AI Video Is Eating The World — Olivia and Justine Moore, a16z

Hey everyone, welcome to the Later in Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and I'm joined by my co-host Wix, founder of SmallAI.

Hello, hello. We have a very special double guest episode, uh, with Justine and Olivia Moore. Welcome.

Hi, thanks for having us. We're excited to be here.

I think you're the first twins on the pod.

We're honored. We love that.

Olivia, are you, are you wearing glasses so it's easier to differentiate? Is that like a thing?

No, we have opposite— even though we're identical twins, we have opposite vision problems. So I actually need glasses and Justine doesn't. But it would be nice. Yeah, sometimes we think we should do like name tags on our foreheads or something, but I think the glasses work just as well.

So both of you are partners at Andreessen Horowitz, but also I think we're actually inviting— talking to you in a capacity of you're just very involved in generative media. We don't cover enough. And I can see a change. Latent Space itself was started because of Stable Diffusion. And then there was like, yeah, improvements in image generators for a while. You could see like Recraft is better than blah, and then Black Forest Labs comes out and blah, but like they're all just image generators. I think VideoGen, and then also there was MusicGen for a while. VideoGen, I think, is like the current thing. And we really wanted to do an episode on that, I guess. And then also I think the last piece that I will preview is that we really wanted to start using it for latent space itself. So We could use some help. We could use some overview of like what people are doing. Um, we can sort of take it from there. I, I, you know, I have some, like some of your tweets pulled up, but I, I don't know how you wanna start.

It's really funny, actually. I got into generative media too with Stable Diffusion in, I think it was like September 2022-ish, and it's grown so quickly since then. And Olivia and I talk about this all the time cuz it used to be, um, that our friends in creative fields would look at like the AI image and video generation and be like, I'm not worried about that, or I can't use it in my job. Like, this is kind of just a silly side thing. And then I think starting earlier this year, we started getting a few of them being like, maybe I should, maybe I should learn a little bit more about how these work and how to use them. And now we'll literally have people coming over to our house on the weekend so we can like give tutorials and walkthroughs of like, here's, here's the tools, here's how you use them, that sort of thing.

I would say we've seen the same thing happen on, I mean, if you've been on TikTok or Reels or YouTube Shorts recently in the past week, probably 90% of your feed is AI-generated video. Like, even 2 months ago, it was like that little orange cat animation that was super popular, and then it was the Italian Brainrot characters, but it was just a few people making AI video. And now there's like, I would guess, hundreds of thousands of people making and publishing AI video, which is just awesome.

Sorry, I just want to clarify, are the Italian Brainrot made by Italians or Is the descent— like, are the names Italian? I haven't quite figured that out. I haven't been able to trace it down to the origins of the Italian brain rot.

It's complicated because it's a decentralized meme that people are taking and remixing. I actually looked into this question as well, and I think the answer is no, it did not come from Italians, but someone early on thought the name sounded vaguely Italian, and so they called it Italian brain rot.

We're innocent. That's all I wanted to know. As long as we're not, uh, it's not our fault.

So I didn't even know about the Italian brain rot, but I wanted to like kind of show and tell a little bit as well, um, so that our viewers can watch along. So this is it apparently.

Exactly.

So this is essentially, it was kind of a universe of characters started decentralized. Like one person made a few characters and then a couple other people on TikTok added their own characters to the universe and the best ones became kind of like canon.

And they started as images is probably important to clarify, and And they, people started animating them into video.

Yes. And then some people, as you can see in this kind of music video, did like compilations of all the characters together or videos where the characters were interacting with each other and whole storylines were forming. And so it became this whole giant entertainment thing. I saw last night actually there, the IP has evolved to the point where people are now selling like toy sets and t-shirts and plushies. And the crazy thing about this first video to me is it's like a real kid who is treating these characters, like knows them by heart and is treating them like they're Nickelodeon characters.

Why not?

It's absolutely wild, but I get it because he's, he's able to watch like dozens, if not, you know, hundreds of videos of these characters every day on TikTok, whereas Nickelodeon might put out like one episode of your show every week. So you get attached fast, I think.

So this is, I mean, this is actually for kids. It's not for adults. I don't know.

Adults love it though. They're making like musicals, they're making, yeah, movies, they're making more, I would say, adult-oriented storylines of like the characters cheating on each other. So I would say it's for both.

It can be too fun to scroll brain rot characters. I was wondering, like, how do you keep track? What is your process? How do you organize the universe apart from just mindlessly scrolling? You know, I think that's the hard part about covering something like this.

Keeping track of trends or models or both?

Trends first. I think models, models will come and go. Like the current thing is VO3, but like there'll be a next thing, you know?

I think first of all, you have to know where the trends are originating at that point in time. Initially with AI video, it was actually Reddit, like the early days of AI video. You had a ton of people making and posting stuff in those, in those forums.

And which ones?

AI video, ChatGPT, Singularity, like basically all of the AI-oriented. The AI video one was like the one for a while. And then people like me would take the best content from there and bring it to Twitter. And then like the very best would sort of make its way eventually to TikTok or Instagram, but that happened pretty rarely. Now, especially after VO3 and like Minimax 2 and like with the animals diving and that sort of thing, We've actually seen like a flip where most of the viral content is now originating on the true consumer, like everyday consumer platforms, which I would say are like TikTok and Instagram. And so, because people more like everyday people who are not technical can make quality, interesting content, and they can remix content that other people have created, these characters like the Italian Brain Rot characters are like a million times bigger on Instagram and TikTok than they are on X. And so nowadays I'd say we spend more time on those other platforms and then sort of watching what starts getting momentum in the community. Like, what are other people remixing and iterating on? What are people making accounts for, like the vlogs? And then eventually, like, what, what starts making its way to X and Reddit?

Do you have kind of like a contaminated account that you use for like max brain rot algorithm? And then once you log off, it's like you close that, you close that in a safe.

No, I like to live in the brain rot all the time. So I purposely do not have a separate account.

I actually do. I even made my own account. I can share my screen.

Yep. Olivia's become like a TikTok creator for these videos.

So once VO3 came out and now I've like maxed out all of my, my credit. So I need to use Justine's special account, but, um, I was like, okay, I'm curious, like how low hanging is the fruit here? Like how easy is it to actually kind of make money on this? Oh, you made your own?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I made my own and then I was experimenting with all the prompts and trying the videos myself. Okay, let's see. So I started, you can see I'm exposing myself here, but I started when the fruit slicing ASMR videos emerged. And I was like, okay, let me get creative and try my own formats, like opening dragon eggs or cracking eggs or something. It didn't really work. So I did the fruit trend myself, and you can see that did the best. I think the trend that always works, like in any format, is lava. Like people love like eating lava, squishing lava, like peeling the crust out of lava. Like, you can see in the comments, like, people are just completely obsessed with it. And then I evolved into— the interesting thing about VO3 is there's no IP restrictions, at least on cartoon characters. Yeah, on real people there are, on cartoon characters there are not. So you can make like Stitch from Lilo and Stitch doing his own ASMR videos, which was super fun. And then I just kind of honestly was like following the trends of, of like what was popular, like gold bar squishing became a thing.

Mm-hmm.

For a while. I would say the thing I'm most ashamed of that I eventually ended up falling for is the Tide Pod consumption. This is a very popular genre of videos. And as you can see, uh, people are admitting that this is their life's dream to be able to eat a Tide Pod, and the AI characters can do it completely safely. So these were super fun to make, and I would, I would cross-publish them on like YouTube and Instagram, and it was fascinating to see like what what worked differently on what platforms.

Were all of these text-to-video directly? Do you ever do frame-to-video to maybe steer it a little more?

Yeah, almost all of them were VO3, just directly text-to-video. I did a couple on the Minimax model, especially the new trend of like animals diving off the diving board at the Olympics, which went mega viral. I did that with the Star Wars characters and I just wanted to get the sound effects like super dialed. So I actually did that with the Minimax model and then use the new ElevenLabs sound effects models to hand-generate the sound effects, which took a very long time, uh, to kind of generate them and then line them up at the right spot in the video. But it was very satisfying when I was done.

Because the thing to know about VO3 that I think a lot of people don't know until you use it is you actually can't do image-to-video with audio. Google hasn't released that yet, I would assume for trust and safety reasons. In the interface, you can start with a frame. But once you do that, if you're doing it on the VO3 text-to-video model, it will switch you back to VO2 and will tell you, hey, we're switching you to a model that's compatible to starting with an image, which means that it makes it super hard for like character consistency, right? If you're not able to start with an image of the same character over and over again, which is part of why you're seeing so many of these viral trends using things like a stormtrooper or like Jesus, where there's like a known identity. that the model already understands and can recreate without a starting frame.

A lot of the Yeti and Bigfoot videos have gone super viral. Like, they have their own channels where they're making daily vlogs and they're getting like millions of followers and hundreds of thousands of likes. And they're genuinely really entertaining and you start to feel like an affinity with the characters, which is super fun.

This is the one that I, uh, somebody, somebody posted about and I've actually unsubscribed. I'm watching it.

They're so good. And they're like real storylines, especially I think there's a lot of people who are like not happy with the way the official IP has been going. And so they prefer to watch, they're like, I can control the story myself now.

Also, I mean, obviously it's nice that they, you don't see their mouths. So it's, they can speak without it. Yeah. So how come you haven't done a vlog? You're just focused on the ASMR?

Exactly. Those are easier to generate for sure. I've been shocked by like, How smart VO3 is. And Justine, you probably know more about this, but like from a pretty under-optimized prompt for something like an ASMR video, because I don't know, I have to imagine it's at least somewhat trained on, on YouTube data. So anything that already exists on, on YouTube, like any genre of video that already exists, it does a really good job of taking like a one-line prompt and like turning into something that you would see like a professional creator publish. But the vlogs, the narrative character-driven vlogs are a little bit more complicated. It's outside of my skillset right now.

I would say though, we test, like, I generate dozens of VO3 videos every day and just don't post most of them on like TikTok or Instagram. So I've definitely experimented with the vlog format and it's like pretty easy to do.

How much of a part do you think the character familiarity plays into it? You know, maybe the Stormtrooper content is actually not that good, but there's so many Star Wars fans, including, you know, I mean, you can see I have a Vader helmet right there. Do you think there's kind of like an initial slope of like, hey, let's remix all known IPs in like this new format and you get a lot of attention, then you kind of see that peter off? Or we're not consumer experts, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

It's such a good question. And our— a lot of our portfolio companies ask us this because obviously they're all trying to figure out how do they make their content stand out or how do they help people make more interesting and viral stuff using their platforms. So we've thought about this and studied this and A/B tested different video formats. I think there are like a couple things that benefit new formats like AI video in general. One is having some element of familiarity, but then having an interesting twist on it. I think it like hits multiple of the like good sectors of people's brains when you're like, oh, it's a stormtrooper.

I know this.

I'm gonna like keep watching because I'm like already bought into the storyline of, of Star Wars and I wanna see what happens next. But then like, You get this other weird happiness in your brain when the stormtrooper does something in the AI vlog they would never do in the real cinematic universe. I mean, 2% of the Star Wars hardcore fans will leave an angry comment like, this isn't realistic. But a ton of them are like, oh, this is super cool. I always wondered about this, and now it can happen. One of the benefits of starting with established IP is you're already tapping into a known association in people's brains that makes them Stop scrolling and be interested. The second thing we've seen work though, honestly, is like just super weird stuff. Like, this is why the Italian Brainrot characters, like, they're not based on any existing IP, right? They're just completely new, but they're just strange and interesting enough that you're continuing to watch just to see like, what the heck is this? Like, am I hallucinating? Are they speaking a different language or is this English and I just don't understand it? And so I think over time we'll see more AI, like, IP like that.

One of my favorite examples, and I'll screen share again, is Kim the Gorilla, which is another TikTok character. And this is a, a new character, a gorilla. I, I actually don't even know who makes it, but it's a gorilla in a zoo named Kim who has a real attitude. And the storyline over time is just her constant conflict with a zookeeper named Becky, who she's fighting with and trying to escape from. And you can see, like, all of her videos get hundreds of thousands She already has, like, 300,000 followers in, like, a really short period of time. Yeah, that's Becky that she's kind of fighting with in most of these storylines. She already has her own website, her own freaking merch as she tries to escape from the zoo. And so, it's this kind of thing where it's like, who knows if this person would've been able to make this content before? Like, I'm guessing they're not a professional filmmaker, but, like—

Or had access to a gorilla. Like, who— Yeah.

And a great gorilla actress as well.

Yeah.

Not just a gorilla, but a gorilla who can act on camera. It's not also like anyone with VO3 is gonna come up with a really fun, great narrative idea like this and keep it going over time. So, in my mind, it's still a mix of, like, we need great creatives, but now they just have, like, a different toolset.

Yeah, they're just gonna be a lot more creative. So, yeah, I would just appreciate— we are more face-blind to gorillas, so that solves the consistency problem. And then you add the people the pink bow that makes it more recognizable, even if it's like misplaced. It's so smart. It's just like, I feel just dumb when I look at these people and like how they solve AI problems, you know?

I think the really interesting thing too is people remix each other's work. Like someone does a Yeti and then other people realize like, oh, I can get around the 8-second limit by having a Yeti look consistent across 4 different clips. And then someone's like, oh, I'll do that as a stormtrooper. Someone else is like, I'll do it as a gorilla. And then someone else sees the gorilla clip and is like, I'll make it a female gorilla, like feuding with a zookeeper in a zoo. And when, when I talk to AI creators, like a lot of the, some of them have just completely new original ideas, especially established creatives who have been doing it for a long time and storyboard and come up with these whole storylines. But many are just literally remixing. other people's work like this. And then the universe evolves from that.

For people who are kind of newish to this whole field, it is actually very valuable to have your own IP that you entirely control. So effectively, I actually tried to get an interview with Lil Miquela.

Ah, yes.

This can be cynically taken or whatever. But like, the cynical version is you have an influencer that will always obey you. Right?

Yeah.

So they'll never speak out about like political stuff. It will just, just do what you ask it to do and behave. And, and like, you know, that's rough for the AI model, but, you know, hopefully they're not sentient yet. But in the meantime, you have like a property you completely control and like you can pose them and then put them in all sorts of situations.

That part is so interesting. I, I have like a very hot and controversial take on this, which some people hate, which is like before, honestly, to be like an Instagram or YouTube influencer, Most of them are hot people. And now it's like anyone can be a popular influencer and you don't have to be a hot person. Like, how many friends do you have that have like, are like really funny and have like great personalities and are super creative, but they like don't fit the exact beauty standard of like what an Instagram influencer is? And now it's like anyone can create a character who, like an AI character who meets the beauty standard, and then it can be their brain behind the content.

We already saw this with whole startups or stacks of products, and Justine looked at a bunch of these where it was like basically make money by building your own Instagram influencer off of AI images. And a lot of people were making, yeah, tens of thousands of dollars through that. They would even have sometimes like a subscription that you could sign up for to get extra content for them that would make like a ton more money than they could make on Instagram ads or something like that. But I feel like with AI video, it's just gonna explode.

How do you see the monetization kind of landscape? So there's the, I use AI to make a fake person that then sells some product. I make the Italian brain rot things and then I sell the toys, or I just get a lot of views. I just spam videos on socials and I get views and kind of get the views per million. Do you see a future in which maybe like Patreon or like some of these other monetization things end up being AI slop feeds, or I'm curious your predictions.

Okay. Yeah, I think there's a mix of ways that people are monetizing. I think the number one way is what you mentioned, which is the, like, you get paid by a social platform for, like, driving eyeballs and engagement to your videos. Another way is, yeah, we've seen people use them for, like, ads or driving traffic to an actual business. We've also seen people who are, like, really skilled prompters, people like a Nick St. Pierre, who sell online courses or do a lot of consulting, like, A lot of actually the best AI creators do a lot of consulting work behind the scenes, whether it's with companies or with brands. And the viral content they create is like generating leads for these people to reach out to them and be like, hey, I wanna learn how to do this. And then they either like sell a course or they sell their consulting services. What I'm waiting for is like, what is the first AI-native IP or AI videos that get packaged and bought by like a Netflix or like a Hulu? And then like from there, How do you even determine, like, who gets paid in that scenario when, like, this gets bought because it's the brainchild of, like, 1,000 different characters? But, like, I'm sure given the popularity of Italian Brain Rot on, on Instagram and TikTok, like, you can totally imagine someone like Netflix wanting to buy and reuse or license those characters for their own content.

My learning of making a bunch of these videos and trying to post them on social feeds is it's actually, like, very expensive still to produce just because VO3 is so expensive. And especially if you're making more complex content than like someone slicing a glass fruit. And even that in itself, like I would have to do, you know, 8 generations before it was cutting the fruit in the right way that I could post it and people would be happy. But especially if you're doing something more complex, like, and you're using something like V03, it's, it's really expensive to run, to run these because you get a certain amount of generations on kind of the core plan, but then you have to pay for extra credits. Exactly. This is the fruit example. Like lots of times when I tried to generate it, it would like you know, cut it horizontally instead of vertically, or the layers would look weird once you cut them through. And so, uh, you would end up having to do a bunch of generations to get one that works. Um, but yeah, my learning is that the generation is still expensive enough that it's like, you have to kind of be smart about how you're going to make money from it. Um, otherwise, I think a lot of people are gonna find that the ROI isn't really worth it.

And, uh, roughly the payouts on the social medias are like $20 per million views, something in that range.

That sounds high.

You have to go viral.

Well, it depends on the platform, but it's like you have to go viral enough or get enough views to even qualify for like a creator program where you can then make money. Like with my videos I posted on TikTok, I'm not part of the creator program, so I'm not making money from those. So it's first like you have to have 1 or 2 videos that ideally go hyper viral and qualify you. And then after that, it's like, Yeah, you have to get enough views on each incremental video that you're actually making money from them. So it's not like cash sitting on the ground, I would say, on these platforms quite yet.

I was going to correct myself. $20, $30 per million is actually low, I think. Or maybe that's TikTok level. I was thinking $20 per mil, which is $1,000. But yeah.

I think it also depends on like the engagement and stuff like that too. But like the other really interesting thing is a lot of people are— so some people are motivated by, I make these viral videos and then I use it to sell something. Whether it's like my time or a course or whatever. A lot of people just finally have the opportunity to grow a big account online. And like the dopamine hit of getting like tens of thousands of likes and like thousands of followers on an account doing like AI guerrilla vlogs when you were never able to like grow a big social media account before. I think that is motivating a bunch of people too, which is fascinating. Like these people are all experiencing what it's like to be— early adopters who are like pioneering a new form of content and people are going crazy for it, that feels sort of really rewarding and fun.

Yeah, I agree. I had a cheap joke that I was going to throw in there, which is like, you know, people who are not hot enough for Instagram or TikTok, you know, they go to Twitter. Anyway, I think this links very closely with creator economy stuff. Creator economy, you know, I think people were very excited maybe like 5 years ago and then it kind of died-ish. I don't know if you would agree or you would vehemently object, but like maybe this is like the return of the creator economy. There's another way to slice the monetization stuff, you know, just to put like VC hat on a little bit, which is like there's the creators and, you know, I think we talked about them, but then there's like sort of the creator enabler platforms. Let's call it like a CREA. Or ComfyUI or whoever. And then there's the direct model layer itself. And I think like right now, especially with Veo, just like directly offering a platform, like it's going to be the model layer that's like gets all the money, unless it's an open model where then it goes to the model enabler, the model workflow platforms. Is that accurate? Would you change that mental model of how money flows?

I would say it's somewhat accurate. I agree with kind of the distinction between the We call it sort of like the interface layer or the application layer, companies that aren't training their own foundation models but are making it really easy to use other people's models. And then the like core model layer itself, like a V03 or like a Minimax or like a Kling or all those, or all those folks. Some of the model providers are better than others at building the consumer interfaces. So like Kling, for example, which is one of the really good Chinese image-to-video models, has like a pretty good interface to be able to upload an image, make it a video, add sound effects in their platform, that sort of thing. I think like VO3 is in my mind actually like a counterexample where it's super hard to figure out where to access VO3 within all of the Google products. Like you have to sign up for this separate product called Flow, which requires like a subscription to one, one of two like very expensive Google plans. And then from that subscription, like you have to make sure you're logged into the correct Google account when you try to access the subscription because we all have like 3 Gmail accounts. And so honestly, what we see is like a ton of creators are just going to the model enablement layer, whether it's a consumer-facing interface like Crea or more of a developer-facing interface like a Fall or a Replicate, where you can generate like videos on a one-off basis in like a pay-as-you-go model because it's easier than trying to navigate like the behemoth that is the Google product infrastructure.

And then you don't have to commit to the like $125 a month Google plan to use the Another example on, on Flow and VO, it's like VO2 is actually the default and you have to like navigate a bunch of like little hidden buttons to change it to VO3. So there's like YouTube videos with like millions of hits of just like, how do I find VO3 within like the Google subscription?

Yes.

You can't, it doesn't work on mobile, which is crazy given so many of these videos are being posted on mobile apps. Like, yeah. And, and like maybe Google will release a video generation mobile app, but I would guess that it's gonna take a really long time and you, the website isn't even usable on mobile. So they might fix some of these things, but I think even in the VO3 example, it is API available already. And so like a lot of the model enablement companies, I think, are making a bunch of money from it. And Google, I'm sure, is making a ton of money from it too. Yeah.

I was looking for one of your market maps. It looks like these are just model companies. They don't have the enablement ones.

Oh, the multimodal model apps are the enablement ones.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, right there.

Pedro had his own models.

They do. Yeah. So they're in the talking avatars category for the model layer. So their model is like a talking avatar model. And then they also host a bunch of the image and video models so that you can generate other stuff on their platform too.

Flora raised a big round recently. Visual Lecture, I have heard. These 2 I've heard less of.

Yeah. And then even, I mean, if you guys even follow the stuff Adobe's doing, like forever Adobe was like, we're only having our own models and they're the the clean models that are only trained on licensed data. And then I think they realized that like no one was using those models, either the image ones or the video ones. And so now Adobe Firefly hosts like all of the other models. It's crazy.

Yeah.

We did a State of AI Engineering survey and we asked people what models they're using and Adobe did surprisingly well. Like, because like everything, everyone, everyone was paying attention, thinks about them as like, oh, they're clean, therefore boring. Um, but actually, um, they, they showed up like here.

Interesting.

Weird. They're like, they're beating Ideogram and Recraft. Maybe because it's Adobe. I don't know.

I think it depends too, because like, okay, if I think about it, there are definitely things I use Adobe for. Like, for example, I think their generative fill within Photoshop or even within Firefly or Express is like, really, really good for inpainting and images. And so I would say I still use like an Adobe model, but I use it for inpainting versus like pure generation.

I think there's another thing about like the depth of workflows. How do you feel about like something like a ComfyUI where it's like literally the, uh, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, like crazy link maps? Um, like you need that to have complex workflows, but then also maybe You know, the, the next model will destroy it.

I love that meme, and I have so much respect for the Comfy community because like they have truly been in the trenches. Like having an open source project like that where you have all of these interconnected nodes that are dependent on each other to run all of these mini apps that like thousands, probably millions of people around the world are using and not paying for, but loudly complaining about is like, that is like doing the Lord's work to maintain that. I have never been a deep ComfyUI user because I am at my heart, as you can probably tell by the fact that my feed is all brain rot, a true consumer. Like, I actually try not to get too deep in the technical stuff because I want to have technical stuff in terms of actually using the products and like running the really complex local workflows because I want to understand like, is this too hard for an everyday person to do? I think ComfyUI is really great for people who want a ton of control. And so for people who have more professional use cases, that's awesome. For people who just like wanna make a meme or like a fun video to share with their friends or with their Instagram audience, you probably don't need ComfyUI. I would agree that more of the ComfyUI use cases are starting to be eaten away by kind of the core foundation model companies, but especially with things like VO3 not offering image to video, They're still definitely lacking a level of control that you can get from a platform like that. And I would say ComfyUI is still awesome for a lot of things like video style transformation. People who wanna turn a, a photorealistic video into an anime video or something like that, like that is not something you can do on a platform like VO3 today. Yeah.

Style transformation, consistency, and then upscaling or fixing hands. I don't know if that's a, that's a thing that people still do.

Or like character swapping. I don't know if you guys follow AI Warper on Twitter, but he does some really cool stuff with a lot of the open source tools and sort of interfaces like ComfyUI and kind of shows like, this is, to me at least, a lot of his stuff is like, this is the forefront of what, what I could do if I was like better at navigating these interfaces. But like the average person, there's just no way.

So, I, I guess like part of this discussion we wanted to have also was just like, Like, how we might put, you know, just like, use us as a case study. I think you're relatively familiar with us. If we were to start like a latent space, like sort of somewhat educational channel or sub-brand that was like entirely driven by these things, like, where do we start?

Okay, have you guys seen the Brainrot education videos? Like the— I had like a super— let me try to bring it up. Okay.

I am very out of—

Everything is Brainrot now.

Well, I mean, like, this is the most uncool I've ever felt, um, because I, I've never, like, I, I clearly don't scroll TikTok and Instagram, but like—

You have to pay a really high price to be this informed about brain rot.

I think this is an interesting place for you guys to start. Hear me out. I know this looks crazy. So I found these like channels on Instagram. I think this one is called Unlock Learning that were getting like consistently millions of views on these sorts of like AI celebrity interviews teaching education. And so basically what they— this is embarrassing. You can see that I like my own tweets, but we're going to, we're going to keep moving. You can see that they use like a deepfake tool. Like, I don't know if they use Yapper or if they use something else to like take an image of a celebrity and have them sort of say the words in their voice of the script. And then they overlay it with some sort of diagram at the top that's actually showing what's going on. You could probably just generate a script. Maybe what I would do is you would take links to like YouTube videos or transcripts of the podcast. You could put them in Gemini 2.5. I actually did this recently for someone else's videos. You could ask for an entertaining Brainrot-style clip summarizing XYZ topic based on your content. Then you, you know, play around with it, edit it a little bit, wait until it's perfect. Then you have to decide, are you guys the Brainrot characters or are you going to use a celebrity Brainrot character to tap into the familiarity, which we discussed earlier, which I think, like, pros and cons. Like, I think maybe for your audience, they would like seeing you guys better. If you want to go viral on, like, Instagram and TikTok and reach new people, like, maybe Sydney Sweeney is a good face for it. I don't know. Just something to think about.

We have an AI host, actually. We've used an ElevenLabs voice called Charlie for a while.

Okay. Incredible.

We could, we could give him a, a body, you know? Right now he's just a voice.

Okay. So you could animate on, on Hydra then. Uh, you could take the audio clip, you could take the image, you could make him talking. And then the, the really interesting part to me is like what plays at the top, right? Like where it was showing the diagrams. Historically, I think people still put that stuff together themselves. Like the one I was just showing of Sydney Sweeney, it's actually an education company who makes those videos.

So, Yeah, I just found their website.

And so they can reuse content they've already made. Yeah, it's giving brain rot.

It's fine.

I know, but like people are— and so yeah, then the question is like, do you guys want to make the diagrams at the top? Or there's also, if you search like AI B-roll generator now, there's a variety of tools that will basically take your script or your audio track and sort of extract the keywords and then either search the internet to pull together a B-roll role in images for you, or they will sort of generate net new images or videos, which is— which could potentially be an interesting way to pull it together.

I would say the other recommendation that we would have for you guys to go viral with AI video stuff is there's this whole ecosystem. You've probably seen their content, but there are people called clippers that just take existing long-form videos like podcast interviews or even TV shows and extract the most interesting and viral clips and then post them on their own platforms as like one second videos. And there's products like Overlap right now where if you upload, say, a new YouTube video to your channel, you can link your channel to Overlap and it'll automatically review it, clip the best ones, and then publish those clips for you across like Twitter or Instagram or other products.

Can you guys see it? And it predicts the virality score, which I find is crazy. So this runs all the time. It's linked to the a16z YouTube.

Oh, you guys are just using it for your channel? Holy crap.

I mean, I am. Like, for example, okay, this one, like, you can go into the video, and then you can see what they picked, and then you can go in and edit. And so you can say, like, hey, I want to remove the caption on this word, or I want to cut this word from the video completely, or, like, I want to extend the clip and make it start longer or shorter. Like, I want to remove curse words. I want to remove filler words. I want to remove stutter. I want to change the subtitle so that they're like, look more brain rot, like that sort of thing.

And then you can generate the social posts and download, and you can set this up on overlap so that it'll automatically publish the short-form clips as soon as you publish the long-form video. And it'll like write the tweets for you or write the TikTok caption for you. Yeah. Which is very cool.

This is exactly what I've been looking for. I, I just didn't know it existed. It's crazy.

Yeah.

Uh, we—

so you guys can become your own, uh, your own fanboy clippers and make money off of, yeah, the, the long-form show itself and the short-form viral clips.

Yeah, so there's all sorts of clipping agents. So it's actually a ComfyUI type interface, which is really cool. So this is basically, this is what it looks, the clipping agent looks like. It is watching for any new YouTube video that is uploaded to the a16z channel. It is automatically finding interesting clips that are between 30 seconds and 140 seconds in length. And the criteria is like topics that would be interesting to like the tech audience. It is adding subtitles. You can then add more actions. For example, you can say, convert it, take all of the 16:9 clips and convert them to 9:16, or add smart zoom so it zooms in on the person's face when they're doing something interesting. This is not a company we're invested in. We just like recently discovered it and we were like, this is the dream.

It is the dream.

Yeah, we have, um, I built a small podcaster thing for us that automates a lot of things and it picks the clips, but doesn't do any— the hard part is actually how do you go from picking the timestamps to actually making it get a lot of views on YouTube? So we'll try it out.

You know, I think there's an art in picking the clips because I think that, you know, maybe they're optimized for Brainrot, uh, and we're a technical podcast. Like they wouldn't pick the same clips that we would pick.

So this is the interesting thing too. It's like, if you guys wanna be across multiple platforms, maybe you have an agent set up that purposely generates different clips for different audiences. Like maybe you have it clip like educational, informative, like technical stuff for YouTube. And then you, you experiment with what if we gave it a prompt to pick like brain rot, funny, controversial stuff for like young people, and then turn it into a TikTok. the TikTok aspect ratio and then post those? Like, what would happen to a TikTok account?

Yeah, yeah. Um, I, I think it's worth experimenting with, with a bunch of those. Um, yeah, my hypothesis is that usually sort of repurposed content doesn't do as well as native content. That's the general rule. Which, in other words, like, we recorded this as a long-form podcast. If you clip it out, sure, like, you know, you might get a little more juice out of it, but it's never gonna go great because it's never made to. Native For the short form. Like, we've actually, you know, so a little behind the scenes, we've actually explored like, what if we change the way we record podcasts and we only optimize for clips?

Okay, but have you— so I used to agree with you, but have you seen the Vitruvo account?

Yeah, that guy's pretty prolific, but I don't know what you're referring to.

So just his— he has clips that go viral, like he clips long-form interviews and they go viral all the time. Like, I also used to think that clips would never do well. But I feel like, especially in the X algorithm right now, it's like a clipping era. Everyone, for some reason, video is like doing super well in the algorithm. And especially if you're, it's a video of like a character that people know, which is like Sam Altman or like Gary Tan or like whoever, you can get in a crazy amount of juice out of these clips.

I think part of it is also we as a brand, like this is seriously like we're, we're considering doing this, right? So we have to think through everything. We as a brand have to resist clickbait somewhat, right?

Yes.

You know, we can't just keep saying like, Sam Altman says the world's gonna end in 2 years. And like, no, yeah, he didn't say that. But like, you could misconstrue something he said to say that, you know.

We have this struggle, which is— and Olivia and I were fighting about this last night. We fight in a good-natured way about a lot of things. It's not really— it's just like, we're twins. Like, we like, you know, have back and forth about things, but we will help each other write tweets sometimes. And she wrote a tweet intro to me that just like sounded like one of those spammy, like, AI is blowing up, like everything has changed accounts. And I had to be like, Olivia, this is not us. Like, we need to like stay on the course.

It's the YouTube thumbnail economy now.

Yeah.

For content. Right, right.

I mean, but like, you know, we could create a sub-brand that is affiliated but not us, that like we could just kind of throw that on there. And I think like, look, like there are some people who are just literally they're best served like that.

Yeah.

They don't have the cogsec, is what I call it, or like they don't have the pride or taste or whatever, right? Whatever you call yourself. But like if you wanted your content to spread to the widest amount of people, you have to sort of adapt it to the way that they like to receive information, whether or not They know it.

Like, I think it's going to be really interesting too, to see different ages of people because at least from what I've seen, the kid, like already the kids, like the Gen Alpha, the kids who like grew up fully in the internet era, fully in the smartphone era, consume content and create content much differently than like Gen Z and millennials. And I hope that doesn't mean that everything has to be brain rot for people to understand it. Like, I really want there to still be space for like these long-form intellectual deep dives as like a habitual blog post writer, but I'm like a little bit scared of that.

No, I think, I think there's always room for like long-form good writing, good, good discussions. I almost think like sometimes it's just ironic and funny that that's why it's viral. Like, people, you're not even like actually learning anything from those like educational Sydney Sweeney channels. You're just like, oh, it's funny that you can do this now. Like, is this what humanity has come to?

Yes.

Anything else in terms of like like creative trends? Like, we've talked a lot about video. Oh, um, I was going to bring up prompt theory. Maybe this is like a nice thing to talk about. I don't know if it's too woo-woo or philosophical for you, but you brought it up. So could you explain what prompt theory is?

Okay, so it sort of evolved. So at first it started with people— when people realized they could make these VO3 characters talk in videos, it started with like, what if these characters either realized they were AI-generated or refused to accept that they were AI-generated and controlled by a prompt.

It's kind of like an existential crisis for AI characters.

Yes.

Like that video that went viral of the NotebookLM, uh, hosts back last September.

Yes.

Realizing that, like, they could be shut down and they weren't real. And he tried to call his wife, and then he realized he doesn't actually have a wife, and he's just an AI-generated voice.

Oh, no.

It's kind of like that, but for VO3 characters. And it's a lot more striking because they look so real.

And then the evolution of prompt theory more recently, and I think I tweeted a video about this that I can, I don't know if I can pull it up or send it to you guys, but now people are like, okay, what if we're actually prompted? Like, what if real humans, like, what if we are the AI characters in someone else's universe? Like, would we know it? And like, are we all controlled by prompts? Like, one of the big trends for VO3 on TikTok right now is AI clapbacks. So it's often like the format is like a young person and an old person, and like the young person is like, Oh, like, my hair looks amazing. And the old person is like, that's not natural hair, whatever. But it started evolving to like, well, you know, your hair is just prompted. You didn't do anything to get that good hair. And then, like, the young person will be like, well, like, you're on your way to the cemetery. Like, it quickly devolves. It quickly devolves into, like, chaos.

Wait, wait, are both people in this situation real?

No, they're both generated.

Oh, okay, okay.

Yes, yes. But it's like, you're seeing all of these, like, like brain rot accounts of like teenagers with anime profile pictures who live in the Midwest, who you would like never expect to be thinking about like the meta layer of AI and prompt theory, are including the concept of prompt theory in their like AI clapback videos. So it, it's really gotten kind of very, very broad. So I think about that a ton because sites like Reddit have existed like that for a while where you actually you have no context on the other person. Like, it's an anonymous username. Almost no one is like doxxed on Reddit. And so on Reddit, it's like everyone could be bots and like, what do you know? Now that LLMs are like getting so good at sounding natural and like pretending like they have interests and like pretending like they have lives in which things are going on. I spend so much time thinking like, would it actually be sad if I was talking with a ton of LLMs on Reddit? Or If there was just a ton of people who are always available to talk about my interests, who had interesting things to say, like, is that the good side of the world? Like, I don't know.

Made your own froyo brand, right?

Yes.

You just used a brainstorm?

ChatGPT for prompting. Yeah.

Prompting.

Yeah.

Uh, you can pose it, you can create artists.

I was gonna say, it's exactly that.

Or Brad Klimp.

Yes, Brad Klimp is another great one.

Have you guys followed Brad Klimp? No. What So Bread Klimp, yeah, it was early AI. Then they started creating videos and stuff like that of him. He got super popular. I tweeted one of the early AI videos of Bread Klimp and people loved it. All right, here is Bread Klimp.

Oh, it's a possum.

He's very cute and he has this whole universe of characters that he interacts with. Let me see if I can find—

Isn't that Yannick?

But the AI version.

Yeah.

So a lot of people liked this. And then like a bunch of people started commented and said that they wanted Breadclimp sweatshirts, that I actually made Breadclimp sweatshirts. And so I, we, we like took a Breadclimp design, we like removed the background, we like overlaid it on, um, a sweatshirt that we had like a screen printing company do. And then we probably ordered like 30 of them and we distributed them to like friends and family and other people in like the AI video community. But like the Breadclimp sweatshirts could have been like a real sweatshirt brand.

Oh my God.

There they are. Wait, can you zoom in on them, Olivia? Yeah. So that's us and that's Anish on our consumer team, um, wearing our Breadclimp sweatshirt. Well, the AI, like, furniture, I don't know if you guys have seen, especially on Facebook, actually, AI furniture, like, totally blows up. So, like, it's a lap, like, it's a couch, but it's, like, shaped like a giant cat and, like, the eyes glow when you, like, sit on it or things like that. Like, these accounts, the AI furniture and the AI home design accounts.

Okay.

are huge. And I actually saw, I'll try to see if I can find it later, but I actually saw one example of someone made this like gorilla chair basically that then actually got like manufactured and you can buy it.

There's a lot of differences between platforms of the type of content that's going viral and the types of people that are making them. So my biggest piece of advice is actually just to like, yeah, set up a separate account on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok, on X, And kind of take a look at what people are posting there and just follow a bunch of AI accounts and then the feed will give you more. There's almost this like content arbitrage thing that happens right now where something will go viral on one platform and then there's like a 1 or 2-day window to be like the person to post it on the next platform. But it's kind of fascinating to watch like what blows up where, which I think is reflective of like who's spending their time on which platforms. Um, it's just amazing to watch like the AI ASMR stuff on TikTok was huge and then kind of slowly made its way elsewhere. I think the animals diving was huge on, on Threads and all the Facebook products first because of the maybe age demo of those users, and then slowly made their way to like X and other places. Justine, what do you think?

I think if you want less of the brain rot, less of the brand new people to this and more like how are people professionally using AI video, there's this guy called PJ Ace on Twitter who He had like the viral Kashi ad that aired during the NBA Finals. He's done like a bunch of really cool, more commercial work, whether it's for individual musicians or brands. And he shows like how, how would a true professional use AI to make stuff? And he also shares his workflows, which is great.

True professional stuff. Yes.

Yeah, he's a real— he has like decades of experience in kind of film production.

I think he made his own TV show before this, non-AI, like he knows To me, the, the biggest thing in my mind is, are people gonna be bottlenecked by how many sweatshirts they can produce basically to make money? It feels like it's much easier to make the, the content and get the audience than actually get good, good merch. So I'm curious to see if we get a, the Overclip thing that generates the clip. You have something that just generates merch based on latest videos with like quotes and like images of it. Yeah, I'm curious to see where, where that goes. Yeah, I think that's a good point.

That would be so cool. I love that actually. Someone should totally do that.

Yeah. Request for startup.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anybody's listening, please go build it for us. Yeah. Thanks for, for your time. This was great. And, uh, we'll keep following the Brainrot closely on social medias.

We will too. And thanks for having us.

And we're looking forward to seeing what content you guys make.

Thank you all.

Thanks guys.

Awesome.

Thanks guys.