it won't, it won't give you an answer unless that person is a public persona. And so I think there's something very interesting around like kind of limiting, limiting what these models can output to not include copyrighted works, for example. Right. So I feel like, because I think the other solution with tokens is amazing, but we all just, we both know that that's going to take, that's not going to be implemented in six months, right? That's a much bigger project to get all this stuff sort of running. And, and, and I think there's a lot of inherent issues with it. I think what's going to be interesting, especially on the tech side of things with ChatGPT, right?

SPEAKER_01: Is okay. So you have this travel blog and you, you publish a lot of content and that you've been trained on that. And you, you go in and you ask it, Hey, what should I see in the North Vietnam or something like that, right?

SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of what is learned comes from the travel blog post. And also you don't need to go to the website anymore. I think that's, I don't think the technology necessarily is there yet, but it's going to be there very soon where maybe you don't really need to visit that many websites, which are just text. That's going to have a huge impact on those creators.

SPEAKER_101: Um, I, again, don't know what the solution is, but I think, I think we're just very early, but that feels like one of the kind of inevitable things that's going to happen as these technologies get better and better.

SPEAKER_37: Well done. I'd like to have you come back on the program and maybe do an AI round table. Would you be open to that?

SPEAKER_356: Yeah, I would love it.

SPEAKER_37: Okay. Producer neck.

SPEAKER_356: Are you on the call?

SPEAKER_37: Yes. Okay. Producer Nick. Victor is very smart and insightful.

SPEAKER_09: I'd love to pair him on one of our AI round tables in the next 60 days. Uh, you know, maybe with sunny and, uh, just have him come on and we just wrap out, uh, since he's, he's deep in this and he's got really great ideas. Everybody check out.

SPEAKER_141: Synthesia spelled S N Y S S Y N T H E S I A. Are you the dot com or dot AI? Dot.

SPEAKER_361: Dot. Dot.

SPEAKER_08: Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot.

SPEAKER_20: Dot.

SPEAKER_49: I mean, you're, that English is the English is the new interface.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_08: I, I think this is what I think this is what, this is, what's gonna scare people, but should inspire them. If you speak English or any language. Any human language, you're gonna be able to produce videos, produce illustrations, produce incredible writing songs, images, uh, code apps. the verticalization and the specialization is going to be democratized and everybody's going to be you know let's call it maybe not a great songwriter but an okay an okay songwriter a good one everybody's going to be able to write a good blog post maybe not a great one an okay one a good one eventually may be great but if you thought hey i have to hire a blogger to write the this or i have to write hire a pr person to write this press release the answer is you're not going to everybody in the organization is going to be able to write a press release that doesn't mean you might have some comms expert who's going to do the strategy but we're all leveling up and the idea that we would sit there and worry about the ink and the hammers in the typewriter anymore is over and i think you just have to say listen we took the typewriter and we threw it in the garbage and now everyone's on word processors okay we took some of these jobs that were tedious and we got rid of

SPEAKER_101: them my hobby is music production right and that's that's what i grew up being being interested in

SPEAKER_00: and it's just amazing how if you look at the shape of the music industry right back in 85 versus today how it's been flattened out talent can come from anywhere it's about making great music less than it's about knowing the right people like all those things i think it's going to come to the tech

SPEAKER_01: industry as well right and we've seen some of that over the last five years but i think as the kind of art of coding becomes more accessible it's like you know what why couldn't you be this eight-person company sitting somewhere in you know norway or denmark something like that and create something absolutely amazing and i'm very excited for that i think i think i love technology that democratizes

SPEAKER_00: enables people to do more with that time and it's still going to require great ideas you're still going to need to have a great product sense you're going to be a great songwriter right if you really want to build something cool but we can just remove all the barriers um that exist to creation today

SPEAKER_09: right and that's going to be fantastic all right you've been awesome dude thanks for giving me an hour of your time and sharing it with the this week in startups audience this week in startups audience founder fridays uh are coming and they're going to come to your city you can go to founder

SPEAKER_11: fridays.tech i'm looking for some folks who want to uh host founder fridays it's only for founders if you're not a founder you can't come uh and we just did the first one here in uh the bay area 50 people showed up it was awesome so this weekend startups founder fridays are starting in september and we're looking for hosts these used to be called twist meetups but we'll call them founder fridays we thought we'd come up with a fun brand every friday 5 to 8 p.m after work everybody gets together and shows what they're working on and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups bye bye