Gol(ai)th's Growing

At this point, AI headlines have become almost trite, but last week’s news was an exception. Many of the announcements directly affect both creators and consumers, as the technology’s becoming deeply integrated into existing incumbent tools and user workflows / activities. Operative word: existing.

YouTube: At their “Made on YouTube” event, the company unveiled a slate of new AI-powered tools to help creators with ideation and production processes. They announced: Dream Screen (a background design tool for Shorts), Insights (coming later this year to assist with idea generation), Create (a mobile editing app), and others (including an integration that allows for seamless video dubbing and a slew of new efforts in music and AI).

Spotify: The company announced their pilot for Voice Translation, a feature that translates podcasts into different languages in the podcaster’s voice. It claims to deliver a listening experience, in the original speaker’s style, that sounds more natural than traditional dubbing. The tool was developed internally but leverages OpenAI’s voice generation technology. It launched with Spanish, French, and German for select episodes of three top podcasts and plans to expand.

OpenAI: Complete with a mind-bending demo, OpenAI released a new capability within ChatGPT that 1) allows consumers to have back-and-forth conversations with the assistant, and 2) offers users the option of providing images alongside questions or prompts. Think: a ‘how to’ feature on steroids. The company may also be working on a hardware device (presumably a consumer one…) with famed iPhone designer, Jony Ive.

WHOOP: The wearables company is getting into the personal training business with the launch of WHOOP Coach. The feature leverages GPT-4 to provide individualized advice, insights, workouts, nutrition and fitness planning for WHOOP users based on their tracked personal performance data.

Amazon: Ok this one doesn't *quite* fit, but it’s still noteworthy. Amazon announced that it will invest up to $4B into Anthropic, a major OpenAI competitor. The deal rhymes with Microsoft’s investment into (and deep alignment with) OpenAI in that the investment comes with an agreement for Anthropic to use AWS to build, train and deploy its models. To the layman, Amazon is the world’s ecommerce giant, but its cloud infrastructure business (AWS) is in tight competition with Google (Cloud) and Microsoft (Azure) and is betting on a massive hosting opportunity by way of Anthropic.

Aside from these announcements having enormous implications for creators and consumers, we were struck by the fact that these were changes implemented by incumbents to their native applications / workflows. TL;DR: the big keep getting bigger.

Last February, we opined on the “creator economy is dead” narrative; we suggested that founders and funders were excited by and eager to capitalize on the opportunity before deeply understanding where value would ultimately accrue. Turns out, alongside poorly conceived value propositions by upstarts in the space, the existing players did a darn good job of delivering against the need states within the value chain. The emergent “creator economy” represented a fundamental shift in labor, giving individuals the opportunity to meaningfully earn through content creation and community building. And, today, the winners of this re-imagined world are the incumbents and the creators themselves.

A similar dynamic is playing out in AI (creator tooling or otherwise). The emergence of LLMs / AI represents a fundamental shift in technology that has ushered in a torrent of upstarts and capital. Just like within the creator economy ecosystem, there will be breakout AI companies that nail their value prop, business model, and go-to-market – and go on to be big and important players. Descript is an example at the intersection of the creator and AI worlds. But, generally, we believe much of the value will accrue to the incumbent providers and the users themselves – leading to a potential startup graveyard and a burgeoning class of solo entrepreneurs with the ability to go faster and harder at a fraction of the cost, much like we saw in creator-land. As reflected by recent headlines, the AI wave is ultimately great for the big guys and, importantly, the users already leveraging their offerings.