The Ledger, every show

“What was expected from the designer at Snap was not just the ability to design, like, you know, the skill set of designing, which all of them were IC designers, by the way, right, and there were no reports, right, so they weren't allowed to have reports, actua…”

“Snap almost had essentially what is TikTok earlier than TikTok existed and it kind of died out because it didn't align, align with the mission essentially.”

“I do think to fully get there to the point where it cannot be differentiated at all, it's still a couple of years away.”

“You could imagine a social network of the future where all content is generated. None of the people are real. It's, I mean, the algorithm isn't tailoring whose content to show you, but it's purely generating content that, you know, is completely catered to you…”

“So once, as AI Creator develops and becomes perfect, you will not use to use the, need to use the camera anymore, right? So you'll just be able to generate all the footage that you want.”

“We are making the unique bet to say that we can actually build a better model than they can because of our unique data sets.”

“And very quickly for us, it became, wait, this actually performs better than if we were to, you know, hire someone to like make this video basically. Right. And the reason is because we can customize it to an unlimited ability, right? Like we can get all the v…”

“And by the way, like the H 100 and A 100 kind of suck at encoding and decoding video, right? They're actually slower than like a T four, for example, which has like media sort of like drivers and stuff that can actually like do it really quickly.”

“We run these things in ads like on scale. We also run these things on social media. People, big creators use, you know, these models and they get tens of millions, sometimes many, many tens of millions of views on their videos and nobody can tell that it was g…”

“I think for video editors, there's a small chance that it actually becomes the most important profession of them all. It actually is possibly the profession that rules them all because suddenly one video editor sitting in their basement can make A movie that g…”

“They were running, like, a hundred million dollars a month of ads on Snapchat, right? Initially, right? When they were not, there was no presence.”

“And the design team was like, 10, 12 people, basically pretty small, even at, you know, five, 6000 employees it was that small still.”

“Initially, there were no PMs at all. PMs were introduced with monetization. Once monetization was a big sort of element, that's kind of where PMs came in.”

“So there's a set of companies today that are able to create these types of what we're talking about is like avatar videos. They're using this technology called neural rendering. It's actually not a technology that's affected by sort of the transformer and diff…”

“About a year ago, we would run AI video in ads and things like that, and we would get all these comments of people being like, oh my god, this is so fake, like, you know, don't show me this, and Around that time, the technology got just about good enough that …”

“TikTok spread in the US mostly through Snapchat, and this is like not well known out there today, but a lot of it was they were spending a very, very large amount of money on advertising on Snap, right?”

“Microsoft OpenAI did much better in terms of reliability. It just worked perfectly for latency and never went down, which is what you want.”

“Audio conditioning is just, it's not a thing that really has been solved at scale, and nobody else has done it, right?”

“I do think the point of, you know, complete perfection in terms of generation where there is absolutely no way to tell is still a couple of years out, especially in terms of this type of a role video because a lot of the core problems haven't even been fully s…”

“Our goal actually isn't to disrupt professional video editing, right? It's actually to enable, and it actually probably creates more professional video editors because a lot more people can get into the profession, right?”

“So it started off being more expensive and it's only the price has gone down, right? It's literally only gone down and it's gone down more than 10 times every year that this You know that we continue down this journey.”

“Like there's more things that can be done than there's people available to do them. It's just such a rare thing. And honestly, it's not gonna last forever. Like we are gonna catch up to this, but.”

“So we had this feature where it basically shifts your eyes to look at the camera, and we were actually the first company to build this.”

“Snap didn't like user research as a function for the longest time. Like, I think there was one user researcher in the company until again, 5000 employees, like post IPO basically.”

“And about a year and a half into the company, as we're working on other projects and stuff, I went back to a personal account, just opened it. And I saw that there was like, 500,000 dollars in there. And I looked at a chart and it was just like growing. The re…”

“The original app was made in a weekend, like literally in two days. And launched and it wasn't marketed at all. It was just put on the app store. And the next day I woke up and I just saw like all the numbers just blowing up completely. And we're like number, …”

“The script generation part we don't take on because we think the LLMs and stuff will solve this eventually. I think they're still not very good at video scripts, and they're getting better and better, but we do think that as these models improve, this will be …”

“If you look at all the video generation models today that are doing text to video, they're all silent videos, right? There's never anybody talking. It's all B-roll, right?”

“Whisper doesn't work in Arabic that well. Right. So we had to figure out how to make something work in Arabic, but it can't be bad because Almost all transcription is bad in Arabic, right? There's just not enough training that's been done on that language.”

“Everything from character consistency, which we, you know, everybody talks about quite a bit, but really what it is today is just face consistency, right?”

“Took two days to build. We put it out there and it immediately took off, right? It was absolutely shocking because I built it on a weekend. We put it out there. I call my close founder on Monday and like, it's at the top of the app store. We're getting like, 6…”

“The social network that we had at the time, we actually removed it from the App Store, so it's not available anymore. But till today, there are people, there are thousands of people that are using it, posting on it, and all the different things”

“We were splitting the video into like 25 frame segments basically, and 25 is 25 FPS. So that's basically a second. And then we were generating overlaps on both sides, four frame overlaps with the next segment. And then we would check for differences, the overl…”

“So I think in our current biggest model, we're only using like less than one percent of our data that we have, our proprietary data.”