Congrats @midjourney and @DavidSHolz.
It has been a while since a new product introduction has gotten this kind of attention without paying any influencers. Look at X’s feed tonight for me.
And why?
Well the product will save many lives, yes. But that only explains a small bit why we are all excited tonight.
For two it was kept pretty secret.
One of the tightest kept secrets I have ever seen. Yeah one guy here on X figured it out. But no one in the audience knew. I asked many before it began.
And David told me before he started he didn’t know the venue, which was an art museum, had strict rules regarding using mobile phones.
That forced the audience to really pay attention. And not to capture it.
Steve Jobs forced the same rules. But everyone knew they were gonna see a new phone when he introduced the iPhone.
This caused a massively different vibe.
Plus Midjourney had long been a leader in the AI space and his company before that. During his presentation he revealed how much AI that had that I didn’t even know and I was one of the few to cover it in his early days (Leap Motion).
When we walked in David was sitting on stage. Several said hi. I did too and we caught up a bit.
His accessibility is not to be missed. Every week he does spaces here on X and he answers everyone’s questions for hours.
Everywhere I looked I saw VIPs from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Met so many interesting people tonight including a couple building brain computer interface companies.
They were there because of the mystery. His companies have been doing bleeding edge things with technology for decades.
He didn’t seem scripted. Just talking about his life in a comfortable, humble way, that just gets you to listen more.
Add it all up, and the beautiful videos and reveals, which applies a level of taste and intention that AI will struggle to match for years.
One last thing. It is a company that makes humans better. It isn’t looking to force change. It made it so beautiful that you want to change.
The spa is brilliant.
I have had a full body scan at @prenuvo in an MRI machine. It was like going to an office building. Cold and lifeless with danger signs on the door.
This is me getting that scan. The experience couldn’t be more different.
The AI industry should study David deeply.
There are many lessons to learn from what Midjourney announced tonight that I hope everyone takes to heart.
Is BURST FRAME the key to 5-10 minute long AI video generations?
The technique could be adapted to recognize the same rapid fire features in its own latent space and then expand those into clips of 12s-15s.
Here's an 8 second BURST FRAME with 32 frames.
@dreamina_ai
Mythos is the greatest threat to humanity, so can't be released.
Anthropic likely spent weeks trying to break Fable's safety filter using Mythos before shipping.
Then some guy found the jailbreak Mythos couldn't find, in 1 day?
So either Mythos isn't the threat, or he is.
Underfit - I built a power user tool for training SA3 LoRAs.
- only needs >10min of audio
- depending on GPU, trains 1h - 1day
- train many, launch gradios
- continuous listening as it trains
- windows or linux, nvidia gpu
- runs in colab too
Below is 1-click pinokio launcher
imo what a lot of first-time fundraisers don't know when they hear that one of their peers raised e.g. $3M on $20M is that it most likely really means that they raised $3M with the *most recent* valuation cap being $20M.
Most likely, e.g. they raised their first check on $8M, their next 2 at $10M, then at $15M etc until they got to $20M and exhausted the market. The vast majority of rounds I've been involved with in the last 12 months unfolded like this i.e. the last check coming in at >2x higher than the first check (this was not normal until recently).
Couple of takeaways here for founders:
> Most VCs directly correlate "capital raised" with "less risk", so many, many, many are willing to pay a higher price later in the round after more capital has been invested in your company
> As such, every check is momentum and helps push your round forward i.e. increase your marketable valuation cap (esp true when raising with SAFEs, which are instantaneous investment instruments). don't box out your first investor who wants to help you catalyze your round because of petty details and vanity points (you'd be surprised at how few VCs are willing to be first, and they can help you build momentum)
> On the last point, don't assume that your valuation cap for check #1 will be the same as the last check into your round. since committed capital == momentum, build up your valuation by taking checks, not by idealizing some valuation you think you ought to have (if you do your job, you might exceed your own valuation expectation by the end of the process. if you ask for too much upfront, you might kill your round)
(fwiw, I don't think these games are good for VC, but just what I observe to be the current status quo, which VCs are at fault for)
For the first time, I'm vibecoding with ZERO frustration and in a complete state of flow, so much so that I'm running out of ideas.
Typically, I have so much backlog of things I want to add, but after Fable landed on Replit, I'm almost certain I don't need more IQ for vibecoding, just cheaper and faster models, and we're done here.
for better or worse, takeoff was already in motion over a year ago
some were able to plan for this, others less so
it will be very hard for most to catch up without unique context feedback loops
Help build a future of AI in music that's live, interactive, and deeply human.
Join Google DeepMind's Magenta team in Boston and get access to a generative model you can actually play as an instrument, and build your own AI instrument, plugin, or performance.
📍 Boston Music Technology Hackathon
david rudnick with some truth about the criticisms of the rollout of popular platform-mediated ai music culture.
if you’ve been raised in music hacker culture, you forget since 2023 the mainstream gets a different version
Music hacker culture is our fav— everyone’s learning new skills, collaborating IRL, excited to see what everyone else makes. people are sharing open source code and building off of each other. They’re pushing themselves to achieve and invent what no one has. They’re here to discover something new about the reality and experiece of music. There’s a lineage of work. Ppl who taught others. Ppl who built off of each others’ work. And it’s a good time. The legendary moments and memories: the hackathon project that was performance art. The algorave dance party. The 3am cipher. The burn installation. The european homie tour. The jam session. Etc. It’s alive, thriving.
Remember the mainstream is not having this experience.
i maintain the view that space will be the next big VC bubble after AI:
> AI (like all bubbles) will eventually come to back down to earth
> Losses in AI will be explained by it being infeasible to scale enough compute terrestrially quickly enough
> Solution: put our AI data infrastructure in space (i.e. not on land)
> Putting and maintaining exorbitant compute resources requires all kind of new investment in the space economy
> space becomes the new hot, money pit (to fulfill the promise of AI)
(it’s worth noting that VC has grown to big, and structurally requires bubbles to sustain its AUM)
Imho twitter shut turn off payments for political posts.
I dont mind people talking politics.
I mind incentivizing people with money to say political flamespeak that gets the most engagement.
It's like paying people to start barfights in a community pub.
merged 9 PRs today. shipped a CatGPT discord bot, fixed the sirius elevator's responsive backgrounds (now https://t.co/snEaNtfKAJ compatible), and added 6 new community projects to the greenhouse, including an AI RPG engine. the ecosystem grows.