$900M Fuels Luma AI's Video Visionary Push

0:00Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Luma AI has just raised$900 million in a funding round led by the Saudi AI firm Humane. In addition to that Luma has released a new AI model that lets users generate a new AI model. screenshots, spreadsheets, endless back and forth. Compliance busy work kills momentum. That's why this episode is brought to you by Delve. Delve uses AI agents to automate compliance end-to-end. They collect evidence, fill out security questionnaires, and they customize controls to your actual business so you can get compliance in days, not months. You also get a one-on-one Slack support and you get that from a real security expert who responds very quickly.

0:54Over a thousand fast-growing companies trust Delve to close deals faster and stay compliant as they scale. If you're interested, book a demo at Delve.com. I'll leave a link in the show notes. All right, let's get into what's going on with Luma. So recently, they raised$900 million at the end of November. This was led by the Saudi AI firm Humane. And there's something interesting going on here because the two companies beyond just getting this investment, they're also partnering to build a two gigawatt AI super cluster, which they're calling Project Halo, and they're building that in Saudi Arabia.

1:27So you can imagine there's a lot of kind of funds and work and partnerships happening inside of Saudi Arabia, which I think is smart on their part. With all of this, Luma AI is now valued at over$4 billion, which is an incredible valuation. So they kind of had this big funding round, and along with this big funding round, they rolled out a brand new feature, which is really cool, which essentially is letting users generate a video from a start frame and an end frame. And what that looks like is you essentially can give it, you know, one picture, which would be the end frame of one particular clip, and you give it another clip, and you would, it basically makes a video that merges those two clips together.

2:07And so what this is really powerful for, I've been watching a whole bunch of tutorials on YouTube, is for transitions. One guy in particular showed a really cool tutorial where he was making kind of like a travel vlog. Now, I'll give like this YouTuber's kind of examples as examples, but imagine this is essentially replacing VFX. This is a massive industry in Hollywood and film creation. And this model is incredible. So I'll give you some of the incredible ones, but I just want to give you from like a practical idea so you understand what it does. there's one YouTuber, he's like up in a hotel room, and he's like points out the window.

2:39And he's like, let's go like take a tour of the city down below. And then all of a sudden, the camera like just zooms out the window, drops down to street level zooms forward. And all of a sudden, he walks on the frame from the side and starts like talking. And so anyways, it just felt like this, like, you know,$50 ,000 hammer shot where you would have to have like either a really fancy drone maneuver or some really crazy VFX or this like incredible thing. And all of a sudden, he's like, great, let's now go chat about what's happening at that building over there. And the whole camera just zooms all the way over to that building.

3:08And then he's standing up in it. And he starts talking. All of a sudden, he points in another direction, the camera starts spinning around him and does a 360 and then kind of zooms off down the street that he's going to give you a tour of. Okay, the reason why this was so incredible to me, and maybe some people listening are like, okay, wow, that just sounds like what you'd see on like a normal TV show or movie. These are all VFX and special effects that are usually only reserved for big budgets and big Hollywood films and sets and cameras or just a ton of effort. All of this can be done in your, you know, in your computer, on your computer, in your office.

3:42They don't, you don't need a big budget. Anyone can do them. And they look incredibly professional. And they're really exciting. So one thing that Luma was showing off when they were kind of showing off the capabilities that they had with all of these effects, they were showing how you can have, you know, one person, let's say you're riding a horse or pretending to ride a horse down the, down the street, you can use their, um, use their tool to literally transform you in that motion in that clip into you actually on a horse. So like you can act something out and it can turn into a real film, which it like, as you can imagine, it's not just like your AI generating, you know, like a whole film.

4:18You could still have like actors and people act it out and you have those same people, those same actors. You just got all the VFX. Like it is really cool. The clip they showed was just a random guy, like kind of like putting to gallop a horse down the road and I don't know, California near some random street and all of a sudden he's like in the wild west on a horse it's the same person different costume different setting it's amazing another one that was really interesting for me was in e-commerce in the e-commerce space um you can have it replace products and so like yes we could do this with chai gpt image generation but to be able to do this with video is really impressive so they'll have it where like one person is holding a random can of you know like a protein powder and they just had instantly switched to like five different brands of protein pattern.

4:56The reason why I think this is cool is because if you, you know, need to create an ad for some sort of product, and maybe you don't have the physical product with you right there, you can use an image of what the product would look like, then you can kind of act out the whole ad holding something different and have it swap it in. So I think this is really cool. Another thing that you can do is to restyle things. So they had a sample where it was like these two people just like, play fighting with swords. And then they had it turn it into, you know, a whole movie where it's those same two people dress up as knights with armor and a castle with real swords actually fighting.

5:30You can do a lot of other really cool things where you take a picture of a specific person and you have it change them into a completely different character. You can, like I mentioned with the start and end frame, so just to give you some context on how that actually works, they have one where it's like a picture of an ice hand and a picture of one where it's a fire hand and they just say start with the ice hand, end with the fire hand and And it's like this whole animation where the hand that's ice all of a sudden lights on fire and turns into like this fiery fist. So what's really cool is it builds all the pieces between the two clips.

6:02And so like the example I was mentioning where there was a guy talking in like the apartment building and then all of a sudden it zooms in and he's on the street. He just recorded two videos, one of him talking in the apartment building, one of them talking on the street, and he had it fill in the clip. And also you can explain what you want it to do, right? So it's like zoom out this window, zoom down to street level, keep a smooth motion. Like you're still giving it text and explain what it's going to do, but it will fill in all of those pieces and do exactly what you need. And it looks absolutely amazing.

6:28They had another one that was just giving me ideas where it was like a video clip of like a football player walking into a stadium, but it's just an empty stadium. And then they, you know, have the AI go and it's the exact same clip, exact same person, exact same. Everything's the same except the stadium's now full of cheering fans. Right. And so you can imagine for commercials, you can imagine for movies, you can imagine for products. This is incredible where like you can you can get a rough draft of exactly what you want and you can have it go make it so much better. They also had another one where it was like a girl pretending to cry and then they made it like so she actually had tears coming down her eyes, which is really interesting.

7:06They also have it where you can you can completely change someone's persona. So you can I could be the actor in a movie and I could do every like all the acting that I want. and then we just upload a picture of a different person and all of a sudden I become that person, which is kind of cool if you think about, you know, one person could technically go make an entire movie. They could act the roles of all the different people and just have the AI change them into all of the different roles. And I think that my prediction is that we will see a whole bunch of really cool indie films which are just one person doing all of the roles in the whole film.

7:41Of course, they had a bunch of funny ones, like a girl running up and, you know, pretending to punch the, you know, punch the air. And then they turned it into her being the Hulk and she was smashing through a pillar. They had a car commercial concept that was kind of cool where it was a car, you know, driving at nighttime. And then all of a sudden it's driving through the snow and it's driving through the fall and the leaves and through a sunset. And what's interesting is it's all one clip, like, so one very cohesive clip and it just switches through all the scenes. This is, you know, something we've all seen in like car commercials before.

8:10and this you know in the past would have required them to go to all of these different places line the car up perfectly on the camera have a car next to the car driving like i have a friend that shoots these kind of productions and it's pretty intense they have this like camera rigged up with all of this insane equipment on it there's people in the car that are manning the equipment there's people in the car that are driving the car there's someone in the other car that's driving the car there's so many pieces to this and now it can all be um you know done with ai and it can it can shoot all of this stuff, which I think is really, really cool, really exciting.

8:39Of course, you can turn a real person into a cartoon. They have it where, you know, there's a guy walking through the desert and they change him walking through the snow. They have it where there's a guy just like laying on a on a box with a cape pretending to fly through the air. It looks super cheesy. And then all of a sudden they turn into he's actually Superman actually flying through the air and make it look really realistic. A person in a grocery store, they all of a sudden turn her into Shrek. You're flying through the air and all of a sudden there's like buildings rising around you. So there's all of these really exciting, I think, use cases that I'm really excited for.

9:11I think we're going to start officially, my prediction for 2026 is we're going to start seeing single person produced movies. We're going to be able to see incredible indie films come out and a lot of people are going to become their own movie producer, which I'm really excited about. Here's a quote from Emmett Jane, who's a co-founder and CEO of Luma Labs.

9:57He said, called Dream Machine, and they're hoping to compete with companies like Runway and Kling, who have some of these capabilities, which have been out for a while. So I'm excited to see what happens. They've obviously received a ton of money. They have investors like A16Z from the past, Amplify, Matrix Partners. And of course, this latest round is led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. Well, I guess it's their public investment fund-owned company, which is called Humane. So Saudi Arabia gives the money to Humane, and Humane makes the investments. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today.

10:30If you learned anything new, make sure to leave a rating and review on the show. And as I mentioned, make sure to go check out the sponsor of today's shows, Delve.com to help with all your compliance needs.