The Twenty Minute VCVictor Riparbelli, CEO @Synthesia: OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai - Who Wins and Why | E1246
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,221 words- 0:00 – 1:20
Intro
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I mean, I think we're definitely in a bubble, right? There's a lot of money that's going to go up in flames in AI products. What I see a lot of in enterprise is buyers don't really know what they want. The real signal is not that you sign a contract. The real signal is renewal. (drill whirring)
- HSHarry Stebbings
Ready to go?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(Upbeat music) (suspenseful music) (clock ticking)
- HSHarry Stebbings
Viktor, dude, we met like six, seven years ago-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(laughs)
- HSHarry Stebbings
... when I was very, very young and, you know, very naive. I can't believe it's been that long. But thank you so much for joining me, dude.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I'm glad to be here, man.
- HSHarry Stebbings
(laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(laughs)
- HSHarry Stebbings
I'm still, are we said before-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I'm sorry for you that we're meeting under these circumstances.
- HSHarry Stebbings
So am I.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
You know-
- HSHarry Stebbings
I said to you before-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
... it's a good time.
- HSHarry Stebbings
... I, I would have done better if I'd invested in every single company I'd ever met-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(laughs)
- HSHarry Stebbings
... because it would have been you, Deal, Vanta, ElevenLabs. I mean, oh, God. But I want to start today on some really exciting news that you have. So what is the exciting news you have for us today?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah, so we just raised our series D, um, which is, which is super exciting, a big milestone for us. We raised $100 million led by NEA with participation from all of our existing investors. Um, so we're very excited to get to 25 with a big war chest and, you know, just, um, I think from our perspective, like get to escape velocity, shut down the category that we're in
- 1:20 – 6:03
The Seed Round of Synthesia
- VRVictor Riparbelli
and win.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Dude, uh, first amazing news. Congratulations. Thank you again for rubbing it in my face. Um, my, my question to you is, we were talking beforehand actually about the kind of funding story of the business.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Mm-hmm.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Can you take me... And I know it's not, uh, scheduled but I so enjoy this. Can you take me to the seed round? People didn't get it. Just what happened and how was that?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
So this is back in '17, so it's, you know, a long time ago now and, um, the very short story is that we were a bunch of people, uh, myself, my co-founder Stephan, my co-founder and professor ............................ And we had this sort of idea that, uh, you know, generative AI, which back then wasn't really a term that most people thought about, but generative AI would change how we create content. And the big shift was that back in s- 2017 when most people thought about AI it was about analyzing data, right, making decisions. That, that's kind of like that era of AI. Uh, but there was this early kind of GANs, uh, which was basically a neural network that could kind of produce new data instead of just analyzing existing data. Um, and, uh, we thought that this was gonna be a world-changing technology. We thought it was gonna change everything we know about how we create content from video, speech, audio, music, whatever, but we were focusing on video. It went out to the world with a great PowerPoint deck, uh, and we think a great vision. But, um, I think understandably most people thought we were pretty crazy, right? We basically went out and said, "Look, in ten years you're going to be able to make a Hollywood film from your laptop needing nothing else y- than your imagination." And, um, that wasn't a pitch that landed particularly well, especially not in Europe. We were based in London at the time.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Why do you think that was?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Because I think in Europe, um, it's gotten better, but I think in Europe the VC industry is still dominated by people who used to work in private equity. And that's a very different mindset than technologists, right? Um, so when you used to work in private equity you are like a financier more than you're a technologist, and this was not a pitch you could understand through an Excel sheet. So we got turned down by, I mean, basically everyone. I think like 80, 90 investors, something like that. And-
- HSHarry Stebbings
Including podcasters.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Including podcasters.
- HSHarry Stebbings
(laughs) Who weren't-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
And yourself?
- HSHarry Stebbings
... in private equity and don't have that as an excuse.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(laughs)
- HSHarry Stebbings
But yeah, sure.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(laughs)
- HSHarry Stebbings
Uh, and how much were you raising then?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
The first round was $1 million.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Uh-huh.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
And we ended up doing it at the $5 million post with Mark Cuban who we sent a-
- HSHarry Stebbings
Mar- did one on five?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
One on five, yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Phew.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
And with today's valuation of $2.1 billion, that's, uh, pretty-
- HSHarry Stebbings
He has like 15% today.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Something in that range.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Wow. Okay. And then you went out and raised, wanted to raise like seven, no?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
So that was the later round. So that was back in 2017, we did a million at five. That kind of got us started. We went like 12, 18 months as you do. Went out to the market, felt like now we had a working technology. We were back then focused in on, on AI dubbing, not the kind of avatar tech that we, that we mostly have today. And, um, again, learned a hard lesson. You know, we went out and we were like, "Okay, we built this great technology, we've got a great team, um, let's raise $8 million." That completely failed and for like nine months we're just like dragging our feet. I'd... I made all the mistakes you can make as a founder, you know, I dragged out the funding process over nine months, like different data points with different investors. It was a big shit show and we eventually had to rewind because we were running out of money and we ended up raising 3.1, and that kind of took us through to, um, the series A which is when we had actually found product-market fit and had like a sustainable business. But those two first rounds were very much rounds we b- raised based on story, and it was a story back then that just didn't resonate that much because it was very hard for people to see what we had, how that could extrapolate that into, you know, everything that it became today.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Today that would have been a $5 to $10 million round on a 40 to 50 given team and given vision.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Would you have been as successful as you have been had you raised that round instead of the ones that you raised which were leaner and smaller?
- 6:03 – 7:34
Thoughts on Large Rounds & Pedigreed Founders
- VRVictor Riparbelli
right?
- HSHarry Stebbings
You're also an angel investor now. How do you feel about the five on 25, 10 on 50 rounds with pedigreed founders coming from your massive names? How do you feel about them and have you seen a trend in terms of how they perform?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Too much money too early is not healthy.Maybe some people are good at really having that discipline, maybe like second time founders but it's very tempting to spend on things that you shouldn't be spending money on, especially when things are not working, right? I think once you clearly have product market fit, there are a lot of things, a lot of decisions becomes a lot easier because they're more obvious but before product market fit, it's really dangerous I think to be developing two, three, four things at a time. Having 15, uh, people working on your team when you're still at idea stage. And I think a lot of people make the mistake of raising the money and then using it too quickly. Um, one thing you cannot use money for or buy your way with is product market fit, right? I think learning about your market, about your customers, it just takes time, and having a team of 20 people instead of five people trying to learn that, I think actually slows you down. You have to own that as a founder, and it's just, I don't think we could've learned the same amount, uh, about our customers, um, faster with more money back then. It will take us like two years to just get into the minds of customers, understand video from like first principles, and I think people try and then you hire like a product manager to help you fix the product market fit problem because they're a product person, um, or you hire like a sales person, uh, because you think you have product market fit and just need to beat someone who's better at selling it, and that's rarely... Unless you have product market fit like you shouldn't have product managers and sales people. Right? That is your job as a founder.
- 7:34 – 10:04
Is Product Market Fit Ever Truly Achieved?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
- HSHarry Stebbings
Do you think that journey's ever done though? 'Cause I don't believe in product market fit being the sa- we have product market fit. You have product market fit with creators, tick, let's say-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
... and then suddenly you need to move into SMBs. Well, you don't have product market fit with them, you have it with creators who are independents, and then you need it with enterprise, and so I just see product market fit as this like ever-moving chapter book-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
100%
- HSHarry Stebbings
... which is different, and so actually, can you ever afford to move away from customers? And does it not always become more impossible with bigger teams?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
No. I totally agree with you, and I think a successful company is a long series of like product market fits but you need that initial spark, right? Because once you have that, you have something to build on. The bigger you get, the more, you know, bigger company you're building, you need new product and a new product market fit essentially, and I actually do think that that's one of the things as a founder that you should always be focusing on. What is the next market? What is the next, uh, product you're targeting? Right? But in our case, you know, we have, I would say we have like a bunch of product market fits already.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Yeah.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
And those I think you can hire super smart people that can run with it, make it great lines of businesses, make it great products, but I think pushing to those next product market fits and like where the company needs to be in two or three years, I think that remains to be the founder's job.
- HSHarry Stebbings
You said about kind of the importance of capital constraints, cockroach mode-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
... I think you hadn't touched your A when you raised your B, you hadn't touched your B when you raised your C, and now you haven't touched your C when you've raised your D.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Well, then why raise it?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Well, I think when you have the money, you, you do spend it, right? I think for us it's, it's been more a matter of just we've always been obsessed about actually building a business, um, which, uh, which sounds a bit wacky-
- HSHarry Stebbings
(laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
... but having great unit economics, you know, making sure that we're a business that generates money and revenue and that we're always in control of our own destiny rather than being like tied to like a VC parachute. Um, and so I think we've always just spent conservatively, but it's also very clear, right, that if you know where to spend the capital, it is, uh, it is an amazing asset, right? So building a great go-to market team, for example. I mean that does cost money, and that means you have to, there's like a cash flow thing of like you have to hire like a bunch of people that are really great. They have to train. They take nine months before they ramp up, and then the investment is worth it. So, I think it, you want to have capital, right? You want to have a really healthy balance sheet so that you can chase any opportunity that comes, uh, ahead of you, and for us like we want to build like a really, really big company. I think there is usually a $50, $100 billion company could be built in this space that we're in, and we want to win that, and you're not going to win that by just bootstrapping all the way, right?
- HSHarry Stebbings
(laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think that's, that's, uh, that's a
- 10:04 – 13:01
How Does Synthesia Become a $50-$100 Billion Company?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
myth.
- HSHarry Stebbings
How does Synthesia become a $50 to $100 billion company? Can you just paint that picture for me?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
So I think we're in the early stages of a shift in how we communicate. If you think of most communication today, it's, it's text based, right? It's emails, texts, we read things, and, uh, text is a great technology, it's amazing technology. It's kind of built the world up to where it is today, but it's, it's actually like a, a, a pretty bad way of compressing information. You lose a lot of context when you transform like your thoughts into something that's written down in, in a document, right? Uh, as humans, we're much better at consuming visual content. We like to hear things. We like to see things. We like to feel things in the physical world. Can't do that yet. Uh, but it's very clear that like higher fidelity content like video and audio is a better way of training, informing, and entertaining people. The reason that we're using that much text today is because text is the only scalable way we have of, um, essentially storing information and sharing information, right? But that's changing now because the more we don't need cameras and microphones and capturing things in the physical world around us, the more we can get video creation, audio creation to be as scalable as text. And once that happens, there isn't really any reason for us to use text anymore. And this, this sounds a bit crazy, um, but I actually do think that maybe not us but maybe our kids' kids are going to be one of the last generations that'll read and write as like the default way of communication. I think we'll increasingly just consume everything by video and audio. I think you have all the trends, like you look at TikTok, right? I don't know if you're on TikTok, but-
- HSHarry Stebbings
Every, every night, I actually watch it from 12:00 'til 12:30, and then I send my team notes on what I think works and doesn't and transitions, fades, music.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Yes.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I do exactly the same thing. And, and I think TikTok is a great example of how, like, how video truly can be the default of how we consume information, right? You s- there's almost no text left in the interface. Even comments, right? People, people respond to comments with videos, and so they've really started to build out this graph of like how we communicate with video as like a default medium. There's a long way to go, but if you believe that that is true and that not just your TikTok scrolling at night, but if you're trying to buy a software product, you actually don't want to read a whole bunch of stuff and jump on calls with people, you want to watch a video, and at some point, you probably want to watch interactive video, right, where you just, you know, put your voice, say, "Hey, can you show me how this functionality works over here?" And the video will just like switch over to that. And when you do custom support, right, you don't, you're not on the phone, you're not like reading long knowledge articles, you're watching videos. Again, probably they'll be interactive. Then all of those communication, uh...... is the market, right? And so when we started the company, we always talked about, and we still, you know, it's very important. Part of our thesis is that our market is not video production because all video production today, um, I mean, that's an interesting market, but all of our, all of our market is text, right? It's text and slides is the market that we are targeting, and that market is infinitely big. And if you manage to capture just 5% of all the world's text communications and turn that into video, I think you have probably more than $100 billion company.
- 13:01 – 16:01
Is Raising Money to Deter Competitors a Bad Strategy?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
- HSHarry Stebbings
We're going to go into kind of future and how we see the future. I do just want to remain on the actual funding.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Is it bad to raise money to dissuade competitors, to win a market and use capital as a weapon?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I mean, I think it can backfire if you don't know what to use the capital for. You start doing stupid things, right? But-
- HSHarry Stebbings
But is this round a signal to other people, "Don't fucking come here"?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(laughs) I mean, sure, it's a part of it, right? But I think more than anything it's, it's, uh, th- this round is raising the capital to build the best product in the category. So, of course, there's... I mean, every time you raise the signal, like hiring people, you send a signal to competitors and VCs, et cetera. But that's not the... I, I, I have never made a decision at Synthesia based off what our competitors do or don't. I think that's, that's a bad way to run a company.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Do you not pay attention to competitors?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Of course, you pay attention to competitors. And now we have lots of them, right? Um, and I think it's great to have someone to kind of play ball against to some extent. One of the interesting things about Synthesia is that when we raised our A to B2C round, it was very much a secret how fast we were growing and how much people loved the product. Um, a lot of people looked at us from the outside like, "Oh, yeah, there's, like, a few people in, like, learning and development and training that thinks it's, like, a cool thing, uh, to, to, to spend time on making these AI videos," right? And what we actually saw from the inside was, "Holy shit, this is huge." And, and training and learning was the first market we targeted, but this is clearly just the beginning. But from the outside, it looked like, "Oh, it's just, like, cute UK company doing these avatars." Kind of fun, but, like, most people probably don't use if anything else than just, like, making a fun video for their mom. And so for many years, we had the market to ourselves, and then slowly people started to realize that, okay, actually, this is maybe not just, like, a flash-in-the-pan cool demo. Maybe there's something real under the hood. And so we started getting a lot of competitors. We have one particular competitor that, I mean, literally verbatim copied, like, our mission statement, like, everything. They, they, like, just copy everything that we do.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Who is that?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
They know who they are. Um, but they, they copied everything that we do from the, the way we talk about the product. We talk about the market. And of course, that's annoying, right? But that's, that's capitalism. That's, that's good. And then eventually, you know, you start to learn from your competitors. Um, you know, they do something right, they do something wrong, and it's actually very helpful. It's really difficult to pioneer a space because you have no feedback loop except for whatever you do and how the market reacts to that, right? And seeing what competitors are doing and seeing what works and what doesn't work is extremely powerful. And I think for us at least, that's been a very powerful thing for us the last 12 months. I think the reason that we, uh, we had a massive re- re-acceleration, um, kind of the second half of the year, and a big part of that is actually because our competitors did a whole bunch of marketing for the category. We clearly had the superior product, and so that actually helped us, uh, quite, quite significantly. I don't think you always have to be a f- like, the first to do something. If you're good at being a fast follower, that's also very powerful. So it's, it's a different way of running the company when you have a lot of, like, feedback signals in the market around you. But I think it's, it's much more fun, and I think it helps you get to the right answer for your customers, uh, much faster, which ultimately is
- 16:01 – 19:44
Where Are We in the AI Hype Cycle Today?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
the most important thing.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Dude, before we kind of dive into kind of journey and elements there, I do just want to discuss AI landscape today.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Um, a lot about... I, I speak to so many CEOs, and they're like, "Harry, you and your tech bros, you sell me the ROI to enterprise. We're still kind of waiting." Where are we at in the AI hype cycle cycle today?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think that, I think that's pretty spot on. What I see a lot in the enterprise is, uh, buyers don't really know what they want. A lot of people have been told that they need to have an AI strategy, they need to execute on AI strategy, which means they're very willing to have conversations. They're also very willing to spend the innovation budgets on doing things, but they don't really know what they actually need and want. They don't understand the technologies well enough, um, to, to kind of themselves figure out what do they need for their business. And that is, uh, both an opportunity, but I think it's also a problem for a lot of AI startups that doesn't have that customer obsession. It's great because you have a lot of budget available and people are extremely willing to do things and, you know, sign up for pilots and POCs because they want to deliver to their boss that AI strategy. But if... when they don't know what they actually want, it's very difficult to, to prove (laughs) , to prove the ROI to them, right? So-
- HSHarry Stebbings
So what was the problem? It's the implementation?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I, I think the problem is that to be successful today as an AI company, I think you need to be extremely customer-centric. You need to deeply understand your customers. What are their problems? How can your product help solve whatever specific problem that they have? Now, that sounds like pretty obvious, right? That's, that's not, like, AI-specific. But the issue is that today there's a lot of companies who do a lot of, like, cool technologies, and they go out and they kind of convince the customers that whatever they're building is the right thing. It'll help solve some, like, big problem for them, but maybe it doesn't really work or they haven't understood the customer's problem deep enough. And so now you have this thing where the, the AI startup kind of thinks that they're delivering real value, but actually it's not a, it's not, it's not a good signal because, on the other side, you have a buyer who's, like, just spent a lot of money on doing something, and they'll, like, say, "Yeah, it works really well," because they just spent $100,000 on doing it. But eventually, they will churn, right? Because it doesn't actually work or doesn't actually do the thing that you, that you want it to do. And so that's a problem because the AI startups think they're doing the right thing, they think they're delivering value, but at some point, you're going to be hit by that wall of churn where all your 12-month contracts, like, begin to, uh, to just, like, phase out because you're not actually delivering, delivering value, right?
- HSHarry Stebbings
Are we seeing that wall-of-churn moment now?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think a lot of companies are seeing that big time, right? And what... I think what's very unique about, uh, about AI the last couple of years is that people are extremely willing to part ways with their money.... people don't mind, people don't mind, like, paying, you, uh, on a consumer level, like, $30 a month to, like, try out something that looks cool. Enterprise level, they sign for a 50K pilot to do something. Um, but the real signal is not that you sign a contract, the real signal is renewal. And I think there's too many AI startups who optimize or have optimized too much for, like, closing new contracts, not for the renewal, right? And if you optimize for the new contracts, not the renewals, you, unless you've hit the right thing, which of course some people do, then you're in for a whole, whole bunch of trouble.
- HSHarry Stebbings
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about where we are today versus where we really are?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I mean, I think we're definitely in a bubble, right? Um, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that's how capitalism works, right? You throw a lot of money, a lot of products, uh, at the world and you try to do, like, a million different things at once, and you kind of see what sticks, and that's the right way to innovate, right? That's Darwinistic, kind of (laughs) , um, by nature. But I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of money that's gonna go up in flames, uh, in, in, in AI products that either just aren't that valuable or things that will eventually become features in some of the big cloud providers.
- 19:44 – 22:35
What's Getting Money Today but Won't Last?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
- HSHarry Stebbings
What is getting money today that people think will be very valuable that you don't think will be?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Like, buzzwords always kind of, like, take me out. When people say they're, like, building AI agents to do all sorts of different things, that always, like, lights up my bullshit detector a little bit. But I just feel like when you're, like, overly obsessed about, like, the technology and, like, the latest buzzword, that's usually, like, a yellow flag for me. Maybe I'll give you one quick example. I really, really hate it when people call, like, AI employees. I think that's like, I think that's so dumb. I think it's, it's not helpful to build useful technologies that people want to adopt, and I just think it's the wrong way of thinking about it that you're going to have, like, AI employees doing all sorts of different things for you. Like, these are algorithms. It's a piece of software, like, you wouldn't say that, like, Miro or Figma is, like, an AI employee that, like, sits and takes people's design and, and put it onto something, right? I understand that it's because people think these things have got to be making decisions autonomously, but I just don't think it's that different from software that we already know.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Did you agree with Zuck in his Rogan episode when he said by, yeah, mid this year, we're gonna have AIs that will be as capable as mid-level software engineers?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think, in general, the tech industry, we're very good at, like, setting really high expectations, and then not always meeting them. For me, I always go back, look, I, I think for me, I always strive with these, like, hype cycles to, like, stay positive but rational. So, what, what does that mean? Well, that means, like, yeah, sure, probably at some point that will happen. I care most about what I know to be true today and in the next couple of quarters, and I'll kind of, like, adjust our strategy based off that. I think it's very clear we're gonna have very capable AIs that can produce software. I also think, when I speak to a lot of developers, that, I mean, we're not at the point yet, right, where you just, like, sit down and say, "Hey, build me, like, the next social network with these functionalities," um, uh, and just comes up with it. I think building software is a lot harder than that, and I think what we see a lot with, or have seen last two years, a lot of, like, cool demos. But, and that's great, that's a good start, right? But what we really want to see is this, like, applied mass scale in production. Because you can prompt, like, a Tetris game in the browser or something like that. Like, that's, that's great, but if you look at most software out there today, it's very complex and it's not just technology, right? There are humans, it's customers, it's feedback loops, and I don't think we're anywhere near being able to, um, to, to, to automate those things. But I definitely think that a great software engineer will be way more productive in the next 6, 12, to 18 months. But, you know, there's a, there's some, like, podcast, some point, especially like 12, 12 months ago, like, all software is, is dead, right? In the future it's gonna be, you've just got to go on to, like, whatever LLM. You're just gonna say, make me a copy of monday.com, you're gonna deploy it, you're gonna sell it at one-tenth of the price, it's gonna be great, and all the existing companies are dead. And I think that's, like, a really, really naive view of what it's like to build a business. Technology and lines of code is super important, but, uh, uh, as you know, right, you've built your company yourself, it's, uh, it goes way deeper than that. And I think it really, f- for me, that, that's really, th- th- that's, that's, that's things that people who've never built operate a company.
- 22:35 – 25:16
Is the Commoditization of Foundation Models Inevitable?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
- HSHarry Stebbings
But it also assumes that you're gonna continuously upgrade and improve them yourself. Can you imagine having to continuously upgrade and improve 150 different internal tools?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Totally agree.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Well, un- uh, unbelievable. Um, speaking of, kind of, rational and clear mindset around where we are today, I think everyone acknowledges that we're seeing the complete commoditization of foundation models. Do you agree with that from what you see, and how do you see the foundation model landscape evolving?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
For sure. Um, I think, I think what it'll come back to, as it always does, like, distribution is king and great products are king. And of course, there will be new LLMs that will be better and more powerful and, uh, as everyone else excited to see what GPT-5 kind of has in store. But I do think we are seeing the commoditization of the text, uh, generation layer, right? For most of the use cases that, um, we'll see LLMs transform the worlds we know today, I think the current generation technology is good enough. It's about, of course, improving the base models, but it's a lot about, like, building the product, the scaffolding around it. Um, but, um, but, but I, I, I definitely think we are seeing that, right? Like, if, if, if we're seeing, like, X and Elon Musk catching up, like, pretty quickly and Phobic has a really great product, a lot of people prefer those models over OpenAI's. OpenAI has a huge distribution mode, and I think they've really managed to capture, like, the consumer version of the world here, and that's definitely gonna be really valuable. But, um, I think it's a lot of distribution of product from here on.
- HSHarry Stebbings
So you've got $10 million, okay? And you can put it in OpenAI at 160, Anthropic at 60, or X at 50. Which one would you do?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I just think I would do X. I think they're all great companies. I would do X because I think their, theirs is the most asymmetric upside if Elon delivers what he usually does. And, I mean, we've all heard of (laughs) some of the, like, that data set that he built in, like, 10 days or something, right? I think, I would just never bet against Elon, and I think the, the upside potential there is, is, I mean, it's huge. And I also think that it's under, um-I think the fact that he owns X is really, really powerful. OpenAI clearly managed to capture like the consumer as in like the destination that you go to use an LLM. I think we'll see LLMs being a part of like many different apps and I think owning X along with, uh, building the LLMs is actually really powerful, especially for the real-time, uh, information that, uh, that will be able to feed into the models directly from X. And the fact that X of course already has like hundreds of millions users that, um, that in theory at least could start using, uh, their, their LLMs rather than
- 25:16 – 30:29
What Will Be the Key Differentiator for AI Winners?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
going to-
- HSHarry Stebbings
What is the differentiator that will create the winner? Is it data? Is it, you know, a lot of people have said to me X because of Elon's access to compute.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Um, is it distribution where OpenAI would win? Is it data where you could say OpenAI or X would win? Is it, which one is it?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Clearly there's still gains to be made from scaling. I think especially if you look outside the text domain, but like in video, audio, et cetera, 3D.
- HSHarry Stebbings
So you agree that scaling laws will continue?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think they will continue, but I don't think it's just going to be linear like whoever has the most compute is going to win. Uh, the world rarely works in those ways. Something will happen, right? Someone will come up with an algorithm that can, that is like 10, 100 times as efficient as what it is today. Um, so I, I, I think compute is important, but I actually also think, uh, data is, uh, actually I would say compute algorithms and data maybe. I think in algorithms what, what everyone is trying to build into more or less any AI system today is control, right? We've proven these things extremely capable at replicating the real world, producing video that looks real, audio that looks real, text that sounds real and... but what we all really want to do is like get a different level of control over these things. In my world, right, it's like you have some of the big video generation models. I can't delineate what we do versus like what Sora does or Runway or something like that. Take Sora and Runway, these models extremely capable, extremely powerful, right? You type something in, put out everything, put out like basically anything you type in, it'll actually spit out and that's really, really powerful and it's a great demo but to really be able to use this you have to be able to say, "I want this same character in a different scene. I want the character to say this particular..." Like there's so many like layers of control and those are very hard to build in because every time we try to build them in, it decreases the overall like fidelity because all of a sudden you're trying to make the model do something, um, you're trying to make the model essentially do what you want it to do rather than just replicate whatever real kind of looks like. And so I think getting those layers of control in is going to be difficult. I think that is going to be a lot of algorithms figuring out like-
- HSHarry Stebbings
To what extent is Grok's lack of layers of control a problem or a benefit?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Well, there's controls of like content moderation, uh, then there is like in- in controlling the output, right? So the thing that I'm talking about here is like the slot machine kind of thing. You type something in, you get something out, then you try and change the probability up, you, you pull the slot machine again, right? And it's very frustrating if you're trying to get to something specific because the model just doesn't really put it out. So you want to have some degree of control in there. I think on the moderation, um, I mean that'll (laughs) be interesting to see how it's, how it's going to pan out, right? I think we're definitely in the middle of like a vibe shift with, uh, with Zuckerberg also pulling back moderation, which I think, uh, in general I'm, I'm, I'm in favor of that. I don't think that like humans moderating content is the right way forward. I think community notes-
- HSHarry Stebbings
Do you think Zuck made the right decision to pull back on moderation?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Uh, well, it's in the statement, I don't have the actual details of it, but I think it is directionally correct that having humans sitting down and evaluating content is not the right way of doing it. I think what we've seen with products like Wikipedia, for example, is that the collective power of people working together to arrive at some sort of truth is really, really powerful. And I think community notes is kind of like taking that Wikipedia way of thinking about the world and trying to implement that into every single piece of content. And it's not easy and it's not solved yet but I do think that is the, that, that is the right way for us to, um, to, to, to kind of have some degree of control over like what people do and say. Where it gets really messy is, is this kind of like gray content. We, we have the problem at Synthesia as well, right? You know, we have a, a full... we have a basically a product internally for content moderation. Um, and it's been a journey for us because the hard thing is you have the, the, what we call the green content. The content that everyone agrees is great, that's 99.9% of the content. You have the red content, hate speech, violence, most people will agree that, that that's bad as well. Then you have all the, the gray middle and that's where it gets difficult. And I think this is the content that Zuck is talking about here where he's going to like let off controls. This is essentially like you're making cryptocurrency content, for example. Where do you... when is it like a really enthusiastic entrepreneur who just started a new coin that he or she definitely thinks is going to change the world? When is it an outright fraud of like trying to get, you know, well-meaning people to put their, dump their money into something they think is going to go up 10X? All those lines are very difficult to draw, right?
- HSHarry Stebbings
And like bluntly, is Synthesia liable? Are you the arbiter of justice on what is good or what isn't? Also if something is an opinionated rant that I put out there-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
... maybe it's right and fair but it upsets a lot of people. Do you see what I mean? Are you the arbiter of right and wrong?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah. S- so today we are, um, and that's a decision that we have made. We had a lot of discussion about this in terms of like how do you... what's our approach to this problem? And for me it again comes back to the customers, right? We're an enterprise product. Um, it's important that the avatars that we have are not seen to be used in all sorts of like wacky content online. We don't, as a company have... we don't see ourselves as having to uphold any kind of right of, of free speech. And, uh, frankly from a business perspective having someone pay me $30 a month to create very questionable conspiracy content is just not good business. So for me all of those things kind of lined up, right? Uh, our enterprise clients, they don't want, uh, you know, avatars to be affiliated with content that doesn't kind of like match their brand. Um, and economically for us it just doesn't make sense, so we've taken a very strict approach, uh, which means that we are actually going and being the arbiters of truth and we definitely have people who are unhappy with that.
- 30:29 – 34:12
How Far Will Model Providers Go in the Application Layer?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
- HSHarry Stebbings
Staying on models before we go down this rabbit hole, just in terms of models, uh, obviously you speak to many investors over the last 18 months and when Synthesia has come up, bluntly they've said like, "Amazing and amazing what they've done but OpenAI are going to move into this. This is the most obvious play for OpenAI to move into."
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yep.
- HSHarry Stebbings
This and customer service is always kind of the two.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
How far do you think model providers go into the application layer and how do you assess that?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
... I think this is like classical busy brain.
- HSHarry Stebbings
(laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Um, which is, again, too much focus on the technology, right? Like, you know, you speak to a c- I think there's a big misconception about Synthesia is that we're like an avatar company um, and it's kind of a fair assumption to make because you go to our website if you'd like, you know, see about us online. And like, avatars is a headline feature for the company, right? It's one of the things that made us where we are today. If you've gone and talked to our customers, they don't buy us with the avatar model. They buy us for the workflow. Like the way we've taken the entire video value chain. We would get an idea, so you make a draft for that video, you don't have to use a camera, uh, or a voiceover artist, right? Because we have the AI model to that. We give you a great editor like using PowerPoint or Canva. We give you a distribution mechanic with an AI video player that's made to serve multilingual content. I... The list could go on and on, right? To talk to our customers today, the reason we have, you know, million dollar plus contracts is not because people are like, "Oh, I want to make an avatar video." It's because they want to convey a message to someone and they want to do that with the highest, um, efficiency and engagement and in the best workflow, frankly speaking. And that is so much more than just the models. So, of course, we want to win in the models and we are going to win in the models, and our specific niche here is human b- humans presenting content, right? Whereas all the other companies, yes, Sora, Runway, all these guys are doing amazing AI video things, but they have a much, much kind of wider merit of what they're doing. They're trying to build true foundation model video models, and maybe we'll be custom of those one day, maybe we'll be partners. The only thing I care about right now is voiceovers and humans presenting to the camera, right? And I think in that niche, and if you take the entire platform as a whole, that's how we win. Um, and, and, and then just the last bit on that, but I, I think that's something we're going to see in the next couple of years, is that the winning companies are going to be the ones that are not overly obsessed about the AI component of their platforms, but who build for workflow. And I think, you know, as I move into, go into 2025, models, super important for us, but expanding across the value chain, uh, we're increasingly the publisher of, uh, of videos for our customers as well, which means that instead of like using, you know, YouTube or another kind of enterprise video hosting platform, they use us directly. And I think that's where you're going to see a lot of, uh, of the value being created. There's going to be a few foundational model companies. They'll be very big and they'll be, they'll power... they already power us with, uh, you know... Of course, we use OpenAI, we use Anthropic, we use Runway.
- HSHarry Stebbings
What do you use most, and has that changed over time?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Personally or as a company?
- HSHarry Stebbings
As a company.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
We're most using OpenAI. Um-
- HSHarry Stebbings
Wow.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah. But I think, uh-
- HSHarry Stebbings
Is that shifting more to Anthropic?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Mm, yeah. We've shifted some workloads to Anthropic. We're also using Gemini actually. Um, I think in general, our sense is that it's a lot about like pricing. (laughs) Some models are definitely like better at, at things than others, but we have like a lot of like workloads that, that... We have big workloads, uh, moderation, for example, is one of them. So I think pricing is important and again like the scaffolded infrastructure around it.
- HSHarry Stebbings
How did you think about the question of whether to build your own models? How do you think about that?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
We only want to build models if we think we can be the best in the world at it, which in general for us means that it's a narrow domain and that it is directly tied to a bigger workflow, right? And so we always work backwards from our, what our customers are trying to do, and if we think we can be the best in the world at it and we think there are compounding advantages of building that model, then it's great for us. And what that means very, you know, specifically is that for humans presenting to camera, um, to dialogue driven content, that's where we want to be
- 34:12 – 37:31
Future of AI: Many Specialized Models or Few Massive Ones?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
the best in the world at it.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Do you think in the future we will have a world of many smaller models that are specialized, as we mentioned there, or do we have three general massive models?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think it's... I think there will be some concentration for sure in the big companies, but I also do think we'll see a lot of like... But it's kind of interesting because like specialized models, right, they're still very technology centric, you know? I think there'll be many, many, many different products that people use in their daily lives to run their businesses and a lot of those will probably use models that are like an open source thing that's kind of like tuned specifically for something and integrated into like an overall platform. And if you think of that as a specialized model, then yeah, I think we'll see a lot of specialized models, but I really think it's like very, it's very like tech industry to talk about models all the time, right? Like I think most people, we will interact with models like we do in, in ChatGPT whatever today, for sure. But a lot of like the things that you won't notice as a consumer when you're just like using someone else's platform or product, there'll be a lot of like workflows in the background that are also driven by LLMs and I think you'll definitely see a lot of companies building their own specialized LLMs, right? But, but I think it's like... yeah, I think, I think we should think more about like products than, than models.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Final one on models then. (laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(laughs)
- HSHarry Stebbings
Fourth- final- we've, we've talked way too much about models. Final one on models. GPT-5 has taken so long, dude. Everyone is like, "Ugh, when's it coming?" It's been delayed, delayed, delayed. How do you think about the delay and do you think it will surpass expectations or fall beneath them when it does release?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think it's going to be incredibly difficult to do anything that can mirror the ChatGPT moment when it first came out, right? Um, as humans, I think we saturate incredibly easy, you know. It's... We often forget how crazy just like GPT-3 actually is when you use it, right? Um, so my sense is that when they release something, it'll probably be good and there'll probably be a whole bunch of tech nerds who will be very excited about all the things it can now do. And, and maybe I'm wrong and it's just like super intelligent thing that will just like self-improve and, and, and, you know, save the world. But I think it'll come out and it'll be like good, it'll be definitely better than the previous things, but I think most people will not like care that much because the bar for someone to really care that much is incredibly high, right? When we talk about... A- and there's all this talk about this is like AGI, it's not AGI, and I think all those things are kind of riddled with like what, what's the definition of, of AGI, right? If you took ChatGPT, um, 200 years back in time, right? In England. And you showed someone this magical thing you've built, you'd be burned at the stake.
- HSHarry Stebbings
(laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
If you did it 50 years ago, people would definitely think this is AGI, I am talking to a computer that knows everything about the world. This is absolutely batshit, right? And then today we have people like, "Ah, it's just a stochastic parrot." And I don't know where the, what, what's, what's true or what's not true there. Um, I think it will be very powerful. I don't think it'll have as much of kind of like the, you know, the cultural moment that ChatGPT, uh, created initially. And I, as I said earlier, I think...... elements of this that there will be, like, a small group of people who really care deeply about what benchmark does it work against and, uh, you know, it's, like, slightly better in this area and this area, and I think that's awesome. But I think for the average... I think for most use cases, for most businesses around the world, the current models are already pretty good and can solve a lot of problems.
- 37:31 – 48:11
The Future of Content Creation
- VRVictor Riparbelli
- HSHarry Stebbings
One of my favorite quotes is Eleanor Roosevelt, uh, and this is what I aspire to, not necessarily what I am clearly, but she said, "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. And small minds discuss people." But I want to discuss the future across a couple of different segments with that in mind and, like, discussing ideas. When we look at the future of content creation, this is my life, dude-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
... what does the future of content creation look like in, say, five years?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think what has happened in very broad strokes is that we democratized distribution with the internet, right? Like, there are no gatekeepers. Anyone can make a website. Everyone can share their content online. That's been really, really powerful. Then we saw, to some extent, the democratization of content creation because all of our smartphones have cameras in them, the price of camera equipment dropped, and all those things which, I mean, we're sitting here with... I mean, this setup, like, 30 years ago would probably have been, like, 100x the price of what it is today. What's about to happen now is that we're truly gonna democratize content creation. We're gonna change the world of making content from something that you need to where we capture things with sensors in the physical world to being able to generate everything digitally, right? And that's gonna have huge implications. When you think about text, which we don't really think of as... Uh, that's just like a fabric of society. We don't really think that much about text, right? But text went through this journey of, like, you know, the printing press was, like, one of the first really big inventions around text. Then we invented the keyboard, the computers, and now text is everywhere and everyone can create content online. It's entirely digital, right? And, and that's really powerful. With something like music, we've somewhat also seen that go from being something we generally do in the real world and capture with sensors to something we can do digitally.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Mm.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
So most music today is not made with real instruments, right? It's made with software instruments and, you know, when I open my MacBook at home, I can recreate almost any song I want without real instruments, right? I can synthesize that on my computer. And that changed the music industry in many, many, many, many different ways, right? And I think we're gonna s- we're gonna start to see the same with, with the video and audio industry, where you are gonna be able to bring your ideas to life without needing much more than just your imagination. And this is gonna have a whole bunch of, uh, of, of effects. I think most obvious one is that the price of creating content is gonna go to zero. Just like it costs you nothing today to write a book, basically, right? Everything is free. In the not-too-distant future, the price of creating a Hollywood film, from a purely technical perspective, I think is gonna be zero as well. That's gonna mean we're gonna have a deluge of content, an absolute deluge of content. It means that people like yourself, YouTube creators, everyone else can compete with Hollywood in terms of what they can bring to life, right? Today, there's, like, still this separation of, like, Hollywood content, so, like, all the Netflix series that we watch, the really high production value things, and then there's, like, the YouTubers who do, like, prank videos and, uh, podcasts and kind of, like, fun things. But, like, even for y- for you, right, it would be very difficult for you to make, like, a Hollywood-style production because it'd just be like... It'd be very, very, very expensive, right? And that, that's gonna, like, flatline, which means that the best ideas and the best content is gonna win, and I think that's gonna be pretty exciting.
- HSHarry Stebbings
But I think we are so far away from this. This is someone who creates content for a daily living.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Like, when I look at the clipping tools, they are so far off what my team is able to do upstairs.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
It's incomparable. I don't see that being two years out. It's also highly... There's s- there's a lot of knowledge involved. It is highly ambiguous what bit's important of this episode. Depending on what we wanted to achieve-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
... we could totally cut six different bits as being the best for a highlight reel. And so I find these, like, clipping tools as, hey, everyone's democratized.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
I think content's less democratized than ever.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah. Uh, and I totally agree with you. I think a very important delineation is when I say that it's gonna be... You're just gonna use your imagination, that doesn't mean that it doesn't require skill, right?
- HSHarry Stebbings
Mm-hmm.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
It means that the kind of... The, the sort of technical barriers, you don't need to have a camera anymore.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Okay.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
You don't need to be necessarily, like, amazing at, uh, visual effects. A lot of the stuff will be able to be done automatically. But it'll be more, uh, put more emphasis than ever on being a great storyteller, on understanding what's important, on asking the right questions, on... If you're creating fictional content, combining things that work in the cultural zeitgeist but still stands out a little bit enough that it's, like, interesting for people to watch, right? So I think all those things will be more important than ever. What will be less important, well, knowing the r- like, knowing the right people to distribute your content, having spent, like, eight years in becoming the world's best visual effects artist, because you can get a lot of help with that from AI systems. But the storytelling piece is gonna remain exactly the same. And I also think what we go- what we are gonna see is that the value of, like, real content is, is gonna be higher than ever, uh, because we'll have a lot of AI-generated content, and I think that'll be a, a genre of itself. But just like we still like to, uh, watch people play piano or, uh, know that someone... That the artist we're watching is actually, like, a real person, I think that will carry over to this world as well.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Will we have more human-made or AI-made content in five years?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Definitely AI-made content, for sure. But I think what's actually more important is what content surfaces, right? Because if you go to YouTube today, I mean, the... It's like... I don't know what the stat is, but it's probably like 95% of all videos have, like, less than 10 views or something. So the content is there, it's a matter of, like, what, what actually gets surfaced.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Well, this was my point, which is when you reduce the cost as much as we are here with AI, and we increase supply side so much, what is the future of discovery?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think a lot about this, and, um, I think... I think TikTok is actually a really great product.... potentially, like, a bit of an unpopular opinion. But I think what, what TikTok has done extr- when I look at my TikTok feed today, I would say it's 90% highly informative, educational, really great content. It's about music production, it's about the music that I like, it's about politics, about tech. I see your face once in a while. I think it's an amazing feed of interesting people, um, and, and based on my interests, right? I think what, what TikTok has done really well is that they built the graph based on your interests, not on your kind of social connections. There's a bit of that as well. And I think that model is actually extremely powerful. Um, what I do want to see is a bit more control over your kind of algorithm. Right? So today, it's basically like I think everyone has this, like, intuitive thing which is, like, if, if there, you see content you don't want to see more of, you swipe really quickly because you know the, the, the algorithm will kind of notice that you swiped quickly past that, so you're kind of almost trading the algorithm yourself. I think that's, like, an awesome way of, of doing it, but a bit more control. Maybe we could say, like, "These particular topics, just don't show it to me. I'm not interested in it." Um, and then I also think what TikTok has done really well is because they have this, like, really great interest graph, they know a lot of people who are very interested in specifi- specific areas. When you post a piece of content yourself, they basically show that content to, like, a couple of hundred of people, and they quickly sense, do those hundred people like the content or not like the content, right? And if you, they don't like the content, you go in the trash. If someone kind of likes it a little bit, they'll show it to a bit more people, and they're trying to figure out what's actually great content. And I think, I mean, if you look at TikTok's usage rate, I think that's very clearly working really well.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Should TikTok be banned?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Clearly, TikTok has built an amazing product. I don't think it's a brainwashing machine. I don't think it's a propaganda machine.
- HSHarry Stebbings
My thing is, like, the denigration of social media, which is, like, to your point, you said it's educational, it's about music. Mine is, like, motivational speeches, air fryer recipes-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(laughs)
- HSHarry Stebbings
... um, pa- and, like, workout routines.
- 48:11 – 53:53
The Future of Identity Verification & Cross-Platform Security
- VRVictor Riparbelli
feel good in some way.
- HSHarry Stebbings
One of the problems is, like, identity misuse or, uh, fraud.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Um, how do you think about the future of identity verification-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
So-
- HSHarry Stebbings
... both for you and cross-platform?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I do think we need some degree of identity verification for some of the big spaces that we use because I just think when you're... I think we need to know somewhat where content comes from. Who created it and when was it created, how was it created? So I think we need identity verification to some extent, at least in some spaces, but I also think we need to take that all the way down to kind of, like, the content level. So if you imagine that your fingerprint... You know Shazam, the app on your phone?
- HSHarry Stebbings
Of course.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah. If you... Imagine you had, like, a Shazam but for every single piece of content on the internet. It could tell you, "Hey, this picture was originally uploaded, you know, like, five years ago. It was uploaded first time by, like, Harry," and maybe in the future, it'll say, like, "This was, like, partly made with Synthesia. You're watching a dubbed version, so this is kind of like AI for translation." Whatever, like, kind of signals we can give around content. If you had that and identity verification and community nodes, every time you scrolled past a piece of content, you would see if it's verified or not verified.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Uh-huh.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Like, today, everything, like, on, um-... well, it's changed a bit now, right? But used to be that only celebrities had, like, verified accounts. Why was that? Well, that's because a lot of people tried to make an account pretending to be some celebrity. And so as a consumer when you see that, like, trusted verified sign, that tells you that that's actually the celebrity posting that content, right? I think we should try and flip that around so that everyone and all content is kind of verified if we have the providence trail of it, we know kind of where it came from, maybe how it was created and some other kind of things around it and they'll give you, like, a green check mark on that content. And it should stick out like a sore thumb if something is not verified. So if there isn't a fingerprint for the content, if we don't know where it's from, that should be the thing that sticks out, not the kind of verified sign on a celebrity's page. Does that make sense?
- HSHarry Stebbings
Yeah. Does that-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
So that'd be-
- HSHarry Stebbings
... does that not inherently lower the value of your content though?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Why would it lower the value of the content?
- HSHarry Stebbings
Because your content is AI generated so it wouldn't have the green tick.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
No. Because I think that... I think we're right now, like, is it real or is it fake? We're all in a world where, like, most content that we consume today is in some, to some extent fake, right? Like most pictures on Instagram have been, like, touched up in some way, shape or form. I mean when it, when it leaves the sensor, they already do like color corrections and a whole bunch of other things. And so I think this line will just increasingly blur and I think it'll be less about how you made something and more about the content itself. You could make, you know, a video of like you talking about something and in a couple of years no one will be able to tell if it's actually real or not, but it won't really matter that much. What matters is that you made it, right, and that whatever you say in that video is something that you actually wanted to say more than how you made it. It's a bit like we don't care if content uses green screen today, we don't care that much if when you go to, to see a Hollywood film, right, I know that's fiction, but you don't care how it's made. You care if it's a good film or if it's a bad film.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Yeah.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
It could be a bad film. We should evaluate content, um, based on the content itself and in here, how it was produced certainly is a signal, but it's also a signal when was it produced, who produced it, um, are you watching the original version, are you watching an edited version of it? And it's really hard, right? It's not because it's like right around the corner, but you can imagine a world where you can begin to build a chain of like where was content originally created, what happened to it since, are you watching an edited version? Maybe you're watching a 25-second outtake from Harry's podcast show and you want to watch the full segment, click here, you can trace it back to actually watch the full episode. Like we can begin to build these kind of things. And the reason I mentioned Shazam is that Shazam exists because this was a commercial problem for essentially YouTube, right? Uh, record companies were telling them, "Hey, people are uploading videos on YouTube, but they're using copyrighted music. We're going to sue you out of existence if you don't fix this problem and pay us some money." And so what did they do? Well, okay, what... We have to detect if something is actually copyrighted, right? So when you upload a video to YouTube, as I'm sure you know, we'll scan it and if there's copyrighted music in it, it'll either, it'll take it down or most of the time it'll just put an ad in the middle of it and it'll pay something back to the license holders. Now what's actually happening here, right, is that you're uploading a piece of content and in, I mean, milliseconds, that piece of content is held up against a database of billions of songs and from that little short clip, right, like a four-second clip of a song, it actually identifies in milliseconds what song it is and if it's a copyrighted song they'll put something in there. So if you imagine that happen as well, you, you upload a video and I upload a video on my channel with, um, maybe with this interview, right? But I've cut out 10 minutes of it. It'll just say this is actually a piece of, of... This is a clip from Harry's original podcast which was released two weeks prior to Victor putting this on his YouTube channel and if you want to watch the full thing you can click to it here. So we begin to build this, like, chain of content that we can identify where things came from. That does require we have a centralized database, not... Decentralized ideally, right, where you just write every time you make content no matter if you're making a video on Synthesia or taking a, a picture with your camera, you register it in this, I kind of hate to say it but it could actually be a blockchain, um, where you register the first time a piece of content was created and when you then upload content to different social platforms, distribution systems, you check it against that just to see if, um, disinformation... One big problems about the, the, what people mostly do, right, is that they take a picture from a war five years ago and they say this happened yesterday in whatever country. And if you had a system like this, if I tried to do that, actually what it would do is it would say, well, this picture was uploaded five years ago so when you're looking at this picture, it'll have, you know, a little block of notice under kind of community notes, right, but automated version of community notes saying this picture was actually taken by a BBC journalist like seven years ago. A lot of this stuff is hard but we actually have a lot of the piece of the technology to get there. And I think when we, when we think of, like, constant identity verification, we think of, um, like moderation, content curation, I think we are beginning to see the birth of an entirely new content ecosystem that will look very different
- 53:53 – 56:45
How Will Content Creation Evolve Labor Markets?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
than what we have today.
- HSHarry Stebbings
I completely agree. Which leads to my next question which is that how will that new content creation ecosystem change the labor markets of content? And what I mean by that is which roles are legitimately threatened and which will be created?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think the, you know, like very technical roles like camera operation those types of things, they'll probably like fade away to some extent and I think a lot of emphasis will be put on creativity, storytelling, being relatable, like all those things that makes great content I think will be more important than ever. And it's a bit-
- HSHarry Stebbings
But if you're like a thumbnail designer today or a visual effects person today-
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
... like who is threatened and whose job is going to be created?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think for most... I actually think that most of those roles will have a natural transition to something different assuming that you're open-minded enough to do it. So visual effects for example, right? Um, as we talked about before with like making clips, AI can do a first pass at it which may be like better than random but it's way worse than like what you can sit down and do yourself, right? But you plus AI can probably be really, really good, right? Because if it's a two-hour episode it just figures out like all the right places that could be interesting and shows you that and you can kind of choose for yourself. If you're a visual effects artist probably what it means that you'll, just like a software engineer right, means that you'll probably be 100 times as efficient and instead of relying on 20 other people to create a digital clone of me by like modeling my face you just, you know, prompt it or control
- NANarrator
... (laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
... I think we'll have much more content creators than we have today. Just like if you look at pre-internet, pre-computers, how many people wrote things? Very few people, right? Like in the 1930s or '40s, most people didn't, like, create text, right? That was like specific people like secretaries and then typewriters later on. Now every, all of us produce content all the time, and I think that'll be, that'll be a big trend. I think most of the rate limiting on how quickly AI becomes a part of our daily life is actually not the technology, right? I, as I said earlier, I think we have very, very powerful LLMs where they can do a lot of, like, great things, like get better and better, but the rate limiter is people, right? Because people have to use these things, they have to trust these things, they have to pay them, buy them, integrate them, and that's... I mean, with technology that's always the case, right? It takes a long time.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Dude, the final one I have to talk about is location. You decided to do this in London, which I love as a Londoner, but it's a different choice. Why did you choose to do this in London?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
(laughs) The honest question is because I couldn't get to the US. (laughs)
- HSHarry Stebbings
(laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Uh, I, I mean, I didn't have like a, I didn't have like an amazing CV before I started Synthesia and I couldn't get... The US like basically you need to get a, a sponsorship if you want to go to the US, right? I couldn't really get that once I started a company, knew a few people here, so I just kind of like moved on a whim actually, and spent a
- 56:45 – 1:05:41
How Would Synthesia Be Different if Based in the US?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
year-
- HSHarry Stebbings
So how would Synthesia have been different, do you think, if you'd been in the US?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I, I still do think that the chance of success is higher if you're in the US or on the West Coast. I think there's a lot of pros, especially like the last six, seven years, got a lot better to build here. But I do still think that there is a lot of advantages to being in, in the US. But I think Europe is catching up pretty quickly.
- HSHarry Stebbings
What are the pros of being here?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think there is one big one, which is talent. It kind of goes both ways in some sense, but I think if you, if you look at the ecosystem in the Valley, one thing is kind of like the price of talent, which is just abnormally high, right? But there's also things like loyalty, for example, that I think are less spoken about. I think in the US you have a lot of people who are very driven and they basically view their career as like building a portfolio of, like, stock options in different companies, and hopefully one of them will kind of explode and they'll, they'll be very rich. Which is a rational way of thinking about it and it makes a lot of sense, right? But it also means that, in general, it's a more transactional relationship, I think people have with their employer. People are much easier to jump ship, right? They have one or two bad quarters, may lose a lot of good people because, "Hey, there's this other cool thing on the block over here that I'll go to and work at instead." In Europe, I think people, a- again, for good and for, for b- for better and for worse, right, I think people are... L- they think less like that, right? As, as, as you of course know, like stock options in Europe, people still view it as like a random lottery ticket, not really as part of their compensation, um, because no one in Europe knows anyone who got rich off working in startup, because we don't have that many successes here.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Are you seeing that attitude change?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I am seeing the attitude change a little bit. Um, but I do still think that it's going to take a long time to change because the way... No matter what I tell people who work at Synthesia, no matter how much they can kind of read the news and see all the stuff, what people care about is like do they know someone, do they have a cousin who made $2 million for being early in a startup. In the US, right, especially in the Valley, everybody knows someone who made $2 million working in a startup and they know several of them. And that's, that makes you feel like you can do it as well, right? Here it's very kind of abstract like, "Oh yeah, people, these companies made..." But before we really see that, and that, that just requires, like, a bigger ecosystem with more exits, more big companies and so on. I think it'll get there, but it'll, it'll take a long time. But what I think you get in Europe is you get more loyalty, in the sense that people care a lot about, like, working in a place that they like working, working on interesting problems, having great colleagues. Um, and I think that's a pro that, that's, like, less spoken about because-
- HSHarry Stebbings
Do you think people work as hard?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Honestly, I don't really have a strong sense that people work way harder in the Valley. Uh, I actually don't. Like, I, I know a couple of great friends who've moved over there, um, and opened offices and, uh, I have not heard from any of them that like, "Wow, people just worked so insanely hard here." There's probably like a percentage of people there that work, like, really, really hard, but I think we have those people here as well. I think that's, that mo- that's more like a personality trait that's dispersed all across the world. But I don't think if you take like an average software engineer in the Valley that they work, like, harder than we do in, in Europe.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Why do you think it's gotten better building here? I feel it's gotten much worse building here in the last six months. Do you share my opinion?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah, I mean, I think, I, I, I think, um, it's gonna be interesting to see what the new government is going to do, right? I think they have a lot of great cards on their hand. Like, we have a lot of great companies that are actually building here and I think what's important or what we're seeing in the London ecosystem is that we're actually building global leaders, not just like regional winners of like expense management or something like that. Like, we have ElevenLabs who are leading in voice, you have us, which is leading in, in enterprise AI video, we have Wave, which is definitely, like, uh, I don't know if they're leading but they're like one of the top three companies in the world doing self-drive... We have a lot of, like, great companies that actually become global leaders and I think it's really important that the incoming government doesn't screw this up because it's a massive opportunity for the UK.
- HSHarry Stebbings
How could they screw it up?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think it could be screwed up by, like, over-taxation, like all the, all the kind of usual things that I think everyone is talking about, right? I think what they can do to make it better, I think the UK has a brand problem, um...
- HSHarry Stebbings
What do you mean?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I think the... I think we disagree on this, but I actually think the UK is a pretty good place to build in general. I come from Denmark, right? That would have been a terrible place to build a company, that would have been impossible basically. I think with SEIS, EIS, entrepreneurs really, I think there's a lot of like good things that have happened in the ecosystem. You have all the talent, I think the venture ecosystem has gotten better, even though it's still very like PE-centric, I still think it h- it has gotten better. Um, but, um, there's also still a lot of ways to like screw it up, right? And I see a lot of people who are leaving, especially after the recent administration-
- HSHarry Stebbings
My phone is just literally, "Hey, why are you moving? What do you advise me? Where do I move to?"
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
From billion dollar founders.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- HSHarry Stebbings
Every single day.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Good.
- HSHarry Stebbings
So my question to you is, you're sitting down with Keir Starmer, you can advise him on what he can do to make the best developers want to build here, the best founders want to stay here. What would you advise him?
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Well, I would...... uh, I mean, I, the obvious things like, you know, corporate tax, entrepreneur's relief, like all those things make it, like, really attractive to build here because we are in stark contrast to Europe, which is, in many places, a terrible... It, it, that's just a terrible... I, I think it's different because you're from here. You're British, right?
- HSHarry Stebbings
Mm-hmm.
- VRVictor Riparbelli
I'm from Denmark and I think we always, like, with our, wherever we're from, we're like much more negative. I moved here and I've seen a lot, a lot of the positives around it. But I think don't screw up the fundamentals, right? Don't raise the taxes too much. Make sure we still have great relief schemes for people who create jobs, create economic productivity and those sort of things. On the brand problem, I think that, of course, starts with the fundamentals like crimes on the rise, living costs, all those things that I think you've also been very vocal about.
- HSHarry Stebbings
(laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Those are big, (laughs) but those are big problems, right?
- HSHarry Stebbings
Sorry. (laughs)
- VRVictor Riparbelli
But, but, but what I, what I actually would say though is that-
- HSHarry Stebbings
But also the consistent negativity from this Labor Government, it's like stand up and say London is open for business.
- 1:05:41 – 1:05:41
Quick-Fire Round
- VRVictor Riparbelli
Episode duration: 1:13:29
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