The Exchanges

Q How do you think the, like, overall landscape for, um, uh, competition is different in language versus images versus music, right? Like, how, how do you think about in what ways you guys would want to, like, build advantage and stand out?

A I think with language, there's like, I don't know, I don't know how many language companies there are. You guys would probably know better than me, but it seems like there's like over 20, and then maybe like five or like eight of them have a billion dollars worth of funding. I also didn't want to work on something if there were already extremely passionate people really working hard at that thing, people that I like really respected that were working on that thing. And so at the time with, with, um, images, there was just sort of, I think there was Midjourney, there was OpenAI doing some DALI stuff, and then you saw sort of stable diffusion. Um, but for some of these companies, it didn't seem like there was going to be a longstanding concerted effort to keep making them better. It was sort of unclear, like who was doing this as like a fun demo versus who was doing this as something they would like spend and invest tons of their time in. And so once I had kind of figured out, um, you know, to what extent OpenAI was going to invest in it or to what extent seemed like the folks at Stability AI were like sort of focused on like seven different kinds of things. And I just thought like, hmm, there's just not enough people that want to do this one thing and do it really, really great. So I think for me, it was just about what, were there enough capable people that wanted to do this? C…

AI assessment note: “I think with language, there's like... over 20, and then maybe like five”

Q do is, um, have like voting schemes or user studies within the product itself. So I don't know if it's grids, but you're asking users to, you know, um, express preferences more so than I, I think, uh, perhaps other research efforts are. Can you talk about just like generally your data curation strategy, if there's some sort of overall framework or if community is a big piece of it?

A Generally we try to keep something like very simple because we know that users are, they have like, they're, they're there to make like images. They're not there to like necessarily like help us label images. And so, or annotate things or tell us everything about their preferences. And so we kind of have like a very sophisticated process of how we sort of curate images and like how we're collecting, collecting data from these users to help us kind of like rank and sort of like make sure we're choosing the right sort of things that we want to curate. And so I think these things are, like, very, they might seem, like, very simple when you encounter it, but, like, beneath that is, like, something very, very complex. But yeah, it's a little tough to go into it too deeply because, yeah, it does feel like a little bit of a secret sauce, I suppose.

AI assessment note: “a little tough to go into it too deeply because, yeah, it does feel like a little bit of a secret sauce”