Name: Brainstorm AI 2024: Building A Better Model For Creativity
Uploaded: 2024-12-10
Duration: 9 min 51 s
Description: Presenter: Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, ProRata AI; Founder and Chairman, Idealab

Presenter: Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, ProRata AI; Founder and Chairman, Idealab

Brainstorm AI 2024: Building A Better Model For Creativity

Conferences

I've been an entrepreneur all my life. And as a 16 year old in passing to California, I was reading Fortune Magazine looking up to all the incredible businesses that they spoke about. And then I had a chance to come to all these fortune conferences and learn so much from all of you and all the people at Fortune Magazine. And now here I am on stage telling you about a new idea. So it's really thrilling to be here. Thank you so much. What I want to talk about today is the disruptive world we're living in right now, which is just more disruptive than anything I've ever seen. You. Cue to my slides, please. We are living in wildly disruptive times. And the question is how will creators survive in these times? Think back to all the different technological revolutions and how creators how to adapt to be able to thrive back to the printing press, radio, television and of course the internet. But I think these times are even different than anything we've ever seen before. I think this A I disruption will dwarf anything we've seen in our lifetimes. I put up on this slide four things that I saw in my lifetime which when I saw them I saw thought the world will never be the same. I go back to the IBM PC in 1981. It actually came out the very month I graduated from college. I went down to my local computer land store in Pasadena, California bought a $5000 monochrome machine with two floppy drives and 256 K of ram for $5000 no hard drive because the hard drive hadn't been invented yet. But it completely blew my mind and of course, it changed the world. It led to a whole new form of creativity code and led to trillions of dollars of wealth creation. Then Netscape in 1994 when I saw that, I also felt the world will never be the same. In fact, I was running a company called Knowledge, a venture at the time selling educational software for kids. And we sold that company in 1995. And now I had all these new ideas for internet companies that you could build on top of the browser. I put down my favorite 12 ideas and I was trying to select which one I wanted to start. And I actually decided to start all 12. And the way I did that was by starting idea lab, a technology incubator where I could start all 12 at once under one roof. One of the companies we started based on the browser was a company called Go to. We invented paper click advertising and it completely changed the way monetization worked on the internet. We were really proud of that, but that just shows how new models are needed whenever there's a new platform, a new technology. And of course, the mobile revolution has been talked about already today that changed all of our lives in 1994. When I started looking at Netscape and seeing how powerful it was, there were 30 million browsers in the world, think about how pitiful small that is compared to the number of mobile devices that are on the planet. Now, 5 billion supercomputers in everybody's pockets all over the world. So all these changes were so dramatic. And then November 2022 we're at the twoyear anniversary of CG BT being released. I remember playing it with that, that one day and saying this is going to change everything. And of course it has, it's led to a trillion dollars of wealth creation and expenditures in just two years, not like the PC, which took two decades for that kind of impact to be felt. So when you have something that big, why does it cost so much change? Well, hugely disruptive changes occur when the cost of something approaches zero with the internet, the cost of distribution approach zero with the cloud, the cost of storage approach zero and with generative A I, the cost of knowledge or knowledge creation is approaching zero. So what does that mean for content creators when the cost change that dramatically, this disruptive moment is really, really large. Well, until now one side of the equation, some of the gene A I companies are saying the content must be free. The other side of the equation, the content producers are suing on the one side, you have Mustafa from Microsoft saying everything on the internet can be used for free to train A I models or Sam who is saying we need this copyrighted material for free to make this business model work. On the other side, you have the New York Times, Dow Jones and many, many other companies suing a lot of the generative A I companies because they feel their content is being stolen in a funny tweet Ariel Dumas says I've been told to stop stealing muffins from the bakery. Unfortunately, it's the only way to keep my lucrative muffin stand of business. Everyone is fine with this and of course, there's sarcasm here, but it's maybe not that far from the truth about companies lifting other people's content and using it without paying for it. And that leads to a dilemma today. Well, in almost all other forms of digitization revenue is shared, I'll give you some examples right here on the App Store and on Google Play revenue shared with creators on Spotify revenue shared with the artist. In fact, Spotify shows that you can make a business like this work even with significant revenue share, Spotify's market cap just today crossed $100 billion. They had $16 billion of revenue and $10 billion of revenue was shared with creators. It was shared based on counting the streams that were played youtube shares revenue, full 5050 revenue share sharing revenue with the street, with the person who created the stream, Apple music and also Apple News. Apple News is another example of another method of counting. You can count by streams, you can count by views or downloads. Apple News counts by minutes minutes spent in different media content. And Apple News took in $2.3 billion of subscriptions last year and they paid out 1.15 billion to all the content partners who provide the content and even in the physical world for offline distribution revenue is shared companies like Nielsen Ascap BM I count and share revenue in those use cases as well. So why are there no revenue shared standard in generative A I? It's because there's no simple streams or views or downloads to count the answers that come from generated I generative A I are an amalgam of different content. But what if you could reverse engineer the output of generative A I and figure out what content contributed to the answer that would enable a fair revenue share. So right now, some of the A I companies are saying we don't want to pay because we can't afford to. We don't think we have to. But some generative A I companies are saying we can't pay because we don't know how to. Well, what if there are a way to solve how to, well, that's what we set out to do. We set out to create an algorithm that could take a look at the operative gen A I, whether it's text images, movies or music, analyze it using A I and figure out where that content came from. And not only figure out where it came from, figure out the percentage that came from each place. And just today, we launched this new search product called GIST at G dot A I. You can go type in a query and you see an attribution bar at the top that attribution bar at the very top is breaking down the sources and where how they contributed to the answer. So for example, in this particular question, 34% came from the Atlantic, 25% came from time, 25% came from Fortune. Fortune is one of our partners and 16% came from the Guardian and all of the sources are called out clearly on the right. This then allows us to share revenue 50 to 50 with all those partners on that exact pro rata basis. We think this is fair. We think this is a great way to encourage monetization of content in the generative A I era but also encourage by providing a business model for more creators to continue to make great content to power. Generative A I. If generative I only starts using synthetic data for its training, the result in quality will go way down. But if content creators have the incentive to keep on creating great content, the quality will go up. So we really believe this is the future and we really want to try and make something like this be the standard. We really feel that generative A I needs to be ethical and fair to make this grow and thrive. I showed you the example with text. It also could be done for images. Here's an example, the prompt that was typed in was generate an image of a mass red superhero that can climb walls, meta generated this image. We look at that image, we analyze it, we look at all the source images and we figured out that this came 90.3% from Marvel and 6.2% from DC Entertainment. Again, giving us the exact percentages so the revenue can be shared. So engine of A I, it is now fully possible to look at the output and figure out who contributed uniquely to that content. So far, hundreds of publications, authors and musicians and artists have joined our system. Actually 400 as of today, 20 more just joined this morning, we made an announcement this morning of new ones including a company called Lee Enterprises which has 71 markets around the United States. And we're working with them to revolutionize the way local news is surfaced in generative A I and also the way local news can monetize with generative advertising as well. We really feel that this is a new frontier. If you think back to search and how it's gone through multiple iterations, search 1.0 was monetized with banner ads. Think back to excite and Lycos and Altavista and Yahoo search 2.0 was monetized with paper click. I believe that search 3.0 which we're seeing right now will just deliver you answers directly. You won't have to click but it will be monetized with paper use. The paper use is the ability for the content creators to make some revenue every time their content is used. Of course, their content also can be used for training, but that's a one time fee just for training. The model paper use enables the content creators to have a sustainable revenue model that can be ongoing. So pro rata dot I enables pro rata compensation on this paper use basis. And I really feel I'm so passionate about this because I really want to make a world where content creators can thrive where it's fair and ethical for everybody and everybody can participate and wherever the content is created anywhere on earth, it could be surfaced in answers to help you have the best content possible and to make a revenue stream monetti, I'd love to work with any of you here. I'd love to have some of you join our Pro Rata platform. But mostly I would like feedback and ideas on how to make this a more successful, thriving ecosystem around generative A. I feel free to reach out to me directly. I'm Bill at pro rata dot A. I thank you very much. You've been a great audience.