Olivia Moore: High model costs and rerolls hurt AI video ROI
Olivia Moore · AI Video Is Eating The World — Olivia and Justine Moore, a16z · Jul 9, 2025 · at 20:27
Olivia Moore, partner at a16z, discusses her hands-on experience generating AI videos using Google's Veo 3 model and calculating production economics.
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“My learning of making a bunch of these videos and trying to post them on social feeds is it's actually like very expensive still to produce just because VO three is so expensive. And especially if you're making more complex content than like someone slicing a glass fruit and even that in itself, like I would have to do, you know, eight generations before it was cutting the fruit in the right way that I could post it and people would be happy. But especially if you're doing something more complex, like, and you're using something like VO three, it's really expensive to run these because you get a certain amount of generations on kind of the core plan, but then you have to pay for extra credits. Exactly. This is the fruit example. Like lots of times when I tried to generate it would like, you know, cut it horizontally instead of vertically, or the layers would look weird once you cut them through. And so you would end up having to do a bunch of generations to get one that works. But yeah, my learning is that the generation is still expensive enough that it's like, You have to kind of be smart about how you're gonna make money from it. Otherwise, I think a lot of people are gonna find that the ROI isn't really worth it.”
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