CEO of Elai: generating top-notch AI videos

You are a serial entrepreneur having founded several start-ups, what were some of these earlier companies? I have spent 15 years in the tech industry, working for some big companies as well as starting a couple of my own startups. In 2018, my friend Alex and I started Progressify, a mobile-first e-commerce storefront. This was an innovative approach where every e-commerce website owner could connect to our storefront and significantly increase the performance and conversion rate of their stores. At that time, this type of solution was very new, and we lacked early adopters and customers. After a year, we decided to close the company due to the fact that the market was not ready. It was the right decision, as the market indeed was not ready, and this type of solution began to rise only in 2021, around 2 years after Progressify.

What are some of your key takeaways from this experience? During this experience, we had the opportunity to develop our skills in conducting customer development interviews and assessing market potential. We spoke with more than 200 e-commerce store owners to understand their needs and determine if our solution could be beneficial to them. Although we were unable to achieve PMF at that time, I am grateful for the lessons learned. It is essential for founders to conduct a thorough analysis before starting a company to ensure market viability and profitability.

Could you discuss the different types of machine learning used to turn a prompt into video? Certainly, first, we need to turn the text into an audio file. For this, we use a text-to-speech engine that transforms text in many languages into a high-quality audio track. Next, we need to synchronize this audio file with the lips of the digital avatar and render the video. Creating such a solution is a highly complicated process overall, and we spent 2 years in R&D research in training and creating the models to achieve top quality. For lipsync and video rendering, we use our own in-house models.

What is your vision for the future of Generative AI? Generative AI has a bright future as it tremendously increases human productivity. Regarding video generation, I believe that in 2 years, you won't be able to distinguish between real video and AI-generated content. This technology is rapidly evolving, allowing real-time conversations with digital photorealistic avatars quite soon.