Laura Burkhauser: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, it has been. fascinating. First of all, there was a huge uptake in that invitation. We got way more people who signed up for it than we could convene in a reasonable way. Although I think I've talked to most folks who signed up for it now. And yeah, so why did I send this e-mail in the 1st place? Because when I became the CEO of Descripten, I had been the VP of product for several years before that, so I wasn't like brand new to the discourse, but we had just changed our pricing, which was a tough moment. We are a really popular product with a huge and loyal and vocal set of customers that we love dearly. And I'm glad that came through in the way that we've talked to you. We are obsessed with our customers. But we did need to change our pricing, which is always like a kind of moment. And we got a lot of feedback on it. And there was this one type of dual feedback that I thought was really interesting and I wanted to dig in on. And came up a bunch in some form of like, I wish you would stop spending time building AI features and use that time to invest in the core quality of the app. And I'm like, when you see feedback like that a number of times as you're raising prices or as you're changing prices, you should get real curious because there's a lot that could be in that. There are like some dual things. So the first is like, do we have a problem with core quality? And what do you mean by core quality? What is core quality to you? Are we talking about performance? Are we talking about reliability? Are we talking about like upload speed? Are we talking about playback speed? And interestingly, and so there were some really good things that came out of that. And I hope folks see that we've been kind of knocking through a bunch of quality things. But Then there was also a bunch of core quality being new features that in fact, to my mind, are AI features, right? And so one of the things that became really clear to me is that when we talk about AI features, different people really mean different things. things. So Descript is like an AI native product. We've been AI native since, like the whole idea of editing a video, like a transcript is actually an AI idea. The way that we implement green screen is like using an AI model, like a visual model. The way that we do studio sound, like that's an AI model that we created. We do like voice cloning, regenerate and overdub, like so you can change something that you've, oh, I recorded the wrong word. Let's just go back and change that and have it in my voice say the right thing. And now Idlib dubs. And We built that model and it's like, these are all AI products and many of the features they wanted us to improve are actually like AI features. in my voice say the right thing. And now Idlib dubs. And We built that model and it's like, these are all AI products and many of the features they wanted us to improve are actually like AI features. And so what I came to understand is that there is a hierarchy of like hostility towards different types of AI features and that Descript users at least love, love a lot of AI features, especially when those features are effects, transitions, Things that have a button that do something that feels deterministic to the video, even if it's powered by AI, green check mark, everyone loves it. Keep building that into an infinity. Then there's like Underlord, which has our AI co-editor. Underlord is somewhat polarizing. Everyone wants it. People are very excited about speeding up their workflows, their AI editing workflows. with AI, and they love the idea of an agentic co-editor that helps them do that. But they're mad that it's not as good as they want it to be, some folks, for some of their use cases. And so there, it's, like, it's not like, don't build Underlord, but it's like, why isn't it perfect yet? But I do want this. I do want you to build something that helps me get through the drudgery of editing faster. That's the general sentiment on agentic co-editing. Then, okay, so when saw the hatred, it is really the generative video is like the polarizing topic. To some extent, avatars, not so much voice cloning and TTS. People feel pretty good about that, but it's really like the generative videos. And when I dig into it, I think, and we've talked a little bit about this, so I don't want to belabor it, but there were really like two things that people didn't like that made people mad about this. In addition to some of the other kind of general pause AI, stop AI kind of stuff that's like in the air, but like strictly speaking from a creator perspective, I think there's like a, I feel like I'm going insane because everyone is telling me that this stuff is super good and it sucks and I hate working with it, which I think is a very reasonable perspective for the average creator to have. Because like I said, I think right now to have a good experience, you've just got to be really invested in the model because the technology is hard to use. And we don't talk about that enough in all the hype cycle. And so people feel like they're sold this story, that this stuff is amazing and incredible in the future, and they use it, and they're like, what's wrong with the world? Like, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. So that's kind of one part. And then I think there is like this idea, like along with the hype cycle, part of this discourse is like, how many times have you seen someone say something like, Sea Dance just put a gun to Hollywood's head and pulled the trigger. And it's like, yeah, okay, well, if that's That's how you're going to sell. That's how you're going to sell your technology. The people who you just said got a gun put to their head aren't really going to like or be excited to use the technology. And like, that's not how I talk about this stuff. ing to sell your technology. The people who you just said got a gun put to their head aren't really going to like or be excited to use the technology. And like, that's not how I talk about this stuff. That's not my perspective is like that this stuff is going to end the role of traditional film, that it's going to end recorded media, that it's going to like put everyone who works in traditional media out of a job. Like personally, I just don't believe that. I think this is a new tool, like many new creation tools that we have gotten over the past, like film was a new tool. And that this is like generally pretty exciting. And I don't know, is it threatening. I don't know that the main story should be that this is like threatening and going to displace a ton of jobs because it's not clear to me it's going to displace a lot of jobs. I think it may also create a ton of jobs. It may shift jobs, but this is simply a creative tool that we ought to be approaching with fun, like a sense of play and curiosity. And instead, because of the discourse around it, is like perceived as being like threatening and overhyped.…

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