5. Eleven Thousand Bollywood Movies on a Truck
It was magical. Zach King (sixth most followed on TikTok?) plucked a spectator from the crowd and made him appear on stage. It seemed like teleportation but was a slick edit on his iPhone. We were all actors in his short video. Watch it below. This was at the first-ever Generative AI conference.
Zach asked if there were any producers in the room, and there was maybe one hand raised. Where were all the producers? Video producers, movie producers, music producers?
Dave Rogenmoser (CEO of Jasper AI – conference host) remarked that there was a time when people weren’t answering his emails. And now 1200 people showed up at his conference! I wasn’t expecting more than 50 and was pleasantly surprised to see so much enthusiasm. It was a sold-out conference and the most interesting I’ve attended.
Freestyle rapper Harry Mack joined the show. He was remote – we could hear him, but he couldn’t hear us. That made for good comedy. Plan was to give him ten words created by Jasper’s Generative AI and for him to freestyle rap with those words. The resourceful conference team texted him the ten words, and he gave a beat and rapped. Even included the fiasco in the lyrics! What fun!
Before Kevin Roose had his deeply unsettling conversation with Bing, he had a conversation with us humans at the conference. You can read what he said at the conference in his book Futureproof. One point to ponder: the price of a simple yet beautiful handcrafted artisanal good such as a ceramic bowl is higher than a more complex yet mass-manufactured DVD player. Maybe because people still use bowls but not DVD players?! The bigger point is whether that would transfer to AI-generated content. Will there be less willingness to pay for AI-generated content? Even if it is better? And would we be able to tell the difference without running it through checkers? Do we need to?
This was a Generative AI conference. So there had to be AI-generated art. There was an entire gallery with dynamic artwork created with AI.
On to some business. There were two enjoyable panels:
Panel 1: How the Application of AI Will Reshape Business
Amjad Masad (CEO, Replit)
Emad Mostaque (CEO, Stability AI)
Dario Amodei (CEO, Anthropic)
Shane Orlick (President, Jasper)
Moderator: Sameer Dholakia (Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners)
Panel 2: The Future AI Tech Stack
Aidan Gomez (CEO & Co-Founder, Cohere)
Andrew Feldman (CEO, Cerebras) – loved his humor!
Greg Larson (VP of Engineering, Jasper)
Peter Welinder (VP of Product and Partnerships, OpenAI)
Moderator: Thomas Laffont (Co-Founder, Coatue)
Tidbits:
Dario: We will have models that don’t hallucinate when you don’t want them to hallucinate.
Someone had an idea of Version 14 of Jasper AI that writes custom website copy in real-time as soon as a person visits, highly tailored to that person. Possible.
Amjad: GitHub Copilot and Replit Ghostwriter – non-software developers will become software developers and expert developers will become super expert developers! Yes!
Replit has exceeded 20 million developers. A 13-year-old in India built a business owner a training platform for $50 under the Replit Bounty program! Wow!
Aidan: Evolution of Generative AI: From a base model to -> an instruct/command model to -> a dialog model to -> intersecting with search to -> models using human tools to complete actions and workflows.
Peter: The massive data aspect is red herring, don’t need to train on all data to be super smart. You can already get a lot from GPT-3 using step-by-step reasoning in dialog. Focus on using the model in an iterative way than a zero-shot way. I’ll need to investigate this further.
Andrew (he’s funny): 14% space on a mobile chip is dedicated to inference - that says a lot about the importance of AI. Also, need to make these big models more efficient, lot of room for improvement. No doubt.
Wikipedia is four billion words. Guess how many words were written in Jasper in 2022? 15 billion! According to Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP of Marketing at Jasper. Marketing is a slam dunk use case for Generative AI. Meghan is in a unique position to think about it given that she leads marketing at an AI-copywriting company! She described the content marketing workflow as Idea->Research->Composition->Editing->Distribution. Her key point was that Generative AI will shift the human workload from Composition to other parts of the workflow that are currently sacrificed due to volume and time pressure. Loved her session.
The highlight for me was Emad Mostaque. He thinks of Stability AI as analogous to Linux. That can co-exist with Windows. Gave an example of a movie scene consisting of a book with pictures of women from the 70s. It would cost $350K (not sure why?) but Stability was able to create it for $60! He also mentioned that Stability AI is supporting imagineworldwide.org for child-directed, tech-enabled learning – well done!
Most exciting part: Emad and Stability AI are training models on ~11,000 Bollywood movies! He said those movies are on a truck from somewhere to somewhere?! Are they shipping reels from India to the UK? Anyway, looking forward to the release of that beauty and what creators do with it! Got to say hello to Emad after, plus a selfie and autograph. He showed me a cool lyric video on his phone, created using Stable Diffusion!
Overall, an amazing conference. No yawns. Be there next year. Well done, Jasper team!