No Priors Ep. 64 | With Suno CEO and Co-Founder Mikey Shulman

(techno music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today, we're talking to Mikey Schulman, the co-founder and CEO of Suno, an AI music generation tool trying to democratize music making. Users can make a song complete with lyrics just by entering a text prompt. For example, I was playing with it this morning, and you guys will all get to hear, um, Kodo Boom Bop with lo-fi intricate beats.

Underneath sakura trees and their spring's embrace. Nature weaves tales in each gentle race. Ethereal petals fall, time slows its pace. Every fleeting cherry bloom, a hint of grace.

Okay. So, um, feeling really excited about quality here for a company that is just under two years old, but is making waves in the AI and music industries, um, since you came out of stealth mode late last year, Mikey?

That's right.

All right. Well, we're excited to talk to you about AI music models and how it's been going since launch. Uh, thanks so much for doing this. Welcome.

Thank you. I'm, I'm super excited to be here.

Okay, maybe just start us off with a little bit of background. Uh, you're a kid who loved music, playing in bands. How do you go from that to, um, you know, Harvard physics PhD building, you know, couple AI companies?

Uh, yeah, I guess a, a bit of a circuitous route. Um, uh, I've been playing music for a really long time, since I'm f- s- I started playing piano when I was four. I played in a lot of bands in, in high school and college growing up. Um, and the dirty secret is I'm not that good. Um, and so the, uh, smart move, I suppose, for me, was to, um, pursue the thing that I was relatively better at, which was physics. I went, I went, uh, to college and then to grad school and did a PhD in physics. Um, studied quantum computing. Uh, maybe for, for your next podcast, I can tell you about why, why you shouldn't go into quantum computing.

What did you think you were gonna do? Like, did you think you were gonna be, like, um, like, a theoretical physicist or, like, an academic?

Oh, goodness. Um, well, two things. Like, I've never had a master plan, so I don't think I-

Okay.

... thought what I was going to do or not going to do, but I am certainly not great at physics. Um, you know, I think I had a, a reasonably successful PhD, um, not because I'm good at physics. The, the quantum mechanics that I studied was worked out in, like, the '50s. Um, uh, there was a lot of very tricky, uh, low temperature microwave engineering that turns out to be really important for, for actually doing this stuff. I got lucky that I was, uh, relatively good at that compared to all the other physicists. So, um, you know, kind of something, kind of something on the boundary between two disciplines. Um, I enjoyed every second of that. I would do it all again, even knowing, um, what, you know, what I would be when I grew up or when I grew out of that. Um, still very close with my PhD advisor. Um, I still live walking distance from my old lab. Um, you know, it's, it's kind of a fun place to just walk around Cambridge, Massachusetts. But, um, yeah, quantum computing is cool. It's not what I wanted to do with my life. Um, I found a company called Kensho by accident. Not founded, found. Um, they were local, and I met them and, um, probably 10 people at the time, and I met all 10, and I really, really liked them. And I said, "Let's go do this." Um, and I was hired as a software engineer, and I think I got really, really lucky in terms of timing. About a month after I joined, the machine learning opportunities came along, and in 2014, guy with PhD in physics is what passes for a machine learning engineer. And so, I took full advantage of that opportunity, learned a ton, got to build a team, got to build some fun products. Um, uh, we were acquired by S&P Global in 2018, um, uh, and got to pursue a lot of fun stuff after that acquisition as well. So, I guess I found my way into AI somewhat by accident, um, but I really like it. Uh, it's, it's a lot of fun.