>> A lot of people are talking about
machine-learning as if it is
some other new thing or
new tool to use in your startup like JavaScripts or,
"Hey, this is mobile responsive design or whatever."
It's not, it's the way the whole
software world functions.
A good way to get your head around how big
an impact machine learning is going to have on our lives,
not just on music and entertainment,
is to realize that about 80 percent of the software
written today is software
written for other software to run.
It's not written as software for
human beings to interface and work with,
it's software for other software.
If you start to get your head around that,
the processing power and the
decision-making and the automation that's
possible inside of
even the smallest apps on your mobile phone,
there really isn't a part of
entertainment or culture or, again, human life,
that isn't going to be touched by
the way machine learning functions.
We've made a bunch of different investments
in companies that use machine learning to
create new things that were previously impossible.
We have a portfolio company called
Popgun that uses machine learning
to make an AI music engine,
to make parts of songs and song packs
so that kids can rearrange them and DJ and perform.
The product of that company is
kids entertaining themselves and performing.
The requirement to do that is to be able to
have an unlimited supply of music.
The product of the company is not
this unlimited supply of AI driven music,
the product of the company is
that experience of performing.
But a prerequisite to perform is to
have access to songs and have access to
parts and have an unlimited supply
of them so that everybody can
have their unique performances
and their unique compositions.
Think of it in that way,
whereas it solves some of the hardest supply problems,
or it's solves some of
the hardest decision making problems.
What it allows is new businesses
to be created on the other side.
Another of our portfolio companies Replica
makes AI voices like voice clones.
You can record your voice and then AI
can re-interpret, text new type,
and it speaks as if you are speaking and
gives someone the control to direct your emotion,
and your inflection, and the
tone of what it is that you're saying.
Now you don't have to have voiceover actors,
now we don't have to have a bunch of things that take
a long time to create
really truly immersive experiences,
now you can play a video game and
talk to the other characters.
Instead of having to interface
with someone through the controller,
you can just talk to them in a much more natural way.
Creates a much more human,
much more deeply immersive experience.
The product, again, is not replica voices,
the product is APIs and tools for directing that so
that you can build other amazing experiences
on top of that.
But the way that machine
learning functions and the way that
computers can learn and iterate and not make decisions,
but create things and
predict the way your behavior is going to
go and target content for you at the right moment.
Allows deep personalization, deep immersion,
really individual one-on-one experiences that were
otherwise just impossible without it.
I think if you're thinking
about machine learning as a way
that it impacts your career as
an artist or how you want to
get involved in the music business,
you don't necessarily have to become a developer there.
It's currently a very mathematics intensive,
deep part of science,
but you should definitely do a lot of reading and
be savvy enough to be dangerous in
those conversations because you'll start
to understand the impacts of the way things will work.
The Spotify algorithm.
Your "For You" playlist,
the way TikTok presents videos to you when
you're trying to kill 10 minutes and
watch, the way they constantly
always get it right and the content
is so engaging and interesting.
All of that is driven by algorithms
digging deep into giant, giant, giant,
giant databases, terabytes of data about
user preferences and behavior and
predicting and selecting things for you to consume.
You will both benefit from
that and have to fight against it,
and have to figure out how to optimize
your work to go live in that world,
and if you don't understand how they work,
it just puts you at a disadvantage.