Video Is About to Stop Being One-Way (and That Changes Everything) | Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia

Every company is creating content that nobody reads, nobody watches, and nobody remembers, and the CEO of the AI platform that 90% of Fortune 100 companies use to fix that just explained what comes next. In this episode, Craig Smith sits down with Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, to discuss the $4 billion company that is now redefining what video communication means for the enterprise. The conversation opens with the founding insight that still drives the company: AI is going to drive the marginal cost of creating video to zero, which changes not just how content is produced but who can produce it and for whom. Victor describes how Synthesia found its first real market not in Hollywood - which rejected the technology as too low quality - but in corporate trainers and educators who were comparing it not to a film but to a 10-page PDF no one was reading. The most forward-looking section of the conversation covers Synthesia's next product: moving video from a one-way broadcast into a two-way interactive conversation, where an AI avatar can conduct a real-time sales demo, simulate a customer for sales training, draw graphs on screen to explain pricing, and score whether the person on the other side actually understood the content. Victor also makes a sharp prediction about where AI entertainment will actually emerge, not in cinemas or on Netflix, but from film students with laptops posting 17-minute short films on Instagram, the same way synthesizers didn't replace pianos but created entirely new genres of music. Key Topics Covered: ● How Synthesia found its first real market: corporate trainers creating content nobody was reading, who compared AI video not to Hollywood but to a PDF, and found it vastly superior ● The transition from one-way video broadcast to two-way interactive avatar conversations, and what that means for sales demos, corporate training, and education ● Why Hollywood will be the last industry to adopt AI video, and why the first AI-generated entertainment will come from broke film students on Instagram, not studios ● Why AI content won't replace real video, it will become its own genre, the same way synthesizers didn't replace guitars but created electronic music ● How the CEO uses Claude daily for strategic thinking, playing devil's advocate, and replacing the long memo with a voice note As AI video tools proliferate, this conversation offers one of the clearest frameworks for understanding where the technology is actually headed, not toward Hollywood, but toward transforming the way every company communicates internally and externally, with interactive AI avatars replacing the static website as the primary interface between a business and its customers. Subscribe to Eye on A. I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI. Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss EYE On A. I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI Connect with Victor Riparbelli LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/victorriparbelli

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think Hollywood is gonna be the last industry to adopt any of these things.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  The idea of doing full-length films, has that gone by the wayside as you've found your market niche? Or do you still imagine going that?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I think what you will see AI-generated entertainment is not in the cinemas, it's not on Netflix.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  And I kept asking, why don't you put an avatar on this that would engage students more? And this is for K through 12, because students are bored by text on a screen.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  They kept telling us the same thing. I know I'm creating all this content and no one is reading it. And even though they do read it, they don't remember anything of it. So I'm wasting my time. I need to create video and audio content. I think for kids, if you could go, you could personalize their education in two ways. Interest-based and with a celebrity or a person that they know, it'd be amazing, right?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Hey Victor, it's great to meet you. As I mentioned a moment ago, I was in early Synthesia. I have a trouble pronouncing the company name.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  And have used it for years. But I'd like you to start by introducing yourself to listeners. Give your background so far as it's relevant and the story of how you came to start the company.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. So yeah, so I'm Victor and I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Synthesia today. And I grew up in Copenhagen in Denmark. And I think my path, what founded company started in my, my early childhood years. I love reading, I love computers. In my late teenage years, figured out that I could make some money off my interest in computers. So began making websites for local businesses, e-commerce stores, kind of small projects like that where I could make, you know, pretty good money for like a 17-year-old. And I was pretty good at it. Started running their marketing and, you know, kind of did it for some years. But eventually kind of capped out in how intellectually interesting it could be to help my local tennis store sell more tennis rackets.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  So I went to the Danish startup ecosystem. I was there for three years. Found myself in like product and growth roles. I have a bachelor in, in computer science and, and, and business. But honestly, I was, I was never really there. I was more interested in building companies. After having worked in the Danish ecosystem for some years, I knew I wanted to build my own company. I also knew that I wasn't super interested in building accounting tools and bookkeeping tools and like usual, normal business process stuff. I've always loved science fiction. I love fringe ideas. I love the weird, wonderful corners of, of, of, of the internet and, and what's happening in the world. And I wanted to combine my interest in building products with that. So I moved to London. And I spent a year figuring out what company I wanted to build.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  Met a guy called Matthias Niester, who was an associate professor at Stanford at the time. And he'd done a research paper called Face to Face, which is started the first research paper demonstrating a neural network producing, you know, very photorealistic video. When we look back at it today, it's less impressive. The world has moved on quite a lot. But I saw this and I felt like there's something very magical about it. And as someone who loves creative things in my spare time, you know, I make music, dabbled in like Photoshop and a bit of video editing, 3D rendering. I saw this technology, I was like, this is gonna change everything we know about how we create video and media in general, and also how we consume it eventually. So I decided to start a company around it, which took a while to convince Matthias. I was 25 years old at the time.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  And I think he thought I was, you know, he wasn't very interested in the beginning. But with enough persistence, we kind of got there in the end and we ended up founding a company. Based on basically two big ideas. The first one being that AI is increasingly gonna be able to generate content, not just analyze patterns and data. And that's gonna change the equation around how we create content, right? It's gonna drive the marginal cost of creating content to zero. So the cost in dollars of creating content is gonna be very low. The cost in time is gonna be very low and the time and skill required to create a video is going to be very low. And I think that's the bits up until now. I think that's the market win right now where anyone can go on internet. They can prompt something in a few minutes and they can produce something that's very, very high quality.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  That changes like the, the, the nature of video production, right?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  When you reached out to him, first of all, how did you happen to read the paper? Because this is an experience I think anyone who follows archive, you know, the repository of pre-print papers, has experienced. You see these great ideas. You think, wow, you could build a company around that. A lot of times that research just fades into the woodwork. Did you, how did you happen to read the paper and how did you reach out to him?

• 4:47Speaker 00

  So when I moved to London in, in 2016, VR and AR was like the hype cycle at the time. The Oculus headset that just came out and I was very enthralled by all this tech. And I actually thought I was gonna start a VR company. So I spent a lot of time just like meeting researchers, meeting companies. I worked as kind of like a freelance consultant to some big companies and what they should do with VR and AR. And I kind of pretty quickly came to the conclusion that outside of the headset being very clunky as a, as a barrier for VR adoption. The other thing that was a big problem was that creating content for VR is very expensive, you know? Because basically what you're doing is you're building a computer game. And that comes at a very high cost, even compared to video production.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  So I kind of started to have this interest in how can we make content creation easier? That took me down a path of things like volumetric capture, which is you have like a lot of cameras in an array around you. You go in and you do a performance and you get a 3D asset out of that. You could port into VR. That was interesting. It was part of setting up a studio for this in London. And, and a whole bunch of other interesting ideas of like how content creation could be made easier. So I was following that space and Matthias Niester had a lot of papers in this space around VR. But he also had this paper coming out called Face to Face. And when I saw that, I think I had this eureka moment where, you know, instead of trying to do this with VR, where we're both trying to bring a new type of media to market, which is hard and a clunky headset.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  And we're trying to make it easier to create content. That's kind of a double whammy of very hard problems. If this works with video, that's interesting, right? Because video, the infrastructure of video is already in place. We're all spending time on YouTube. Like video is, you know, you could just take an AI video and replace it with a, with a normal video. And so the distribution problem wasn't really there. And I think that's where I kind of started to feel like this is actually like a very interesting business idea. Because if we can solve this for video, we, you know, we can, we can distribute it to the world pretty quickly.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  So you started the company then, and that's very funny. I was about the VR stuff. I was running the New York Times operations in China at the time. And when VR first came out. And there was a company, I'm sure they've long disappeared, that came through town and they, they were showing us their cameras. I got very excited and I ended up partnering with a Chinese media to do a big conference on VR. I thought, boy, that's the future. But as it turns out, it wasn't.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  So you, when did you start Synthesia? And tell me about the name. I always wanna say anesthesia.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  So we started the company in 2017, but there was a lead up to that of, you know, trying to build a prototype and, you know, get the thesis down. And, and all the, trying to raise money, which was very, very, very difficult because this was a very non-consensus bet at the time. We were basically telling people, in 10 years, you can make a Hollywood film with nothing else but your imagination. And at that point in time, like, that was certainly like a sci-fi dream more than it was something that was like tangible to investors. And every investor just wanted to invest in fintech at the time. But in 2017, end of, in October 2017, raised the first funding round, got a million dollars from Mark Cuban. Who was a big believer and has been since, since day one.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  That process. So you, how did you get to Mark Cuban? Just a cold outreach or?

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we had a long list of investors that we tried to speak to and we weren't, you know, very lucky. And we had a list over like business angels, you know, wealthy people that fit well in the kind of media and technology Venn diagram. And Mark was one of them. So we found his email online, actually by downloading a hack. Sony got hacked a few years prior and there was a lot of emails in that hack. We found his email. We sent him a cold email and he responded back within four minutes saying, I think this is really interesting. Came back with some more questions. And then we had a 14-hour email conversation with him. Mark doesn't do any video calls or normal calls. He only does email. And so 14 hours later, he'd asked a lot of great questions and he said, I'll do a million dollars if the diligence checks out.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  And I think one thing that was very interesting about this process was Mark was aware of the, the research paper. He had, he had implemented it himself at home. And he 100% believed in the vision around, you're gonna be able to make a Hollywood film from your laptop and 10. We don't have, we didn't have to discuss that.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  He was just interested in how are you gonna build a company around it? And what are you gonna do until the technology actually works? Which is a very different conversation than every other investor we spoke to. Where we had to start at like, hey, this thing's gonna be possible in ten years. And they just, if they didn't, you know, Mark shared the same belief around us. So he was evaluating us as a team. Whereas everyone else, we had to try and convince them about this like worldview. And that's very hard. So we got turned down by, I think, almost a hundred investors before Mark actually invested. And that became the, yeah, the premise of the company.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so you started with a million, I mean, after your angels. That was a seed investment. You just completed series E, I think, two hundred million. And you're now, your valuation's like four billion. Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, that's, I mean, all of the companies are growing extremely fast. So the, the initial product was, was around avatars for advertising or different use cases.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  I'm particularly interested, you know, I was involved early on sort of as a media advisor with a company, an AI education company. And I kept asking, why, why don't you put an avatar on this that, that would engage students more? Because, and this is for K through twelve, because students are bored by text on a screen. And you've moved into education or you've been in education, corporate training primarily. Is that right?

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. So what we discovered was that the first use case where this kind of technology was actually valuable and not just a cool demo or cool PR stunt was in, in explanatory or educational video. And especially the enterprise, which is what we've been focused mostly on up until now, right? Because we, we first started to try and create, you know, technology for Hollywood studios, video production agencies, the most obvious people to use this kind of technology. But what we bumped into was that the quality requirements was extremely high for these people. And the willingness to experiment was pretty low because they're already creating lots of great content. You know, they don't really need an AI solution. They're already making fantastic videos. But then we discovered there was this other group of people.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  And this group of people were people who were desperate to make video content. Because they're educating someone on something. And the only way they could do it was to send them long pages of text or maybe a slide deck. And they kept telling us the same thing. I know I'm creating all this content and no one is reading it. And even if they do read it, they don't remember anything of it. So I'm wasting my time. I need to create video and audio content. That's how everybody, especially the younger generation, wants to consume their content, right? But I don't have a way of doing it. And when we then came up with the first iteration of our technology and our product, what we discovered was that for these people, when they evaluated the quality of the AI video, they would hold it up against a ten-page PDF document. Whereas in Hollywood, right, they would hold it up against a real Hollywood film. They'd say, the quality is terrible.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  So that was when we figured out that here's a really interesting first use case. And then we've evolved the company since then to still focus on like educational explanatory video and the enterprise. We haven't gone, we, we work with a bunch of universities and schools and so on, who also use the product for educational purposes. And I think we're gonna evolve into doing more and more of that over the years. We're just now launching our second big product, which is evolving video from being a one, one-way broadcast, which is what a video is today, right? Like you make one video and then everybody watches the same thing. With this, it's a two-way conversation. So you can talk to the video, you can talk to the avatar in a training or educational context. And, you know, if you're training your sales team, for example,

• 13:28Speaker 00

  then today what people do is that they create a video. The sales team sits down and watches the video, and that's better than text. What you can do now is you can insert agents into the video. Because that could, for example, be, you watch the video, and then the agent pretends to be a customer for fifteen minutes. And you have to answer questions, overcome objections, build empathy, set up next steps, and basically practice like you would with a real customer. But you're doing it in a setting with an AI agent, right? And the reason this is very powerful is because we learn so much better by practicing and saying things out loud. And we can also, through technology, we can actually score your eyes. We can, we can actually give whoever created the video a signal that you've actually understood the content. You haven't just like passively sat through it.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Has anyone taken that further? And instead of just training, used it as a, a salesperson on a Zoom call?

• 14:21Speaker 00

  I think all that stuff's gonna happen in the next twelve months. So people are gonna be using these things, like do more things with them. I think the, I think the, um, the consideration that's important is in the different scenarios that you use it, is that the quality really matters a lot, right? So if you wanna put it in front of a customer, it has to be very, very high quality with the latency. It has to feel like talking to a real person. Whereas you can get away with a bit more for internal use cases, where it's like the stakes are a little bit different. But I absolutely think that in the future, the way you're gonna interact with a company is gonna be probably less like a website, which is basically a brochure. And more like you go in and you open up a kind of a Zoom call with an avatar. The avatar can, you know, pull up content, share their screen.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  And you basically go through it more like a demo with a real salesperson than, you know, go to a website and like click your, your own way around it.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Training that you're talking about, the avatar is, uh, the, the text or the content that they're speaking is all written. It's not live, right? Do you have, have you looked at doing, I mean, you were talking about having a salesperson trained. Can you do live interaction?

• 15:38Speaker 00

  So this is live, yeah. So this is a live avatar you're talking to.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Right. So how do you, what, what's the, the, is it just a large language model that you plug in on the back? That's producing the text that the avatar is speaking?

• 15:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, I mean, for most use cases, it's gonna be an LLM that's like driving the avatar. And it can be whatever you want it to be. If you want it to be an API that feeds it information without an LLM, you can also do that. Basically, what the system does, right, is it takes a string of text and then it like generates in real time the avatar kind of saying whatever you want it to say.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Right. And is that built into the product? Or, or does someone have to do some engineering on the backend to?

• 16:19Speaker 00

  So we, we're offering it for, for the first use case is what we call skills, which is training. It's an interim product that you could go in and we can create, you know, you can set up your own scoring system for how you evaluate the people who talk to it. You can change the prompt to be whatever it is you want it to be. And we're also gonna enable you to use a low-level API if you just want the avatar in real time or you don't want the rest of like our product around it. So both things are gonna be possible. And in the future, we're gonna launch more than just the skills, like the training use case. Maybe we'll launch the sales use case at one point. Recruiting is another one that's obvious. And we'll kind of go solution by solution.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the live, uh, uh, interaction, that's already available in the product?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  It, not yet. It's, uh, it's in beta right now with, um, with a bunch of customers, but it's launching within the next couple of months.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Okay. The other thing that I'm, I'm curious about, I have a son who's an actor, who's very much against all of this. And I've been telling him, hey, license your, your likeness. I mean, you guys do license actors' likenesses for avatars. Uh, I don't think you likeness, you license celebrity likenesses.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Uh, have you thought about doing that? It is?

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's an idea that comes up like pretty often. And I think there's a bunch of companies that have tried to do it. Uh, I think the best proxy is something like Cameo, if you remember that app. I think they, I think the company does not really exist anymore. But basically you could go in, right? And you could buy these like clips and a real celebrity would take up their phone and they would do some of that. I think there is probably a business to be built around that. It's not really our focus because we're much more like a corporate B two B platform. But I think something that probably can work. And I think where it's interesting is probably the scale you can get. So if you have an ecommerce store and you want every customer to receive a personalized video from a celebrity, for example, you could do that. And maybe you pay the celebrity one dollar for every video, right?

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Um, so I think it's gonna happen, but my sense with this stuff is always that until the technology is truly so good that you cannot tell the difference, it's not good enough. Because it's gonna be, it's not gonna feel the way that you, you want it to feel.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Right, right. Oh, is that right?

• 18:36Speaker 00

  But I think we're approaching that now.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Because, again, on the education, uh, the idea of having an avatar is the interface between the, the system and the student. If you had, uh, you know, I'm, I'm old, so I think Tom Cruise is, I don't even know who a young sixth grader would be excited by, but if you had the avatar of a celebrity that they uh, were attracted to, uh, that would be a wonderful way to deliver content. Uh, so you think that's coming, that's possible, does, is the uncanny valley

• 19:20Speaker 01

  uh, you know, between what you can produce now and what you think would be necessary? How wide is that or how deep is that currently? Because when I look at uh, uh, your avatars, uh, they, they, they seem very realistic to me.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I, I think it's, it's almost there now. Um, and I think some of this stuff probably will happen in the next six to 12 months. Because the technologies by this point is like so mature that they really are of very high quality, right? And I totally agree, I think for kids, if you could go, if you could personalize their education in two ways, interest-based and with a celebrity or a person that they know, be amazing, right? If you just really love soccer or music or like whatever ninja turtles, and you could have all your math problems be framed as ninja turtle problems and, and delivered by your favorite celebrity, that's amazing, right? And I think we are getting pretty close to that being a reality where if you're, want David Beckham to teach your

• 20:22Speaker 00

  kids about mathematics, you probably can do that very soon.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and how does uh, Synthasia, am I pronouncing it right? Well, first of all, where did you get the name? I know synthesis and Asia, I don't know where they're.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's, actually it's a code name for like, that started off and we just never changed it, but it comes from, uh, I love music and when I'm in my free time, I, I make music. Especially electronic music is, is my big passion. And electronic music is kind of interesting because it's a product of, you know, way back in the seventies and eighties, people were trying to create digital instruments like drum machines and synthesizers. And a synthesizer's job is basically to imitate a piano or guitar or something like that. That was, that's why they were created in the first place. Now, what happened back then was that the quality of the drum machines and the synthesizer was, was not very good. It didn't at all sound like a piano or guitar. So it wasn't used for what people thought it was going to be used for. But then there's a lot of people who, who took it and created new genres of music with it,

• 21:23Speaker 00

  where you want it to sound otherworldly and digital, right? And so if you look at music with sampling and synthesizers, you could basically make anything you want. And so that's kind of like where the, where the name comes from, because basically that's what we're doing, right? We're building synthesizers for, for video.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so uh, how do you work with companies? Uh, say a, a corporate training company, do, do you have an API that they, uh, they plug into their system or do they come in and collaborate uh, in a studio or how does that work?

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's a web app and I think the best way of thinking about the product is PowerPoint two point zero. It's used generally by people who use PowerPoint in enterprise, so it's not video experts that use it, it's like your average office worker. And they log into the platform and making a video is kind of like making a slide deck. Go in, you create an avatar of yourself, you choose from the, from the library, you type the scripts that you want, you put the visuals together, we have agents that can help you with all this stuff as well. And then you start to make videos. So it is really like a content creation tool, you know, like, like us making slide decks using Canva, Photoshop, those kind of products, uh, yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Does, on the interactive uh, uh, interactivity, uh, does, do you, do you have any way of reading uh, the, the attention of the, of the person on the other side?

• 22:51Speaker 00

  So not, not yet, but we are building that because what you want is that if you're doing one of these like simulation calls, for example, you want the avatar to be able to show that it's bored or that it's unengaged or that it's very excited or something like that, right? As a signal to like how you're doing yourself. Um, it's a hard R research problem, uh, of course, but I think it's something we should, you know, we will be able to do within the like foreseeable future.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, and who, there's uh, competition out there, obviously. Where do you see this industry growing and, and where do you put yourselves in uh, in the, the competitive uh, landscape?

• 23:30Speaker 00

  So I think in, in terms of uh, you know, kind of head-on competitors, our play, our space is very much for the enterprise, you know? We, we have customers of all sizes, you can sign up with your credit card, we have a premium version of the product. But we're very much building for businesses, you know, bigger businesses. They have specific requirements that a TikTok creator doesn't need, and that's the ones that we're focusing on. Some of the other companies are more targeting that like down-market TikTok creator style of, of content, so I think that's, that's one dynamic. Um, I think a lot of the very consumer level um, creation, I think it's going to end up happening inside of like Meta's apps, for example, inside of TikTok. I think they're going to launch all these AI creator tools inside the, the apps themselves.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  And then I think the big other push, right, is this like moving away from just video and to video that's interactive, two-way dynamic, as soon as you move into that space, the universe becomes a lot bigger, right? Like we'll probably focus more again on like business use cases, training use cases, HR use cases, which is more like kind of the world that, that Synthesia generally sits in. And there'll probably be other companies who'll go and make amazing consumer level experiences of like talking to celebrities or um, you know, almost like game show kind of, there'll be a lot of like new experiences that, that's brought to life. So I think we're about to see the industry, up until now, it's been

• 24:52Speaker 00

  everyone operating pretty close, it's what each, each one does. But I just think in the next couple of years, we'll see a much bigger diversity in what the companies are doing and what they choose to focus on.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's also a kind of a convergence uh, uh, between voice cloning and uh, image cloning.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Um, do you, do you do the voice cloning yourselves or do you have a third party?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we train voice models ourselves, um, we train video models ourselves and real-time video models ourselves. We also use third-party providers for language coverage and I'm, I'm not like, um, you know, extremely beholden to the fact that we need to do everything in-house. But what we've seen is that across all these modelies like voice, for example, our customers have some needs which are not available in the market, they really want to preserve their accent, for example. A lot of the existing solutions are not very good at that, so we built those ourselves, uh, yeah.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  This idea of you, you started out with this vision of, of producing a Hollywood movie and then, I mean, Sora's been retired, but, but there have been all these video generation platforms that have uh, come up. Uh, how different do you consider yourself from the video uh, generation platforms?

• 26:10Speaker 00

  I think there is going to be a foundation model layer and then there's going to be an application layer and then it's going to be some mix in between, right? And I think what we're very clearly seeing now is that the players that have the most compute and the most talent, like Google but VO3 can produce amazing models. Frankly, a world model like that is very hard for me to compete on, even though I, you know, raised a lot of money and we're a, a pretty big company. Um, I don't want to compete on like very general models that can do anything you want, which is basically what these companies are, right? The models we train is very specifically for avatars, people talking to the camera. They need to be able to produce clips of arbitrary length, not just eight minutes. We need to be able to have consistent identity, the avatars can't like change looks every time you make a new one with it and so on and so forth.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  So we partner with these big companies, they're a big part of our product, you know, we offer many models inside their platform, both just as a standalone, but also if you want to have your avatar driving a car, for example, we can tap into these models and build a workflow around it. So I don't see them as competition, I see them more as partners. Um, and my guess is that, that's, that's going to continue and they're going to be essentially like one of the primes that we use to, to build our product.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you're, the idea of doing full-length films, has that gone by the wayside as you've found your, your market niche or do you still imagine?

• 27:32Speaker 00

  No, I think someone else is going to do that better than we are, it's not the company we are, it's not the DNA. On a personal level, I love this stuff, but I don't think, I don't think we're the right ones to do that. Um, I also don't think it's going to be 90-minute feature films, uh, that's going to be made with AI. I think Hollywood is going to be the last industry to adopt any of these things. And I think what you will, what you will see AI-generated entertainment is not in the cinemas, it's not on Netflix. It's going to be on TikTok and Instagram, it's going to be a film student with no money but a laptop who's going to make something amazing, a short film that's 17 minutes long and posted on Instagram. It's going to be very different. Um, so in general, my confidence on someone saying, I'm going to go and make technology for Hollywood to make Hollywood films,

• 28:17Speaker 00

  I'm very skeptical that that's going to happen in the near future.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's interesting, uh, I spent a lot of my life in China and in China, uh, it's, it's starting here, they have these uh, mini-series of like a minute per episode. Uh, and they become very popular, people consume them on the subway.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, I, I actually watched a documentary about this phenomena, uh, like literally two days ago.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  And I, I think exactly that's the kind of stuff that's going to happen, right? It's, uh, because these are basically like factories where they create these like short clips that are 20-hour sets and then you have like one full-fledged content piece. And I think we're going to see the same thing with AIs, maybe it's this kind of content that will create, people will build, especially like in that part of the world, things like live streaming is incredibly popular. We'll probably see it being used there. Um, I think going back to the idea of synthesizing in mu, in music, right? Like, that creates a new genre of music more than anything. And we still today use pianos and guitars, right? And I also think we're still going to be recording things with cameras. AI content is just going to be its own genre that's going to look fundamentally different.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and you see AI content being mixed with uh, live content or I don't know what you call non-synthetic content these days.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  For sure, I think, I mean. A lot of this stuff ultimately is visual effects, right? The visual effects have been around for a very long time. The change is just that now it's, you know, it's very, very realistic and it's very, very easy to use. Whereas, you know, even just five years ago, if you wanted to create a scene with visual effects of like you floating in space, that would have been very expensive. It'd take a lot of people, you had to be in a green screen somewhere. It'd be like a very involved project and now you can go in and you can, in literally five minutes, we can create a clip of you floating in space. So I think we will see a lot of this stuff just being picked up as just a faster, easier way to produce visual effects. And I also think when, when I say Hollywood isn't gonna be the last ones to adopt this,

• 30:20Speaker 00

  I mean, in like fully adopting it, I'm sure that the way Hollywood's gonna be doing next couple of years is instead of using old school green screen technology, they'll begin to dabble in these things. And instead of, a lot of these like traditional workflows will probably slowly be replaced, but it will still predominantly be like real video with added visual effects as opposed to the one hundred percent AI-generated content, which we're, which we see a lot of on, on socials right now.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are you still following research? Is that feeding into the product at all? Because there is a lot of research going on with.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Agentic AI and, and, and.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Things like that.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  For sure, like, I mean, we, we, we spend a lot of money on training models. We have a big R and D team that does the video of voice and audio models. And, and I mean, I wish I had more time to like really closely following everything that's going on. But I think the explosion of things you have to keep up with, twenty twenty-six around AI, means that I have a great team that, you know, that, that, that is mostly concerned with like the specifics of the models.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanna ask where you guys are going next. But before I do that, I, I've been asking people with, with the agentic ecosystem developing. There's been a lot of talk of having

• 31:46Speaker 01

  more precisely trained CEO co-pilots so that the founder or the leader of a company can talk to an AI chatbot or L L M or something to, to, to think through how the company should develop, where the opportunities are, what the economics of various opportunities are. Do you do any of that?

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I spend a lot of time on like feeding the models that I use. And I just switched to Claude to understand like how I think. And I think I'm trying to figure out like what the best way of implementing that is. I think having something that people can ask for like my opinion is probably interesting. But I'm also wanna make sure that it responds in the right way, right? And so I think everyone, it feels like everyone's like trying to figure out like, what do you do with all these models that are very smart? They can understand how you think, how do you operationalize it in, in, in the best way? I don't think I have the answer yet, but I, I definitely like every strategic

• 32:58Speaker 00

  question I try and answer, I use L L M's, right? They're really good for like, you know, playing devil's advocate to your thinking. They're really good for, instead of me having to sit down for half an hour and write a long memo, I can just like voice note it and it'll understand, have a lot of context around how I think generally. So, um, yeah, I think it's gonna be, it's gonna play a big role in, in how we operate companies in the future.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, the, and you're using, you switched to Claude recently? Is that Claude cowork or?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Right now it's just a vanilla Claude, not the cowork. Um, but, uh, yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a fascinating idea that as a, as a founder, you know, you generally, hopefully you surround yourself with some very smart, like-minded people, but as a corporation gets larger, there's a problem of, of yes men sort of reinforcing your own biases and, and to have an extremely intelligent AI that you can bounce ideas off or brainstorm with. Or, uh, for example, are you guys looking into acquisitions? You have all this money now. Uh, how, how are you expecting to grow from here?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Is that going into research, product development, acquisitions or, or what?

• 34:22Speaker 00

  I mean, I think it's all of them, right? Like we, we, we evaluate all those things on a consistent basis. Like I think this year we're gonna grow headcount by seventy percent. Um, we're opening new offices where, yeah, I think there's a part of this which is just scaling our core business. And then there's like bringing new products to market. Those are two very different disciplines, right? And, um, and, and they require like different things. We haven't made any acquisitions yet. Um, but I mean, who knows what the future will bring.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then in, within the workforce, are you implementing uh, agentic workflows or, or uh, agentic systems to, to take up a lot of the?

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, everywhere, yeah, everywhere. Like, I mean, you're very gifted with a very AI-native workforce and people are finding all sorts of amazing ways to use these tools from the smallest like miniscule problems all the way to dealing with things like content moderation, for example, for us, right? Which is an important piece of the product. So I, I love seeing how people are just picking up these tools and automating, you know, business processes that, that just save them time so they can be more productive and other things.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, so where is Cintia going? I mean, what, what's next on the roadmap?

• 35:41Speaker 00

  So I, what we're trying right now is invent a new media format that, you know, is proprietary to us. And it's gonna be all about interacting with agents in a visual manner, right? There's gonna be an avatar that you talk to. It's gonna be graphics that's drawn on the, on the screen in real time. It's gonna be agents that can take action for you and that can help you do work better. And that's an audacious task, there's, you know, lots of things to do. We're doing it from the position of having a lot of amazing customers. We work with more than ninety percent of the Fortune one hundred. And we're working a bunch of deployments for them. And I'd love to see like, you know, in two or three years, we've really managed to transform how companies communicate

• 36:23Speaker 00

  and that the percentage of like one-way broadcast communication with two-way interactive communication, it'll have taken a big swing towards the two-way interactive communication, which I think for like a majority of use cases is a better way of communicating with, with people.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, described that in a little more detail. I mean, I was asking about, uh, you know, having live interactions with an L L M with an avatar as the interface. Uh, what, what's the architecture that you're looking at?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Is it as simple as that or is there, there? We were talking about the avatar being able to read uh, the, the emotions on the, the person it's interacting with. Is, is, you know, is that one of the directions? What are, what are the things you're working on?

• 37:14Speaker 00

  That, that certainly is an important part. There's a lot of things that goes into this, right? I think it's also why, for me, building a great company, in our case, it's about combining a lot of different technology and a lot of different models into great workflows ultimately, right? More than it's about the individual technology. That is a very important part of it. Real-time avatar is important. Being able to draw motion graphics on the screen in real time is very important. Um, we have an editor today where you put together your video or your experience and that's evolving into becoming, instead of you just creating a scripted video, it's evolving into how do you wanna structure this conversation with someone, right? So if it's the sales example you used yourself earlier, if I go on a website and I want a demo of the products, how do you want that demo to be conducted?

• 37:59Speaker 00

  You know, instead of just showing people a video of what the product looks like, it can be like, hey, what would you like to see? What, what are you interested in? Let's have that conversation. And then maybe sometimes the agent will fetch a video from over here that shows this in detail, a scripted video. Other times it may just like draw a graph on the screen to explain how the pricing works. All this is around like visual communication, right? And that's both the avatar and it's like all the stuff that happens on the canvas.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  And how far are you from, from having that, uh, general release for, for that, so general available?

• 38:33Speaker 00

  It's live with a bunch of like big customers today who are using it. Uh, and it's gonna hit GA probably within the next like couple of, of, of, of months. You'll be able to have like the real-time avatar specifically for the training product to begin with. Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I'm, I'm running out of questions. Is there something that, that I haven't talked about that's top of mind?

• 38:55Speaker 00

  I think we got pretty, pretty far and wide.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, are, are you talking to any education companies?

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Uh, we have, we, we do work with like universities and primary schools and that kind of, I think, yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  But no one building what I envision, uh, an AI?

• 39:12Speaker 00

  No, not yet, not yet, not yet. I think it's gonna happen soon. I'm actually going to ASU G S V, which is a conference in San Diego. Yeah, yeah, so I'm going there next week and, and hopefully meet a bunch of interesting guys.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Okay.