This Week in Startups - AI Demos: Dinnerfy, Hour One, AI short film “Borrowing Time”, Bland AI and more! | E1884

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by…Northwest Registered Agent. When starting your business, it's important to use a service that will actually help you. Northwest Registered Agent is that service. They'll form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and even provide you with mail scanning and a business address to keep your personal privacy intact. Visit - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist to get a 60% discount on your next LLC.Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at https://www.vanta.com/twistGusto is easy online payroll, benefits, and HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://www.gusto.com/twist*Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025*Today’s show:Sunny Madra joins Jason to demo video creation platform Hour One (9:28), meal planner Dinnerfly (26:35), a short film titled “Borrowed Time,” entirely created using AI tools (49:18), and more!*Timestamps:(0:00) Sunny Madra joins Jason(1:37) Exploring the dynamics of AI in the workplace, focusing on remote work management and efficiency debates.(9:28) Sunny demos Hour One sparked from Reid Hoffman’s deep fake post.(12:06) Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist(13:35) Sunny further demos his own use of Hour One.(17:22) Sunny demos Bland AI.(21:29) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(22:37) Jason and Sunny analyze "Bland AI," discussing various applications and evaluating the demo.(26:35) Sunny demos Dinnerfly.(31:52) Gusto - Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://www.gusto.com/twist(34:25) A conversation on Apple’s behaviour regarding its oxygen technology in smartwatches, including a fun John Malkovich reference from the film "Rounders.”(37:42) Sunny demos AI Comic Factory.(49:18) Sunny presents a short film entirely created using AI tools, titled “Borrowed Time.” Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*LINKS:Check out Hour One: https://app.hourone.ai/homeCheck out Bland: https://www.bland.ai/turboCheck out Dinnerfy: https://app.dinnerfy.com/Check out AI Comic Factory: https://huggingface.co/spaces/jbilcke-hf/ai-comic-factoryCheck out AI short film “Borrowing Time”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCIsHNQHcKQCheck out Jason and Sunny’s 2024 AI bets: http://www.thisweekinstartups/betsCheck out our AI demo clips: http://www.thisweekinstartups.com/AI*Thanks to our partners:(12:06) Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist(21:29) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(31:52) Gusto - Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://www.gusto.com/twist*Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025*Follow SunnyX:  ⁠https://twitter.com/sundeep⁠Check out: ⁠https://www.definitive.io/*Follow Jason:X: ⁠https://twitter.com/jason⁠Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/jason⁠LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland*Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis*Follow TWiST:Substack: https://twistartups.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin*Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

This is a company called Dinnerfly, where you sign up and then you swipe left or right on the kind of meals you like and the dietary restrictions and whatnot. And basically, it creates like the meal plan for you for this week. And then basically it says, I want lasagna soup today and caprazy salad on Wednesday and chicken pesto on Friday. I think this nailed it. You're a carb guy. You're an Italian carb guy. Here we go. Yeah.

It's your favorite, I think. Yeah. I mean, you know, we like Italian. It's great. And then you basically go here and you say, okay, add it to my shopping cart, and you basically adjust whatever you want. And it just basically orders it via Instacart. Oh, this is awesome. This weekend startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent will form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account and more.

Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist to get a 60% discount on your next LLC. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for. for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And Gusto is easy online payroll, benefits, and HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. It's Madra Mondays. Every Monday I like to have

my bestie Sandeep Madra on the program to do AI demos. And you know, we talk about AI and we talk about, you know, what we're talking about in our group chat and our Slack rooms. And you had an interesting observation just about efficiency and what's happening in this back and forth between employees and employers back to work, back to office, AI outsourcing. Maybe you could just summarize that because it's very controversial, but I think we should attack it head on here. It kind of stems from kind of the end of the ZERP era, the move towards efficiency, and then the rise of AI. And you really have to kind of look at those things as all, you know, together right now because before, you know, in ZERP, we had a lot of access, right? And now out of ZERP, companies are looking for efficiency.

And guess what pops up instead of humans is AI. And what we're starting to see companies do is use AI in and we're going to see some great demos. today, but we're starting to use AI in order to replace human operations. Customer support, SDRs, you know, sort of all the low-level operations are being replaced faster than people can imagine. And even in our group chat today, I think, you know, someone mentioned, we won't mention the company, but mentioned that they're using it in their tier one support. And so this is it. It's happening right now. And for those folks that don't pick up and become, you know, masters of this technology in terms of implementing and using it, there is a solid chance that

the technology replaces you. So we're going through a seismic change between employers and employees. COVID threw a huge wrench into the machinery. People went home and that was during ZERP. This is when people were competing for employees here in America at least. And, you know, globally to a lesser extent. Now you have all the major companies, Google, Facebook, etc., laying people off. Even to this day in 24, we saw a bunch of layoffs happen at Google. These firms have unlimited capital sitting in their bank accounts. They literally have tens of billions of dollars sitting there and they throw off tens of billions of dollars and profits a year. So they don't need to lay people off. They're choosing to do that to make earnings go up and because they think some people are dispensable. Now,

if you're an employee on the other side of this, what a swing this has been, Sandeep. They started having competition but three years ago for their services. And the average tenure here in Silicon Valley was probably 18 to 24 months at a company. Yeah. Because you were getting outbid by Uber, by Airbnb, by Google, by Microsoft, and then a well-funded startup. Now it's the opposite. People want to work from home.

They're being told, come back to the office. And if you don't want to come back to the office, that's fine. Your job's been eliminated. It's not a choice. It's a mandate. And it might be a mandate for, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It might be a mandate for two days a week, whatever it is. Then the unexpected happen, as you're saying, Sundee,

AI came into that picture. And then the bottom third, let's not even say jobs, but I think the bottom third of work we all do has been automated or semi-automated this year alone. What that means is the employers

have an even more leverage over employees. So this idea that an employee can complain about coming back to the office, it's just ending. And this is the pendulum that goes back and forth. But do you see, the important question is,

is there a path to this going back to the employees having power again, or is this a permanent shift? Well, everything oscillates. You know, the power balance will, you know, go back in some direction, but it's not going to go back for everyone. I think the real, you know, sort of the real tragedy in some thing, in some ways during the Zurp and COVID era was people started taking advantage of companies, right? People started taking advantage of working hours and, you know, some people working multiple jobs.

and I think what we're not going to, and then, you know, this expectation of not even working like the full time. And I think now there's going to be a big jump in productivity. And I do see there be in competition for folks that are AI native. You know, Paul Graham had a tweet last week and he said a number of his companies, you know, in the Y Combinator cohorts have told them a 22 year old with AI is as good as a 28 year old with experience. And so that, I think that's a really good lens to use as a benchmark of where the value will happen. So if you are a young engineer that's leveraging AI, or not even an engineer, but just someone within the team that's really using AI heavily, you'll become really valuable. And you will have all the perks and

benefits of being courted all over. But if you're not, you're going to become irrelevant. Yeah. And there's an incredibly well-known, infamous sub-rattit called Over-Employed. And I just pulled it up while we're talking and this got posted over just five hours ago. It was nice while it lasted. For a brief period of time, I had three jobs. Unfortunately, I had to drop one due to some conflicts. I woke up today to the last paycheck from them. And, you know, the comments are great. White through tears with a $100 bills. Yeah. Had a third, yeah, I mean, people are literally working multiple jobs. And this has been why a lot of folks are in management are getting upset about this, right? And so if you just go there, you'll see people abusing the system. And,

you know, in their minds, they felt like employees, employers were abusing them for many years. And now, I mean, it's amazing when you read some of these, somebody will be put in charge of some project and they're like, I haven't worked on this project in four months. I haven't worked on anything in three months. And they're just collecting paychecks. But managers, I think, are learning how to look at activity. And there's still some managers who I guess don't know how to manage remote workers. But it's going to be chaos. So I also think just one last thing. And let's jump into the demos is it's not about managing remote workers.

I think what happened was, and you know, we've seen this in, in different businesses that I'm involved in as investors, as an investor or just kind of help as a mentor. You know, the time before COVID, if you had like an appointment, you really wouldn't put your appointment in like the middle of the work day. You would try to maybe at the start of the day or at the end of the day. Yes. This is why dentists would have nighttime appointments, morning appointments, and weekend appointments. They don't even have those anymore now.

Exactly. And so now it's very common for someone to just be gone for half the day because there are appointments at 1130 or 1 p.m. Yes. Yeah. And so it's kind of crazy. I decided I was going to bring my venture firm back to in person two days a week here in Silicon Valley. We're coming back because of this founding university program, this pre-accelerator, started is going so well. I just said, let's start doing it twice a week in person. I only have

like two employees in the Bay Area now out of 20. And I have, you know, one or two in New York. So we're going to do like one day in New York and two days here in the valley. But I've got to get people back at the office because my competitors are starting to do other accelerators, pre-accelerators, et cetera. They're starting to do things in person. And then LPs and VCs, LPs who invest in our fund and VCs who look at our companies, they're all here. They all. all want us to be back in person. They want to meet the company's person because they want to decide who to invest in. And so I think this is the end game.

And I think AI, you're correct, does push us towards the end game. Doesn't mean people still won't use remote workers. Of course they will. They'll still use freelancers. Yeah. But I think the idea of just abusing the system, the overworks trend, that's ending. And yeah, I mean, it's going to suck for some people to commute. But I think there'll be a balance.

I think it'll be a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday then. I think that's kind of reasonable. Work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Monday, Friday, get to work from home. Kind of dope, actually, when you think about it. It's almost, it's not a four-day weekend, but it's kind of nice to not have to do that arduous commute, whether it's, you know, 20 minutes. If you're using all the AI tools, you can be very efficient to.

So the first one today is inspired by Reed Hoffman last week hosted this, which was a short video. I'm just going to play a few seconds of it, right? What defines humanity is not just our, unusual level of intelligence, but also how we capitalize on that intelligence by developing technologies that amplify and comp. Okay. So one of the bets that we have is we will be able to do a J-Cal episode of a segment. A segment, sorry, segment we said, and people will not be able to tell. Now, this is pretty good. I think you can tell it's generated, but, you know, so I wanted to test out

hour one. And so what I did was, uh, I went to their platform and I tried a couple things. So the first is they have, um, you know, these built in avatars. And I picked like a default one. And I just had it do, uh, write a like a script on its own and do a quick little introduction for this week in startup. So I'm just going to play this really quickly. Okay. Let's see. Good day to all the innovators out there. Welcome to This Week in Startups, where we bring light to the most groundbreaking stories from the startup world. Today, we're diving into the remarkable realm of artificial intelligence, from self-driving cars to predictive algorithms that can help doctors diagnose diseases better. Okay. So this is, you know, let's kind of get your reaction to this and then I'll kind of go a bit deeper. This looks like, because of the tone of the voice, being a little bit like a robot,

it just takes you right out of it. So it's not smooth enough in the case of the This Weekend Startups person or in the case of Reid Hoffman. Yeah, it feels like it's 60 or 70% of the way there in terms of tone because it doesn't have the ums, the aos, um, thinking for a second here

and I'm tilting my head, it's a little bit too perfect of a performance. And if you have too perfect of a performance and you're doing it in a monotone, it looks like you're reading from a script and then it feels like a robot, and I'm doing that with my voice right now. That's what kills engagement. You want to feel like you're talking to a human, and humans have that, Sonny, built into their,

you know, emotional cortex, their brain, their emotions. It's hardwired in us to interpret emotions. Like, you're looking at me right now with a thoughtfulness and processing what I'm saying. I'm talking to you with a little bit of passion here about the human species. Those are very non-obvious cues that are going to have to be. learned by AI. It feels like it's halfway there. Maybe it's 60% of the way there in both of these cases. Starting a business used to be a pain. You needed a lawyer. There were hidden fees. It was a mess. Now, with Northwest registered agent, it only takes 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Northwest provides

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two components, the visual, the auditory of the tone, right? Well, that's what makes a good actor amazing too, right? Like the script is, you know, thing. And that's, you know, there's a difference between sort of like the best Hollywood actor and, you know, someone else, right? Is their ability to, I guess, really exemplify what the original author was trying to put in the script. Anyway, I give these both like a C plus B minus. They would be fine. Yeah, they would be fine. Yeah.

I want to just share one more. And then before we grade it, just. Okay, before we grade it. Okay, here we go. Here we go. And so then what I did was I also created an avatar of myself. And so it's a pretty easy process. You just basically use your iPhone.

They use the scanning features of it. And then you don't even have to record a video or anything like that. visually it looks like you. And so I'm just going to play this. And I didn't use my voice. I had to change my voice. And so you'll just hear it. So here we go.

And I did like a summary of yesterday's football games. This week in startups is a news and information update featuring stories about the world of tech startups, venture capital, and more. Each episode is packed with insights from leading thought leaders, investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Join us for entertaining conversations that dive deep into the... Yeah. So this is, again, you can obviously add your voice in as well. And so they really have a really interesting platform. I have to say it's difficult to use. Like I had to, you know, spend like almost an hour just to kind of get all these things to work. But end to end you can get your video. And I think it would have taken a lot of work to get the read one to the quality it is. So now, that's great because I think based on that. I give it a C plus right now. The potential is obviously there. It does not cross the uncanny valley. And I think, you know, in a year, we could be looking at it. And it might fool some people if they weren't paying attention.

But I still don't think it would fool me as a performer and as somebody who, you know, builds media products. I don't think it's going to fool me. Just like I see ads for like crypto on TikTok sometimes where they obviously take Elon or somebody else, Mark Cuban, and then they have them say they're doing some Bitcoin giveaway or some token sale. You know, those fake ads, those deep fakes. And they don't cross the valley for me either. So it feels like we're, I'm a C plus. You can see all of our bets at this week in startups.com slash bets.

So I can't remember what our bets were for this. But we said, I think by June 1st, it would be a segment. So I think you're under and I took me over. Yeah. I'm feeling good. Like if I were to say, so I'm kind of in the same as you, I think it was like, they've done a really good job. The tech is incredible.

The usability is still hard and making it more real. I think that, you know, what, if I track the progress of what's happening, with the image generators. The image generators are real, right? We did the influencer a couple weeks ago. I just think we have to get the video gen and the voice gen. And that's just like the same thing that happened with the image ones of the amount of fine tuning to make them perfect when in. So I really feel as though we're going to see that. Like we're only in the third week to care. You feel good about your bet. I feel good. I don't, I'm not looking for an early buyout. No early buyout. Okay. No early buyout. Yeah. Okay. This week in startups.com slash bets.

I give it C plus. What did you give it? Is it great? I give it as C plus C plus as well. Yeah, I'm in the same area. The usability was very, very hard, but like the potential is incredible. And to just get people an idea, I remember when we were using PCs, then the internet, and then smartphones, we went through the same transition. Text easy, images a little harder, audio a little harder, and video very hard. So every time a new medium comes out like this, smartphones, when you had your Blackberry, like it took a really crummy picture.

Somebody sent your picture. It was blurry. You could barely take it. Now you take pictures on your iPhone 15 years into this. And they look better than a digital SLR. So here we are, you know. And I think this will happen in 15 months or 1.5 years or 15 quarters as opposed, maybe 15 quarters, four years.

This whole thing will occur as opposed to 15 years. Yeah. Still way under on you, but let's keep going. You have money on the line. Okay. The next one. I think you're really going to love this, Jekal, because it's kind of been a part in and around your business

in a different way, shape, and forms last couple of years. So this is called bland.aai. Okay. And what they do is basically they give you AI phone agents and the ability to create an AI phone agent and you can use it for cold calling and surveys, inbound sales, customer support. All right.

And so what I'm going to pull up here is I just did a little demo. I'm going to have it call my phone. I've created an agent, which is doing some inbound sales. And so you're going to see the platform live. And basically, I've picked inbound sales. And so I've told the agent that it's a part of the sales team for Searchlight LLC. And it does, you know, all this kind of stuff.

So you gave it a prompt. It's a robust prompt. Yeah. Yeah, a pretty robust prompt and like a sample of a dialogue. Okay. So I'm going to have it send me the call. And let's kick this off. It's making a phone call.

And it's transcribing the call. We have a little heads up to, display here that will show us the call in real time. Wow, this is potentially amazing. Hi, Max. Thanks for taking my call. This is confirmed. That's what I'm speaking with. Yeah, this is. Great. Thanks for confirming. Jump right into it. Did you provide a brief overview of the challenges you're facing with your current pricing and monetization approach? Yeah, you know, I'm finding my customers are really looking to get discounts on my pricing

and I don't really know what I should do. No problem. Discount can definitely be a struggle. In your experience, what do you think is driving customers for lower prices? But there's certain planning products or usage levels that retain to trigger those requests more than others. I just think it's the end of the ZERP era and everybody wants cheaper prices. What can you offer me to help me here? That's a great question.

Our class is focused specifically on helping companies like yours and the maximize revenue by ensuring the right customers on the right price. we analyze the usage patterns and purchasing behaviors across. Okay, I'm going to end that there. Yeah, wow. I mean, apologies, now that is no indication of their software. Just when you put a, when you do a speaker phone call, it can be, it could sound a little not Chris, but that was on a headset, it would be fine.

Yeah, I tried to keep it close there. But look, that is less than five minutes of set up. And you can give it, let me, let me put the share back up. you can have it call multiple people. I guess I use their default prompt. And so you can have a do batch calling. Really, and you're getting the full transcript of the conversation that your customer is having with your virtual sales associate. Really impressive.

Like I can find a lot of use cases for this. And, you know, especially for enterprises. This is amazing. Wow. I am blown away. I'll tell you what's really compelling about this is I think I would prefer this to talking to a human sometimes. I'll give you one example. It's really annoying to get phone calls from a human confirming your reservation at a restaurant, right? Nobody wants that. It's annoying. Yes. Now, it is really nice. I get, there's a restaurant I love up in Tahoe called Great Gold. Really great pizza pasta joint. Amazing. And, you know, it's a hot ticket in town and it's hard to get a reservation. And, you know, it's a hot ticket in town. And it's hard to get a reservation. And so they will text you an hour before, hey, your reservations at an hour. They just want to know if they can release the table or not for planning purposes.

And they tell you in the afternoon, hey, your reservation is confirmed, you know, one to confirm, nine to cancel. Super convenient. And I love that text ring. Now, if I were to get a phone call or I asked for a reservation and said, hey, what time would you like? And we just talked about this on speakerphone or it asked me a couple of questions. I would be okay with that, you know? and if I was calling about a product or service and I had questions or an airline, this would be wonderful.

And so I could see like, you know, that classic phone call to an airline for customer support, classic Uber. I'm calling Uber because my car didn't show up or my Uber each showed up cold, whatever it is. Like, yeah, I could see this working wonderful. And it feels like it's so close to crossing the Uncanny Valley. All right. Listen, selling software is hard. It's hard right now, right?

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asking it different things, it'll really guide you. And I, I tested it a few different times. Now, if you ask it for like a score to last these games, it tells you it can't. But it can, it can really help you. And the experience is incredible. Like I really was blown away. They made it such that it's like drop in code, super easy to use. And you. You can think about this for a number of use cases, like collecting feedback from your customer's example. You talked about and even just like SDR type things. It feels like a great survey monkey type application here or type forum, et cetera.

Like you could have it ask a series of questions to somebody, hey, thanks for coming to our event, wondering if you could, you know, answer five questions about the event and you can talk in your normal voice. And the fact that it makes the transcript is super dope. I love the fact that it does a transcript. You think about this for political calls, right? hey, I'm calling on behalf of, you know, President Biden, want to make sure you understand that your voting has happening on this day.

Do you have any questions about our platform, whatever, and then they ask questions. But the idea of having that transcript, watching it in real time is super cool. Yeah. And so I give this an A. I think it's an A minus, maybe A or A minus. I think this is a true. I give it an A too. I'm an A.

This is like just really well done. Work super well. Yeah. I think they charge like a, you know, really like 12 cents. a minute for a call, which is, you know, think about that from a cost perspective. Yeah, it's basically free. I mean, if you, well, let's say, 10 cents a minute, 10 minute call, a dollar. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if you compare that to an agent, it would be, you know, five, ten times that. So you're saving somewhere between 80 and 90 percent on each of those calls. Imagine I'm calling, I'm a UPS driver. We're at your gate. We have your package. It needs to be signed for because you order an iPad or your iPad is on the way. it's 10 minutes out, would you be okay with us leaving it there since you're not there and signing it?

Like think about that use case. You ever have that happen when you order your iPhone? And they're like, we don't want to leave your iPhone. And it's like, please, just leave it there. Like they could actually have that conversation with you and then have a record of you saying, hey, I said, okay, the driver hears you say, okay, boom, it goes in real time. So yeah, there's real time agents. I can also see them being super annoying. There's going to have to be some, there's already regulation about robocalls. So I think this would all fall under the regulations about robocalls. I find that, This is great. I think it's great. Yeah, I think you, like you said, you opt into it with the service you're using. You know, many times on airlines, like there's some basic stuff you want to do, which they

don't allow you to do through the online system, but you call in. I'd be okay with an agent where it's like, I'm just trying to get an upgrade or something like that, and it's nothing, you know, magical. So I do think there's a lot of use cases for that. I guess the way support works these days is you have these different tiers, as you were alluding to before. Some of them, you know, at FAQ, a frequently asked questions. will resolve it for you. Sometimes the app or text messaging resolves it for you. Sometimes talking to a live

agent, I guess is when you start to get really intense. But building up the information so that you can get to a resolution is really what you're trying to go for here. I love it for product feedback as well. And then do people really want to be doing these phone calls like humans in a boiler room somewhere? They don't. So this is like human jobs that will go away in India, in Manila, in other places. and then those people can move up the stack and work on higher level things. That's my true belief. Yeah.

All right. So we both gave this one an A. That's good. I mean, if we don't get A's often here, but this intelligent agent with the LLM behind it is absolutely fantastic. All right. Okay. So the next one is super interesting.

You know, we saw some of these very early on in the life cycle of kind of GPT-powered use cases. I think we even shared some where, you know, you were asking for meal plans and everything else. And so this is a company called Dinnerfly. And what they do is you go through like a little bit of like a Tinder like process where you sign up and then you swipe left or right on the kind of meals you like

and the dietary restrictions and whatnot. And you go through that process and basically it creates like the meal plan for you for this week. You know, so I did that. I just going to pick some random things. And then basically it says, okay, and I think I messed it up. But basically because I want lasagna soup today and caprazy salad on Wednesday and chicken pesto on Friday. I think this nailed it.

You're a carb guy. You're an Italian carb guy. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, we like Italian. It's great. And then you basically go here and you say, okay, add it to my shopping cart.

And you basically adjust whatever you want. And it just basically orders it via Instacart. And then for tonight, you click on it. And basically, this is the lasagna soup recipe. And obviously, the ingredients would have been ordered via Instacart. And it gives you the preparation and you're off to the races. So, you know, all the, they basically went end to end, you know, coming up with the meals to the ingredients, to the process, to the ordering. You give it your preferences.

Hey, your keto, your low carb, et cetera. It gives you a meal plan for the week. It then gives you all the shopping you need and the recipe. And this doesn't need to be. three or four different services previously. You might look at a meal plan from like some health nut website or you might go to the New York Times

cooking app and pick some recipes. Then you got to print each one out. Then you're going through shopping and you're like, okay, this one needs onions, this one needs garlic. Oh, wait a second. How much garlic do I need for each recipe? You know, this is fantastic. And if it makes a shopping list and then goes and orders it from Instacart with an agent,

that's the next piece. Yeah. And that's it. And it just basically puts it in here. You click corridor on Instacart and it drops it into your Instacart and you're off to the races. Now, what would be really good is if I took a picture of my pantry in this app and it knew I already had olive oil and it would know that olive oil bottle is half full. Yeah. And say, we know you have olive oil.

Now you're getting into the realm of having a household assistant, like a family assistant. like you might call it a family assistant I think who might do the shopping for you, do the meal planning for you, and then also see if you have to refresh the pantry. So I love this refreshing of the pantry idea. Absolutely great. I give this a B plus

only because I'm trying to give it some room to improve, but this is fantastic. If it took pictures, take pictures of your food, give you the calorie count, whatever. I mean, it just got so, I guess I would give it a day if it had that,

take a picture of your pantry and did pantry management. Pantry management. There used to be this concept that you would have like a smart egg holder and it would tell you when you have a certain number of eggs and when you get down to four eggs, it would reorder your eggs automatically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Remember that kind of silly stuff that existed? I think actually we're going to get to that point where it knows from a barcode or from a camera in your refrigerator that your milk is at a certain weight because the shelf has a weight on it. When the milk comes on and off the shelf, it knows the delta in that, oh, you know, when you took it out, it had 16 ounces.

When you put it back, it had eight ounces because the shelf had a different weight. And it knew your calendar and that you were going to be away next week, so don't order more milk. Or it knows you're in town, have more milk. Like, this is actually going to happen, folks. This kind of weird stuff is going to happen. You know, so people were trying to do this with like refrigerators and smart refrigerators. Yeah. The real enabler will be AI because the regular software to do image detection to figure all that out was just way too complex.

Like you'd need a team of people that are, you know, and would work on it. They'd only get to like 55% accuracy. Now you can get to 90 plus percent accuracy with just an off-the-shelf API from Pick Your Favorite LLM provider. I did this. I took a picture of all of our spices. I like the spice draw. And the spice draw was organized nice and neat with the spices facing out. It's like a slide-out draw.

So I slid it out. I took a picture, said, what's in here to chat GPT for my app? And it worked. Oh, wow. So that does work, by the way. I just said, what's in this draw?

And I did it in my cabinets up at the ski house. I took a picture of each cabinet, said, what's in here? And obviously, like, there's things that are deep, so you can't get them on camera. But it did a reasonable job of, like, knowing what's in there. So that's really interesting where this could all go.

Now you start thinking about, well, we're going to marry what's happening in my refrigerator. and with my meal plan, with my health, with my doctor, with my weight, with my sleeping patterns.

And it's like, hey, by the way, you're gaining weight, too much pasta, Sonny. Got to take it. No more,

no more lasagna soup for Sunny. Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was keto. It was a keto recipe. Yeah, I don't know.

I don't buy it. I heard lasagna. I don't buy lasagna's keto under any circumstance. But anyway, it's fine. Maybe they had like a protein-based one. All right.

Listen, I know. I'm a founder just like you, and there are things that I love doing. I love working with my team to build great products and services that delight people. You know what I hate? I hate doing my chores. What's on the top of my chore list? Payroll, HR.

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because you're a Twist listener. You get three months free. One, two, three, three months free, 25% of the next year is going to be free for you. All you had to do is go to gusto.com slash twist. I use them, I love them. You must go to Gusto. Again, that's gusto.com slash twist. That's my point is it might at some point have your smart scale data know your blood work no your weight and say hey listen you gain seven pounds this month you this is what you've been eating here's some changes you could make we should get you a salad in here and a caprici salad is not a salad a a crazy salad is a pound of cheese with a couple tomatoes on it and some salamic vinegar it's delicious but yeah let's not call it a salad let's call it what it is a ball of cheese with some accoutchamong

well done i give this a b plus well done to the team over there yeah great job uh i think i'm similar with you i think they did a really good job maybe i had some features that you can add in what your existing um ingredients are so it simplifies the ordering process and and go from there i'm waiting for this life assistant health assistant to just you know have my watch day and be like great job skiing this weekend. Yep. You know, you probably could use

it a little extra cardio. We noticed your heart rate, blah, blah, blah. You know, here's some ideas for you. Would you like us to put a workout in your Peloton for you? It can't be Apple right now

because they're screwing over the company that did the heart rate stuff. Or the oxygen, yeah, that was lame. I mean, when I heard that report of how Apple behave there, I think Apple should just apologize, settle this.

No, no. And really, on Tim Cook, for those of you don't know, the Apple Ultra Watch, the Apple met with a team that makes some of that I believe it's the oxygen reporting of your blood or whatever. And they basically, according to this claim, and I think the judgment, because there was a judgment against them,

they basically stole this content, stole employees, and just acted abhorrently. I mean, to anybody at Apple, you should be ashamed of yourselves. And the corporate development team, I mean, do you want nobody to trust you, Apple? And if you have all the money in the world, you have all the distribution in the world, why would you screw startups? A shame, shame on you, Tim Coe. for this horrible, obnoxious, predatory behavior. And this is something where I think, you know,

I'm not big on government intervention, but when I see something as abhorrent as this and the legal stuff happening, this is the kind of stuff that builds up to more government regulation. And so I think it's very stupid by Tim Cook to allow the business development team that does M&A to behave like this.

Tim Cook should get, send this message to Tim Cook, somebody, you have their email, to this deep link. Kim Cook, this is not what we expect from Apple in the venture capital startup community. You should make amends. You should explain why you went wrong here. And you should make specific changes to your business corporate development group, fire whoever did this, whoever acted this sharp elbowed, and start over, and start over

knowing you have unlimited resources to treat the startup community well. It's absolutely abhorrent the way you behaved. Or like, you know, if it's true. The classic line from Rounders paid that man. Paid that demand. Pay him. Pay that man his money. I mean, what does it cost you?

I mean, you're sitting on a hundred. They're the largest hedge fund in the world. They have like, is it up to 200 billion? I mean, they had so much cash. They didn't know what to do with it. Yes. And to just nickel and dime companies where you could just pay the man, paid the man, his money.

Paid the man his money. His money. Yeah. His money. It's arounders, everybody. Yes. John Malcolmich. But I'm serious.

Somebody who's got Tim Cook's secret email or text. deep link to this. I mean, I'm looking at it as an investor in startups, and now just Tim Cook and the corporate development group over there,

if somebody in my group in my portfolio said, hey, Apple's interested about, oh wow, this amazing, what a great outcome for everybody involved. And I have had companies

sell to Apple. We had a podcast company that sold to them. And, you know, I just feel like I would tell them, don't trust Apple. Do not talk to their corporate development people.

You know, if they sign up for your app, you know, track what they're doing in the app and make sure you do some monitoring of them coming to your website. You know, like basically look at Apple as the enemy. And why would Apple want to take that stance with startups? I mean, especially with small

ones where it's like a small tuck-in. Apple doesn't do big acquisitions. The biggest one was Beats probably. Like, if you're doing tuck-ins anyway, just, come on. I think the founder of that company, like, spent his life savings and everything fighting them. So, goodos to him to standing up to Apple.

We're going to keep going here. We've got a couple more. This one is really neat. And it just kind of like, continues to build on open source models and fine tunes. And so this is basically just on hugging face. And it's a model by this user called AI Comic Factory. Wow.

What it really allows you to do is, I just gave it a short prompt, which is a young boy is a superhero after school fighting bullies. And the style was Nerodoo. Right. And so that's it. Like, and think about,

you know, content. And I want to, you know, give these folks, credit here. They've created this wonderful model and and you know, this is

it. And basically, you know, he's got this AI comic factory and this is how we're seeing innovation happen right now. Amazing. What was it trained on, I guess is the question. And then are those people being compensated? Would be my question on this in terms of

fairness. If like I did this, you know, and it gave me, you know, Frank Miller whatever, Wolverine, dark night. You know, it's kind of unfair if I'm capitalizing on his work and it trained on his data. So I think that would be my first question is what was this trained on? And if it is trained on certain artists, those artists should get a royalty. So this is a perfect example of where you can take the New York Times Open AI lawsuit, which we've discussed before. And now you can

see crystal clear that this is, you know, in all likelihood. And again, I don't know the training data, maybe they have permission, I doubt it, because it's an open source project. What they say here? They're saying, like, basically, free and open source, demonstrate capabilities, you can generate your own comic panels, and it shows code is public and can be deployed. So we just got to go through it. Doesn't say anything on the training data. So that's where the, that's where the rubber meets the road. If this was trained on, you know, images of comic books that are, you know, somebody else's IP, you can really see how this infringes, right? And when you make it in a very nice,

narrow case like this, that's where you really can see the unfairness of this. If somebody spent their life 30 years making a certain style of comic book and a certain, and put all their creativity into it, and then you can just take it and have the AI make something in a couple of minutes, and then you then go make a business out of it or work out of it. Would it kill you to give a couple shekels? What if you were just inspired by it? If you were inspired by the art style of Andy Warhol and you started making art as an individual, that would be okay. If you confuse the audience, or you're monetizing it, or you're infringing upon that person's ability to take on the same economic opportunity with their work, that's where you would be mistaken.

That's where you would be breaking the Fair Use Doctrine. And so let me just take that apart for a second. If it was non-commercial and I made something that's an homage to Andy Warhol and I put it right there, or I made, like, actually, that Blade Runner poster here is a piece of art that some fan made, right? And they sold it, right? And I bought it. There's actually an argument here that the owner of Blade Runner or that Gladiator poster here has a claim to that. Now, if it was a one-off piece of art, non-commercial, maybe not, but if Blade Runner was your IP or Star Wars, and then you make a bunch of Star Wars posters and start selling it, you obviously know that's illegal, right? these are more bespoke artists doing interpretations of Blade Runner.

So it's just the dove from Blade Runner. It's just the mask from there. But they too are, these ones are skirting a copyright law because that should be the original IP owner's opportunity. Then if the training data makes this product and then I could make that product as the owner of these comic book characters and styles, I should have that opportunity, not somebody else. So that's what people don't understand is when there is a new medium that, you know,

emerges, the, it doesn't make it a free for all for copyright. So when DVDs came out or VHS tapes, it wasn't like, just because it's a new medium, I can take Star Wars and start selling Star Wars VHS tapes, which I did when I was 15 years old. I was making bootleg copies of Empire Strikes back and selling them for 20 bucks a copy. I shouldn't have been doing that. That was a terrible thing for me to do. I broke the law, whatever. And so here, yeah, look at that Spider-Man. So in this case, same, same prompt, but now this is very clearly Spider-Man and This is, you know, kind of in your... You can't do this on Dolly.

If you try to do this same prompt on Dolly, it wouldn't work. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, this is, I know for some people this is triggering that we're holding back AI. Nobody's saying hold back AI. We're just saying if you use somebody else's training data, get their permission, and or compensate them if they want to be compensated. It's very simple. Yeah.

It's not, it's not, I don't know why people are so triggered by this concept of the original artist getting, you know, some fair, shape, you know? I think there's just been a larger trend in society of not wanting to pay people for stuff. And like, think about all the areas as links to Netflix subscriptions. Like, you know, when you're sharing that, you're hurting Netflix as a company, right? If you're sharing it. And obviously, they've done a bunch of stuff to make that harder now, right?

You know, all the way to, you know, folks, you're ripping off content in this way. and do you think it's because the ease isn't there? Do you think it's like in from a societal standpoint, people are just value the creative less than less? I think people don't like to pay for content. And they expect they've been trained to think content is free. That's one piece of it. And then the second piece is I do think there are people who believe that we're holding back a technology that's going to happen anyway.

And I remember this argument with Napster and you remember it too. you know everybody wanted to just play have a what we would call a uh digital jukebox everybody wanted the concept of a digital jukebox that's what you used to call it in the 90s yeah and the record labels wouldn't allow you to have a digital jukebox everybody wanted to have a video um jutebox that's what they used to call it and in fact there were physical products that did this you could buy from sony we'll pull it up on the screen right now a device that held 50 or a CDs in it. And it was a carousel.

You remember the carousel? And you would put every single one of your CDs in there and you could stack them. So you could have 50, 50, 50, 50. I had one that you could put five in. That was the carousel. You dropped five in two. You put all five Chaudet albums in there. You put it on random.

Man, you could be a great, very romantic weekend. Leave it at that. Now, you also had the one where you could stack the Sony 50 and you'd front load them and then you would turn the dial to name each one. They were little cartridges. Little cartridges. little cartridge, put all 50 in. And then I was at a friend of mine had rented this beautiful house, like a resort with, you know, 10 bedrooms in it for a birthday party or something.

In Italy, it turned out it was George Lucas's place. It was a movie theater. And we go to the movie there. We're going to watch a movie. This is a long time ago over 10 years ago. And they had a virtual jukebox. And you started going through it. And I was like, oh, it's all the Spielberg movies, all the George Lucas movies, everything.

And I guess this is before these things really existed. And they had all this DRM and CRM on it to make a digital cloud. This is before Netflix was streaming. This actually was 15 years ago. And you had to have a media server for this and it costed $50,000. Everybody wanted that. When Napster got shut down and all these things happened, people complained about it. When a legal option is available, then there's no restricting the technology.

It's just fairness. So that's what I think Chat GPT4 and OpenAI is trying to do right now And the New York Times is like Just doesn't like the price or the terms But they'll come to price and terms And the price and terms should be fair And it should be ongoing

If that's what the IP people want If the IP people want just one time use That's fine. If they want to be able to cancel it, that's fine And if Marvel came out with this And you could make Marvel characters And Marvel reading cards With your Disney Plus subscription which I guarantee you will be able to do next year,

that solves the whole problem, doesn't? So why doesn't Marvel have a subscription where you can make your own comic books? They'll have that next year. So then all this has to get shut down if Marvel has that. Just like Napster had to get shut down if Sony Records, Columbia Records,

iTunes, Spotify exist. And once you shut down, once you have an illegal option that's priced fairly, piracy goes away. This is piracy. What we just saw there was piracy. Now, people don't want to call a piracy

because it's new and it's different, but it's piracy. The same thing happened with NAFSA. People wouldn't call it piracy, but it was piracy. People were stealing stuff. This is just stealing. When you can generate Spider-Man and then sell it, make t-shirts out of it,

you're just stealing. So the real opportunity is for these businesses to come together and embrace this and make it available and monetize it and basically allow, their fans, their users, their customers to really embrace it. And I think that's what we should really maybe promote is that, look, the technology is there and it's good.

And sort of like WAPAD, if you're Marvell and you have all this great IP, you should allow your fans to create comic books and you should have maybe a site or a web or mobile app or whatever it is where people can share them. And if the story really takes off, you can basically share in the revenue with your customer. And you can also maybe even turn it into a movie in some ways, right? Like what happened with WAPAD? Any of those are possibilities. And the rights owner at Marvel, Marvel, would get to choose.

And they might say, you can use this app for 20 bucks a month, non-commercial. And then, but if you want to print it, we will vet it and then we'll decide. and maybe you made the character do something that's not something we want, right? You had Spider-Man, you know, kill somebody and strangle them. You're like, you know what? Spider-Man doesn't kill people. He puts his web around them, and that's the extent of his violence.

He doesn't actually kill people. So fun. So, yeah, I think this comic book thing is a B-plus out of the gate. It's extraordinary. I would give it an A-plus if you could, you know, do stuff with it, and it was licensed properly. it would be an A plus for me, but I mean, that's incredible what it can do. And it's just kind of remind you of programming where when you narrow the data set,

the output gets better, correct? Yes. And that's what's happening here. People are taking these models and fine-tuning them and the output is getting better and better and better, you know, as good as what humans would be able to create. And so now I think the intersection of the business opportunity is where there's big opportunity. What did you give it as a grade? You know, like I said, if we're not looking at the,

the licensing stuff, I give it an A. I think it's a, you know, and I, you know, I would like to see content come out of that. And I'd like to see people create, you know, the stories are getting weaker, in my opinion, with Disney. I know it's one of the J-trades, but I think there's the folks out there can create much more interesting storylines and give them the platform to do it. We give one more, which is not a demo, but we're going to, this is also an update on one of our bets, which is a short film and quality. And the interesting thing here is this one is generated

using all the tools that we've demoed here. So I'm going to just pull this up real quick. And so this one used Magnific, Runway, PICA, and they've created this like sort of three-minute short. And so I'm going to play maybe 30 to 45 seconds of it. All right? There we go. Okay. Look closely Whoa Intense All of this is generated by AI The sounds

Voiceover Images I wasn't there for my father Mr. Anderson You have been found guilty Of the charge of first degree Murder I didn't protect my mother

And now I heard my own legacy I believe my clown is innocent And I will do everything My God give the right to prove The severity of this crime is not lost on this court. Time weaves as tapestry and silence. A fabric so intricate

as pad as repeat. Wow. It feels like a student film, artistic film. It feels like an art film. Yep. But the CGI in it and the fact that there's like a burning building in it or some of this like high-end CGI means it couldn't be like a student film. But it feels amateurish in like the dialogue

and the editing. It feels like it's just like slapping together a bunch of different weird scenes that don't make sense to me. So it's either very avant-garde or whatever, but on a production basis, feels like a well-produced trailer of a real movie. So while I don't understand what's going on, it kind of feels like a challenging kind of sci-fi, indie sci-fi, intellectual sci-fi Sundance film, right? If I was being honest, which isn't everybody's cup of tea, but that's pretty impressive. Yeah, I think there's like a couple things happening here. One,

the technology is still early, and it limits these clips to being relatively short. And so what the person is doing is having to kind of stitch together these very short clips that are maybe at maximum 15 seconds long. What I'm really bullish on our bet, which is again before June 1st, is I think all the elements are there and the right storyteller with those set of technologies and the voice was 11 labs as well. So the whole thing is AI. And the right storyteller can help me win my bet with J-Cal.

So please someone. I feel like this week in Starbursts.com slash bets, you can see the different bets we've done. Hopefully they'll be up by the time you get there. I think like for the short film, this is, you took the under July 1st. I took the over. I feel like I'm still 60-40,

but I feel like, you know, if somebody put their nose to the grindstone here, you could win the bet. I think this is a pick-um. I think this is going to be like down to the wire. Somebody could make a Pixar film or in this case a sci-fi film that was indistinguishable. If somebody does do this and they're doing it non-commercially, I do suggest using like maybe the IP of some characters for people who allow that. So I know Star Wars allows it.

You can look at it up yourself. I think Star Trek does not allow it. So if you did a Star Wars one and it's non-commercial, like I see them all the time. And as long as they put it's non-commercial, they don't put ads on it. they don't monetize it on YouTube. I think it's okay. So to do it with Mandalorian as an example, I don't know if Pixar allows it or not,

because I had said, do the rat tattooy one. And somebody had sent me one directly where they just slapped together random rat tattooy stuff. And it was terrible, but it was a non-technical person who did it for two hours.

So I think you're going to win this one. I got to be honest, I feel like the audience could tip over and for the short film, the Pixar short, I think is the way we said it, like a Pixar short, that is indistinguishable to the average user,

I think you're going to win it. I'll be honest, because you've got four months here. February, March, April, May, June. You got five months? Yeah, five months. I mean, I think you're going to win this one hands down. I feel bad about this bet.

All right, everybody, there's been another amazing episode. This week in startups.com slash AI. This week in startups.com slash bets. This week in startups.com, you can see our AI powered website by podcast AI, where it's got every transcript of all 1,800-plus episodes, and you can look at the transcript.

You can play it, and you're going to be soon able to then, Sunny with podcast AI is going to allow you to highlight a portion of this and create a clip automatically. You know, I was just having this conversation with someone, and they were seeing exactly this. It's like, why can't you clip and then retweet or whatever portions of a podcast and then have it link back to it?

Because there's a lot of sometimes great snippets, which are very short. There should be an industry HTML-like standard for this. There isn't. Or if somebody can let us know, I'm Jason at caliccanus.com for live. You can tweet at me at Jason and at Sundeep on Twitter X and let us know about it. What you can do is I have no problem with people doing short non-commercial clips from the podcast as long as they link back to the original.

So there's somebody who's doing like founder advice and they do it every day. And like every fifth or six day, they take Paul Graham or Travis or whoever's been on the pod and then they write a little essay about it. They put the clip and they link back to the original. I'm fine with that. As long as you're providing some value back to me and it's like a little bit of fair use. Now, if you put an ad on it, you said brought to you by one of our sponsors, I would be like, no. But not commercially, you take a clip from here, you say something about it.

I feel like it's fair use. It's fair. It feels fair to me. And that's always the thing to keep in mind with fair use. Does it feel fair? It doesn't feel fair. Then you probably got a problem, right? So like wholesale taking a show, no one-o. But yeah, okay, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. You could follow at Sundeepe on Twitter. Definitive.io is your website. if you're interested in doing a giant project for your big company. In the AII space, Sandeep has unlimited resources and knowledge.

Okay, we'll see you all next time. Bye. Bye.