While most tech CEOs take a “build it, and they will come” mentality to building their products, Stability AI CEO Prem Akkaraju said he doesn’t develop any applications or AI models without the experts in the field.
“I find it incomprehensible creating creator tools without creators,” Akkaraju said Tuesday at TheWrap’s inaugural AI Creator Day, a part of our annual Grill business conference.
It’s that approach that Akkaraju believes gives Stability AI, best known for its Stable Diffusion and Stable Image suite of tools that let individuals or businesses create and edit photorealistic images from text prompts, breach the media world.
Akkaraju, who previously served as CEO of Weta Digital, boasted that in a year’s time, he believes Stability AI’s audio platform will be essential to making music and audio for games, creator content, films.
His comments come as AI increasingly embeds itself into the entertainment world, with studios and some in Hollywood quietly embracing the technology even as there remains a stigma attached to it. Creators, in particular, have increasingly used these tools to more efficiently produce content. But they also must walk a fine line since many of their fans have shown heavy resistance to the technology, and some, like science YouTuber Hank Green, have suffered from an AI backlash.
Stability AI has framed itself as an AI startup with direct connections to the media industry it’s trying to transform. The startup boasts several backers in the entertainment industry, particularly on the music side, with Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group strategic partners and investors participating in a recent funding round.
On the film side, it counts director James Cameron as a board member, and works with another partner
Akkaraju said Stability AI leans on Cameron and those relationships when building tools.
He made the point that the models with the highest return on investment are coding tools, and it’s because they’re built by the people who know what good coding and outputs look like, and believes it can translate to other mediums with the right experts.
To the creators in the audience, Akkaraju hailed AI as the ability to “decrease the two evils in entertainment, time and money.
“If you had an opportunity to decrease time and money and increase your output and story time, I say go for it,” he said.
