The Exchanges

Q give you a hand on that. I know in the US there's not that many dialects, there's like accents, but like most of the language is like, like the words that people use are similar. Because I know, for example, Spanish is like, you know, Spanish spoken in Argentina is like very different than Spanish spoken in Mexico. How do you kind of adjust for that? Or maybe you don't.

A So I would say that, for example, currently we teach American English, standard American English. We don't really teach other accents or other dialects. For now, given how small we are, we just have to be pragmatic and Teach in the direction that most people want and most of our users know. So we've made those decisions like on the contacting side for American Spanish, every language that we're teaching. But I do expect that in the future, we're going to get a lot more sharply differentiated. Like if you want to learn British English, then we'll teach you British English. We'll teach you how to pronounce it, et cetera. I think all of that feels like something that superhuman language, you know, tutors should be able to do.

AI assessment note: “currently we teach American English... We don't really teach other accents or other dialects.”

Q obviously only, only, you know, like those kinds of people, you are now CTO co-founder of Speak. Uh, I would say from a very early stage, like one of the most successful and prominent open AI partners that like anyone would know is like doing, doing well and like teaching English to Koreans is like your, your, your rough, um, remit at the time. How did that all come about?

A It's funny that you say that because despite our current sort of revenue scale and Objectively, I think how successful we are. We've always operated in a market, at least initially on the other side of the world and been much, much more popular in the sort of Eastern world and a bunch of Asian markets and relatively unknown in the West. So it hasn't really felt like we've had that sort of awareness until, you know, the past few years really. But brief story is that my co-founder and I back in Fascinated by the promise of AI, and we spent a year sabbatical basically learning everything we could. We talked to Karpathy back then, actually, when he was, like, just finishing grad school, and did a lot of sort of self-study research, and we were just so convinced, I think fundamentally, that speech models were going like this, language models were going like this, and in the five to 10 year span, they would become superhuman. And We were utterly convinced of this future, and we saw that the way people learn things, and specifically learn languages, which was a very sort of human-based thing, if you really care about fluency, that would completely change, and we'd be able to build language shooters that were pure software, pure AI. So that was kind of the genesis story of Speak. It took much, much longer Then we expected to build a great product and find good PMF. The first few years …

AI assessment note: “So that was kind of the genesis story of Speak.”

Q lot of Americans learn Korean because of K-pop. That's a, that's a side thing. But like, you could have done Taiwan. You could have done China. I saw, I remember starting a documentary about how China was crazy about English or mad about English. I think that was the title of the documentary. Was it obvious? Were you sure when you went into Korea or was it just a test?

A We visited a bunch of Asian countries when we were thinking about how do we relaunch things? How do we focus in? And we almost chose Taiwan actually. Um, but I think it was a little bit serendipitous. So our first employee is Korean and was my co-founder's college roommate, actually. When my co-founder visited Seoul, To check out the market. He asked SJ to come along as essentially a translator and to like, you know, facilitate. And I think that just went really well. And it was just very obvious from being on the ground in the market that Korea is pretty obsessed with learning English. And there is every human-based solution Possible, right? You know, like English academies, classes, skyscrapers full of classrooms, stuff like that. And our logic was basically, if we can really make headway and win this market that is chock full of these human competitor products and all these people that fundamentally care about fluency, then we probably have something pretty real and strong PMF that we could win other markets with. So that was the original logic. And, you know, so far it's been working.

AI assessment note: “it was just very obvious from being on the ground in the market”

Q I'm curious to sort of double click on to just the tech side. We talked a little bit about the content that you, that you own and develop in-house. And we talked a little bit about the onboarding memory. I assume that you have conversational memory as you, as you go, right? And any other major pieces of the puzzle that really unlocked it for you?

A So there's a few things I can talk about. I think one thing is In order to go from teaching English to teaching a bunch more languages, we needed to really figure out more direct AI content generation. That was a pretty, right, because it's hard to scale like our little studio in LA where we shoot a lot of the video lessons. Um, all of the scripts were written manually before by our content team, but we want like a hundred X more content, right? And 10 X more languages, eventually a hundred X more language pairs, which is how we think about it. It's like, what's your native language and then what language are you learning? And really the only way to do that is to make it more AI generated and, you know, very much like a AI native company. We want to be on a frontier here. We want to keep a small team and to have as much leverage as possible through these types of tools. So that's a big active area where we're building out I think using, you know, people overuse the word agent, but we have a tutor agent, we have a curriculum writing agent, we have a giant LM based pipeline that creates curriculum, scaffolds it in the right way, writes the lessons themselves. That's a big active area that will basically help us to scale to a lot more markets and a lot more languages. So that's like one big thing. Another big thing is we care a lot about Fluency, obviously. Specifically, we want t…

AI assessment note: “we have a tutor agent, we have a curriculum writing agent, we have a giant LM based pipeline”

Q time looking at this like, uh, you know, like video tree where you do video plus audio at the same time on how you can tweak the audio part versus the video part? Because I can imagine you might work on a video part, And then you want to change the audio generation model. I don't actually know how the model works inside on like how much you can tweak.

A We haven't really looked at the video stuff much. We basically think that we're very bandwidth constrained, right? So we're just scaling and trying to hire as fast as possible, like everyone else is. And as a result, we're really focusing on just like the most in reach, highest impact things. I do think that the barriers are coming down very fast for all of this sort of stuff. I'm just so excited about multimodality and where things are going here, because imagine if you're learning Spanish, being able to look at an image that the model generates for you and then doing Q and A on it, right? Like a beach scene. And then the model will ask you like, oh, how many people are running on the beach? And then you have to sort of respond in the target language that you're learning. Very traditional language learning exercise, but you can imagine it being fully generative, which is really cool.

AI assessment note: “We haven't really looked at the video stuff much.”

Q It's, it's such a, such a great word. Makes for great swag. Very nice decision. You had a couple other fun, fun questions. Any fun Korean celebrity stories? Cause you work with so many influencers.

A We have a bunch baking right now, but I think it was, you know, some, something more generally that has just been so fun on the journey. So we, we would visit Seoul every year and seeing Speak go from nothing to the first time we saw somebody on the street using Speak. To now our main teacher in the app is like a mini celebrity. People will come up to her on the street as she's just walking around Seoul and recognize her from the app, which is really cool. Now we do a lot of advertising. We do billboards, TV commercials. We work with big influencers and so on. So just like seeing the scale of that has me kind of like in awe. It's like really cool, um, just to see something that used to be nothing.

AI assessment note: “We have a bunch baking right now, but I think it was... something more generally”