After Seeing OpenAI’s Sora, Tyler Perry Cancelled Building an $800m Studio

0:01Today on the AI Breakdown, we're looking at Tyler Perry cancelling plans for an$800 million studio expansion after he saw Sora. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to Breakdown.network for more information about our YouTube, our Discord, and our newsletter.

0:24Hey, hello friends. Quick note before we dive in. Because of a slightly weird schedule today, I'm doing an extended brief episode instead of the full brief plus main. Apologies for that, but there is some really interesting stuff going on, most notably this Tyler Perry story which we get into right away. However, before we dive into that, I do want to mention one more time that we've just opened up registration for the March version of the AI Education Beta. We're trying to create the single best resource for learning AI in a really practical, hands-on way. Instead of hours-long courses, we're producing tutorial videos that take 4, 5, 6, 7 minutes, and then comprehensive step-by-step instructions that follow to actually get you using these tools that you're learning about.

1:04We've got more than 100 of these lessons available so far, and starting in March, we're actually moving to a dedicated platform where you have access to all of those. You can save the ones you want to watch in the future, even share the results from your own experiments. If you're interested in that, go to bit.ly slash AI beta. That's bit.ly slash AI beta. Registration closes on Monday. Hope to see you. Welcome back to the AI Breakdown Brief, all the AI headline news you need in around five minutes. Today will be a slightly longer extended brief. We start with a very interesting story from the world of Hollywood and entertainment.

1:38Tyler Perry, who is of course one of the most successful filmmakers today, had been planning on an$800 million studio expansion in his home studio in Atlanta. The project would have added 12 sound stages on a 330-acre property, but now four years of planning is on hold after he saw Sora. Perry told The Hollywood Reporter, being told that it can do all of these things is one thing, but actually seeing the capabilities, it was mind-blowing. What's interesting about this interview with The Hollywood Reporter is that Perry is really living in both the good and the bad possibilities of AI. Let's check out a few of the quotes.

2:11The Hollywood Reporter asks, After seeing Sora, what are your current feelings about how fast AI technology is moving and how it might affect entertainment in the near term? He said, I've been watching AI very closely and watching the advancements very closely. I was in the middle of and have been planning for the last four years about an$800 million expansion at the studio. All of that is currently and indefinitely on hold because of Sora and what I'm seeing. I had gotten word over the last year or so that this was coming, but I had no idea until I saw recently the demonstrations of it, what it's able to do.

2:39It's shocking to me. When HR asked what was so surprising to him, he said, I no longer would have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it's text. If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it's text. And this AI can generate it like nothing. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don't have to build a set in the mountains. I don't have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in the office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me. Now, if on the one hand, that creates new opportunities, Perry is also worried about the consequences.

3:04He said, It makes me worry so much about all the people in the business. I immediately started thinking about everyone in the industry who would be affected by this, including actors and grip and electric and transportation and sound and editors. I'm thinking it will touch every corner of our industry. And yet, this doesn't mean that Perry thinks we shouldn't use AI. For example, he said, I just used AI in two films that are going to be announced soon. That kept me out of makeup for hours. In post and on set, I was able to use this AI technology to avoid ever having to sit through hours of aging makeup.

3:29Now, one thing Perry thinks is that there needs to be a whole industry response. He said, It can't be one union fighting every contract every two or three years. I think it has to be everybody, all involved in how do we protect the future of our industry because it's changing rapidly right before our eyes. To Brass Tax, the HR asked, As a studio owner, are you feeling any pressure to use AI? He said, No, I'm absolutely not feeling any pressure to use it, but I'm definitely looking at the advantages and what it brings to the table. However, I can focus on the bottom line of my studio continuing to do extremely well and avoid the conversation, or we can jump in and have the conversation head on to make sure that we're protecting all the people that are coming up.

4:02So I've got two sides here to this thing. For me, I'm looking at my business in the bottom line, but I'm also very concerned about all the people that I have trained and brought up in this industry. Ultimately, he says, I hope that as people are embracing this technology and as companies are moving to reduce costs and save the bottom line, that there'll be some sort of thought and some sort of compassion for humanity and the people that have worked in this industry and built careers and lives, that there's some sort of thought for them. And I think the only way to move forward in this is to galvanize it as one voice, not only in Hollywood and in this industry, but also in Congress.

4:29Part of the reason that I thought it was worth sharing more of this interview, rather than less, is that it's one of the first times that we've seen someone, particularly in the entertainment industry, which has been particularly antagonistic towards AI, really be able to express both sides of the equation. Perry is absolutely right that there is opportunity and challenge, and change is coming fairly inevitably. He can see it as a studio owner who's thinking about the cost opportunity and frankly, probably the creative opportunities that it opens up. But he can also see it from the perspective of all the employees that he's worked so long with.

4:56I think that if we have more conversations that can start from this place of a nuanced, complex perspective, the more likely to get this right we actually are. It's certainly on the minds of Hollywood. There was another interview with Natalie Portman shared on Fox News where she was asked if she felt AI was a threat to her livelihood. She said, I don't know about threat because it just feels like it's another form that's going to exist, which is always interesting for art, and who knows where it will take us. But sure, there's a good chance I won't have a job soon. A quick message before we get back to the episode today.

5:25At this point, you guys know that Notion is one of the major tools that I use day in and day out across the Breakdown Network, the AI Education Beta Project. Basically, anything that I'm doing in any sort of professional or entrepreneurial endeavor is going to be anchored by Notion. Now, you also know that one of the big themes that I keep talking about for 2024 when it comes to artificial intelligence is the integration of AI into our workflows. I think in many ways, it's not just about which third-party AI tool is best for any given use case, but how they actually fit into what we're doing in ways that are actually time-saving.

5:58And that's why I love that Notion now has AI so deeply integrated across its entire suite of tools, which means that it's everywhere in your entire workspace. Now, for those of you who don't know, Notion combines your notes, documents, and projects into one space that is simple and beautifully designed. It's your one place to connect teams, tools, and knowledge, so you can do your most meaningful work. Unlike other solutions, it doesn't have you bouncing between six different apps. It is seamlessly integrated, infinitely flexible, and incredibly easy to use. Now, with the new, fully integrated Notion AI, you can work faster, write better, think bigger, and take care of tons of tasks that might normally take you minutes or hours in just seconds.

6:35One of my favorite use cases is to use Notion for brainstorming. So, for example, what would a great launch strategy be for some project? Use Notion AI to help you think through all of the different dimensions of how you could tell that story. Now, the proof is in the pudding, and Notion is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies. And most importantly, probably for you guys, the teams that do use Notion, send less email, cancel more meetings, save time searching for work, and reduce spending on tools. Right now, you can try Notion for free when you go to notion.com slash AI breakdown.

7:19Now, of course, Sora came from OpenAI, the same company that created ChatGPT. And moving on to some feature announcements from OpenAI, the GPT store has gotten some expanded features. Yesterday, they announced that you could now rate GPTs on a 1-5 star scale, as well as provide feedback privately for the builder. This is honestly a pretty remarkable feature, given that in most cases, rating systems don't give people the ability to leave private feedback. You can do this in some places like Airbnb, but as a podcast host, for example, if someone wants to say something to me, they're pretty much doing it in public through a review, which can, as you imagine, be quite positive or quite negative.

7:57So I think this is a really cool feature and I'm glad to see OpenAI implement it. The GPT's About section is now expanded as well. It has a social profile for the builders, those ratings, categories, the number of conversations, and other GPTs by the builder. One subtle dimension that this is adding is a little bit of a social feel to this. We haven't really gotten any statistics around how much GPTs are being used, but I know for myself at least, if there's any sort of engagement I have with ChatGPT that's in any way regular, or that I need my team members to be able to do, I'm building a GPT for it to see if it helps.

8:27Now, another new product announcement comes from Stability AI, who has just announced their latest Stable Diffusion 3 model. The earlier reports are really good. It's being rolled out slowly, so I haven't had a personal chance to play with it yet. But Decrypt, for example, writes, Stable Diffusion 3 is here, and the AI image generator blows away MidJourney Dolly 3 and Google ImageFX. They write that the headline improvements delivered with SD3 are better text generation, strong prompt adherence, and resistance to prompt leaking. Said MattVidPro, an AI YouTuber, This AI image generator is the best we've ever seen in terms of prompt understanding and text generation.

8:59It is leaps above the rest, and it's truly mind-blowing. This seems to be the theme across all of the reviews that I saw, that Stable Diffusion 3 is better at text, and it's better at listening to instructions. Chase Lean, who does a ton of testing of these tools on Twitter, really emphasized this in a post as well. What's more, Ahmad, the CEO of Stability AI, suggested that there is even more exciting stuff coming. On January 27th, he tweeted, Trying one of the experimental Stability AI-based models fresh from baking with some friends feels like another Stable Diffusion moment, to be honest. The text message he shared from a friend reads, The leap here is still effing with me, to be honest.

9:31You can spend years preparing yourself for it, but when it arrives, it hits like a train. I'm thrilled, although a little concerned for how ill-prepared people are. Ahmad added yesterday, not release this yet, still cooking. It's really fun. Sounds like from that, we are not done yet with big product announcements. Now, speaking of image generation, unfortunately, the big story this week has not been Stable Diffusion 3 and its increased capacities, but Gemini and the backlash around historical inaccuracy when it refused to create images that didn't express diversity, even if there was no biodiversity as we know it in the actual historical context.

10:03As I shared in an episode yesterday, part of the reason that this has exploded so much is that it's triggering not only American culture warriors, but also some much more deep-seated questions about the future of who owns history when it comes to AI. But in any case, yesterday, Elon absolutely went off as the loudest voice in the conversation. He shared memes like a divide in the road between maximum truth-seeking AI, which had a logo of XAI and Grok, versus what he labeled woke racist AI, which had OpenAI and Gemini's logos. He tweeted, I'm glad that Google overplayed their hand with their AI image generation, as it made their insane racist anti-civilization programming clear to all.

10:37He said, Perhaps it is now clear why XAI's Grok is so important. It is far from perfect right now, but will improve rapidly. B1.5 releases in two weeks. Rigorous pursuit of the truth without regard to criticism has never been more essential. And then just before I recorded this, he wrote, A senior exec at Google called and spoke to me for an hour last night. He assured me that they are taking immediate action to fix the racial and gender bias in Gemini. Time will tell. If you're interested in a deeper exploration of this story, which by the way, it's quite reasonable if you are not, I think I am doing my Sunday episode on it, so come back then.

11:07For those of you who are more interested in new features from Google that are actually useful, and not just all this debate and discussion, Google Chrome has started rolling out an experimental Gemini-powered feature called Help Me Write. It is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's a writing assistant that can be used basically anywhere there's text input if you're browsing with Chrome. So that means it's available inside things like Google Documents, yes, but also for form fields, filling in surveys, reviews, again, anywhere that you might write on the web. The promise, says Google, is that it can understand the context of the webpage that you're on, and so pull relevant information into the copy that it's suggesting.

11:40To me, this is a great representation of one of those unsexy, but very useful features that is part of this integration era of AI, where even though we're getting rapid races to the state of the art, we're also seeing a lot more of the AI story be just about how these tools come into our lives and into the workflows we use day in and day out. One more cool feature, if you haven't seen the Arc browser yet, they're thinking really differently about how people interface with search and with browsing on the web. They just introduced a new feature called Pinch to Summarize, where if you're using the Arc Search mobile app, you can pinch on a website, folding it up effectively, and AI then summarizes what was on that site.

12:19Ray Wong writes, the new Pinch to Summarize feature for Arc Search browser is so responsive and so good. This is how design should work. The good news if you like things like that is that funding for AI startups seems to be just going up, up, up, up, up. Nikolai Yakovenko tweets, those not following AI funding on X would be surprised how it's taken off in 2024. Averages hide bigger story. We're doing 125 million per business day across a large number of deals. Q3 and Q4 of 2023 were dominated by massive rounds for OpenAI and Anthropic. This is different. Basically, more startups are getting funded.

12:51It's not just these mega rounds that are dominating the overall numbers. So friends, lots of interesting things happening in the world of AI. However, that is going to do it for today's episode. Until next time, peace.