Digital Replicas That Can Have Real Conversations

13 Apr 2026 · 37 min
Episode

13 Apr 2026 · 37 min

0:00

In this episode of Infinite Machine Learning, host Pradeek Joshi interviews Hassaan Raza, co‑founder and CEO of Tavis, a video‑API platform that creates AI‑driven digital replicas (avatars) from short webcam recordings. The conversation covers the fundamentals of AI video generation, the distinction between novel video creation and likeness‑preserving avatar generation, and the specific model families used (large diffusion models for novel video, NeRFs, Gaussian splatting, and neural rendering for 3D avatars). Hassaan explains Tavis’s data‑capture pipeline (≈2 minutes of webcam video), how audio‑to‑expression mapping, 3D morphable models, and texture rendering are combined to produce realistic, controllable videos. He discusses challenges of facial‑expression fidelity, benchmarking against ground‑truth, and ensuring temporal coherence. The discussion then moves to real‑time conversational video, highlighting latency constraints, the need to generate frames faster than real time, and the surprising fact that LLM inference (time‑to‑first‑token) is the biggest bottleneck, not video rendering. Hassaan outlines trade‑offs of building end‑to‑end multimodal models (speed vs controllability) and hardware requirements (A100‑class GPUs, memory optimisation). Finally, he shares product‑and‑business lessons for API‑first companies: prioritising developer experience and documentation, incremental feature disclosure, reliability, and avoiding overwhelm, as well as rapid‑fire insights on AI trends, multimodal models, and founder advice. The episode ends with a quick rapid‑fire round covering books, overlooked AI trends, and predictions about digital twins.

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