YouSaid · the spoken record

Michał Kuczynski

lines on the record: 45
first: 2024-07-12
most recent: 2024-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Open source, then you might end up looking to switch. And we've seen that with OpenAI, like the big migration that from developers that started using OpenAI, ChatGPT, APIs and GPT 3.5s, and then now they migrate into like anthropic and mistral or Lama. That's been happening for the past six months. It will continue happening, right? So you start to validate that everything goes well and then you figure out what the...”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think anyone that has actually built a full LLM if they're not able to build applications on top of it to make life easier for consumers and businesses, you will end up struggling down the line, whether that is in six months time or that is in 18 months time, you will struggle. Because at the end of the day, like I want to launch my own application, like my product or use the product like this in Italy, right? And if I need to spend the next month coding and building the UIs and everything, I might give up and go somewhere else, even if it's more expensive, especially if I don't even know whether I have product market fit. And product market fit, like we always think about like actual startups, but like big corporates might not have even product market fit. So if you want to iterate quickly and then go to market as quickly as possible, then you might want to have a stack that is like truly readily available for you. But once you're ready and you've tested it and the technology feels good enough with other LLMs or like”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open source at a cost, which is like the number of features that you will have is more limited, right? So you will end up also having less voices. So what's your preference? You don't have the UI. So what's your preference as a business, as individual, is it purely building on top of it? Then maybe open source is a good way. Like today, the quality is not there yet, but I'm sure that within the next three years, the quality is going to be like matching anything that is like private, right? So it's going to be more about like the aqueous ecosystem that you build around it to make sure that people start using it in a much easier way and then embed it anyway. But actually, I think it's complementary. Without one, we cannot have the other one, purely because the market needs both sides.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's complementary, actually. You always end up having businesses or people that can go and use open source and they have the means and the tools and the knowledge to make that work. And then you end up having quite a lot of different people. They're like, don't really have those means or knowledge, right? So it just ends up becoming like different sides of the business or different sides of the market, right? However you want to segment it. And when I think about voices, we've been talking to each other as humans for the past 50,000 years, right? And there wasn't really a good technology that was able to replicate how we talk as humans. So the fact that like as a platform or like even open source, you're able to actually replicate people's voices with their permission, make it sound natural, engaging, and then power a new type of communication and like platform and experience, that market is massive. So by default, you need to have both sides to be able to actually counterbalance each other and push each other. But it comes also.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, with DScript, you can create a voice clone of yourself and sort of like intermingle. We have this thing called Overdub, where if I say the wrong word, I can go back in with the text, say the word that I actually meant to say, and then it will with my voice clone kind of create that. But obviously there are a lot of misuses there. And so whenever we launch a product, we launch it with protections in place and do a bunch of testing and hire outside people to try to crack it and try to make sure that we do our very best to make sure that it's ungameable. But like you said, if people are extremely determined to crack through security, like they will always find new ways to do it. And this was the case when I was in social media too, where like you do all kinds of things to try to protect your platform and bad actors, they get up every morning and grind just as hard as you do. And so you're just sort of in the eternal struggle. And I think like every single tech product should be thinking about like how are people?”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, right? But I think if you build that into a product, like, for example, we have the language translation feature, which can translate whatever you're speaking to a different language, change your lip movements as well. And yes, that's using the same technology, but in a very opinionated way that you can't change what was said, but you can change what language it was set in. And so that limits the scope of abuse immediately quite a bit, right? And then all the traditional methods can be used on top of that as well.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People understand it online. The product side of this too, which I do think is super important to sort of like build the safety features from the product, from the ground up, like in the product from the ground up. And that's kind of the difference between offering a technology versus offering a product. If you just say, hey, come to our website, make deep fakes, right? That's awesome.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question, right? Boys is not as unique as everyone thinks. But, however, they're quite unique. So you end up having like false positives for sure, but we end up doing it, like if it's a false positive, if it tells you like, oh, you don't have permission for this voice, automatically tells you like, oh, but you can still pass the voice structure and it will show you the voice capture. So if you pass it because it is your voice, then you're able to actually like use your own voice, right? I have a twin brother for the ones that are now. We do sound exactly the same. And even my parents actually, they sometimes they make mistakes, right? So truly, like I could be talking, but you could be thinking it's my twin brother. We have exactly the same voice. And that is a challenge as a company we have and a society we have, right? But I think like if you end up building layers as a product from a product perspectives to help filter those false positives, I think like people understand that you're trying to go from like everything is free for all and then you can misuse it as much as you wanted. There was like, let's put some controls. And even if there's some false positives.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To some extent, you don't really have that much control over those tools, right? But I think it's important as a company, we will keep investing like millions every single year and we can increase it as the market grows as well.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for us, internationalization has been like since day one there. We have a full international team, everyone is full of remote. So that actually there's a very strong correlation, funny enough, between the actual employee profile and the fact that we have multiple countries. Everyone can be based whatever they wanted and travel and all of that stuff. And the actual user type that we've gathered, right? So yes, in the initial days, like a lot of our growth came from North America and European markets, but actually these days when you look at the entire pie, it's like super spread out across the world. I can relate to that purely like on the fact that people want the best tools that will help them on a day-to-day basis, right? And you don't really need to spend these days like thousands of dollars or like hundreds of dollars to actually produce a video or to produce a podcast or produce something, right? You could do it much cheaper using tools. And that's the beauty of it. So by default, like anyone that truly wants to have a cost efficient solution will end up using any of the tools.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, I think around the world people are super open to trying something new to see if they can change their workflow. I think as long as you can provide something that is once you try it, you can't go back to what you were doing before. That's it. That's the difference, right? If you can provide that experience in any language, any culture, any country, people will use the product.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we've had zero users and overnight had an explosion of users in that market. But then we learned something about that particular market where, oh, they don't like this particular thing. Or if you think about, for example, the Middle East, right? Text is written in the opposite way. And so that changes a lot about the UI and changes a lot about the user experience. And we've done a lot of work to make that good and make that as usable and as amazing of an experience as it is in any other language. Those are the types of efforts we've made high priority from the beginning.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had an international audience from the beginning, including every country and every region you could possibly imagine. So I think it's been a high priority from the beginning, right? Because the interesting thing is a lot of the Development that AI is bringing is not just things that are usable in like, oh, it's just an English thing, or oh, it's just like a US thing or something. It actually brings change in workflows across almost every country and every culture you can imagine. And it actually works, right? Like I think we've gone and launched new markets.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About those two elements, like the biggest challenges that we constantly facing as a company. Like, we're winning, but still, it's just a matter of making sure that you're constantly innovating and having resources for something that is important. Otherwise, like regulators come or like consumers don't blame and things like that and people complain, right?”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is definitely hiding? I can relate a lot on that. It's difficult. We've gone from like zero to like tens and tens of millions in months, not even years, in months. And it's really difficult to find people that have experienced that previously. Also because like the market has evolved very quickly in such a time frame. So that's one side. So there is a lot of commitment that we expect from people at the company and we need to be able to actually keep growing at this space. And on the research side, it's extremely difficult to find the right researchers on Jane side, on the operation side, on the sales, even support across the board. That's one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is preventing misuse, right? And I think realistically, that is something that we have an entire team dedicated to that day and night, 24-7. But every time that we put together something that is windy other different things that like people make up, try to game it. And it is similar to fraud where you're always like a few steps behind. And it's really difficult to catch and I keep fighting it. So I think like.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's just that we're in the middle of a paradigm shift, right? Like we haven't gotten to the end of it. We're in the middle now. And what I can tell you is that the way that we're going to edit video and audio in a year or in two years is going to look completely different than how we're doing it right now. But we don't know how yet. And on one hand, like, that's why I'm here. That's like why I'm doing this job, because this is a place where the next generation of like product managers and designers were going to reinvent the way that humans and computers interact with each other. Someone's going to figure it out. And God, I hope it's like me or that I'm part of it in some small way. But that's also just like a very fragile moment, right? Like it's both a challenge and an opportunity. And I think it's like the challenge of our industry right now.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'd say for us, it's hiring, actually. It's very traditional, right? But I think hiring the right people to solve the particular problems that we're having in our company. And problems grow really quickly, the company's growing really quickly, right? And you have to kind of keep an eye on all the different things that are happening, where new needs might come up, especially with a company like ours where we've existed for about three years and there's video companies that have been around for a long time. We've passed everybody in revenue in like literally a year and a half. And with growth at that scale, you just have to constantly be thinking about what are the new problems that are coming up and who can we hire solve those problems, right? So I think that's like a very traditional answer. And maybe there's some AI recruiters out there, but we have a great team. So I don't think we need them, at least not.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's from an operations site, it's like even more complex, right? Because, like, there's so many things that you need to do, how do you automate or how do you get someone to help you on that front, right? So ideally, you end up having a product that helps you to twice as much in the same amount of time, not because I'm thinking about it from an efficiency perspective, but much more how I can potentially generate more revenue for the business, right? I think that's where potential...”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot about this. What is the AI product manager? The paradigm that I use is more like how do I want to interact with AI to do my job better? One of the use cases I'm excited about is a rubber duck who talked back. You guys hear about like rubber ducking where you keep a rubber duck on your desk and you talk through difficult problems with that rubber duck. And I think I'm never going to cede control of the creativity and the genius to like the entity. Clearly have you met me? I'm in charge of that. But I think like it can be fun to toss the ball around with someone. And I think I'm excited to see how AI continues to develop to be like a fun thing to toss the ball around and then can take all of the stuff that you're just like spewing out all of the kind of word garbage and turn it into something crisp and readable and easy to understand. So that's a use case that I'm excited about.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Setting up the overall architecture of whatever is being built, right? But a lot of the work's been done by AI and they're coming in, they're making edits, they're like, maybe we need to change this reviewing stuff, right? Same on design, right? Like kind of giving high level instructions and like, let's have this. Let's maybe use this style over here. Let's change these components, right? And getting that output back and kind of reviewing it, leaving comments the same way that a manager might write and being able to produce hopefully a lot more value and output. That means that companies can be going to a much larger revenue scales with way fewer people, which is going to be interesting.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's going to help you quite a lot, either because you can do a lot of modern monetization with your customers, you can reach new markets, or you can actually do it much quicker, right? But I think framing it on actually what is valuable for you as a business or as an individual is much more important. So like initially our metrics were like Python about like users, right? And over the past month, we've ended up like switching to like usage is important, but that does not define the long-term success of an actual customer for us, right? It's more of a activation side. It's about actually what's the use case that you have and how do we measure that of the long term and how do we understand and try to insert the use case based on the way you're using the product, right? So that we can offer you the best tools and the best tips and all that stuff. For us, that essentially those are the key metrics today. Usage is still super important, but I don't really mind if someone uses the product today and then doesn't do it for like a week or two weeks because I know that like if we”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI tourists are there and they're very big. It's because everyone comes with such a big expectation that he's going to be solving all of my problems and it's going to be cooking dinner for me tonight as well. And unfortunately, it's not going to cook dinner for you. It's just not going to solve.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anywhere between 50 to 60 times the time. There's 60, like it slashed by 50 and 60, and they were like, no, that's not possible. And we did the math, and it was very interesting. So I think there is an emphasis on that. Think sometimes we try to Of the efficiency of the”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Element that we've gone from one side to the Probably like someone in the middle is what it fits well. I was actually in a meeting with a customer and we presented the C level last week. Question they came back with was like, okay, so how much time am I going to save? And I was like, well,”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That to go down and down, and so you're able to just create more and more of the content. Is anyone here a creator in any way have a YouTube channel or a marketer? Do you know about just like the gaping maw that can never be fully fed or sated for content that I find so many of our customers are just staring into with despair? And so getting kind of their time to expression down is really important. But one of the ways you do that is just like by creating worse and worse content that is just a role with an iPhone and you slap some captions on it, which is great for some use cases, but for others, just like a missed opportunity, like you could have done so much more to create really high quality video content.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will say that I am so glad to be out of the game of trying to optimize for MDAU for monetized daily active users. I think that daily active use is like a pretty terrible metric to uncover customer value, right? And so one of the things that I just love most about working at descript is being able to identify alternative metrics to think about have I done right by the customer, two that I really like to think about that are a bit in tension with each other. They act as guardrails is time to expression and editing richness. So I think if descript is doing its job really well, the amount of time it takes you from starting a project to getting it into a shareable state, whether you're a marketer who's like trying to repurpose a webinar into clips or someone who is more of a creator trying to make your latest YouTube review or you're someone in learning development trying to create a training, I want the amount of time it takes you to create.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product people, the main problem is hey, like, how do we actually solve problems? Actually, solve real problems that people have, right? And not just sell the technology as technology, right? Like, hey, we have technology, just that, right? But actually convert it into real value delivery for users for specific use case, even an issue use case, right? Whatever it might be, right? And then I think for marketers, the problem is how do we actually educate people that there's a new way to solve these problems, right? Like people may not think the first thing, oh, you know what? I'm going to Google AI for this. That might not be the first thing that people think about, right? They might be searching for just whatever they were normally doing, which may be something that takes a long time. And or they might be like not aware that there's new solutions available to these problems, right? So I think that's sort of the end to end. I think if you focus on that at that level, like all the other numbers sort of follow on their own, and that's kind of what we've seen, both across our desktop app and our mobile apps as well. And we're in the consumer space. So retention is definitely a very hard game.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's something we think about a lot because at the end of the day, I think you can kind of go by metrics and you can really worry about like, oh, there's retention number. It should be at that number and you can kind of get caught up in that a little too much. When the reality is those micro optimizations are not going to solve whatever retention problem or any other metric problem that you might have, right? At the end of the day, it's about the user experiences. It's about solving a real problem. I think generally if you want a complete hit end-to-end, you need to have a breakthrough technology that's applied to solve a very specific problem that a user actually has. And then you need to have an engine that can deliver that solution to people who have that problem as quickly as possible across the world, right? If you have all those pieces, then you won't have a retention problem or an acquisition problem or any other problem, basically, right? Now, the cool thing about this time right now is the technologies are being developed and there's actually a crazy number of technologies out there, right? I think it's a very unique time from that perspective, right?”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That, like, if you retain them and you give them the best experience possible, they will stay there for the coming year, right? Whether that is because they're building their own applications on top of that or because they essentially are like, well, I want to use your app overall. And the way we also think about this at 11 apps is like layers, right? So having the foundational layer, which is like the research that we provide, right? We do LMs and essentially we provide the best text to speech and AI voices in the market. Fantastic. What else do you have on top of it? The data that we've acquired that we've licensed from partners, the products end-to-end products that we're building, the partnerships that we have, the customers that we have. So you end up creating all of these multiple layers that essentially end up building your core defensibility in the market that hopefully will sustain us for the coming years, right? As the market changes, if one of the layers ends up getting replaced, absolutely fine, because then essentially you have all of the other ones that will back you over the long term, right?”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there is an element here on if you think about purely about differentiation in these days, like, because the market has evolved a lot from purely foundational pixels and shovels, and now the transition towards the app side, like what you end up thinking about how I think about defensibility sphere about your users, your consumers or your businesses, right? Like that's essentially what will drive the fensibility over the long term. And if you think about Instagram or Meta or like a Facebook in the early days, what was their defensibility? There was literally nothing out there, but they were able to fast grow like outpace everyone in terms of growth, deliver value, and then the UI was not even that great, right? But it was actually like you were feeling there was part of the community and it was like the experience that you were getting, right? And I think like the transition that we're seeing today from the foundational models totally upside, it's actually very interesting because then you're able to engage different type of generations or different type of users.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at Descript, I would say that we are a horizontal editor and we're a very powerful human editor, which is something that I think a lot of kind of newer just started in the age of AI, in the second chapter of AI companies can't say because it takes a long time to build a really powerful horizontal human-driven editor. So you can do like really complex editing jobs with DScript if you already are like an expert who's great at this work and you can do it really quickly with low barriers to entry if you're new to it. For that reason, I think the application layer is especially important to us. And I almost see us as a mirror to kind of what 11 labs was saying, where I think like”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Published through our platform for a consumer company, it does matter a lot to have that differentiation at this stage. I think in the longest term, if you think about what differentiates a consumer company in the longest of terms, it's probably just brand, right? And that's kind of what you're building over a period of time. And the only way a brand dies is like with the generation. It also takes a generation to build a brand too, right? So I think that's kind of the ultimate goal of where you want to get to. But I think in the meantime, there's many modes that long last like different lengths of time, whether that's a data mode or a model mode or like whether it's a UI, UX mode, whatever it might be.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I'll start here by saying again, not much has changed in terms of like, there have been companies built in the past on just grade design. So I think there's no reason that they can't be built on the AI side. But at this point of the journey, there's so much to innovate on and so much to build on. It does help to have models that are foundational and built in-house because it does give you that extra differentiation and that extra step. It is a competitive field. And the deeper you can go and the more you can build from the ground up really connecting these different layers together, right? You can deliver super fast speeds on your models. You can deliver the highest quality that anyone's seen, right? And you can deliver great user experience that solves a real problem. Then you have an advantage there. So I would say though for consumer companies, which we're a consumer company, right? Like were used by literally millions and millions of people around the world and people make over 100,000 videos a day.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot of startups, and we are very proud to help all of these companies succeed as well, right? So it's been very interesting, like having both sides, both motions, like the pure API play and the application layer on top of it. It's challenging as well, because then you end up having different profiles in terms of like on the product side, on the GNI side and everything, right? So you always need to balance it.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we launch the product, and we thought, well, actually, there's going to be like some pieces of some content creators that might want to use the UI, but we expect on the API side, it's going to be quite big, purely because people might want to build their own applications on top of it. And it worked really well. And since then, what we also realized is like, well, you cannot expect all of the business to have the capabilities, build their own application. So what if we end up going full end-to-end and we build our own applications for areas where we really care about? And that's how we end up creating like projects or audio native or like the dubbing product and a bunch of other pieces, right? So it's been very interesting for us. And of course, we always say that it's AI driven because at the end of the day, we're a foundational model that happens to also build applications on top of it. But I think the beauty of it is that anyone can build anything they fancy on top of the API. And today we power quite a lot of different companies, more than 41% of Fortune 500 companies use 11 labs.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we need to be open. Like, we are an AI company. Sorry, guys. And we say it all the time. Like we say, we do AI voices. We do AI sound effects. We're going to be doing AI music in many ways. So for us, it's all about the audio sphere, right? It's like that layer infrastructure that allows you to create high quality engaging content, what that is like with voice, with like audio overall. And the way we thought is, well, actually, there wasn't really a good quality text-to-speech available before we invented our own site. So we were fundraising initially. It was difficult because the market is not there, like how are you going to be getting customers and so on. So it's like it was really tough in the early days, but we thought, look, if you're able to deliver quality, the voices that sound engaging, the applications on top of it, then you end up having a market that is just fully on top, right? So how do you do that? AI voices simple and plain, right? And that worked really well. So we started with like the LLM API play with a very simple UI. That was end of January last year.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have been saying for literally a hundred years about every product, right? Like, yeah, yeah, trust me is better. Trust me, come on in, try it out. This is every single product that exists, right? But putting in that AI term in there just from the marketing side is just tactical actually lets people understand, oh, wait, this is going to be a step change, right? Of course, if you don't meet that expectation when they land in the product, you're going to have a problem. But if you're able to meet that expectation, putting that in kind of does inform people about like, okay. This is not going to be sort of like the better product. It's going to be a step change compared to everything else we've seen. So that's the general guide. I do feel like a lot of people are just throwing in the high term when the marketing side now just to kind of get the eyeballs there. And maybe that message will kind of get lost a little bit. But so far, the innovation's just been so strong that the messages kind of remain strong. And if it continues this way, the marketing side can continue as well. But at some point, it might get.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd say at the end of the day, you have to solve customer problems. That's what we're trying to do. I think the biggest mistake that can be made is to say, hey, here's a technology. You can have technology, do whatever you want. People can't just take that and be like, okay, I know what to do with this, right? I think you have to mold it into a product that solves a problem at the end of the day. So I think that's like traditional. Nothing's changed there, right? It's exactly the same as before. And if you're not doing that, then essentially you're going to see retention problems, right? You're going to see people coming in, trying out the thing, not knowing exactly what to do with it, not working perfectly for their use case, and then they'll leave kind of tourism is what we're calling it, right? But I think at the same time on the marketing side, like stepping away from product for a second, there is something to be said about sort of having AI in your message on the marketing side. Here's why. If I just say, I have a better product, it's so much better. You won't believe it. I'll be saying the same thing.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then hilariously, you have the other side of the debate that I don't want an entity because actually it turns out this technology is really stupid sometimes. And if you make it an entity, you said like, hey, welcome. This is like your co-editor. And it turns out you're co-editor is just like a total moron that makes horrible suggestions sometimes because it's hallucinating. And so we're like, okay, how do we deal with that? So what we decided to do with this newest release is we're actually. And it's a nod to the potentially apocalyptic future of AI while also admitting that right now this thing is kind of like a very eager, like somewhat competent intern that does a really great job at the first pass of the worst parts of your workflow. So that's some of the story about how we've thought about designing with AI over the years.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI in the product differently. And if so, how? And so with our latest release, we're actually bringing all of the AI features that we've long had in the product into the same space and adding a ton of new ones. And we had a big discussion with our design team about how do we do this. And one of the big discussions we had is, is AI a magic bond or is it an entity? And one of the big decisions you have to make there is that traditional creators are much more used to interacting with Pro tool software or creative software in a point-and-click way. And so they want a magic wand. But you have this whole new wave of people that are now generating and editing, video, and audio, and they're used to using kind of more of this entity interaction. They want an entity. Then you start talking about an entity, right? And you get into internal discussions like, I don't know if it's an entity. That might be a bad idea because what about our robot overlords, our inevitable robot overlords, right? That's kind of like one side of the debate.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology that sort of undergirds that is, in fact, AI. But we haven't traditionally come forward and said we're an AI video editor. A, there wasn't like this huge reward in the hype cycle for saying that. So we didn't have marketers saying it. But also what we found is that customers didn't care, right? They don't care what is the technology that is creating this value for me. What they care about is there is value here. This is helpful for me. And so that was long our way of designing software. And it probably would have continued that way forever, except that actually when I think about the thing that is making us change our minds, in addition to some of these cool models that are coming out, it is that the way that humans and computers are interacting is totally different. So you can talk to your computer now. You can use human language to communicate more subtle intentionalities that you have for how you want to edit your video or create your video. So as this technology has gotten better, we thought, well, gosh, do we actually want to design?”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's correct. The key message for us experimentation for 11 lamps has been if you put garbage in, garbage out, right? If the quality of the data that you put in is not that great, then essentially what you end up producing is half-baked with lots of mistakes and things like that, right? And we can see that with Whisper, how many of you have tried Whisper and it comes out that like subscribe, subscribe, subscribe and things like that, right all the time. We've seen it all the time. But so I think for us, there's been a layering initially we trained with a lot of data. And then over time, we end up curating the data to make sure that it is very high quality. Otherwise, you're not able to achieve the results that you are expecting or that your consumers or your businesses would need, right? But that's a fundamental change that has happened in the market, amounts of data being used with transformers and lamps to generate this human content generated, like whether that's speech or text or anything else.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really exciting time generally just because obviously there's been a couple of key breakthroughs just in terms of technology with transformers and diffusion models and so on and so forth. But I think the key here is we're able to use a lot more data to train these models now than ever before, right? And there's a bunch of things happening both on the hardware side, the software side, and the data side to enable that to happen. And that's why we're seeing amazing results, right? If you look at a lot of what the key players in this industry are doing, they're just training these models with more and more and more data every iteration, right? And that's able to produce reliably better and better and better results, which is pretty amazing to see. And it's not inside so far.”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we're actually less than two years since that, but a lot of people are familiar with text to text. But all three of the products here go into several other modalities, right? We've got audio, we've got video, imagery. So I think that's really exciting. But maybe we could actually just start with the why now and specifically maybe the unlock that we've seen with unstructured data right before we use databases and everything needed to be really structured in order for us to make sense of it today that's not quite the case. So Gorov, maybe we start with you and what do you see really today as the why now?”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been companies built in the past on just great design. There's no reason that they can't be built on the AI side. End up creating all of these multiple layers that essentially end up building your core defensibility in the market”
2024-07-12 · a16z Podcast · Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source