Decart founder on Mirage: real-time AI that applies 'cyberpunk' and other styles to live video streams for free

Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon, Chris. Cheers. Bye. Awesome. Next, one last one last guest. Uh, Decart. ai. That's right. The first ever world transformation model turning any video game or camera feed into a new digital world in real time. Very, very cool.

I've played around with a lot of this stuff, not this in particular. Very excited to talk to the founder. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Dean? Welcome. Sorry for the chaos. We are so happy to chat with you. Super nice to meet you both. Super nice to meet you both. Good to meet you.

Um, why don't you start with an introduction? I already have questions, but just uh give me a little background on yourself and the company. Okay. So, you know, the card the car is a very young company. We're less than two years old. Uh, we're a research lab and our goal is to build a consumer company. Okay. Okay.

And what we just launched today is the only real time video model ever. I can I can just show it to you. Yeah, please. Can we share screen somehow here? Yes, but you are live. So, whatever you share on that screen is baked into the internet forever. Amazing. We just have to make sure that we don't leak anything.

Just do the right tab, not the API keys. I was going to I wasn't sure. We've never met uh I mean, we met uh uh over DMs, but not uh face to face. So, I wasn't sure if this was your real face or or just a character that showed up that you're playing. This is This is definitely not me. You realize that, right? Yeah. Yeah.

In the real world, he's an anime, but but he's using a transformer model to appear like a human. That's right. He's in fact a Minecraft character. Uh I have so many questions about uh this model. Um I want to jump into how you built it.

Um we can also potentially have the team pull up the the demo video on your website, mirage. ddaycart. ai, and just kind of show folks what that looks like. Um whatever would be helpful. It is currently I'm trying to get the Zoom call to be able to share this. Okay.

But if the team could do it from your side as well, that could work too. Yeah. Why don't we just have the team pull up the core website and and we can just jump into questions. So um real time um what's the secret sauce? Is it a condensed distilled model? Are you using a special chip to inference this stuff? Okay.

So So real time let's just talk about let's talk about the use cases. Obvious use case would be like real time video calls. You're dropping into a Zoom call for example and instead of yourself uh there he is. There's Here we go. Do you guys see me? Yeah, we see him. Look looking. Okay. There we go. Okay. Okay.

Now we got it working. There we go. There we go. Uh what is the use case? So, uh who are you? Uh there. There you go. We're just cycling through. We're We're just cycling through everything. What do you guys like? What do you guys like? Uh, anime going not big into the the anime world, but uh what about like Legos?

Any anything there? Legos. Let's Let's put in Legos. We can just type Oh, you can just type it and it'll do it. Okay, let me make this full screen. You can just type in Lego and it'll just turn everything into Lego. Wow. Okay, look. This is This is our house. You see the real stream in the zoom? Yep.

You can see, you know, this is the the house office thing. See all the Lego characters walking around here. It's insane. Okay. And then and then you can decide that you're into Christmas and so everything becomes very Christmy and your house is decorated. Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow.

Uh I feel uh what what's the word for a moment like this? This is actually feels like enter the metaverse. Indeed. this I I was I was hoping you wouldn't say that cuz that becomes like you know became a cursed word. Yeah, it did. But but like it's it's it's a good thing. It should happen at one point, right?

Cuz cuz look no this is a this is a big transition from the moment where Zuck was you know said you know did his like hello from Horizon's world. Um those Wii graphics was those Wii graphics and this feels like being in a video game. What what what is that? Is that a wand?

This this is just this is uh you can see the straw on the regular stream, right? Yep. Yep. And inside the wizard's prompt, it becomes a wand. And you can if you if you flick it hard enough, sometimes it does magic spells. It throws things out. This is Guys, which one? Uh that's the team.

The team's been playing with a prompt here all day. Gactic War. Uh which Galactic War is the one you like? Oh, Cyber Punk. That's the lightsaber one. Okay. No, you had a you had one that you should here. Look. So, is this running locally on your computer? So, this No, this is running on the server.

It's running on the server and it's going so So, it's going from your webcam to the server back to us over. So, how quickly is is like Kai Sat going to be running this like half the time that he's streaming? This is This is insane. This is fun. It's pretty fun. The question is what you do with it, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. This is a This is a bold demo, too, because the variation in the different prompts and how how well it's working is absolutely insane. Totally. Totally. I have forgotten what you look like in the real world entirely. Here, here's a question. Would you guys run an entire show through this? We can we can try.

Maybe not. We might put Tyler on the intern cam. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good place to start. So, we have an intern cam over here. We can get Tyler running on this. Oh my gosh. The way that you're just cycling through these prompts is Tyler can be on Wizard Cam for a little bit for one stream. That's pretty crazy.

This is insane. Something Something cool. Let me show you this. Something cool that we found out is that it's really fun watching YouTube through this. Okay. Watching YouTube. Tell me like give me give me a YouTube show that you like. Something you like. I mean, just do that Mr. Beast video. Whatever video. Okay.

So, we can just look at this Mr. Beast video. We can look at this ad. Look at the ad and we can share the Mr. Beast video. I somehow have und you guys hear the audio now. Yeah, we do actually do the audio. I don't know if we should, but Okay. Okay. And then it's being transformed now. Yep. This is the original Mr.

Beast video. Wow. Yeah. Even trippier. You can here's like Mr. Mr. Beast videos worked really well with cosmic medieval golden. We iterated through so many prompts till we found the ones that worked really well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is Mr. Beast videos and the cosmic medieval golden world. Okay.

Cosmic medieval golden. I mean, they're already pretty stimulating. This is even more now. Wild. Very wild. So, yeah. Yeah. Where do you think this lives? Does this live with the consumer and they decide to put on the rosecolored glasses or do you like let's say you joines somebody's joining a standup tomorrow.

Can they just automatically put the entire team into whatever character they want? Let's see what standup comedies do you like? I was talking about an actual like engineering standup stand up. Oh, an engineering standup. Okay. Yeah, it can definitely do that. I'm more asking about you.

I'm asking you where do you think it winds up living? Like do you think Here's here's what I think is cool about this.

You know, I think it's the first time that we have a new a new kind of consumer interaction with with video AI because so far, you know, video AI was just okay, let's create a slot, put it on existing platforms, Facebook, uh Instagram, Tik Tok, whatever.

Here, for the first time, you can actually do something that's slightly different. Mhm.

We're showing it to a bunch of kids and what they ended up doing was for a few hours they just fought each other with sticks and they started doing like Tik Tok dances in front of this and you have a new kind of consumer and like experience here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like the original in the what was it in Steve Jobs did that demo of the Mac where it like warped the image uh and and and and there was like a it's like a crazy historical photo in the in the uh uh original uh like MacOSS uh launch. How how expensive is this for you guys to run?

If somebody just starts streaming this in real time, are they paying for it? Are you guys just eating it? It's it's we're we're doing it efficiently enough. like we had to write like all the low-level assembly code for GPUs to get this to be both real time and super cheap for us.

Uh it's at a point that we can actually provide this for free like it can actually be monetized without like subscriptions like there are ways uh it's it's it's cheap enough to actually be able to build a platform on top of this. Interesting.

Do you think uh yeah I mean do do you think uh one of the use cases will just be folks who create video content running their video through this to kind as like a previs for what they ultimately want to build. That could be very interesting. Well the other the other thing you can imagine it actually in YouTube.

So like a a creator like Miss Rachel for example popular kids creator could basically say like do you want the Lego version of this video? Do you want the question about where this lives?

Because I can go and put my phone in grayscale and I can and I can view everything on my phone without color and that is effectively a style transfer and that's something that I as the consumer decide or you know Mr.

Beast can turn up the saturation in or you know if you're watching a Hollywood movie they might turn up the teal and orange because that is a traditional Hollywood color grade. If you're watching the Matrix, they might color grade it green when they're in the Matrix.

They might color it blue when they're out of the Matrix, right? And so, um, it'll it will be interesting to see where this lands, whether it's on the consumer. I like watching Lego version of YouTube. I like watching Lego version of my of my conference calls or it lives on the on the on the producer of videos.

I want to show up as Lego and then that could be transformed as well. Very interesting. Can you quickly can you quickly do a gigachad filter? Oh, yeah. Do you have a gigachad filter? Let's check that out. Let's see what Giga Chad does.

I will say that the model is really the current version of the model is getting changing the entire style. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not the entire world. It's not Oh, turn me into Trump. Okay. You're pretty orange. Yeah. That's the way it goes.

But but it is doing something to the cheeks and the jaw, which is textbook gigachad. There we go. There we go. Very funny. There we go. Yeah. Maybe you need to prompt like So, is this already fully open access? Yeah. is open. We launched it literally 30 minutes before the podcast. We're waiting for you guys.

Congratulations. Thank you. It's uh Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We It's It's It's This is the first time it's used on a video call. Amazing. Insane. Insane. Well, thank you so much for joining. Uh we will get access to it. We'll set it up on the intern cam tomorrow. And wait, you already have it set up? Okay.

We're going to hop off with you and we are going to check it out with Tyler, get some more feedback. Thanks so much for hopping by. Congratulations to you and the whole team. Insane. And uh is there anyone else in the waiting room or are we good? We're good.

Let's uh can we go over to the over the intern cam and see if that works? I don't even know if that if he's there. Oh. Oh, technical difficulties of course. Anything else you want to cover in terms of news or Yeah, there's some new news. Oh, wow. That's Tyler there. Wait, really? Whoa. Yeah, you just did it.

Yeah, this is me like 30 seconds ago. Okay. Wow. Yeah. It looks better without the zoom compression. It It's a pretty high fidelity model. Wow. Very cool. Yeah. So, we were talking in the background, so you hear our talking. And then Tyler's in the corner, too. We're getting rec recursive.

Not that we should use that word now. It's the M dash of the modern era. Interesting. Pretty good. And these were pre-loaded prompts that you were just uh clicking through, Tyler. Yeah. Like selecting. You didn't generate any of your own prompts. I didn't, but I think you might be able to. Yeah. Yeah.

That seemed pretty cool. Ah, some of this seems fun. I I imagine that people will be having fun on this on the internet very very soon. See a lot of viral videos.

I always just wonder where this stuff like what the like the novelty is like you you have to it's like wow it's incredible technology but then people have to actually figure out like a real use case for it like like well so so here's a use case streamers having some type of like basically like if you tip a certain amount or hit a certain button it puts the streamer into that cool Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of streamers stream with uh with green screen backgrounds and they already drop out the background and put themselves in an environment that matches the game that they're playing or just clean up the messy background.

And so, yeah, you could imagine uh this being like basically in the VFX in the VFX pipeline for for streamers. Um I think if most people showed up to a to a Fortune 500 Zoom call uh with this uh it might not go over too well.

Well, they can always make everybody on their screen look a certain way and not make themselves look normal to to everyone else, right? So, there's a bunch of different ways. Yeah. If your boss is yelling at you and you put him in Lego mode, it's probably going to hit a little bit differently.

Might be a little more tolerant. Yeah. Turn the volume down. Lego mode. Lego mode. Oh, sorry. Lego boss block man. You expect me to be uh couple more headlines since we're here. Uh, Perplexity apparently just closed a new round at 18 billion. 18 billion. Wow.

So, Perplexity has around 2% of queries according to semi analysis right now. Uh, I use it regularly. Uh, we talked to Chris who's on the show. 7 million DAUs, 30 million daily queries, 4. 3 queries per user per day, a 2% share of users, and a 2% share of queries. Solid. That's the perplexity. Solid numbers.

pretty good. They got their new browser. They're going to be investing heavily. And then outside of that, Lovable just raised 200 million at a $1. 8 billion valuation led by Excel. Congratulations of heat on the timeline. Lots of big rounds getting done.

Everyone decided to launch today, I feel like, and then uh they got steamrololled a little bit, but that's why we're here. We didn't spend too much time on uh the concert fiasco and instead can move on and talk to you about the news. Also, I want we want to send our best wishes to Tyler. Uh, he says, "Hi, crew.

I had surgery to remove lots of infected fluid from my chest and a big lung abscess with infected tissue. Pneumonia, sepsis, antibiotics weren't working in the ICU now. Surgery went well. Surgeons are heroes. I'm so grateful recovering. Thank you for your prayers. All good. So, I hope he's doing well.

" Uh, send some prayers over to Tyler. Yes. Um, what else is in the timeline that would be worth to close on? Um, I have a good closing post. Uh, the the the the lads over at Reindustrialize are having a lot of fun.

If you can pull this up in the bangers tab, you can see uh a quite a number of former TBPN guests all in the back of a pickup truck. Fantastic. if you can pull this up. Team, we're working on reducing the time between talking about a post and getting it live on the screen. There we go. All the boys. We got Augustus.

Nice. Py, Steinman, everybody all in one place. Love to see it. So, anyways, uh, thank you for tuning in today. Super fun show and I can't wait for tomorrow, John. Can't wait for tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and