Is Hollywood poised to embrace AI image generation?

0:00Mike Butcher:Hello and welcome to Path Founders, the new tech media brand for entrepreneurs, investors and operators with me, Mike Butcher. For the last few years, AI has largely been a bit of a mess. One AI model to understand language, another to generate images, another to handle video. And some platforms are stitching them together, such as OpenAI. Some are specializing. So what's the latest? Well, in fact, US company Luma, an artificial intelligence startup, has launched UniOne, which it calls a unified intelligence model. The idea, says the company, is not to be just another image generator. But here to chat about what's actually happening is Jason Day, head of EMEA for Luma.

0:48Mike Butcher:Jason, thanks very much for joining us on Path Founders. Our pleasure, Mike. Thank you very much. Big fan of what you do. Thanks. Well, UniOne, so you're calling it a unified intelligence model. Some people might say it's multimodal. So what's actually going on? What's the story? So UniOne is the first model that Luma's built based on Unified Intelligence Architecture. And what that means is we're unifying both understanding and generation in a single system. We can think about what the outputs are, and those outputs are genuinely representative for the real world. So it enables our agentic solution, Luma Agents, that we launched just two and a half weeks ago to be genuinely intelligent.

1:35And it's a real leap forward in how anyone that is engaging with models, be it for creative purposes, for business planning purposes, it's a real leap forward in the output that they are getting. What kind of market are you going for with this? So the fascinating thing is that really the technology can be applied in many instances. And there's lots of examples every week where there's instances that we haven't even thought about that we're going, hey, that's a great use case. But the initial focus for me in EMEA, at least, is one, film and entertainment. Two is advertising agencies. We've got partnerships already established with Publicis, with Service Plan and others of midsize and boutique size.

2:22We've got a really amazing announcement coming very, very soon about a boutique agency that's doing transformative work using our technology. And then the third bucket is directly with companies and directly with brands who we believe can really benefit from our technology, both for marketing purposes, but also for general business purposes, be it in-house communication, be it really understanding lengthy documents, such as financial statements or legal documents and being able to present that intuitively very, very quickly.

2:54Mike Butcher:Okay, perhaps we can unpack the technology a little bit and maybe straddle the worlds of engineering and business because there's some stuff in your announcements about how you're moving away from diffusion to auto-regressive. Do you want to sort of unpack that a little bit for us and sort of see if you can manage to bridge the two worlds of what you're doing technically and what that actually means for the business? Yeah, so UniOne is a decoder-only autoregressive transformer, which is a lot of sort of, you know, quite technical words. And we've got some great engineers that are developing fantastic technology.

3:35And what that actually means is text and images are represented in a single interleave sequence. So they act as both inputs and outputs. So practically it means that UniOne can imagine, it can plan, it can iterate, it can execute across both digital and physical modalities jointly. So we don't have this sort of separation of different models that are chained together in a very brittle and unscalable way anymore. It's all happening in one place. And that's the real leap forward. And we believe that having unified intelligence, this is the first step in ensuring that AI is meaningfully delivering productivity gains that it has promised.

4:22That AI is being leveraged by professionals and people who aren't professionals, be it the creative community or consumers at large, to realize its potential in the day-to-day life. So we're removing the separation of different models and we're removing this swivel chair mentality that's required of using multiple models to get the right outcome by putting it all into one place.

4:45Mike Butcher:So do you expect this to have impact in advertising and creative and Hollywood spaces in the way that means that they still retain their capability to be creative with imagery, the creative, obviously. but it's effectively like a new arrow in their quiver. I think it's going to absolutely transform those three industries you just mentioned. So when I think about the advertising agencies and creatives, the people who love our technology the most is not the finance director, it's chief creative officers, it's ECDs, it's CDs. And that gives us a lot of optimism for a few reasons. One, our technology is not the enemy of creativity.

5:35It's an enabler of creativity. It enables people to take a grain of imagination and blow it up into a whole campaign or into a whole mood board, into a whole concept, literally in minutes. You can take that to your customer, you can be operating in real time, you can be really moving at the speed of culture in a way that hasn't been achievable before. If we think about brands and direct companies, yes, we can collapse the marketing workflow and the creative workflow, but by collapsing that, we can re-engineer business workflows, be it supply chain, be it go-to-market strategies. We're working with some amazing companies, blue chip companies, Fortune 500 companies, where our technology, by enabling the collapsing of one workflow, is actually meaning that they're looking at the entire business.

6:27And then when we're thinking about Hollywood and entertainment, it is only a matter of time until long form documentaries or even Hollywood cinematic films are going to be fully leveraging AI. There's a lot of it going on behind the curtain at the moment, but it's going to become more prominent and it's going to enable incredible output. And what we're seeing is that this isn't leading to an erosion of jobs. Actually, it's leading to a retooling and re-enablement of how people interact with technology. We've got one customer where they've generated 600 jobs in an industry that was declining by leveraging our technology.

7:13We've got another customer that we are working hand in hand to train and enable over a thousand of their people, which represents 25 % of their business in not just AI and agents, but also in how models work and how they can embrace our technology to really advance their business and advance, frankly, the careers of their workforce. So I think we're about to enter an era of the next creative sort of renaissance. And I think it's tremendously exciting. And at Looma, at least, we want to be working hand in hand with customers to make sure that they're really embracing and able to benefit from that creative finance.

7:53Mike Butcher:I mean, it does sound very cool and a bit of a Shangri-La for some of these agencies. But I noticed that in some of the data that's coming out, you're saying that, say, a$15 million year-long campaign could be compressed into 40 hours for$20 ,000. So what actually ends up disappearing in that process? Is it staffing agencies, production teams or what? I think that example, and that's based on a proof of concept that we actually did for a FTSE 100 company. And that example means that we can be delivering much more content at a much more personalized level at the cost of computes, effectively, with strategic insight and consulting on top.

8:42we don't we don't see a world where luma at least is holding the kind of brand guidelines and the creative fiber and the brand fiber we are partnering very very closely with studios be they hollywood studios film studios production studios uh agencies we we want to partner with the whole ecosystem to ensure that the whole creative ecosystem to ensure that people are upskilled and enabled. So what I see is that I see a world where we can do a lot more content, which is much more relevant to the end customer, and it can be delivered with much more effectiveness, not necessarily focusing just on efficiency.

9:25And Mike, I take you back to the people who love our technology the most. If you'd asked me sort of six months ago, I would have thought I'd be having a lot more conversations with finance directors because there's the obvious There's cost savings there. But actually, it's creatives and it's people who are really looking to advance their craft and who love their craft, who are the biggest adopters of our technology. And that's really exciting. That's really exciting. Yes.

9:51Mike Butcher:And I noticed you're actually at an advertising conference today as we speak. So it's quite interesting that you're doing that. um but um the other another aspect is this um this world model aspect because you said the architecture extends naturally to video audio and potentially world simulation does this sort of put you in the world model or physical ai space as well yeah so the background of the company is that um our mission is to really work on multimodal artificial general intelligence that works in the physical world. So the mission of the company with even with a new model launch is unchanged and when you break that down where we really started is around thinking about video and if you can really understand video and if you have a video model that really works and can reason about the world you can work back and you come back into audio, you come back into image, you come back into text.

10:49So I'm very lucky that the founding engineers of this company and our CEO, Amit Jain, who's the founder and CEO, an absolute visionary. He started thinking about these things before multimodality was a term that we were using, or world models was a term that we're using. And what unified intelligence means is that we can take the multimodal inputs, but our model can reason and understand the outputs. And when you bring those two things together what you get is you're not just able to have content for advertising or for infouse teams or for film you're not you're just able to have content that looks right in the physical world but also you can start thinking about other applications so how for example can we be helping a construction company with their with their very complex very long very very high value bid documents how can we be helping uh nasa look at the engines that they're building and identify faults or identify opportunities to optimize the engine that they're building to send people to the moon or send people to mars so it's it's much the mission it doesn't stop just because we've launched a model we're continuously looking at how we can deploy our technology not just around around creative output and the creative industries, which is where we're initially focusing, but also how we can apply it across many, many use cases.

12:14And that's really, really exciting to be a part of.

12:17Mike Butcher:Right. Well, you've launched Uni1, and it's clearly going to be a reasonably powerful application and model, especially for the tasks you've outlined. But also, in the rearview mirror, You've got Google, you've got Gemini, you've got OpenAI, you've got potentially Meta, or some people are a little bit thinking whether or not Meta really is in the race anymore. But do you think that, as I said, that the big guns are going to be taking an interest in being able to best you on some of this stuff? Or are you confident in your sort of inch wide, mile deep verticalization of the business model and going after this kind of creative sector?

13:04Undoubtedly, people, there's going to be competition. we're very proud of what we've achieved and in independent evaluations we we score on some cases better than some of the competitors you referenced but neck and neck on average and a company of our size and of our of our sort of history we are very very proud of what we've achieved and it's just the beginning but competition is healthy competition means that We all raise our game. And I think that's great for us. It's great for some of the companies that you mentioned. And it's great for people and customers who are going to be the recipients of all of our AI tools and products and models, because it means that we're all going to be improving.

13:50So competition is good.

13:52Mike Butcher:Right. Well, Jason, I'm not nominating you for politician of the year. That's a very diplomatic answer. But I appreciate you taking your time out today. from obviously a busy conference to talk to Path founders. So that was Jason Day, head of EMEA for Luma. Thanks very much for joining us.