Mikey Shulman is the co-founder and CEO of AI music platform Suno. He describes how rapid advancements in generative AI forced Suno to pivot away from its initial enterprise audio understanding tool.
“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. You know, try to scratch your head and think back to, like, GPT-II. No one was really making interesting text with GPT-II, but GPT-II 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 we, I mean, the interesting thing here is the ability to generate stuff, and so we kind of very quickly threw out the sense making tool.”
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More from Mikey Shulman
Disclosure
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.”
Mikey ShulmanJan 10, 2025▶ 17:53Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
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.”
Mikey ShulmanJan 10, 2025▶ 39:11Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Shulman: Scaling laws will not solve AI music generation
“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 …”
Mikey ShulmanJan 10, 2025▶ 2:21Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
AssertionPartly supported
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…”
Mikey ShulmanJan 10, 2025▶ 7:08Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
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…”
Mikey ShulmanJan 10, 2025▶ 21:14Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
PredictionOpen · timeframe Jan 2028
Shulman: Suno will survive even if it loses copyright lawsuit
“If this lawsuit goes to trial and we lose, it's obviously not good for us. The company, the company's not dead, but it's obviously not good for us. I don't think that's likely.”
Mikey ShulmanJan 10, 2025▶ 22:08Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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