Shulman: Scaling laws will not solve AI music generation
Mikey Shulman · Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jan 10, 2025 · at 2:21
Mikey Shulman is the co-founder and CEO of AI music platform Suno. He argues that audio models cannot rely solely on compute scaling laws like LLMs from OpenAI or Anthropic because music requires subjective taste.
0:00 / 0:35exact quote · 35.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“For music, It's very different from text, and I think people will very sloppily look at the world of OpenAI and Anthropic and the hyperscalers and say audio is just a couple years behind, which it is, but that scale is gonna solve all these things. But unlike those domains where you're trying to just get more and more answers to objective problems, like I wanna get a better SAT score, I wanna do better on this benchmark, music is totally subjective. And 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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mikey Shulman
Shulman: Using copyrighted works in AI training data is industry standard
“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.”
Shulman: Empty text box UI is wrong for most AI products
“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.”
Shulman: Quantum computing startups face fundamental physics challenges, not engineering ones
“The challenges are not they're still physics challenges. They're 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 co…”
Shulman: Music incumbents suing AI startups before negotiating is inefficient
“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. You know, like, deciding to sue first and then ask questions later seems to me to be inefficient, bu…”