00:25:38 · Amit Jain
[00:25:38] S0: Again, Luma is a deeply research focused company and the prime directive is end to end optimization or this optimization loop. FDCs, FDEs, whatever you wanna call it, like FDCs is a term we invented for creative people because they're not really engineers. So FDCs, one, help our customers actually deploy these really, really powerful systems into their organizations, which is not a given because organizations are very complex organisms. Especially when you work in enterprise, you're always amazed by the level of complexity that is in any workflow really, especially if that workflow is critical to their business. So if you think about a customer Coke for a second, you might think like, okay, it's Coca Cola. Well, one, the sugar water is actually really special and incredible that we can't put it down. But two, Coke is like, their business is actually two things, right? Like selling Coke, but to the brand of Coke. Coke doesn't make new Cokes every year because that's not a good thing. We learn from New Coke, if anybody know what I mean. But Coke is a massive brand in the world, right? They came to the second largest only after Apple. And they spend about $2,500,000,000 a year on content, right, on producing every image that you and I see and subconsciously make us think about the drink and then we go drink it. It's such an incredible operation. It's driven by weather, right? It's driven by where you are, all of these kinds of things. And once you start to learn the details of it, like every organization is very, very complex, especially if they're successful because they didn't get to be successful by doing like baseline stuff. They got to be successful because they just really goddamn honed in on that. And so when you're trying to sell them a product or when you're trying to solve a problem for them, you need to mask that complexity. And as a technology company, how do you do that? How do you do for every single customer you have? You have this forward deployed motion that obviously Palantir pioneered because they had to go in government institutions, which are the epitome of complexity if I have ever seen anything. So these forward deployed creatives help our customers by understanding what they're trying to achieve, and then one, helping them with our products, and then second, tailoring the product to what they need it to be.
00:27:56 · Amit Jain, Finn Meeks
And two, they help our research teams understand these things and create these optimization loops that literally actually go directly to our model in the training process, in the data, in deciding what features the next model will have, in deciding if you need to really scale the size of the model, whatever have you. So extremely valuable. [00:28:15] S1: I think everyone here who's, you know, probably with ChatGPT or, you know, with coding agents has felt that magic moment. What do those magic moments look like for for your customers in the in the visual and creative domains?
00:28:26 · Amit Jain
[00:28:26] S0: Yeah. So actually, I'll tell you a couple of things. We were at this gaming company, Savvy Games, that makes, like, you know, Monopoly Monopoly Go and and huge number of mobile games that you you you guys might actually love and and play a lot. So we were we were talking to them and, like, you know, they were talking us... Talking to us about, like, know, hey, they're doing this thing with Avengers where like, know, they will have characters from Avengers in their games. Yeah. And then creating every single one of these takes like, you know, months and months of work. And I was just sitting there, like, know, they were talking about they were talking and then I I downloaded some of those images from from the Internet and like, you know, I asked it like, hey, look up every single Marvel character and, like, you know, produce a campaign that can be done in, like, you know, 16 countries, like, you know, with different languages. And by the time we had, like, you know, in about thirty minutes or so, I was not really paying attention to the board or that is the product we have. It had produced something really incredible actually, and we were just like, oh, let me plug this in, and we were showing it to them. And it was actually ridiculous for them to even imagine because they were like, oh, yeah, we thought that AI could be fast or all these kind of things, but when they actually... When you actually see it in practice, that is actually ridiculous. The second one is this Ben Kingsley production now. So I was with James Cameron and John Favreau this thing in LA. Essentially the Academy of Arts. Anyway, so this was a long winded conversation about AI in Hollywood and AI in movie production and studios and all these kinds of things. And oh, where can we use it? We can use it for like in this tool, this tool, this tool. But everyone has a very theoretical idea. So when we started to show like, okay, look, this is how they act. And in about like five minutes, there's a full production loop, a thing that would have taken six months before, A full production loop from like shooting to editing to changing the whole set and then being able to produce the thing. That blows people's minds. And again, it's not really easy to blow James Cameron's mind because he's the director of blowing everyone's minds really.
00:30:25 · Amit Jain, Finn Meeks
So I think that was actually a really powerful moment for me that like even people who you would imagine like are are pretty blown can be actually... You know, you can you can grow their minds quite a lot. So I think these are the kind of magic moments. [00:30:38] S1: That's that's amazing. Those are some great stories. I... I'm curious, you know, obviously, you guys are are blowing people's minds kind of in, you know, large enterprises. You've had a lot of, you know, individual creators using the products in the in the past too. You know, there was obviously a pretty big wind down of a consumer video kind of visual kind of effort recently with Sora. I'm I'm curious, like, where do you see these models kind of being most useful? Is it enterprise? Is it individual creators? Is it consumer again in the future? I'm just curious how you how you think about that as a founder.
00:31:16 · Amit Jain
[00:31:16] S0: I mean, we have had efficient video models for a very long time and like, you know, we talked in our teams many many many times about building like a generative social network or something like that. But the problem we always would come back to and like, you know, if you guys know our teammates, you should ask them. We talked about this in 'twenty five, and it's '24, 'twenty five, all of those times. But the problem was what makes a video interesting has almost nothing to do with whether it was generated or not. So when it launched, most of you probably had the same moment where it was like, one, it was really interesting immediately. And you were like, oh, this is generated video and then generated video can be generated. You scrolled for maybe a day. If you're really dedicated like some people who are in our teams, they scroll for two days, three days, five days, But then it's like, okay, now what? Right? And so you saw that in sort of usage graphs and retention graphs, all these kind of things, because the problem is that a video is not interesting because it's stun rated. A video is not interesting because it's CGI. That there's almost nothing to do with why it is interesting. Some of the most interesting videos on the internet are the lowest resolution, right? Like the worst kind, but they are interesting because what's happening in them. Until we solve intelligence in video, a network like Sora is pointless because you need these models to understand humor, you need these models to understand context, you need these models to understand your context. A video that might be interesting to you, I might find like, what is this? I have no idea what you're looking at, right? Because context is local, right? Humor is local. Something we might find funny in San Francisco, people in Miami like, what the hell are you talking about? Right? Like, I can make a joke about MOE and like, you know, you guys might laugh. And in in Miami, I was like, this is a weirdo.
00:33:01 · Finn Meeks
[00:33:01] S1: They made an entire TV show about it.