YouSaid · the spoken record

Pieter Levels

lines on the record: 304
first: 2024-08-20
most recent: 2024-08-20
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

“I'm so happy to form stays in Google Chrome now when something goes wrong. But so Google somebody did Google improve society with death”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like with the airlines. Remember the forums with the lead you could next submit 404 or something where your internet would go down your modem?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's always startups. They start with disrupting. Like, booking also started as a startup in 1997. And then they become like the old shit again. Like, you know, Uber now starts to become like a taxi again, right? It was very good in the beginning. Now it's kind of like taxis now in many places are better, they're nicer than Ubers, right? So it's like the circle.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Face money. Do you know Booking.com? It's a booking, it's the biggest booking website in the world. It's Dutch actually. They have teams, because my friend worked there. They have teams for a specific part of the website, like a 10 by 10 pixels area where they run tests on this. So they run tests, and they're famous for this stuff like, oh, there's only one room left, right? Which is red letters, like one room left book now, you know, and they got a fine from the European Union about this. Kind of interesting. So they have all these teams and they run the test for 24 hours. They go to sleep. They wake up next day. They come to the office and they see, okay, this performed better. This website has become a monster, but it's the most revenue generating hotel booking website in the world, number one. So that shows that it's not about like user experience. It's about, I don't know, about making more money. And not every company, but.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, I thought about this for years, so I think it's like. I have to book the flight anyway. Like, I know there's a route that they take, and I need to book, for example, Qatar Airlines. And I need to get through this process. And with a hotel similar, you need a hotel anyway. So, do you have time to figure out the best one? Not really. You kind of just need to get the place booked and, you know, you need to get the flight and you'll go through the pain of this process. And that's why this process always sucks so much with hotels and airline websites and stuff, because they don't have an incentive to improve it. Because generally only for like a super upper segment of the market, I think a super high luxury, it affects the actual booking, right?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's true, but the problem is with these hotels, it's the same with airline industry. Why does every airline website suck when you try book a flight? Yeah. It's like very strange. Like, why does it have to suck? Obviously, there's competition here. Why doesn't the best website win?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the booking fees, the Phillies, right? I thought about this idea because we have the same problem. I go to a hotels and there's specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff. Even if you go, some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other cities.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand why it says not safe for women to check the data set. Feel safe. Problem with a lot of places like the United States is that it depends per area, right? So, if you get like city level data or nation level data, it's like Brazil is the worst because the range in safe and wealthy and not safe is like huge. So you can't say many things about Brazil.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we have meetups so people organize their own meetups. And we have about, I think, like 30 per month, so it's like one meetup a day. And I don't do anything. They organize themselves. So I just, it's a whole black box. It just runs and I don't do a lot on it. It pulls data from everywhere and it just works”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ranking you see here is based on actual digital nomads who are there. You can click on the city, you can click on people, and you can see the people, the users that are actually there. And it's like 30,000 or 40,000 members. So these people are in Austin now.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so Stardoth Crowdsource, but then I realized that you can download more accurate data sets from public sources like World Bank. They have a lot of public data sets. United Nations, and you can download a lot of data there, which you can freely use. I started getting frauds across those data where, for example, people from India, they really love India and they would submit the best scores for everything in India. And not just like one person, but like a lot of people, they would love to pump India. And I'm like, I love India too, you know, but that's not valid data. So you started getting discrepancies in the data between people where people were from and stuff. So I started switching to data sets. And now it's mostly data sets. But one thing that's still crowdsourced is so people add where they are. They add their travels to their profile and use that data to see which place are upcoming and which places are popular now. So about how”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need to do that because the data sets are usually national, they're not on city level, right? So I don't know about the freedom of speech. Between Bangkok or Chianghai. I know them in Thailand.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So normalists started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is now like the second city here. And I was working on my laptop. I met other nomads there. And I was like, okay, this seems like a cool thing to do. Like working on your laptop in a different country kind of travel around. But back then, the internet everywhere was very slow. So the internet was fast in, for example, Holland or United States. But in a lot of parts in South America or Asia, it was very megabits. So you couldn't watch a YouTube video. Thailand weirdly had like quite fast internet. But I wanted to find other cities where I could go to work on my laptop or whatever and travel. But we needed like fast internet. So I was like, let's, you know, crowdsource this information with a spreadsheet. And I also needed to know the cost of living because I didn't have a lot of money. I had $500 a month. So I had to find a place where the rent was like, you know, $200 per month or something.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, exactly, because if you make people pay for it, you lose 99% of the user base and you lose the crowdsource data. So it's not fun anymore. It stops being accurate, right? So you kind of. They pay for it by crowdsourcing the data, but then yeah, it's fine, you know, it doesn't make money, but it's cool.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, where do you put the ad right? Like, if you have a website, you can put an ad box or you can do like a product placement or something, but you're talking about a map app that where 90% of the interface is a map What are you going to do? You're going to like it's hard to figure out where is this”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think map apps are very hard to monetize. Google Maps also doesn't really make money. Like, sometimes you see these ads, but I don't think there's a lot of money there. You could put a banner ad, but it's kind of ugly. And the project is kind of like, it's kind of cool. So it's kind of fun to subsidize it. And it's kind of a little bit part of NomadList. Like I put it on NomadList in the cities as well. But I also realized like you don't need to monetize everything. Some products are just cool. And, you know, it's like it's cool to have hoot maps exist. I want this to exist, right?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that the thing is more about you can't make money with this project. I try to do many things to make money with it, and it hasn't worked.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I don't think a map hosting service should cost this much, you know, but I could host it myself, but that would be, I don't know how to do that, you know, but I could do that.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had to. So funny during when I launched it, went viral, Google Maps, the map didn't load anymore. It says over the limits, you need to contact enterprise sales. And I'm like, but I need now like a map. And I don't want to contact enterprise sales. I don't want to go on a call schedule with some calendar. So I switched to map box and then had map box for years. And then it went viral and I had a bill of $20,000 was like last year. So they helped me with the bill. They said, you know, you can pay less. And then I now switched to like an open source kind of map platform. So it's very expensive product and never made any dollar money, but it's very fun, but it's very expensive.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I started adding blurring and stuff. I think now it's not smooth again because I liked it better. People like the pixel look kind of, yeah, a lot of people use it. And it keeps going viral. And every time my maps bill, like map box, I had to stop using, you first use Google Maps, it went viral. And Google Maps, it was out of credits.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think here the problem was that you have this data, but it's like it's not locked to one location. Had to normalize it. So when you click, when you draw on a map, it will show you the specific pixel location, and you can convert the pixel location to a GPS coordinate, right? Like longitudes. But the number will have a lot of commas or a lot of decimals, right? Because it's very specific. Like it's like this specific part of the table. So what you want to do is you want to take that pixel and you want to normalize it by removing like decimals. Which I discovered so that you're talking about this neighborhood, this or this street, right? And so that's what I did. I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this and then it starts going to like a grid. And then you have like a grid of data. You get like a pixel map kind of.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, obviously it's simplified, but you need to simplify this stuff. You don't want to have too many categories. And it's essentially using a paintbrush where you select the color in the bottom, you select the category, and you start drawing. There's no instruction, there's no manual. And then I also added tagging so people could write something on a specific location. So don't go here or like here's a nice cafes and stuff. And man, the memes that came from that. And I also added upvoting so that the tags could be upvoted. So the memes that came from that is like amazing. Like people in Los Angeles would write crazy stuff. It would go viral in all these cities. You can allow your location. And it will probably send you to Austin.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can see there's like hipster tourists rich business there's always a business area right and then there's a residential residential is gray I thought those were the most common things in the city, kind of”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Draw the penis on the sick. Man, I did it in the snow, you know, but the penises did not become a problem because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place. So, most people use it fairly. So, just if I had enough crowdsource data, so you have all these pixels on top of each, it's like a layer of pixels. So, yeah, it's just like a bowl, but in visual format, and it works. And within a week, I had enough data. And there was like cities that did really well, like Los Angeles A lot of people started using it. Like most data is in Los Angeles.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which every week would calculate, or every day would calculate like okay, so Amsterdam Center, there's like six people say it's tourists, this part of the center, but two people say it's like hipster. Okay, so the tourist part wins, right? It's just an array. So find the most common value in a little pixel area on the map. So most people say it's tourist, it's tourist and it becomes red. And I would do that for all the GPS corners in the world.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Draw images, just draw pixels essentially That was special back then because before you could only have elements, right? So you want to draw a pixel, use a convals. And I knew I needed to draw pixels because I need to draw these colors. And I thought like, okay, I'll get like a Google Maps iframe embeds. And then I'll put a div on top of it with the colors and I'll do like opacity 50, you know, so it kind of shows. So I did that with convoys and then I started drawing. And then I thought like obviously other people need to edit this because I cannot draw all these things myself. So I crowdsourced it again and I you would draw on the map and then it would send the pixel data to the server. It would put it in the database and then I would have a robot running like a cron job.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was traveling and I was still trying to find like problems, right? And I would go, I would discover that everybody's experience of a city is different because they stay in different areas. So I'm from Amsterdam, and when I grew up in Amsterdam, or didn't grow up, but I lived there university, I knew that center is like, in Europe, the centers are always tourist areas. So they're super busy. They're not very authentic. They're not really Dutch culture. It's Amsterdam tourist culture, you know. So when people would travel to Amsterdam, I would say, don't go to the center, go to southeast of the center, the Jordan or the Pipe or something, more hipster areas. a little bit more authentic culture of Amsterdam. That's where I would live, you know, and where I would go. And I thought this could be like an app where you can have like a Google Maps and you put colors over it. You have like areas that are like color coded, like red is tourist, green is rich, you know, green money, yellow is hipster. You can figure out where you need to go in the city when you travel because I was traveling a lot. I wanted to go to the cool spots.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For example, a website generated like weeks or something Squarespace, right? You don't need to code to build a startup. All you need is a idea for a product, build something like a landing page or something, put a strike button on there, and then make it. And if you can code, use the language that you already know and start coding with that and see how far you can get. You can always rewrite the code later. The text tag is not actually not the most important of a business when you're starting out a business. The important thing is that you validate that there's a market, that there's a product that people want to pay for. So use whatever you can use. And if you cannot code, use. Spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you should build with the technology that you know. So, for example, Nomad List, which is like this website I made to figure out the best ways to live and work as Digital Nomad, it wasn't a website it launched as a Google spreadsheet. So it was a public Google spreadsheet anybody could edit. And I was like, I'm collecting like cities where we can live as genomics with the internet speed, the cost of living, other stuff. And I tweeted it and I would. And back then I didn't have a lot of followers. I had like a few thousand followers or something. And it went like viral for my skill viral back then, you know, which was like five retweets. And a lot of people started editing it. And there was like hundreds of cities in this list, like from all over the world with all the data. It was very crowdsourced. And then I made that into a website. So figuring out what technology can use that you already know. So if you cannot code, you can use a spreadsheet. If you cannot use a spreadsheet, like whatever you can always use a...”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of Buddhist, you know, you need to lose control, let it lose, and I think things will happen. When you do mushrooms, when you do drugs, like psychedelic drugs, the people that start, that are control freaks get bad trips, right? Because you need to let go. Like, I'm pretty control freak, actually. And when I did mushrooms, when I was 17, it was very good. And then at the end, it wasn't so good because I tried to control. It's like, ah, now it's going too much. Now I need to, let's stop. Bro, you can't stop it. You need to go through with it, you know. So I think it's a good metaphor of life. I think that's a very tranquil way to lead your life.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think relationships, like you want to hold relationships, right? You want to hold your girlfriend, you want to become wife and all this stuff. I think you should stay open to where, like, for example, where you want to live. Like, I don't know, we don't know where we want to live, for example. That's something that will figure itself out. It will crystallize where you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you want to live, for example. What you're going to do. I think that's a really good way to live your life. I think most stress comes from trying to control, like hold things.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's also kind of live. Like, life brings you to it's very hard to super intently kind of choose what you're going to do with your life. It's more like surfing. You're surfing the waves. You go in the ocean. You see where you end up, you know?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Became apparent immediately. Back then, they also had this thing, we don't need these computers. They're like a hype. And it also went like in kind of like, you know, way.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Boston Dynamics, I still don't know what they're doing, but they always upload YouTube videos, and it's amazing. But I feel like a lot of these companies don't have, it's like a solution looking for a problem for now, you know? Military, obviously, uses, but like do I need a robotic dog now for my house? I don't know, like it's fun, but it doesn't really solve anything yet. I feel the same kind of with VR like it's really cool, like Apple Vision Pro is very cool. It doesn't really solve something for me yet. And that's kind of the tech looking for a solution, right? But one day we will.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes And I also, it comes up, and I bring it, I send it back, you know, like send it back to the kitchen boil more. It's like a soup of ideas that's cooking. It's 100%. This is how my brain works. And I think most people.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wrote it wrong because I don't know, I'm not Native English, but it emerges from your subconscious, right? It comes from the water is your subconscious in here, it's boiling. And then when it's ready, it's like ding. It's like microwave comes out. And there you have your idea.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, I saw some YouTubers doing this, there's a lot of these productivity gurus also, and they do this whole iPad with a pencil. And then I also had an iPad and I also got the pencil and I got this app where you can like draw on paper a calendar, you know? People's students use this, and you do coloring and stuff. I'm like, dude, I did this for a week. And then I'm like, what am I doing in my life? Like, I can just write it as a message to myself and it's good enough, you know?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, back then, I used Trello. But now I don't really use Telegram. I write it on safe messages and I have like idea I write it down.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not But it seems, man, I sound like idiots probably not, but it sounds quite approachable, relatively approachable. You don't have to build the rockets.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Together No, exactly. This is it. This is the We do this not because it's easy, but because we thought it would be easy. Exactly, that's me with asteroid mining. That's why I should do this”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think asteroid mining would be very cool because you go to an asteroid, you take some stuff from there, you bring it back, you sell it, you know, it's, but then you need to do, and you can hire someone to launch the thing. You need is like the robot that goes to the asteroid, you know, and the robotic's interesting. Like, I want to also learn robotics. So maybe that could be.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, mostly you don't know. Like, mostly I choose the ones that are most viable for me to build. I cannot build a space company now, right? It would be quite challenging, but I can build.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of like this frameworks, but then they didn't bribe enough influence to use it and they didn't charge money for the platform, you know.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and the strange thing is that this comedy raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting from it are really small people like me who make these small apps that are using the model. And now they're starting to charge money for the new models, but the new models are not so good for people, they're not so open source, right?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For you, yeah. But actually, so like stable diffusion, I use 1.5, 2.0 pic came out as stable diffusion XL came out, all these new versions, and they were all worse. And so the core scene of people are still using 1.5 because it's like, it's also not like what they call neutered. They neutered to make it super safety features and stuff. Most of the people are still in Stateless Fusion 1.5, and meanwhile, Stable Diffusion, the company went like the CEO left a lot of drama happened because they couldn't make money. Yeah, so they gave us very interesting one, they gave us this open source model that everybody uses. They raised like hundreds of millions of dollars. They didn't make any money with it. They're not a lot. And they did an amazing job. And now everybody uses open source model for free. And they did, you know, it's amazing.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And then if it's significant enough data, you switch to that for the whole, you know, all the users. And so that was like the breakthrough to make it better. Just use the users to improve it themselves. And I tell them when they sign up, we do sampling, we do testing on your photos of random parameters. And that worked really well. I don't do a lot of testing anymore because it's like, I kind of reached like a diminishing point where it's like, it's kind of good. But there was a breakthrough, yeah.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had this photo guy, and a lot of people using it, there was like a million or more photos a month being generated. And I discovered I was testing parameters, like increase the step count of generating photo or changing the sampler, like a scheduler. Like you have DPM to Karas, all these things I don't know anything about, but I know that you can choose them when you generate an image and they have different resulting images. But I didn't know which one were better. So I would do it myself, test it. But then I was like, why don't I test on these users because I have a million photos generated anyway. So on like 10% of the users, I would randomly test parameters and then I would see if they would, because you can favor the photo or you can download it, I would measure if they favor it or like the photo.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 100%. I like Twitter for that most like building stuff, seeing other, because it inspires you to build. And it's just fun to see other people share what they are discovering. And then you're like, okay, I'm going to make something too. It's just super fun. And so if you want to start going X, and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models. And when you have something that kind of, you manually enter stuff, you set the parameters, something that works, you can make a app out of it or a website.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you need to join Twitter. X is amazing now, and the whole AI industry is on X. And they're all anime avatars. So it's funny because my friends asked me this, like, who should I follow to stay up to date? And I say, go to X and follow all the AI anime models that this person is following or follows. And I send them some URL and they all start laughing like, what is this? But they're real people hacking around in AI. They get hired by big companies and they're on X. And most of them are anonymous. It's very funny. They use anime avars. I don't. But those people hack around and they publish what they're discovering. They took out papers, for example. So yeah, definitely X.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, actually, this like this week, or recently, there's some new model came out that can adjust the light of any photo, but also AI image with stable diffusion. I think it's called relight. And it's amazing. You can upload kind of like a light map. So for example, red, purple, blue, and it uses that light map to change the light on the photo you input. It's amazing. So there's for sure a lot of stuff you can do.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source