Mikey Shulman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, gotcha. I'm curious about just sort of your overall evolution so far, something I think we may have missed in the introduction is why did you end up choosing just the music domain in the first place? You have this pretty scientific physics and finance background. How did you wander over to music? Like a lot of us have interest in music, but we don't necessarily choose to work in it. But you did. Yeah, it's funny. I have a really fun job as a result, but all the co-founders of Suno worked at Kensho together and we were doing mostly text. In fact, all text until we did one audio project that was speech recognition for kind of very financially focused speech recognition. And I think the long and short of it is we kind of fell in love with audio, not necessarily music, just audio and AI. We all happen to be musicians and audiophiles and music lovers, but it was like the combination of audio and AI that we like initially really, really fell in love with. It's so cool. It's so interesting. It's so human. It's so far behind images and text that there's like so much more to do. And honestly, I think a lot of people when we started a company told us to focus on speech. If we wanted to build an audio company, everyone said, you know, speech is a bigger market. But I think there's something about music that's just so human and almost couldn't prevent us from doing it. We almost like we just couldn't keep ourselves from building music models and playing with them because it was so much fun. And that's kind of what steered us there. You know, in fact, the first thing we ever put out was a speech model. It was Bark. It's this open source text-to-speech model, and it got a lot of stars on GitHub. And that was people telling us even more, like, go do speech. And like, we almost couldn't help ourselves from doing music. And so, I don't know, maybe it's a little bit serendipitous, but we haven't really like looked back since. I don't think there was necessarily like an aha moment. It was just like organic and just obvious to us that this needs to like we want to make a music company. So, so you do regard yourself as a music company because as of last month, you're still releasing speech models. We were? Parakeet.…

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