The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Misra: CapCut relies on simple UI and TikTok distribution rather than AI
“Whereas I think Capco's approach is much more traditional. They're actually just trying to do exactly what Canva did, which is, okay, let's make the UI simpler and add a few more buttons and essentially bootstrap it to TikTok and distribute it like crazy.”
Misra: AI video has no positive use cases in documentary footage
“But on the documentation side, there's no good thing that AI video can do. Not one good thing, right? Like there's, it's all bad. There's nothing good.”
Snap A/B tests showed TikTok ads initially had no effect on Snapchat engagement
“We ran A-B tests actually Within the advertising groups to see like, oh, like let's segment some users out, not show them TikTok ads, see if they behave differently in the long run, right? In terms of engagement on Snapchat and stuff like that. And there was n…”
Misra: Video cannot be templated without AI content understanding
“Like you actually can't templateize video because the nature of it is completely, it's unknown, right? It could be saying anything. It could be doing anything. Anything would be happening. The, template just can't fit with, it can't understand what's happening…”
Misra: AI video generation will eventually make cameras obsolete for creators
“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.”
Misra: Captions can build better video models than frontier AI labs
“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.”
Misra: AI-generated marketing videos outperform human actors via infinite variation testing
“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…”
Misra: Nvidia H100 and A100 GPUs encode video slower than T4s
“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.”
Gaurav Misra: AI hallucinations are creative features in video generation
“I think hallucinations in text obviously can be a bad thing, potentially, because they're saying stuff that, you know, isn't true, but in a video, like, you are delegating a lot of decisions to the model, right?”
Misra: Captions AI videos get tens of millions of views without viewers noticing AI
“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…”
Gaurav Misra: AI could allow a solo editor to create theatrical movies
“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…”
Misra: Video generation is probably the most dangerous AI unlock
“Because I think of all the possible sort of AI unlocks, like even compared to LLMs and stuff, there's probably nothing more dangerous than video. Generation in a way, right?”
Gaurav Misra: TikTok's US growth was heavily fueled by Snap ads
“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?”
Misra: Microsoft Azure OpenAI outperformed direct OpenAI on uptime and latency
“Microsoft OpenAI did much better in terms of reliability. It just worked perfectly for latency and never went down, which is what you want.”
Misra: Crawling YouTube for AI training data creates enterprise sales liability
“If the goal is to sell to enterprise, it's like really hard to justify it if you're crawling YouTube”
Misra: Audio conditioning for AI video has not been solved at scale
“Audio conditioning is just, it's not a thing that really has been solved at scale, and nobody else has done it, right?”
Gaurav Misra: Indistinguishable AI video generation is a couple years away
“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…”
Misra: AI lip-dubbed foreign language video ads perform as well as English originals
“Actually just dubbing it literally with LibDub. And now it's like the same exact script, just in a different language delivered the exact same way. Right. Actually performs just as well as the English version. Right. Which is like, which was a crazy discovery …”
Gaurav Misra: AI will likely create more professional video editors
“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?”
Misra: Captions' AI model and infrastructure costs decrease over 10x yearly
“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.”
Misra: Captions would be cash flow positive without long-term model training R&D
“Today, like, You know, for us, COGS is like the least of our concerns, basically. I mean, to give you an idea, like if we were to remove a lot of the sort of capital investment in you know, model training and things that are long-term value for us, like we wou…”
Misra: Product design and machine learning is a hard-to-beat founder background
“I transitioned to product design, which is a rare transition, I think. But it actually, like, really helped me in my path to starting this company. Because think about it, product design plus machine learning, like, hard to beat as a combination.”
Misra: Muscle memory makes UI innovation difficult in professional creative software
“I think that's what makes it actually hard to innovate in these spaces is because people have so much built in muscle memory about how things have been done that if you come in and change a bunch of stuff and be like, here's a simpler video editor, people actu…”
Misra: Captions stayed paid-only initially to filter out user noise
“One thing that we did well sort of in the first couple of years with the company is we actually kept the application paid only. And that actually. It just filtered out anybody who's not. Right. Exactly. Right. Right. So it really left us with the people who ar…”
Misra: Captions hit top 30 on App Store after two-day build
“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, …”
Misra: LLMs will eventually solve video script generation
“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 …”
Misra: Captions switched its script generation LLM provider to Claude
“And then, but we ended up switching to Claude. So now we're on Claude.”
Misra: Existing text-to-video AI models produce only silent B-roll
“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?”
Misra: Captions trains AI models entirely on fully licensed proprietary data
“So we, the data that we're training on internally is all fully licensed, completed proprietary.”
Misra: Whisper and standard transcription models perform poorly in Arabic
“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.”
Misra: Mobile video rendering software is among the hardest technical engineering challenges
“Just building the ability to render all this stuff on video on your phone, right? Like the technical challenges involved, this is probably one of the hardest things you can do besides maybe building a game, right? Which would be maybe the hardest thing you can…”
Misra: AI video becomes useful only when average viewers cannot spot generation
“One of the main criteria for the ability to actually Use something like for it to be like actually practically useful versus entertainment and just like interesting is how photorealistic is it? Right. And it has to be past the level that the average person can…”
Misra: Video encoding often takes longer than AI processing in video pipelines
“Oftentimes we'found that the video encoding decoding takes longer than the AI processing, you know, which is like, oh my God, like we're waiting a minute for the video to encode.”
Misra: Current AI character consistency is limited to face consistency
“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?”
Captions transitioned from remote work to a five-day in-person office culture
“We were a fully remote company. But as soon as COVID started exiting, we realized that to start a company, there's just nothing like being in the same room. And so we started doing the in-person thing. First start with one day, then two days, then three days. …”
Gaurav Misra: Captions uses Ideogram for in-app image generation
“So we are using Ideogram for that one because it generates really good text.”
Captions parallelizes video rendering via 25-frame segments and overlapping GPU clusters
“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…”