Building The World's Best Image Diffusion Model

Suhail Doshi, a YC alumni who previously founded Mixpanel and Mighty, has created a state-of-the-art (SOTA) AI image diffusion model with Playground. The app allows you to talk to it like a graphic designer and helps you create imagery and text for a wide variety of use cases. In this episode of Lightcone, Suhail sits down with the hosts to talk about his experience building Playground with his team, and what it takes to make a SOTA model. Try Playground: https://playground.com/design Read Playground V3 Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10695 Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Intro 1:07 What is Playground? 1:47 What Garry was able to make using Playground 7:04 The focus on text accuracy 10:44 Building a marketplace for Playground 16:00 Prompts are like HTML for graphics 22:25 Creating new design professions 26:13 Using tailwinds of what is happening in language 30:06 Problems with aesthetics evals 32:42 The commercial applications 33:54 When the users you get are not the users you want 40:30 Reflections on going through YC twice 48:30 Running a research lab/startup hybrid vs a pure startup 53:35 What it takes to make a state-of-the-art model 55:09 Outro