YouSaid · the spoken record

Mikey Shulman

lines on the record: 81
first: 2025-01-10
most recent: 2025-01-10
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

“There's a few different ways. I'll tell you what I hope it is, which is that there are a lot more people participating and there are a lot more experiences on TAP. And so what does that mean? That means we didn't just want to build, let's say, a company that makes the current crop of creators 10% faster or makes it 10% easier to make music if you want to impact the way a billion people experience music. You have to build something for a billion people. That is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music. And this is a huge departure from how it is now. It's not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think in the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If this lawsuit goes to trial and we lose, it's obviously not good for us, the company's not dead, but it's obviously not good for us. I don't think that's likely. I would just be thinking about, A, the game theory of what all players want here, and B, what is the best future of music for everyone? Even if you could make sure like companies or AI companies go away, do you really want that? What if the music industry can be as big as the gaming industry? There's going to be a lot of happy people.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's certainly an element of that, but those people, I think, are lying if they tell you this is a good thing. It's like maybe it's a sign of a good thing, but it it itself is not a good thing. If nothing else, it's going to cost money and time.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some did, some didn't. On paper, I would say it just seems silly to throw a bunch of venture dollars at lawyers instead of sitting down and talking about how you could work together. Deciding to sue first and then ask questions later seems to me to be inefficient.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. There's like the traditional Silicon Valley mentality of screw you existing industry. I will disrupt you. There's nothing that you can do about it. And then there's like the existing incumbent approach, which is like, I will sue you until you go away. And both of these are obviously wrong. People will ding us for building a tech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it's actually nice not to have that embedded Silicon Valley mentality of, screw you, existing industry, I'm going to disrupt you and there's nothing you can do about it. Every single person at Suno has like an incredible deep love and respect for music, which culturally is amazing, but also just keeps people out of that mentality and much more focused on building a bigger, brighter future, hopefully with the incumbents in the industry. And by the way, there are plenty of incumbents in the industry who do work with us.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Country. The conclusion is more engineers equals more growth, more lawyers equals less growth, and that's like a little bit reductive. But I think that instead of fighting it out, if we were talking, which we were before this lawsuit happened, at least to some of the players in that lawsuit, if we were working together toward building a bigger future of music, everybody would just be happier. And the music business is one that has such an embedded fixed pie mentality. There's a fixed pie of money out there, and we are all just trying to divide it unfairly for ourselves. And if we were focused on growing that pie, I think just everything gets easier.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to be very careful what I say and don't say about a lawsuit. So, yeah, we know that there are some copyrighted works in our training data that's not illegal. It's stock standard for the industry. It's what every AI company does. In some sense, the lawsuit wasn't totally shocking. Most AI companies get sued. Everybody in music gets sued. It's a highly litigious industry. It's a little bit depressing in some way because I think there is a much bigger and brighter future of music to build together with the existing industry instead of kind of fighting it out and having the potential for this thing to just be net smaller. You know, I'll say something ill of lawyers for a minute, but we were talking about economists, and there's this famous econ paper from like the 80s looking at why do some countries grow and some countries don't grow. And by this guy, Andre Schleiffer, one of the conclusions is basically like, they're looking at the ratio of like how many engineers are in a country and how many lawyers are in a country.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you know, you need to run high quality experiments. And so the machine learning team at Suno will almost certainly not scale as quickly as a software team or said differently, research is not something that you can solve with scale. You can just throw more bodies and you'll get comparatively more results. It will be sublinear returns there. And so it's very important to really understand like, okay, I have like really talented researchers doing the problems that are going to be really important for the future of music.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the biggest thing by far. It's a few times payroll. We also have a big research cluster that these technologies didn't exist when we started the company. And research is still a huge part of what we do.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine it were just only the free tier or everything were totally free. When you hit the end of your free tier, I don't know why. I don't know if you wanted to continue or didn't want to continue. I don't know how to pick out the users that I want to interview that found this really valuable or not really valuable. Like, I'm kind of lost in the desert a little bit. And if you have it and you can say, okay, these are the people who subscribe. These are the people who subscribe before they even hit the paywall. Let's go talk to them. Let's figure out what was that magical moment they had. Or these were the people that hit the paywall and didn't subscribe. Let's go talk to them. Let's figure out why we didn't wow them. Sure, maybe we would be a little bit bigger, but we would also have, I think, a worse product if we hadn't had that data at our hands.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we didn't want to be a novelty item. We wanted to be giving people something that they enjoyed enough to pay for. And so I remembered when we launched this thing, it was a Discord bot. We started collecting, you know, we always had this free tier, same free tier as it is today. And if you wanted to do more, you had to pay. And a surprising number of people subscribed in that first month. And it was a sign that like, hey, this is a real thing. But even without the revenues, which are fantastic to have, and they offset a lot of GPU burn, knowing what gets people to subscribe is such valuable data that I don't know how we would do this without it.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do want you to do an annual subscription, though I think, in some sense, not the most deliberate decision, but we made a decision to start charging from day one, which is like a little bit against the traditional wisdom of Silicon Valley of just like give the product away for free, scale, scale, scale.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a few things we look at there. The most salient one is actually just like, did you hit the paywall your first day? Even if you didn't go through it for whatever reason, if you hit the”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but 10 seconds is worse than eight. I don't see us getting to one second anytime soon, but I think the crossover that you're talking about, we're still kind of far away from.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very happy we use transformers because it lets us kind of get that too quicker. We can actually measure it's super important what you said and we keep a very close eye on making sure we deliver an amazing experience for your first song because it matters a ton. And I can tell you, for example, we can introduce a little bit of artificial latency into the product and we can see people like it less. Probably eight seconds.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The future of customer support might be much, much bigger than Zendesk, right? If everything can be automated, you have all these BPOs, you have all these, it's not obvious to me. I'm quite certain that the future of music is also much bigger than it is today, but maybe that's not dawned on the folks at OpenAI. What I will say is that this isn't just, it's the same thing about things being tastes. This is a product game. At the end of the day, people will use Suno because it's a better product, not because there's a better, bigger model under the hood. We are in the business of selling pleasurable musical experiences to people, plain and simple. And so a chat interface is not the be-all and end-all that people want to do for that.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. We think about this a lot. They will try. I don't know if it will be music. Customer support seems honestly bigger. The thing that OpenAI is going after is, let's be honest, I hope to build a giant company, but general intelligence and customer support are both much bigger than music.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really hard. We have the advantage of having a lot of usage, and so we can run, we have a lot of data, we can collect a lot of data, we can run a lot of A-B tests on things. In the future, there's probably a lot more personalization than happens in this domain, but in the meantime, it's similar techniques that align models to human preferences for like RLHF for chat GPT, et cetera. But it's totally not obvious that that is what the future should be. You know, it's totally not obvious that the same techniques that are used to align LLMs to weird human taste should be the same techniques that we use to align music models.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we don't pay millions of dollars. So, how do we compete? There's a couple things. One is we're not in Silicon Valley. If you want to be in one of the cities where we are, we're headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We're kind of the coolest AI company, certainly in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There's something else that goes back to what we were talking about before, which is that if you're interested in a different AI problem in the problem of how do I align models not to objective truth, but to human taste, I think there's nowhere else to do it.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question, two completely different reasons. I think, you know, and I'll preface this with building an AI company. You are in the business of trying to find talent and trying to find underappreciated talent, let's be honest, I will pay you less than OpenAI will pay you. And I need to find a reason to convince you to come join us. And I think for economists, economists are great at thinking about natural experiments. They're great about doing kind of first principles reasoning in a way that isn't just like, turn the crank, get better at this benchmark, but it's much better at thinking about what do these benchmarks really mean? Are there natural experiments that I can pursue there? Because lots of economics research happens in kind of data poor environments. And I think those are really interesting perspectives. Physics, I'm maybe a little bit closer to. Experimental physicists just get good at running high quality experiments really quickly. And AI is an empirical discipline. And so whoever can run more high quality experiments quickly will win.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you. It's like a tragedy of the commons, but it's an irrational decision right now, right? It's like it's going to need some massive government intervention, I think, in a good way to make it happen. And we should do that.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should, you should not, you know, career advice, it's a very risky career because it may not work. So there's to be spicy. People should not join companies doing it just yet.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the promises are incredible. There's a big part of me that wishes that we knew more things to do with these quantum computers. But I just see a rush of commercial dollars into the space where far more research was necessary and people are so short-sighted, including, if I may, in your business, VCs are so short-sighted, you expect returns over a certain time horizon. And at least from my vantage point, the challenges are not they're still physics challenges. There's still like basic research challenges that have to happen here. And so it's not something where you can kind of just turn the crank and make companies out of it. And to my knowledge, all of the companies that sprang up around this are not doing all that well. And to my knowledge, the best stuff that happens happens in this weird public-private partnership type of situation.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it reduces the average value of any given piece of content, but I think it greatly increases the value of music to society or to any given person. I think that's what we want, right? Like we want a bigger, more vibrant music industry that has way more participants in it, that has way more engagement, and not this more precious thing where very few people have access to actually doing it, to making it. And the range of experiences that the average person has is kind of limited and therefore not valuable.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a transformer model. We've not been shy about it. But if you spend night and day doing that and basically take everything from the open source text community for how to make and scale models, that's a pretty good recipe.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could. Thank you for your support I agree with that very strongly. I'm not even sure you'll know what model there is. At some point, I don't know if it's version four or version five. There will be a last model release that is released as a model. And everything else is just product releases because in the end, you know, it's not today, but in the end, I think people aren't going to care what powered the thing. You're just going to care that the music made you feel a certain way. And there's going to be lots of things that go into that.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing about video games is that they're interactive, they're engaging, they're rich experiences, they're fun by yourself, they're more fun with your friends. And when I think about what music should be for me, it should be all of those things. In that sense, I want to make music more like a video game. Nobody half plays video games the same way people kind of put on music in the background and half pay attention to it. And then the other way is I think if you accomplish all those things and if you make music interactive and you make music engaging, people will pay for it like they pay for video games. And I'm sure I don't need to tell you the video game industry is so much bigger than the music industry and most other industries. And it's because people have no problem parting with their hard-earned money to experience those things. And to me, it seems like just crazy that music should not be as engaging as Fortnite.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For music, it's very different from text. And I think people will very sloppily look at the world of open AI and anthropic and the hyperscalers and say, audio is just a couple years behind, which it is, but that scale is going to solve all these things. But unlike those domains where you're trying to just get more and more answers to objective problems, like I want to get a better SAT score, I want to do better on this benchmark. Music is totally subjective. So scale is not the answer to all the problems. So the models stay relatively small. And there are other techniques that you have to use to actually have these things have good taste.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't call it a pivot. You know, we always knew that audio was really far behind the world of text. That's where we came from. Our backgrounds are all NLP. And we thought it would actually be a lot harder to do good generative stuff. And so we thought the first product would be more sense making. Try to scratch your head and think back to GPT-2. No one was really making interesting text with GPT-2, but GPT-2 was like this interesting tool for understanding text. And that's where we thought we would be stuck for a couple of years until we learned to scale these things up. And it turned out we were wrong. And that good generative capabilities came out much, much sooner. And so the interesting thing here is the ability to generate stuff. And so we kind of very quickly threw out the sense-making tool.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Suno is a way for everybody to experience all of the joys of music, meaning not just background listening to music, but losing yourself in the process of making music, sharing music, of editing music, of being a much more active participant in music. You know, I like to think we're not making music, we're making musicians.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“OpenAI, they did every AI company a huge disservice because everybody thinks that just like empty text box is now the right interface and it is for ChatGPT and it is incorrect for basically everything else. At some point, I don't know if it's version 4 or version 5. There will be a last model release that is released as a model. Everything else is just product releases.”
2025-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source