Pika CEO Demi Guo (left) grew up fascinated with poetry and artistic writing, whereas her cofounder and CTO Chenlin Meng (proper) needed to be an animator. Their AI video software, Guo says, shouldn’t be tailor-made for professionals: “What we’re attempting to do is one thing extra for on a regular basis shoppers — folks like me and Chenlin.”
Pika
Final winter, Demi Guo and a number of other Stanford pc science Ph.D. classmates spent their winter break attempting to make a film utilizing generative AI. Buzzy AI video editor startup Runway, which had simply hit a $500 million valuation, was providing a $10,000 grand prize for the perfect submission to its inaugural “AI Movie Competition” they usually had been assured they’d a shot.
However Guo’s group didn’t even place. “We had been probably the most technical group, however we actually struggled to make the movie,” she advised Forbes. Whereas latest AI breakthroughs had been promising, bringing them to bear on the video-making course of itself proved exceedingly cumbersome for Guo, who poured hours into instruments like Runway and Adobe’s Photoshop with middling success and nice frustration. In the long run, the awards went to skilled creatives. “It simply didn’t look that good,” she says of the movie. “I used to be so pissed off.”
So in April, Guo and Chenlin Meng, a fellow Ph.D. scholar, dropped out of Stanford to launch Pika to construct an easier-to-use AI video generator. Since then, some 500,000 folks have tried the software program and it’s now getting used to create tens of millions of recent movies every week. That explosion in curiosity has despatched Silicon Valley buyers right into a frenzy and the four-person startup has raised $55 million throughout three funding rounds in fast succession. The primary two had been led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and the most recent — a $35 million Collection A from Lightspeed Enterprise Companions — values Pika Labs at between $200 million and $300 million, in line with a supply with direct data of the matter.
“We’re attempting to revamp the interface of video-making,” stated Guo, who serves as the corporate’s CEO. “It’s nonetheless very laborious to make good movies.”
Pika’s video technology software has to date solely been obtainable via the social messaging app Discord. Customers kind textual content right into a chat field — for instance, “a robotic strolling on the seaside at sundown” — and obtain an AI-generated video as a chat reply. On Tuesday, Pika introduced that have to the Net, and an enormous new mainstream viewers, with a brand new app and options to permit for the enhancing and customizing of objects inside a video — including sun shades to the aforementioned robotic, for instance.
“A startup’s largest weapon and largest benefit is pace, and that is actually the quickest transferring group I’ve ever seen.”
Nat Friedman, who has emerged as one of many main solo buyers within the AI area since he departed GitHub in 2021, first invested in Pika again in April. He advised Forbes he was impressed by an early demo model that Guo and Meng had cobbled collectively utilizing a single graphics processing unit (GPU), the {hardware} chips which energy most AI computing duties. Friedman and frequent coinvestor Daniel Gross have amassed a 2,500-plus GPU cluster they name Andromeda which they make obtainable to startups wherein they make investments. That helped supercharge Pika’s efforts to construct a proprietary AI mannequin for video, much like OpenAI’s text-based GPT-4 or Midjourney’s image-based fashions.
In its early days, Pika centered solely on producing anime. The founders advised Friedman that taking over AI technology of real looking movies can be too troublesome, on condition that bigger well-funded firms like Runway and Stability AI already had vital headstarts, like,. Then, there was Adobe, a $280 billion public market behemoth that was transferring rapidly so as to add AI performance to Inventive Suite. However Guo and Meng’s fast tempo of growth stunned buyers — and themselves.
One summer season afternoon, Friedman instructed they add a approach to embed textual content into movies. He acquired a textual content message again at 3 a.m. saying the function was prepared. Friedman remembers being shocked initially, however he quickly realized this “very intense” tempo was typical of the group. “It was a part of what persuaded me to do the subsequent funding,” he says. Lightspeed companion Michael Mignano, who invested in September (The Data was first to report that Lightspeed was in talks), sees this as an important edge for Pika: “A startup’s largest weapon and largest benefit is pace, and that is actually the quickest transferring group I’ve ever seen,” he advised Forbes.
Certainly, inside weeks of Pika’s founders telling Friedman real looking video was far too troublesome a job for them to tug off, they did simply that. And when Mignano introduced up the thought of an online app earlier in November, Guo took it as a directive to ship the product that very same month.
We’re not attempting to construct a product for movie manufacturing. What we’re attempting to do is one thing extra for on a regular basis shoppers.
Pika is now leasing just a few hundred GPUs — some from Friedman’s Andromeda cluster, some from different cloud suppliers — which it used to construct a brand new model of the AI mannequin it debuted at the moment. It’s meant to carry out higher and permit for extra refined enhancing, adjusting the side ratio of a video, for instance. In the meantime, the corporate is tough at work tinkering with algorithms to additional enhance the mannequin, and in addition growing ones for filtering copyrighted supplies which have tripped up rivals and dragged them into pricey IP litigation. “Proper now that’s nonetheless very exploratory,” Guo stated.
With new funding in hand, Guo says she plans to broaden Pika’s group to about 20 folks subsequent yr, most of them engineers and researchers. Monetizing the product, which is presently free, isn’t a key precedence but, although she says the corporate might ultimately introduce a tiered subscription mannequin (pay extra for entry to extra options) for shoppers.
That’s additionally how Guo plans to distinguish Pika from its greater rivals. “We’re not attempting to construct a product for movie manufacturing,” she advised Forbes.“What we’re attempting to do is one thing extra for on a regular basis shoppers — folks like me and [Meng] who’re creators at coronary heart, however not that skilled.” If there had been a software like Pika a yr in the past, Guo says her Stanford group might need had a combating likelihood within the AI Movie Competition. “I believe it positively would’ve helped loads,” she stated.
