Decart makes AI faster, Lume teaches lamps to fold laundry | E2166

0:00Mirage is the only real-time video model in existence today. Even the big tech still don't have it, except for Google. Google does have this. But even the other big tech, as far as we know, don't have this. And it's challenging to build because you have to build a completely different model on the algorithmic side. You're training actually a different model. It's lots of algorithmic mathematical challenges. And at the same time, you have to write a bunch of assembly code for GPUs. Like all this was written like in PTX, it was assembly for GPUs to actually get it to execute like this efficiently.

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1:17Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Twist. This is Alex. And today we have two absolutely amazing interviews for you. First, we're talking to the folks over at Descartes AI. You may recall that they recently raised $100 million at a$3.1 billion valuation. Quite a lot of money. What are they building? Well, Descartes got its start actually working on GPU optimization and since then has been working on world models. This comes in the form of Mirage and Oasis. And if that does strike a bell, that's because I showed off Descartes' Oasis world models on the show last November. I've been dying to talk to the company about what they're building and where AI is going.

1:54So stay tuned. It's an amazing chat. Then after that, Jason and I are talking to the folks behind Sincere AI. Don't you know that company? Well, you actually do. They're the company behind that viral video of the lamps that sit next to your bed and then turn into robot arms and then do your laundry for you. Well, we were really curious, how far along is that product? What are the margins? What's it gonna cost? When's it coming? And also, what are they gonna build next? So stay tuned because we have all that and quite a lot more from Sincere AI. So first to cart, then Sincere, you're welcome. Let's go.

2:29Back in November here on Twist, we took a look at a really cool product from a company called Descartes. It had built a world model that generated a game around you. So you play the game and then it was kind of making it as you went. I was enraptured by this, just blown away. Now I'm happy to report that since then, Descartes has gone on to raise$100 million at a higher valuation and has stayed very, very busy shipping new goodies. So to help us understand what Descartes is building and why, and to explain what the hell a world model really is, please welcome to the show, it's Dean Leidersdorf.

3:03Dean, how you doing? Hey, how's it going? Thanks so much for having me. I'm so glad. Also, you're calling in from Tel Aviv where it's midnight, so you get like double extra credit bonus points for burning the midnight oil here. Midnight is like regular working hours. If I, you know, show you around the office right now, the office is still full. Okay, jokes aside, Descartes does a couple of things, and I want to just talk about each one quickly in sequence. You guys got your start doing GPU optimization, essentially helping people that are training AI models or running inference to dramatically lower their cost.

3:35And if I understand, that's where the company started, yeah? The company started by making a lot of money, and that's a good thing to do. Okay, and the way we did it was by saving a lot of people lots of money. You really are good at getting the most out of GPUs, and GPUs are expensive because NVIDIA makes a lot of money. There's a handful of products with insanely high margins that make over$100 billion a year the h100 is one of them by the way there's only four others uh one of them being the vatican very interesting but completely different discussion similarly hard to get your hands on though you can't really get the vatican and you can't get a lot of h100s there you go but you know next startup will optimize the vatican we we you know we started off the cart the cart's only less than two years old first year was really focused on how do we get the most out of gpus how do we get them to be insanely fast insanely efficient from a software level when we when we started at the cart, we're ideating for a long time.

4:24Like, okay, what do we build? Do we build, you know, everything from a solar panel company to cybersecurity to AI for healthcare? And just nothing stuck. But we're honest with ourselves. And we realized that just once in our life, we got to try to build a kilocorn. So, you know, you have the unicorns, deca corns, centicorns, and kilocorns. Build a kilo of a thousand, build a trillion dollar company. Actually try to build a company that matters. Okay, build a Facebook, build a Google, build an Apple, build a company that if you look at the world before and after, it's a completely different world.

4:58Now, when you start things like that, everything starts making sense. You don't have too many options. There's only a handful of things you can actually do. And in our day and age, I think there's pretty much only one thing you can actually do. Create a billion user consumer experience. Now, ChatGPT is the last billion user app out of it. I just can't. Oh no, I don't think it is. But so billion user consumer application, it has to be something then that I'm gonna touch every day. It has to be accessible via standard communication devices because you can't reach a billion people otherwise. So how did you narrow down to what to build to meet that standard?

5:37Okay. You know, I have to actually show you something. Let me show you something. Okay, let's do it. Okay. I don't know if you saw this, but we launched Mirage recently. As you can see, this is Mirage, and you can see the real me, and now you can see me in the Versailles Palace. Or you can see me in a blocky kind of world, okay? Or you can see me in anime. Oh, I don't think that suits you, actually. What about... Oh, we can do this. This is one of my favorite ones, okay? This is a wizard's world. Let me find... One second, I'll get... Here's a pen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. See this pen, see this red pen?

6:14Great. If I put it in the wizard's world, sometimes it becomes a magic wand and you can cast magic spells with it. Okay. I can also change to, say, portal. Okay. And then if I have a shampoo bottle here. Standard office accoutrement. We actually do have a shower here because I am gonna go shower after this before we go to bed. because they have a bed in the office. But, you know, this shampoo can turn into a portal gun, okay? And you can try to launch portals with this. Every once in a while, it does work. With the next version of the model, you'll be able to just say like, okay, launch portal, and then like, boom, it'll open up.

6:57So, Dean, let's talk about what this is. So this is a real-time model that can take a video that you give it and automatically transpose it to a different style, but you don't have to give it a video, wait for it to process. It's happening as you're using it, which I presume was technically very easy. AI video models to date, they've always taken a lot of time to generate their outputs. You know, you give it a prompt and then you wait a bunch of time and 10 seconds, maybe 20 seconds for some model, even a minute, and you get something back. Mirage has a 40 millisecond delay, like 0.04 seconds, okay?

7:34So the version that you're seeing right now that you can actually play with is it takes any input video stream, any prompt, and just changes it based on the prompt. What we're gonna launch pretty soon is also just, you know, generic video generation that's 40 milliseconds in. So you just tell it something and boom, it creates it. So in the case of the real-time usage, what you just showed me with it making you into different forms, 40 milliseconds, is that a lot or a little? Because I know that if I'm playing a first-person shooter in a competitive environment, that's probably a lot, but for pretty much everything else That seems quick enough, I think.

8:08Exactly. We're also going to be dropping it pretty soon. It'll reach, it should reach like 16 milliseconds a month from now. Okay. And going back to the first topic of GPU optimization, I am just presuming that this does not melt entire data centers. Mirage is the only real-time video model in existence today. Even the big tech still don't have it, except for Google. Google does have this, but even the other big tech, as far as we know, don't have this. And it's challenging to build because you have to build a completely different model on the algorithmic side. You're training actually a different model.

8:40It's lots of algorithmic mathematical challenges. And at the same time, you have to write a bunch of assembly code for GPUs. Like all this was written like in PTX, it was assembly for GPUs to actually get it to execute like this efficiently. Okay, so you have to do the hard work of making the AI model and then you have to go essentially reprogram the GPUs to actually be efficient. So technically very impressive. And visually, because I love this sort of thing, stunning to me, but I'm curious where you see it finding commercial application. You do have an example up on the site of someone looking down their sniper rifle site inside of a game.

9:14And I think there's an effect inside of there, which again, visually stunning. But is that where you see this kind of slotting into the economy today? I think I completely take over like half the internet. And I'll explain. What was the previous internet pre-ChatGPT? It was basically four things. You had knowledge, which was basically everything under Google's domain. Second category that you had was creativity. What do you do when you're not doing your homework? Okay, and that's TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. Then you had communication, WhatsApp, iMessage, and you had shopping. At launch, we talk a lot about systems over goals, right?

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11:04It's gone. The knowledge portion. The knowledge portion, exactly. I don't know who will win, if it'll be OpenAI or Gemini or XAI, whoever. But chatbots are the way humanity is going to access knowledge and going to create knowledge going forward. That's it. Well, then it is done. Shopping, I think, will be split in two. You're not going to browse Amazon.com or Shopify. Your chatbot is going to tell you, hey, look, here's something cool or, you know, try this on or whatever. messaging, completely different topic. I can get into it, but I do think chatbots will take over that as well. And we're left over with creativity.

11:37Which is a quarter of the prior internet going by one of four categories. It is the largest. And the nice thing is that as we get more productive and we spend less time doing our work, it's the only category that's growing, that fundamentally has to grow. If we now have to do four days a week of work or three days a week of work because bots start making us more productive. We're going to have more and more and more creativity time. What's going to completely change your experience when you're having fun? That is, I think, the biggest open question today in the consumer internet. Someone is going to answer that question in the next year, and whoever answers that question is going to be a trillion dollar company.

12:19So to me, what you're describing sounds like a new world that we inhabit that is persistently drawn by, I mean, perhaps something along the lines of your OASIS model. Exactly. And that's where we get to what a world model is. It has an incredible ability to just look at a bunch of videos and get how the world behind them works. And then just let you come up with completely new worlds. For the first time, we can take what's in our minds and just instantly show it to ourselves and to others and really have a completely immersive experience. No, I love that. Now, what you're describing to me still feels relatively single player because the entertainment or consumption portion of the internet that we described, Netflix and TikTok and so forth, mostly consumption, not as much creation.

13:09It's a single player experience. What I think you're kind of talking about though, feels much more multiplayer, as in you and I are doing this together. So are you and I sharing down the road when we're working towards a billion people and a kilo corn or whatever the fuck it was, are we together or are we still apart in that world? You know, something mind, so we just put up the Mirage demo three weeks ago and we've been mind-loaned by what people do with it. And what blew us the most was that people actually did physical experiences together. So we had so many people just took out broomsticks and started hitting each other.

13:46And they put a Star Wars prompt and it just turned into lightsabers. And hitting each other with broomsticks. So it becomes an okay thing to do when the world sees it as you guys having a lightsaber fight. I really think it'd be mind-blowing to see if it creates a new reason for people to hang out in person. and just have some physical combined joint interaction and have the AI cast that into a different world. Did you ever play with Microsoft's HoloLens headset? No. We do have the Quest 3 and the Vision Pro here, but not the HoloLens. HoloLens blew me away. So I used to be a Microsoft beat reporter, so I just covered the company.

14:26And I got invited up to Redmond for the HoloLens first day. Like no one had knew this thing existed. and I was playing, I put it on and suddenly I could play a game that was on a tabletop that was real, but the assets were digitally drawn on top of it. And I like, you know, pushed a little, it was kind of a Minecraft-ish game, like everything is at that level. And I kind of like pushed blocks through tables and got to interact digitally and physically at the same time. And I've never quite forgotten how straight up magic that felt. So I do think there's a point of synthesis. I think it's actually more of a physical form factor question than it is, how does the software work?

15:01100%. I think it's a physical form factor. Something that blew our minds with Mirage. Do you know how many hotels reached out to us? Hotels. Hotels reached out to us and said, can we stick this in our lobbies? Oh, as a game. Exactly. As like a new game and new experience. They're like, can we just stick this in our lobbies? They will put up a big TV screen and a nice camera on top and people will just walk by and be like, huh, I'm in Frozen right now. and use that as a gateway to you arrived at your vacation. Imagine like you're going to a resort in the Bahamas and so you walk up in front of the screen and you're all sweaty after your flight and everything and suddenly, boom, you're in your beach shorts and everything's sunny.

15:48And we're like, huh, we never imagined that this is what people want to do the first week in Mirage. That is surprising. But if I was a Las Vegas hotel, I would put you in a James Bond style tux with a martini and a stack of roulette chips, for example. Or if I was in Russia, maybe a funny hat or whatever it is. I like that. But there's several steps between where we are today with Mirage and Oasis. I can see them coming together. I can see the vision. I also think that you and I have the similar optimistic view of where we're going. I guess what I'm curious about is what are the steps in between and are they frequent and small or infrequent and large?

16:29It took us seven months between Oasis and Mirage because there were lots of key breakthroughs that we had to solve. I think that a year from now, if we have this interview again in a year, we'll be living in a completely different world. And the answer of who gets to be the AI that you use when you're not doing your homework will probably be answered in this upcoming year, just because there's so many product advances that are going to be coming out based on this tech. Now, based on this tech, are you referring to AI as a whole or what you guys are cooking up in particular? AI video and audio.

17:00The combination of AI video audio models, real time is just going to be incredibly fast and it's going to also have so many products built on top of it. So this is a business show. I know it doesn't sound like one so far, but when people talk about building models, usually what I hear in the background is the crackling fire of entire bales of cash. You guys told Fortune that you had burned incredibly small amounts of money, like 10 million when you raised your last round. And usually when I talk to a company that's doing that, they found some way to have a very efficient go-to-market motion or whatever it is.

17:34You guys are doing the hard, expensive thing and not losing money. And I'm just kind of curious, is that going to be something you can keep doing through this process of progress or is it going to get more expensive to fulfill this vision? What's been very central to the card from day one was being able to actually utilize GPUs incredibly efficiently. And we're significantly better than that in the rest of the industry. By doing this, we're actually able to do what costs hundreds of millions of dollars for other people in an order of magnitude less cash. That's a key fundamental advantage that we have.

18:11It is based on the tech stack that we built over the past two years. It is surprisingly hard to replicate. Now that we have this as our bedrock, it really sets us apart in being just able to operate incredibly more cash efficiently and create new products that other people just can't create. Okay, so you have the right team. You can make this stuff cheap. Things are moving quickly. I guess then the right next question is, what is coming? You've hinted now at new models that are coming in the next couple of weeks or months. So without breaking your own internal NDAs, what should I be looking for from you guys as you work towards this trillion-dollar, billion-user future?

18:49So you're going to see three things. Okay. From the lab, from the experiences team, and from the B2B team, from the enterprise team. From the lab, you're just going to see insanely cool models coming out. I can tease one of them already. Imagine in real time, Mirage currently changes the entire world. The next version also gets to make local edits. So I can, for example, you know, just be like, hey, give me a sword. And then boom, I get a sword without anything else changing. Give me, you know, a long ponytail. Then boom, I get a long ponytail. And you know, like make it like ninja style hair and make it like sleek black or something.

19:26And change my entire clothing to ninja. You're going to turn every zoom into an RPG character creator screen? Exactly. The amount of products you can build on top of this is insane. We're going to build our own Mirage Zoom, Mirage FaceTime, Mirage Snapchat, Mirage YouTube, everything they currently imagine just with, hey, let me just change the entire stream in real time. So is that one app? Because you could do Zoom and WhatsApp and everything else as a combined experience that is multi-platform or as a multi-part product. So what are you thinking? Despite what they may say, no one has a crystal ball.

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20:44At launch, we are huge sticklers for data. Every Monday, the team meets. We review their goals, their strategies. And most importantly, they share specifics on how everything performed. You spend a little time looking backwards, and you can accurately and confidently focus on what's next. And that's what NetSuite by Oracle is going to help you do. Our friends at Oracle want to give Twist listeners a free gift. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash twist. Once again, netsuite.com slash twist. We're going to be launching this in a combination. So a lot of it is going to be combined into one.

21:19Some of it will be a standoff. For example, gaming. Gaming makes sense as its own gaming platform. We're going to be launching mods for some of the popular games. For example, you can install a mod and boom, change your Minecraft world into Frozen. So we're going to see gaming platforms. We're going to see social platforms. We have lots of products that we're going to launch very soon, built on this tech that we're creating. And the last part is we just had so much inbound for enterprise usage for this, from the entertainment space, from the education space, by the way. Teachers love this. They can, you know, just turn their entire classroom into safari or to dinosaurs or whatever.

21:59School has changed since I was there. Teachers are looking for something to keep kids engaged. You know, something mind-blowing that happened, hospitals reached out. One hospital reached out and was like, you know, a big problem with kids' hospitals is that when you do procedure on a child, they're scared and they're uncomfortable. And so they try to distract them. And they showed the mirage, and the kids were just captivated by it. Like, holy shit, look at what happened to me. I turned into something super cool. and the hospital, the doctor was able to do whatever they need. Dentist office. My spouse is a physician who is also a pediatrician.

22:39So this is very apropos to the world that I'm right next to. So I can see the absolute demand for that. So many different domains that we probably can't even imagine where it begins, but where it ends, but we can see where it begins. And so you're going to see all three things. You're going to see new models, new consumer experiences, and new enterprise applications. And then it'll be quite a ride. We have a few amazing weeks coming up. Okay, Dean, we've already gone way over time, so I have to kind of wrap us up here. But being very honest, I saw what you guys built. I loved it. I saw that you raised$100 million, I think like a$3.1 billion valuation.

23:19And I went, huh, now I get it. there aren't that many companies apart from maybe open AI that are thinking this expansive and long-term. And if you're right, cool. And if you're not cool, but I mean, at least you're taking a swing big enough that you might smack the moon. So I'm here for it. Once in your life, you got to give it a shot. Either it works or you had the best ride you can possibly have. All right. Tell people where they can find Descartes on the internet. And if you have a role, you're having a hard time filling, and shout it out so the world can gather around. So we would love for you guys to visit the cart.ai or our Twitter accounts, TikTok accounts, all our socials.

23:59The best role that we have to fill right now, we have insanely talented people. We're the most talented, young marketing person possible. And you can't have a nice marketing degree. What you need to have is insanely creative TikTok or Instagram or YouTube short skills to just be able to take this visual technique that we're building and show the world what it can do. All right. Well, Dean, thank you so much. And we'll have you back, not in a year. It'll be sooner than that because I'm sure there's gonna be a lot to talk about, but I appreciate you very much. Go have that shower, get some rest, man.

24:33Talk soon. Good night. A couple of days ago, there was a big viral video on Twitter of a couple of lamps that turned into robotic arms and began to fold clothing. Everybody hates doing laundry. Everyone loved this idea. Many questions about what it can be used for and where it is. But to help us explain all that and more, let's welcome Aaron Tan from Sincere AI, the company behind the Loom Robot Lamp. Aaron, hey. Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me. I saw the video and I thought immediately, and we'll play the video now while I'm talking. Number one, this is AI generated. It's not real. it looks too insane to be real please confirm with me that what we've seen here is a real video it's a it's not an ai generated video but it's also not a real video either it's a it's a rent it's a render of our design yes okay so this is a render that's because it felt a little like too perfect so you're making these lamps with these precision clips on them we're playing right now So explain to me why you chose as an entrepreneur this specific design and these calipers at the end, if I could call them calipers, they look like calipers, pinchers.