Name: Brainstorm AI 2024: The Business of Better Storytelling
Uploaded: 2024-12-10
Duration: 14 min 25 s
Description: May Habib, Co-founder and CEO, Writer Sujay Jaswa, Co-founder and Managing Partner, WndrCo Jeffrey Katzenberg, Founding Partner, WndrCo, Andrew Nusca, Fortune

May Habib, Co-founder and CEO, Writer Sujay Jaswa, Co-founder and Managing Partner, WndrCo Jeffrey Katzenberg, Founding Partner, WndrCo, Andrew Nusca, Fortune

Brainstorm AI 2024: The Business of Better Storytelling

Conferences

Hey, folks. Thanks for being here with us. OK. May I want to start with you? I saw that your company is all about business writing. I'm a business writer. So uh help gonna replace me. Well, that's, that's where we got our start. Um We are the only generative A I company that is productive on top of every step, function change in the capabilities of the, the transformer. We were founded four years ago. Um And that's what models were good at then. Now LL MS and natural language really are the, the gateway to intelligence. And now we say if you can write it, if you can describe it, you can build it. And so we have pioneered the enterprise generative A I category by combining LMS with retrieval and guardrails and orchestration. And it's that full end to end solution that enterprises need. And you know, that's what we've built over the last few years. So I'm safe is what you're telling me. I don't know. I'm right here, mate. All right. Um Su J I want to come to you next. You've invested in this company. Um Tell us a little, remind us what wonder coasts thesis is and how write it fits in. Yeah, of course. All right. So, first off, we were incredibly lucky to invest in May. Uh She's crushed it since we invested. She raised it like four X devaluation a year later. I mean, it's kind of wild what she's done. I'll talk about that in a second. Um What wonder co does is we create a company every year, about one company a year. Uh We make about 5 to 7 venture investments a year and we make 15 seed investments every year. The focus of the firm from the beginning. This is kind of like an unknown thing we were talking about it earlier is from the beginning two thirds of the money that we had went into software at that point in time, one third went into digital media in 2020. We said, you know what, let's just move entirely to software. And so since 2020 we've been 100% software, but we've been doing software since the, since the get go. Yeah, for sure, Jeffrey, you have your pick of what you want to invest in. Why A I stuff right now, what are the opportunities and risks in going in that direction for you? Well, I mean, I think that uh again, as CJ says, our focus is really um uh been productivity tools. How do you uh take IA I and create applications that make people more effective, more efficient, more productive, more creative at work. Um, and, um, the, there's certainly the, you know, the, the big guys that are out there who are, uh, I think doing a pretty world changing, uh, things in terms of, you know, what, what's the future look like and sort of the larger future of A I, but what we've tried to do is just sort of be boots on the ground on a very practical basis. And you have companies like writer today who can instantly deliver productivity and real ro i to companies of things that are essential to their day to day business and hers around storytelling, which is in particular why I think we were excited and why we related so much to her to writer and to her mission from the outset. Yeah. Yeah. May I want to press you a little bit on this? May it may be, I'm a replaced or not thing. We've been talking a great deal over this event as to the role of humanity and, and creativity vis a vis the tools. So how do you look at that? Especially given what you do, where do we fit in as humans? We're tools. Also humans are tools and I know that sounds nuts. But we are moving to a world of autonomous action for A I where we're going to be nudged when we're needed. Uh And uh across the street, uh we've got our customer conference going on where Uber sales force. Victoria Secret are, are walking folks through what is truly possible with, with a Gente A I using our, our tooling. But the guardrails are so important and you know, folks are so obsessed with, with LL MS. And that's one piece. The part that folks really miss is and, and this is part of our storytelling, this is now very meta, but this is really what's happening in the enterprise, you know, to make A I work. You absolutely have to get your business process, your business logic, your data in order, right? And marry that with the LL MS whose reasoning capabilities really are increasing. We build our own LL MS. We are pushing the envelope on the architecture of the transformer to enable the kinds of complex orchestration of, of work that truly is possible. But it is no question so confusing for the enterprise right now. And it's just mass delusion that you can get to transformational generative A I working just with the hyper scalars Jeffrey. I want to come back to you. Same question essentially around where the humans fit in. I think about DreamWorks. You started it in 94 and would you start it the same way now? Given the preponderance of all these tools? No, but I've, I've lived through these transformations before. Um I'm I'm I was born in the Jurassic era and we used to make animated movies by hand drawn cell animation and um and went through that transformation into um uh the resource and assets of technology as the assets, two artists, two animators uh and then obviously into what was the most transformative part, which came in the sort of mid nineties, which was CG I animation, which obviously has become, I don't know, four out of the top 10 movies this year. So I've seen this story before it gets retold time and again, and each set, each time there are these new sets of tools, it's a new paint brush, it's a new, uh does anybody know what a typewriter is? I've heard of it. Um And so I actually think these are phenomenal tools. I think they are gonna be extraordinarily empowering. I said, I don't know. Now it's a year ago where, uh you know, when I, you know, left the business now, nine years ago, it took 500 artists, five years and $200 million to make a movie. And, you know, that is already on this extraordinary curve down. It doesn't mean it's less creative and it doesn't mean that it doesn't require a great storyteller and a great vision. It does. It's just we're giving a new set of tools to them to actually realize um and make these dreams come true. Right. Right. You know what, 11 thing to think about just to, just to contextualize it because I think this feels scary because of how um most, most of the people that we all interact with, have the application of creativity as part of their job. But if you look back at like, if you just go back, like to the time of the American revolution, the industry that 75% of American workers worked in was agriculture. And you look at, you look today and it's like 2 to 3%. And it's not because we're producing or consuming less food per capita, in fact, probably the opposite, right. It's, it's because tools allowed us to kind of supercharge things and humans could go away from work that they would, you know, kind of the parts of the work that were drudgery and move to things where we could get to higher and higher orders. And I think likely it's going to be the same thing with A I tools. So do you think that, I mean, you're looking at the whole landscape and trying to choose, make your bets? Right. Um Do you think that we're going to lose entire industries or entire companies because of these dramatic changes we've, we've articulated at the individual level now in this conversation, how do you look at it at a bigger scale? Look, the big debate is whether A G I is gonna happen in the near term or whether it's gonna take a long time and you know, there are people smarter than me that would tell you that A G is around the corner, I think where we're betting as wonder co as we think we're going to see, you know, scaling limits to the development of the current generation of models and algorithms. And we think A G is a long way away. And if we're right, then I think what you're going to see is industries are just going to get better because they have data, they can make things better, drudgery can go down. But all of us are going to be fine if we're wrong and A G I is around the corner, all bets are off, got it. I'm gonna come to the audience for a question in just a minute, but I have one more for you, Jeffrey. Um You spent a great deal of the last year being the co chair of the Biden campaign. I would love to know what you learned about how Silicon Valley and technologists are thinking about A I in that context. What did you learn campaigning for, for President Biden? Not that much next, fair enough to the audience. They won, they won, we lost their bat their ball and I'm, I'm rooting for them to play. Great. Seriously, like I, I, you know, this is the way I've been doing this for 50 years. And, you know, I've been been on the winning team and I've been on the losing team. I should be on the winning team, but it is their turn at bat. And honestly, for the future of this country and for the things that I think means so much to, you know, to many of us II, I am rooting for their success in every single respect. I, I hope the changes that they bring make us a better, stronger, more successful country. Yeah. Right on. All right. A question from the audience. Yes. Right over here. Hi, Steven Steven Wolf Berea from Aon. Co May. Huge congrats love everything you've been doing with. Writer. Your issue about data governance is so important and so many of these companies are just not A I, right? Because of the data issue, where do you see some of the challenges? Is it more on the CTO technical side where they're kind of um not made here and they're kind of being protective or is it on the business side where maybe it's the CMO but they really don't understand everything that you're talking about. Yeah, so maybe 22 challenges both on the business side and and on the tech side. So, you know, on on the business side, um it is AAA real interesting um challenge. If you think about the industrial revolution, we all those technologies existed, but we didn't get that big, big change in productivity until we got the assembly line. And so much of what is required is this assembly, this guard railing of the work. Give you an example. Large fortune 10 asset manager. How do you do investor reporting? Right? You've got five mil on a credit fund and you've got 10 mil on a private equity fund. Literally, how do we do reporting? Nobody knows, right. Someone outsources it to a si for the tune of 200 mil a year. But there's no process and to get generative A I against that process, the, the data, right needs to follow the, the, the business logic. And so the human effort to actually go in and diagram out all of this stuff. That's data too, right? The examples of how we've done it before, how we don't like to do it, how we want to do it, that's data and how you make that into continuous pipelines. That's a technology problem right now. And so, you know, folks paint a very wide brush of data is challenging for generative A I but like let's get specific and it's all very use case driven. Yeah, that's well, well said, thank you may. Well, let's go for one more, please. Yes, way over here. Hey there, good to see you. Hi, Laura Yeller from playground. Uh A number of I know you've been talking about enterprise productivity and I think we agree that is wonderful with the appropriate guardrails. But a number of artists and writers who are writing nonfiction and more creative works have had successful pieces and then have been approached by A I companies to write the Sequels and use A I to generate those based on the characters and the initial work. And they have been told by other friends who are creative that that would be terrible. It would dilute their brand and using A I for that would make it look like they didn't have that creativity going forward. What do you advise folks who are being given offers to develop a I cogenerated content? I'm, I'm actually not uh I'm not sure. So I don't wanna. But what I will say is, is that I, I have uh many uh friends of mine are uh among the leading writers, creators and showrunners in Hollywood today. Um And I would say almost across the board, they have all talked about how uh the A I tools today have been helpful to them. They have seen them as a resource and as uh an asset, they have made them uh uh more productive. They've been able to, to uh widen uh uh the uh diversity of their work, the quality of their work. So, again, I'm just, I'm only telling you what I hear from, from I would say among the most talented showrunner creators today, how they find these tools, um an amazing resource a for them and it's not constraining them. It's inspiring them. Can I build on that, Jeffrey? Go for it. We've got, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Wrap it. The answer for Jeffrey is no. Forgive me. May please a round of applause. Thank you for the OK.