AI视频正在吞噬世界——Olivia和Justine Moore，a16z

[Music] Hey everyone, welcome to the latest in space podcast. This is Allesio, partner and CTO at Desible, and I'm joined by my co-host Wix, founder of Small AI. Hello. Hello. We have a very special double-guest episode 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 wearing glasses so it's easier to differentiate? Is that a thing?

No, we have opposite vision problems. Even though we're identical twins, I actually need glasses and Justine doesn't. It would be nice, though. Sometimes we think we should wear 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 I think we're actually inviting you here in a capacity where you're both very involved in generative media. We don't cover it enough, and I can see a change. Latent Space itself was started because of Stable Diffusion, and then there were improvements in image generators for a while. You could see that Recraft is better than blah, then Black Forest Labs comes out, then blah, but they're all just image generators.

I think video generation—and obviously there was music generation for a while—is the current thing, and we really wanted to do an episode on it. We also really wanted to start using it for Latent Space itself, so we could use some help and an overview of what people are doing. We can take it from there. I have some of your tweets pulled up, but I don't know how you want to start.

It's really funny, actually. I got into generative media, too, with Stable Diffusion in around September 2022, and it's grown so quickly since then. Olivia and I talk about this all the time because it used to be that our friends in creative fields would look at AI image and video generation and say, “I'm not worried about that,” or, “I can't use it in my job. This is just a silly side thing.”

Starting earlier this year, a few of them started saying, “Maybe I should learn a little bit more about how these work and how to use them.” Now we'll literally have people coming over to our house on the weekend so we can give them tutorials and walkthroughs: “Here are the tools, and here's how you use them.”

We've seen the same thing happen on TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts. Recently, in the past week, probably 90% of your feed has been AI-generated video. Even 2 months ago, it was that little orange cat animation that was super popular, and then it was the Italian brain rot characters. It used to be just a few people making AI video, and now I would guess there are hundreds of thousands of people making and publishing AI video, which is awesome.

Sorry, I just want to clarify. Are the Italian brain rot characters made by Italians, or is it just the accent? Are the names Italian?

I haven't quite figured that out. I haven't been able to trace it down to the origins of 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, so they called it Italian brain rot.

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

I didn't even know about Italian brain rot, but I wanted to do a little show-and-tell as well so our viewers could watch along. So, this is it, apparently.

Exactly. So, this is essentially a universe of characters that started in a decentralized way. One person made a few characters, and a couple of other people on TikTok added their own characters to the universe. The best ones became canon.

They started as images, which is probably important to clarify, and then people started animating them into video. Some people, as you can see in this kind of music video, made compilations of all the characters together or videos where the characters were interacting with each other and whole storylines were forming. It became this giant entertainment thing.

I saw last night that the IP has evolved to the point where people are now selling toy sets, T-shirts, and plushies. The crazy thing about this first video, to me, is that it's a real kid who knows these characters by heart and treats them like they're Nickelodeon characters.

Why not?

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

So, this is actually for kids. It's not for adults?

I don't know. Adults love it, too. They're making musicals and movies. They're making more adult-oriented storylines about the characters cheating on each other. I would say it's for both. It can be too fun to scroll through brain rot characters.

I was wondering, how do you keep track? What is your process? How do you organize the universe apart from just mindlessly scrolling?

I think that's the hard part about covering something like this.

Keeping track of trends or models, or both?

Trends first. Models will come and go. The current thing is Veo 3, but there will be a next thing. 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. In the early days of AI video, you had a ton of people making and posting things in those forums.

Which ones?

r/aivideo, r/ChatGPT, r/singularity—basically all of the AI-oriented forums. The AI video one was the main one for a while. People like me would take the best content from there and bring it to Twitter, and then the very best would eventually make its way to TikTok or Instagram, but that happened pretty rarely.

Now, especially after Veo 3 and MiniMax 2, with things like the animals diving and that sort of thing, we've actually seen a flip where most of the viral content is originating on the true consumer platforms—everyday platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Because everyday people who aren't technical can make quality, interesting content and remix content that other people have created, these characters, like the Italian brain rot characters, are a million times bigger on Instagram and TikTok than they are on X. Nowadays, we spend more time on those other platforms, watching what starts getting momentum in the community: what are other people remixing and iterating on, what are people making accounts for, like the vlogs, and eventually what starts making its way to X and Reddit.

Do you have a dedicated account that you use for maximum brain rot, so that once you log off it's like you put 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.

Olivia has become a TikTok creator for these videos.

Once Veo 3 came out, I maxed out all of my credits, so I need to use Justine's special account. But I was curious: how low-hanging is the fruit here? How easy is it to actually make money on this?

I started when the fruit-slicing ASMR videos emerged. I thought, “Okay, let me get creative and try my own formats,” like opening dragon eggs or cracking eggs. It didn't really work, so I did the fruit trend myself, and you can see that did the best.

The trend that always works in any format is lava. People love eating lava, squishing lava, and peeling the crust off lava. You can see in the comments that people are completely obsessed with it.

I evolved, and the interesting thing about Veo 3 is that there are no IP restrictions, at least on cartoon characters. On real people, there are. You can make Stitch from Lilo & Stitch do his own ASMR videos, which was super fun.

I was honestly just following the trends of what was popular. Gold-bar squishing became a thing for a while. I would say the thing I'm most ashamed of that I eventually ended up falling for is Tide Pod consumption.

This is a very popular genre of video. People are admitting that this is their life's dream, where they're able to eat a Tide Pod, and the AI characters can do it completely safely. These were super fun to make, and I would cross-publish them on YouTube and Instagram. It was fascinating to see what worked differently on each platform.

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

Almost all of them were directly text-to-video with Veo 3. I did a couple on the MiniMax model, especially the new trend of animals diving off the diving board at the Olympics, which went mega-viral. I did that with the Star Wars characters. I wanted to get the sound effects super dialed in.

So, I actually did that with the MiniMax model and then used the new ElevenLabs sound effects models to hand-generate the sound effects. It took a very long time to generate them and then line them up at the right spot in the video, but it was very satisfying when I was done.

The thing to know about Veo 3 that I think a lot of people don't know until they use it is that 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 Veo 3 text-to-video model—it will switch you back to Veo 2 and tell you, “Hey, we're switching you to a model that's compatible with starting with an image.” This makes it super hard to maintain 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 Jesus, where there's 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. They have their own channels where they're making daily vlogs, and they're getting millions of followers and hundreds of thousands of likes. They're genuinely really entertaining, and you start to feel an affinity with the characters, which is super fun.

This is the one that somebody posted about, and I've actually unsubscribed. I'm watching it. They're so good, and they have real storylines, especially. I think there are a lot of people who aren't happy with the way the official IP has been going, so they prefer to—they're like, “I can control the storyline myself now.”

Also, obviously, it's nice that you don't see their mouths, so they can talk without you seeing them. So how come you haven't done a vlog just focused on ASMR?

Exactly. Those are easier to generate, for sure. I've been shocked by how smart Veo 3 is. And, Justine, you probably know more about this, but from a pretty underoptimized prompt for something like an ASMR video—I have to imagine it's at least somewhat trained on YouTube data—anything that already exists on YouTube, like any genre of video that already exists, it does a really good job of taking a 1-line prompt and turning it into something that you would see a professional creator publish. But the vlogs, the narrative, character-driven vlogs are a little bit more complicated and outside of my skill set right now.

I would say, though, I generate dozens of Veo 3 videos every day and just don't post most of them on TikTok or Instagram. So I've definitely experimented with the vlog format, and it's pretty easy to do.

How much do you think character familiarity plays into it? Maybe the Stormtrooper content is actually not that good, but there are so many Star Wars fans—including, I mean, you can see I have a Vader helmet right there. Do you think there's an initial spike of, “Hey, let's remix all known IP in this new format,” and you get a lot of attention, then see that peter off? We're not consumer experts, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

It's such a good question. We and a lot of our portfolio companies ask us this because, obviously, they're all trying to figure out how to make their content stand out or how to help people make more interesting and viral stuff using their platforms. So we've thought about this, studied this, and A/B-tested different video formats.

I think there are a couple of 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 hits multiple of the good sectors of people's brains when you're like, “Oh, it's a Stormtrooper. I know this. I'm going to keep watching because I'm already bought into the storyline of Star Wars and I want to see what happens next.” But then you get this other weird happiness in your brain when the Stormtrooper does something in the AI vlog that 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 that 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 just super-weird stuff. This is why the Italian brain rot characters—they're not based on any existing IP, right? They're just completely new, but they're strange and interesting enough that you continue watching just to see, “What the heck is this? Am I hallucinating? Are they speaking a different language, or is this English and I just don't understand it?” So I think over time we'll see more AI IP like that.

One of my favorite examples, and I'll screen share again, is Kim the Gorilla, which is another TikTok character. This is a new character. I actually don't even know who makes it, but it's a gorilla in a zoo named Kim who has a real attitude. The storyline over time is just her constant conflict with a zookeeper named Becky, who she's fighting with and trying to escape from. You can see that all of her videos get hundreds of thousands of likes. She already has around 300,000 followers in a really short period of time.

Yeah, that's Becky, who 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. So it's this kind of thing where it's like, who knows if this person would have been able to make this content before? I'm guessing they're not a professional filmmaker or someone who had access to a gorilla. Like, who?

And a great gorilla actress as well. Not just a gorilla, but a gorilla who can act on camera.

It's not as though anyone with Veo 3 is going to 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: we need great creatives, but now they just have a different toolset.

Yeah, there are just going to be a lot more creatives.

I would just appreciate that we're more face-blind to gorillas, so that solves the consistency problem. Then you add the pink bow, which makes it more recognizable, even if it's misplaced.

It's so smart. I feel just dumb when I look at these people and see how they solve AI problems, you know? I think the really interesting thing, too, is that people remix each other's work. Someone does a Yeti, and then other people realize, “Oh, I can get around the 8-second limit by having a Yeti look consistent across 4 different clips.” 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 feuding with a zookeeper in a zoo.”

For people who are kind of newish to this whole field, it's 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 the cynical version is you have an influencer that will always obey you, right? It'll never speak out about political stuff. It'll just do what you ask it to do and behave. That's rough for the AI model, but hopefully they're not sentient yet. In the meantime, you have a property you completely control, and you can pose them and put them in all sorts of situations.

That part is so interesting. I have a very hot and controversial take on this, which some people hate. Before, honestly, to be an Instagram or YouTube influencer, most of them were hot people, and now anyone can be a popular influencer and you don't have to be a hot person. How many friends do you have who are really funny, have great personalities, and are super creative, but don't fit the exact beauty standard of what an Instagram influencer is?

Now anyone can create an AI character who meets the beauty standard, and they can be the brain behind the content. We already saw this with whole startups or stacks of products where it was basically, “Make money by building your own Instagram influencer” off of AI images. Justine looked at a bunch of these, and a lot of people were making tens of thousands of dollars through that. They would even sometimes have a subscription that you could sign up for to get extra content from them, which would make 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 going to explode 10×.

How do you see the monetization landscape? There's, “I use AI to make a fake person that then sells some product.” I make the Italian brainrot things and then sell the toys. Or I just get a lot of views. I spam videos on social platforms, get views, and kind of get paid per million views. Do you see a future in which maybe Patreon or some of these other monetization things end up being AI slop feeds? I'm curious about your predictions.

Okay.

Yeah, I think there's a mix of ways that people are monetizing. The number one way is what you mentioned: you get paid by a social platform for driving eyeballs and engagement to your videos. Another way is using them for ads or driving traffic to an actual business.

We've also seen people who are really skilled prompters, like Nick St. Pierre, sell online courses or do a lot of consulting. A lot of the best AI creators actually do consulting work behind the scenes, whether it's with companies or brands. The viral content they create generates leads for people to reach out to them and say, “Hey, I want to learn how to do this.” Then they either sell a course or their consulting services.

What I'm waiting for is the first AI-native IP, or AI videos, to get packaged and bought by Netflix or Hulu. From there, how do you even determine who gets paid when this gets bought because it's the brainchild of 1,000 different characters? Given the popularity of Italian brainrot on Instagram and TikTok, you can totally imagine someone like Netflix wanting to buy, reuse, or license those characters for their own content.

My learning from making a bunch of these videos and trying to post them on social feeds is that it's actually still very expensive to produce them, just because Veo 3 is so expensive. Especially if you're making more complex content than someone slicing a glass fruit—and even that, in itself, would require 8 generations of cutting the fruit in the right way so that you could post it and people would be happy. If you're doing something more complex and using something like Veo 3, it's really expensive to run these because you get a certain amount of generations on the Pro plan, but then you have to pay for extra credits.

Exactly. This is the fruit example. Lots of times when I tried to generate it, it would cut it horizontally instead of vertically, or the layers would look weird once you cut through them. You would end up having to do a bunch of generations to get one that works.

My learning is that generation is still expensive enough that you have to be smart about how you're going to make money from it. Otherwise, I think a lot of people are going to find that the ROI isn't really worth it.

Roughly, the payouts on social media are like $20 per million views, something in that range.

That sounds high.

Well, it depends on the platform, but you have to go viral enough—or get enough views—to even qualify for a creator program where you can then make money. With my videos that I posted on TikTok, I'm not part of the creator program, so I'm not making money from those.

First, you have to have 1 or 2 videos that ideally go hyperviral and qualify you. After that, you have to get enough views on each incremental video that you're actually making money from them. So it's not cash sitting on the ground on these platforms quite yet.

I was going to correct myself. $20 per million is actually low, I think. Maybe that's TikTok-level. I was thinking $20 per mil, which is per thousand, but I think it also depends on the engagement and things like that.

A lot of people are motivated by making viral videos and then using them to sell something, whether it's their time, a course, or whatever. A lot of people finally have the opportunity to grow a big account online, and the dopamine hit of getting tens of thousands of likes and thousands of followers on an account doing AI gorilla vlogs—when they were never able to grow a big social media account before—is motivating a bunch of people too.

These people are all experiencing what it's like to be early adopters who are pioneering a new form of content, and people are going crazy for it. That feels really rewarding and fun.

Yeah, I agree. I had a cheap joke that I was going to throw in there: people who aren't hot enough for Instagram or TikTok go to Twitter.

Anyway, I think this links very closely with the creator economy stuff. I think people were very excited about the creator economy maybe 5 years ago, and then it kind of died-ish. I don't know if you would agree or vehemently object, but maybe this is the return of the creator economy.

There's another way to slice the monetization stuff, just to put my VC hat on a little bit. There are the creators, and then there are the creator-enabler platforms—let's call it Krea, ComfyUI, or whoever—and then there's the direct model layer itself.

Right now, especially with Veo just directly offering a platform, it seems like the model layer is going to get all the money, unless it's an open model, in which case it goes to the model-enabler or 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 the distinction between what we call 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 the core model layer itself, like Veo 3, MiniMax, Kling, and all those folks.

Some of the model providers are better than others at building consumer interfaces. Kling, for example, which is one of the really good Chinese image-to-video models, has a pretty good interface for uploading an image, turning it into a video, and adding sound effects on its platform.

I think Veo 3 is actually a counterexample. It's super hard to figure out where to access Veo 3 within all of the Google products. You have to sign up for the separate product called Flow, which requires a subscription to 1 of 2 very expensive Google plans. Then, from that subscription, you have to make sure you're logged into the correct Google account when you try to access it, because we all have 3 Gmail accounts.

Honestly, what we see is that a ton of creators are just going to the model-enablement layer, whether it's a consumer-facing interface like Krea or more of a developer-facing interface like Fal or Replicate, where you can generate videos on a one-off basis in a pay-as-you-go model. It's easier than trying to navigate the behemoth that is the Google product infrastructure, and you don't have to commit to the $125-a-month Google plan to use the model.

Another example with Flow and Veo is that Veo 2 is actually the default, and you have to navigate a bunch of little hidden buttons to change it to Veo 3. There are YouTube videos with millions of hits that are just about how to find Veo 3 within the Google subscription.

Yeah, you can't do it on mobile, which is crazy given that so many of these videos are being posted on mobile apps.

Maybe Google will release a video-generation mobile app, but I would guess it's going to take a really long time. The website isn't even usable on mobile, so they might fix some of these things.

Even in the Veo 3 example, the API is already available. A lot of the model-enablement companies are making a bunch of money from it, and Google is surely making a ton of money from it too.

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. Right there.

Hedra has its own models?

They do. They're in the talking-avatar category for the model layer. Their model is a talking-avatar model, and they also host a bunch of the image and video models so that you can generate other things on their platform too.

Flora raised a big round recently. Visual Electric—I have heard less about these 2.

Yeah. And if you even follow the stuff Adobe's doing, for a long time Adobe was saying, “We're only having our own models,” and they were the clean models that were only trained on licensed data. Then I think they realized that no one was using those models, either the image ones or the video ones.

Now Adobe Firefly hosts all of the other models. It's crazy.

We did a State of AI Engineering survey, and we asked people what models they were using. Adobe did surprisingly well because everyone who's paying attention thinks about them as, “Oh, they're clean, therefore boring.” But they actually showed up here.

Interesting. They're beating Ideogram and Recraft. Maybe because it's Adobe. I don't know.

I think it depends too. If I think about it, there are definitely things I use Adobe for. For example, I think their Generative Fill within Photoshop, or even within Firefly or Express, is really, really good for inpainting images.

I still use an Adobe model, but I use it for inpainting versus pure generation. I think there's another thing about the depth of workflows.

How do you feel about something like ComfyUI, where it's literally the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia of AI? It's crazy.

Yes. Node graphs—you need that to have complex workflows, but then maybe the next model will destroy them. I love that meme, and I have so much respect for the ComfyUI community because they have truly been in the trenches. 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 thousands—probably millions—of people around the world are using and not paying for but loudly complaining about, is doing the Lord’s work to maintain.

I have never been a deep ComfyUI user because, at my heart, as you can probably tell by the fact that my feed is all brain rot, I’m a true consumer. I actually try not to get too deep into the technical stuff because I want to understand the products and run the really complex local workflows. I want to understand whether this is too hard for an everyday person to do.

I think ComfyUI is really great for people who want a ton of control. For people who have more professional use cases, that’s awesome. For people who just want to make a meme or a fun video to share with their friends or Instagram audience, you probably don’t need ComfyUI. Justine Moore

I would agree that more of the ComfyUI use cases are starting to be eaten away by the core foundation model companies, but especially with things like Veo 3 not offering image-to-video, they’re still definitely lacking a level of control that you can get from a platform like that.

ComfyUI is still awesome for a lot of things, like video style transformation—people who want to turn a photorealistic video into an anime video or something like that. That’s not something you can do on a platform like Veo 3 today.

Yeah. Style transformation, consistency, upscaling, or fixing hands. I don’t know if that’s still a thing people do, or character swapping.

I guess part of this discussion we wanted to have was how we might use us as a case study. I think you’re relatively familiar with us. If we were to start a Latent Space educational channel or sub-brand that was entirely driven by these things, where would we start?

Have you guys seen the brain rot education videos? Let me try to bring one up. Everything is brain rot now. This is the most uncool I’ve ever felt because I clearly don’t scroll TikTok and Instagram, but 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. I found these channels on Instagram—I think this one is called Unlock Learning—that were consistently getting millions of views on these AI celebrity interviews teaching educational concepts.

This is embarrassing. You can see that I like my own tweets, but we’re going to keep moving. You can see that they use a deepfake tool—I don’t know if they use Yapper or something else—to take an image of a celebrity and have them say the words in the celebrity’s voice from the script. 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 take links to YouTube videos or transcripts of the podcast and put them in Gemini 2.5. You could ask for an entertaining, brain-rot-style clip summarizing a particular topic based on your content. Then you play around with it and edit it a little bit until it’s perfect.

Then you have to decide: are you guys the brain rot characters, or are you going to use a celebrity brain rot character to tap into the familiarity we discussed earlier? I think there are pros and cons. Maybe your audience would like seeing you guys better, but if you want to go viral on Instagram and TikTok and reach new people, maybe Sydney Sweeney is a good face for it. I don’t know—just something to think about.

We have an AI host. We’ve used an ElevenLabs voice called Charlie for a while. Incredible. We could give him a body. Right now, he’s just a voice.

You could animate him on Hedra. You could take the audio clip and the image and make him talk. The really interesting part to me is what plays at the top, where it was showing the diagrams. Historically, I think people still put that stuff together themselves. The one I was just showing of Sydney Sweeney is actually made by an education company. I found their website, and they can reuse content they’ve already made.

Yeah, it’s giving brain rot.

Oh, fine. I know. People are doing this. The question is whether you guys want to make the diagrams at the top. There’s also a variety of tools you can find by searching for “AI B-roll generator.” They’ll take your script or audio track, extract the keywords, and either search the internet to pull together B-roll and images for you or generate entirely new images or videos, which could potentially be an interesting way to pull it together.

The other recommendation we would have for you guys to go viral with AI video stuff is that there’s this whole ecosystem—you’ve probably seen their content—but there are people called clippers who take existing long-form videos, like podcast interviews or even TV shows, extract the most interesting and viral clips, and post them on their own platforms as 1-minute videos.

There are products like OpusClip right now where, if you upload a new YouTube video to your channel, you can link your channel to OpusClip and it will automatically review it, clip the best parts, and publish those clips for you across Twitter, Instagram, or other platforms. Can you guys see it?

It predicts the virality score, which I find crazy. This runs all the time, and it’s linked to the a16z YouTube. Oh, you guys are just using it for your channel. Holy crap.

For example, with this one, you can go into the video, see what they picked, and then edit it. You can say, “Hey, I want to remove the caption on this word,” or, “I want to cut this word from the video completely,” or, “I want to extend the clip and make it start longer or shorter.”

You can remove curse words, remove filler words, remove stutters, or change the subtitles so they look more brain rot. Then you can generate the social post and download it. You can also set this up on OpusClip so that it automatically publishes the short-form clips as soon as you publish the long-form video, and it will write the tweets or TikTok captions for you.

Yeah. You guys can become your own fanboy clippers and make money off the long-form show itself and the short-form viral clips.

Yeah. There are all sorts of clipping agents. It’s actually a ComfyUI-type interface, which is really cool. This is basically what the clipping agent looks like: it watches for any new YouTube video uploaded to the a16z channel, automatically finds interesting clips between 30 seconds and 140 seconds in length, and uses criteria like topics that would be interesting to the tech audience.

It adds subtitles, and you can then add more actions. For example, you can say, “Convert all of the 16:9 clips 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 recently discovered it and thought, “This is the dream.”

It is the dream. I built a small podcaster tool for us that automates a lot of things, and it picks the clips, but it doesn’t do the hard part, which is figuring out how to go from picking the timestamps to actually getting a lot of views on YouTube. We’ll try it out.

I think there’s an art to picking the clips because they’re probably optimized for brain rot, and we’re a technical podcast. They wouldn’t pick the same clips that we would pick.

This is the interesting thing, too. If you guys want to be across multiple platforms, maybe you have an agent set up that purposely generates different clips for different audiences. Maybe you have it clip educational, informative, technical stuff for YouTube, and then experiment with what would happen if you gave it a prompt to pick brain rot, funny, controversial stuff for young people, turn it into a TikTok aspect ratio, and post it. What would happen to a TikTok account?

Yeah. I think it’s worth experimenting with a bunch of those.

Yeah. My hypothesis is that usually repurposed content doesn’t do as well as native content.

That’s the general rule. In other words, we recorded this as a long-form podcast. If you clip it out, sure, you might get a little more juice out of it, but it’s never going to go great because it was never made for short form. We’ve actually explored, behind the scenes, what would happen if we changed the way we recorded podcasts and optimized only for clips.

I used to agree with you, but have you seen the Vitrupo account?

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

He has clips that go viral all the time. I also used to think that clips would never do well, but I feel like, especially in the X algorithm right now, it’s a clipping era. For some reason, video is doing super well in the algorithm, and especially if it’s a video of a character people know, like Sam Altman, Garry Tan, or whoever, you can get a crazy amount of juice out of these clips.

I think part of it is also that, as a brand, we’re seriously considering doing this, 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, “Sam Altman says the world’s going to end in 2 years,” because no, he didn’t say that. But you could misconstrue something he said to say that. We have this struggle, 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 fighting; we’re just twins. We have back-and-forth about things, but we will help each other write tweets sometimes. She wrote a tweet intro to me that just sounded like one of those spammy, “AI is blowing up. Everything has changed” accounts, and I had to be like, “Olivia, this is not us. We need to stay the course.”

It’s the YouTube thumbnail economy now.

For content, right?

Right.

I mean, we could create a sub-brand that’s affiliated but not us, and we could just throw that on there. I think there are some people who are best served by that. They don’t have the ick, as I call it, or they don’t have the pride or taste or whatever you call it. But if you want your content to spread to the widest number of people, you have to adapt it to the way they like to receive information, whether or not they know it.

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

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

Anything else in terms of creative trends? We’ve talked a lot about video.

I was going to bring up prompt theory. Maybe this is 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. Could you explain what prompt theory is?

Okay, so it sort of evolved. At first, it started when people realized they could make these Veo 3 characters talk in videos. It started with, 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 an existential crisis for AI characters.

It was like that video that went viral of the NotebookLM hosts back last September realizing that they could be shut down and weren’t real. One of them 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 Veo 3 characters, and it’s a lot more striking because they look so real. The evolution of prompt theory more recently—and I think I tweeted a video about this; I don’t know if I can pull it up or send it to you guys—is that people are now asking, “What if we’re actually prompted? What if real humans are the AI characters in someone else’s universe? Would we know it? Are we all controlled by prompts?”

One of the big trends for Veo 3 on TikTok right now is AI clapbacks. Often, the format is a young person and an old person. The young person is like, “My hair looks amazing,” and the old person is like, “That’s not natural hair,” or whatever. But it started evolving into, “Well, your hair is just prompted. You didn’t do anything to get that good hair.” Then the young person will be like, “Well, you’re on your way to the cemetery.” It quickly devolves into chaos.

Are the people in this situation real?

No, they’re both generated.

Okay, okay.

Yes, yes. But you’re seeing all of these brain-rot accounts of teenagers with anime profile pictures who live in the Midwest, whom you would never expect to be thinking about the meta-layer of AI and prompt theory, including the concept of prompt theory in their AI clapback videos. So it’s gotten very, very broad.

I think about that a ton because sites like Reddit have existed like that for a while. You have no context on the other person; it’s an anonymous username. Almost no one is doxxed on Reddit. So on Reddit, everyone could be bots—what do you know?

Now that LLMs are getting so good at sounding natural, pretending they have interests, and pretending they have lives in which things are going on, I spend so much time thinking: Would it actually be sad if I were talking with a ton of LLMs on Reddit? Or if there were just a ton of people who were always available to talk about my interests and had interesting things to say? Is that the good side of the world? I don’t know.

You made your own Froyo brand, right? You just brainstormed for prompting?

Yeah, prompting. You can post it; you can create art. I was going to say it’s exactly that—or Brett Climo.

Brett Climo is another great one. Have you guys followed Brett Climo?

No. What is that?

So, Brett Climo—it was early AI. Then they started creating videos and stuff like that of him, and he got super popular. I tweeted one of the early AI videos of Brett Climo, and people loved it. All right, here is Brett Climo.

Oh, it’s a possum. Isn’t that Ian McKellen, but the AI version?

A lot of people liked this, and then a bunch of people started commenting that they wanted Brett Climo sweatshirts. I actually made Brett Climo sweatshirts. We took a Brett Climo design, removed the background, overlaid it on a sweatshirt, had a screen-printing company make them, and probably ordered around 30. We distributed them to friends and family and other people in the AI video community. But the Brett Climo sweatshirts could have been a real sweatshirt brand.

There they are. Wait, can you zoom in on them, Olivia?

Yeah. So that’s us, and that’s Anish on our consumer team wearing our Brett Climo sweatshirt.

Well, AI furniture—I don’t know if you guys have seen it, especially on Facebook. AI furniture totally blows up. It’s like a couch, but it’s shaped like a giant cat, and the eyes glow when you sit on it, or things like that. These AI furniture and AI home-design accounts are huge.

I actually saw one example of someone who made this gorilla chair that then actually got manufactured, and you can buy it.

There are a lot of differences between platforms in the type of content that’s going viral and the types of people who are making it. My biggest piece of advice is to set up a separate account on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and X, take a look at what people are posting there, and follow a bunch of AI accounts. Then the feed will give you more.

There’s almost this content-arbitrage thing that happens right now, where something will go viral on one platform and then there’s a 1- or 2-day window to be the person to post it on the next platform. It’s fascinating to watch what blows up where, which I think is reflective of who’s spending their time on which platforms.

The AI ASMR stuff on TikTok was huge and then slowly made its way elsewhere. I think the animals diving were huge on Threads and all the Facebook products first, maybe because of the age demographic of those users, and then slowly made their way to X and other places. It’s just amazing to watch. 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 of how people are professionally using AI video, there’s this guy called PJ Ace on Twitter. He had the viral Kling ad that aired during the NBA Finals.

He's done a bunch of really cool commercial work, whether it's for individual musicians or brands. And he shows how a true professional would use AI to make stuff. He also shares his workflows, which is great.

True professional stuff.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, he's a real—he has decades of experience in film production. I think he made his own TV show before this, non-AI. He knows what he's doing.

To me, the biggest thing in my mind is: are people going to be bottlenecked by how many sweatshirts they can produce, basically, to make money? It feels like it's much easier to make the content and get the audience than actually get good merch. So, I'm curious to see if we get an OpusClip thing that generates the clip. You have something that just generates merch based on the latest videos, with quotes and images of it.

Yeah. I'm curious to see where that goes. That would be so cool. I love that, actually. Someone should totally do that.

Yeah, request for a startup.

Yeah. Yeah. If anybody's listening, please go build it for us.

Yeah. Thanks for your time. This was great. And we'll keep following the brain rot closely on social media.

We will too. And thanks for having us. We're looking forward to seeing what content you guys make.

Thank you all. Thanks, guys. Awesome. Thanks, guys.