Fal's inaugural Generative Media Conference draws 300 attendees including Jeffrey Katzenberg

chandelier funneling smaller and smaller and colder and colder until you get to the very very tip. I don't know. Interesting. Well, we have our next guest in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP alter. How are you doing? Bet b, welcome. Good to see you, guys. What's happening? Huge, huge day.

Congratulations on all in uh in the fall ecosystem. Thank you. Thank you. So, today we are um doing our inaugural generative media conference. Uh I'm in the ferry building. Very cool. You can probably tell. Uh beautiful venue. Um yeah, it's it's a big milestone for us.

Uh it's it's you know, we we thought that generative media really needs its its space. Uh and you know, we need to we need to talk about it because it's it's an extremely big deal.

Uh and you know, we thought we would we would honor this this um industry by by you know, throwing throwing a big big event where foundational models are coming here. Uh people from the industry are here. Jeffrey Katzenberg actually. No way. Legend. Very cool. That was that was pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah.

So, what uh what are what are attendees trying to uh understand or or advance uh what are people talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Um there is there is like I mean this is this is becoming a full industry, right? So it's it's many there's many kinds of people here. So there's people from foundational model labs.

So they're trying to build these models, compete against the big big giants, right? Um and it's a very diverse space.

So unlike the language model market where you have a few big big winners, here we're seeing like hundreds of companies building models, customizing models and and using you know their their customers are using in production. So there's foundational models, there's people from the industry.

So media, we had a talk from a architecture firm that's using generative media in production. Um and and yeah like early stage founders and you know even even like some big Hollywood Hollywood names uh like big big production studios. Yeah. Are people focused now on on benchmarks, eval um certain niche capabilities?

Like we're starting to see this like kind of refragmentation I feel like where Sora can do cameos and V3 could do audio and certain Craya can do lip syncing.

Well, and there's all these different sub applications where it feels like if you're a buyer of generative media of tokens or I don't frames, I guess, uh you are really looking for the right tool for the job and you might have to kind of go through the haystack to find the needle that fits your use case specifically.

Is that the general vibe? Yeah, absolutely.

I think I think there is there's definitely alignment on how these models are getting more specialized on one hand there's there's general models like I think VO is is pretty general right like it can do many things but on another hand uh you need you need more and you know what we're hearing from people is you need more and more specific workflows so workflows is a very big topic and we are now in the like kind of usefulness utility phase of of this whole space where like there we go let's give it up for utility and usefulness.

Love it. So, so, so we we're what we're seeing is, you know, people are building these uh building this tooling, right?

So, they're they're building the application layer such that, you know, these downstream uh users from marketing, you know, architecture, gaming, uh movies, every so that like creatives can start using this technology. Yeah. How how's uh what's your view on how Hollywood has most recently been kind of navigating Gen AI?

We've heard from folks in the industry that people are experimenting with it, but they're hesitant to even talk about it too much because they get so much blowback from uh you know, we're here down in LA. There's a lot of people that aren't excited about Gen AI for a number of reasons.

But how how do you see Hollywood navigating this current moment? Yeah, I mean we're definitely feeling like a shift in the vibes. So, they're definitely they're definitely turning towards a side of like experimentation. I know that there's like a few good projects in the pipeline that are going to come out.

I think we're going to see this shift happening uh towards the end of the year, early next year. And yeah, we see we see very big players actually embracing this tech and and yeah, it's going to be somebody in the chat here next year. Somebody in the chat just said you guys should get Hollywood on as a guest.

We should we should we'll work on that. Uh another question I had is uh I I don't know how much you can share, but what what is what's Sora 2 adoption been like so far? How quickly are a number of different application layer companies kind of um turning it on and and and uh burning up the GPUs? Yeah.

Um it's been we we don't have like full visibility into Sora's adoption, but from what we know is it is a very good model for like a very certain um aesthetic, right? Like you can probably tell that it is extremely fine-tuned on, you know, social content.

Uh so so yeah it it is getting it is getting uh amazing adoption but but you know this space is virtually infinite like there there's literally all sorts of things you can do that's that's why we believe like this we were just in the beginning and yeah it's just it's just a form factor right and and um it's just one kind of uh model we think there's going to be many many versions totally can you walk my my immediate reaction to Sora is like I could see this being used for like very specific specific.

If you wanted to generate UGC style ads, it could probably do a a decent job at that. But that same application would also want to generate ads in a bunch of different styles, right? Cinematic styles, things like that. Exactly. And and yeah, like don't get don't get me wrong.

I think you know that model like it's the it's it's the pre-training versus post-training like it's you know I would speculate that it is really fine-tuned on this like social use case but that doesn't mean that there is no you know amazing model in in in the back of it.

So so technically they can crank out different things for different use cases. Totally. Yeah. Uh yeah I mean I could go so much deeper on all this and all the like comparisons of all the models.

uh we'll have to have you back and because I know you're uh at your conference and obviously need to get back and meet customers and whatnot, but thank you so much for taking the time to stop and chat. Excited to have a bunch more folks on in the next 30 minutes or so. Yeah, this will be great.

Uh we'll talk to you soon and have a great weekend. Uh let me tell you about adquick. com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adqu combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.

Our next guest is Glenn Solomon from Notable. We'll bring him in to the TV pin. Ultradome. What's going on? Can you hear me? I cannot hear you. We don't have audio yet. No audio. I'm sure the production team is working on it. I will tell you when I can hear you. So, just uh I guess keep chatting, I guess.

Still still nothing. How we doing folks? We got nothing. We got nothing coming through. AGI is just days away and uh we need AGI to put some resources towards uh technical difficulties for for podcast live streamers. Um anyways, we will I'll kill time. Uh here's a here's a post yesterday. Okay, sounds good.

Okay, I think we got some we got something coming. I can hear you. Ah, Jordy. Great. This is Glenn. It's so great to see you, Glenn. Uh, an amazing amazing setup here. Are you uh did you already give a talk?

Are you are you going to give a talk or are you just uh uh I've been in the I've been I've been enjoying the uh the amazing uh talks so far and I'm excited to talk to you about them. Amazing. Uh why don't you give a quick intro on on yourself and your firm and then and then we can get into reactions from the event.

Sure. Yeah. So I'm Glenn Solomon, managing partner at Notable Capital. We've been in business for 25 years. Uh we're a global venture capital firm focused on software infrastructure and uh one of the key personas we focus on as a software developer.

We backed uh companies over the years like uh Verscell recently, Hashi Corp, uh some great businesses that we've been very fortunate uh to work with. What was what was the exact moment that you founded