00:46:42 · Burkay Gür, Gorkem Yurtseven
[00:46:42] S2: I think the fact that people want to protect their IP and that's going to continue, right? Not just for media, but also, like, you want to protect your source code, you want to protect your customer list, whatever, right? All of that, that's always going to be a thing. So, I think, yeah, and if you have something local, you you don't have to worry about it. So, think it's always going to be there, this debate. [00:47:09] S1: Like, when we talk to our customers, if they know the model is run on our GPUs, they trust the whole process so much more. Open or closed, this works the same. But that has been a big differentiation for our business. And obviously when it's open, they know for sure that they can even sell for us, but they trust us because we can do it better than them. But trust is really important with video models especially because people don't want their unreleased content to leak, and it's usually an input to the video model when these creatives work with it. So we've been really pushing on that with the enterprise customers and it resonates.
00:47:52 · Molly O'Shea
[00:47:52] S0: How good is AI at real professional work? Mercor's AI Productivity Index or APEX tracks it with every major Frontier model release. Bill with partners like Harvey and Cognition, see where the Frontier actually stands stands at mercor.com/apex. Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Public is a multi asset investing platform where you can automate your investing with AI agents. Create your own custom agent with a simple prompt. Agents can monitor markets, execute trading strategies, and manage your cash across stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and more. Want to buy at market close and sell the next day's open? Just tell your agent. Automate your investing at public.com. Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com/sorcery. That's deel.com/sorcery. Talking macro, what do you
00:49:04 · Gorkem Yurtseven, Molly O'Shea, Burkay Gür
[00:49:04] S1: think the biggest question is that people aren't asking right now? Not exactly that, but if you listen to like any Hollywood podcaster or look at the news about Hollywood, they always have this angle of, oh, AI is going to kill Hollywood. And we are like really in this business, like we talk to these people all the time, so far I would say I had zero impact on anything in Hollywood. It's just like people are projecting to the future a little bit. The business we get from Hollywood has been increasing in the last six months. I think it reached to a meaningful percentage of our revenue, but I would say it had zero impact on the labor, it barely made any content that's worthwhile in Hollywood. It's going to happen, there are signs of it, but we've been talking about it for four years, and it's always been fear mongering and nothing real. I think that's the thing that people don't realize from a distance. [00:50:06] S0: Yeah, most of LA, like that's where It's this is really regulatory and what they're doing there with different laws. Exactly. And that's been [00:50:16] S1: the reason the adoption has been slow because it's not only the quality of the models, lawyers of the companies need to be okay with it as well. But finally, slowly, are seeing that everyone is going full force at it. [00:50:32] S0: What do you think people should be asking? What's going on out there? [00:50:36] S2: I think people are asking everything. [00:50:38] S0: They're asking too much.
00:50:38 · Molly O'Shea, Burkay Gür
[00:50:38] S0: They're asking too much. [00:50:40] S2: They're asking too much. Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of skepticism, I think, about use cases. Again, like, just speaking more broadly about AI, right? There's this certain skepticism about, Oh, like, all of this CapEx investment, where is that gonna go? And, like, know, like, is AI actually useful? But I think, like, I'm more on the optimistic side. I don't think a lot of the people who are making these claims, I don't think they really actually understand, like, what's going on, how, like, AI is actually being used at companies. And, you know, I think gen media is still very early. If anything, it's just starting. It's just like on a I think ads, we're starting to see it. Hollywood, social, whatever, we're starting to see it. I think there's real value. Like, we were just estimating how much faster we're going. Like, our software engineering team is moving, and I estimated somewhere between three to 4x. Would need pre AI, we would literally need like four times the people to go at the same speed. And we're definitely paying less than that. Right? So, there's clear ROI for us. So, yeah, I think if you really, like, go deep into the ROI for the companies who are using AI, like, you really go deep and actually try to measure it, not read it, like, from a bunch of reports or, like, I don't know, nontechnical people, I think you'll see a different picture. So, I'm very in favor, like very long compute, as they say.
00:52:24 · Gorkem Yurtseven, Burkay Gür, Molly O'Shea
[00:52:24] S1: Yeah. Like we talk about it. Every big company is gonna be a compute company. Just the storefront is gonna be different. Our storefront is unique and interesting. Like no one else has a storefront similar to us. Some has coding agents. If you go to a Neo Cloud there is no storefront. If you go to Databricks, whatever, it's about like data. Everyone has a different story and different way to talk about it, but behind the scenes it's who's running the most compute that brings the revenue. And yeah, we have a unique, interesting storefront and it keeps growing. [00:53:00] S2: Yeah. And there's not enough of it. Like, all the numbers you hear, you know, like 200,000,000,000 in, you know, CapEx or whatever, like, a lot of that stuff is, like, not built yet. Like, it's very slow, right? Like, building these things takes a lot of time, and there's not enough compute right now. [00:53:20] S0: So, I have two final questions, and then I'm going to ask you what your hot take is. I'm letting you know that now, you can like get it [00:53:26] S1: Think about it. [00:53:27] S0: Prep. [00:53:29] S1: This was a [00:53:29] S2: hot take. [00:53:30] S1: Don't want to get [00:53:31] S2: it. You guys [00:53:33] S0: have been crushing it. You have great answers, and they're quite opinionated, so it's awesome. But before we get there, what are you most looking forward to in the next twelve months?
00:53:33 · Molly O'Shea, Gorkem Yurtseven, Burkay Gür
[00:53:33] S0: have been crushing it. You have great answers, and they're quite opinionated, so it's awesome. But before we get there, what are you most looking forward to in the next twelve months? [00:53:43] S1: I'm looking forward to the first timeless AI content. And the way I define this is you and I, we are going to watch this and it's gonna be a year later, we're gonna watch it again and we are still gonna like it the same way we like it today. So far AI content has been about capabilities, it's been about, oh look this is possible to do with a video model or that's possible to do with like an image model. But we need to reach that point where things look fresh all the time. And I'm looking forward to that. I think we are, in the next year there's gonna be a widely accepted, maybe a short movie, maybe animation that people are going to look back at it in a couple years and they're still going to enjoy it the same way they're enjoying it today. [00:54:30] S0: It's pretty good. [00:54:33] S2: Evergreen content. [00:54:34] S1: Yeah. [00:54:34] S2: It's very important. [00:54:35] S0: I try to do that, but... [00:54:36] S1: There you go. [00:54:37] S2: People say [00:54:37] S1: Toy Story is that for computer graphics. Like, that was the first time. It came out in 1996, something like that. [00:54:45] S0: Isn't it crazy how long ago that was You [00:54:47] S1: know, we can just go watch it and it's going to be good. [00:54:50] S0: Yeah. [00:54:51] S1: I'm going enjoy it. [00:54:52] S0: Did you like the Odyssey in that way? [00:54:53] S1: I haven't seen it yet.