The Exchanges

Q Anything in the labs or roadmap you can talk about? I know you have this concept of sneaks where you can see some of the stuff that's brewing.

A Yes. We did show some of our generative video stuff and three D stuff. But one of the things I'm most excited about is we did a sneak of something that we call just the Firefly editor. Very creatively new. But the Firefly Editor is pretty wild because you have an image and there's, it's an image of a family, right? And so you could always select the five-year-old boy, but if you move him, well, there's going to be a blank spot behind him, right? But what this does is actually allows you to select objects and move them. And it generates all the pixels behind whatever you're moving in real time to fill in what would be there. And so it's like this crazy, you feel like everything is layers, but you captured every aspect of the image in endless layers because you can just do anything with it in real time. And it's one of those experiments where we were like, wow, this is going to change image editing forever. People are just going to just move their kids around in family photos, and it's going to be effortless. It's intensive from a generation's perspective, but it's the future.

AI assessment note: “we did a sneak of something that we call just the Firefly editor.”

Q So moving on from the Adobe hat and putting your thinker and writer hat, I love all the content you've created and stuff you've written about the intersection of AI and creativity. Maybe give us some summary of some of the thoughts. What do you view as the future of how we work and how that gets impacted by AI?

A Yeah. Well, I've had a lot of discussions as you can imagine over the last year or so of people You know, asking what does this mean for the creative industry? What does this mean for advertising? And we're entering a world where, first of all, every brand's gonna absolutely flood the zone with content. That's gonna make the bar go up for the digital experiences that really engage us. Whenever you talk to any great creative and you ask them how they come up with a great solution to a problem, they always say it's a function of time. I mean, if you give them more cycles, they'll come up with more possibilities and then they'll find the better three to present to their client at the end and get a choice. So if you give them, you know, two X the time, they'll do two X the exploration of the surface area possibility, and they'll come up with better solutions. AI basically truncates the time. So what we're seeing in our products is that instead of an illustrator testing three color palettes for a packaging for a perfume product, they'll test, you know, 30, and then they'll have so many better choices to choose from. So I think that AI is going to raise the bar. Now, when you get more Capacity out of a creative professional. Does that mean you need fewer of them? Or does that mean you actually want more of them? Well, in the last 20 years, engineers have gotten a lot more productive …

AI assessment note: “AI basically truncates the time. So what we're seeing in our products is that”

Q You mentioned some outside vendor LLM. How do you think about build versus buy?

A On the LLM side, people are now talking about multimodal models, and that's something that we're exploring as well, which would include kind of all of the above. But I don't think that any company should build everything themselves. Like you have to consolidate your resources to be great in the things that matter most. So for the example of LLMs, I mean, we have a great relationship with Microsoft and with OpenAI and with NVIDIA and with Google, and we have a number of partnerships leveraging some of their stuff. My strategy for the team has been, let's do everything that is our competitive advantage, we need to do ourselves. But the stuff that is not our competitive advantage, we need to partner. And that's been the drive.

AI assessment note: “everything that is our competitive advantage, we need to do ourselves”

Q How do you evaluate an investment, especially at the pre-seed or seed stage where you're most active? Like, what's a good AI entrepreneur from your perspective?

A Well, I think a very good AI entrepreneur is very skeptical and somewhat paranoid, you know, of their own ability to stay differentiated. I worry when founders seem to be either naive or like not wanting to face the fact that that could actually just be a feature, a ubiquitous feature. I love it when folks are like, well, you know, we're not going to do just that because that's not special. Like, I mean, it is now. But it won't be in a few months. We all know that. I think it's a very refreshing characteristic or trait that you need to have right now. There's a lot of like passion for solution right now, which in my experience always loses to empathy with customer. So too many of us start businesses and I've made this mistake in my experience with projects where it's like so passionate about a solution. And at the end, you're like 30 degrees off of product market fit and you wonder why. And it's because you didn't spend time shoulder to shoulder with the customer realizing the dirty little truths in enterprise. People want to look good to their bosses. People are lazy, vain and selfish. Oftentimes they want to, I mean, there's a lot of practicalities that actually impact product market fit. And so unless you have like real empathy with that problem you're trying to solve and that customer, you're liable to probably build something that might be extraordinary, but just mean it m…

AI assessment note: “a very good AI entrepreneur is very skeptical and somewhat paranoid”

Q And those are your own models, you said. Is it completely homegrown?

A Yeah. So all of our generative AI models for Firefly are homegrown. And then we are, we have partnerships on the LM side for some of the LM power capabilities across our, our products. But we realized that not only did we have to, um, become best in class in how these models were trained, but also we have a lot of information from how customers use Photoshop and Lightroom and the tendencies of Photographers and how they make their images better or improve their videos. I mean, that is a lot of usage data. It's not using the customer's work, but it's using the way they use the product that we can also use to actually make the models better.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. So all of our generative AI models for Firefly are homegrown.”

Q Great. So that's Firefly, which is the image generator. What is Adobe Sensei?

A Yeah, so Adobe Sensei actually is 10 years old, and this is our AI effort overall. Internally, Sensei is the research team and the AI development team. But over the years, we've had all sorts of technologies. Now, it's like the first, we had neural filters three years ago in Photoshop, where you can kind of like, you know, with just a dial, like change someone's facial expressions or things like that. And those are, it's all AI as well. One of the moments where this all really hit me, though, and the power of it, and also the, the problems with it, and I could talk about some of the work we've been doing around sort of fake media and a lot of that stuff, because we've been at the head of a lot of this stuff, and we're working with a lot of the governments on it. I was sitting in a room like four or five years ago, and I was getting a demo from the After Effects team of a tool called Content-Aware Fill, which was an AI tool from the Sensei team. And Content-Aware Fill allows you to move an object or a person from video. Now you could always do that. It just took a long time to go frame by frame, removing someone and the dust and their shadow and the footsteps and everything. Right. And now you could literally just select and mask an object, click a button, wait like 30 seconds. And then boom, this person is just gone, you know, and the team was so excited about this. Our custome…

AI assessment note: “Adobe Sensei actually is 10 years old, and this is our AI effort overall.”