AI Avatars & the Future of Video, with HeyGen CEO Joshua Xu and Benchmark's Victor Lazarte

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Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together, we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a B2B SaaS application, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication, SCIM provisioning, role-based access control, and audit trails. That's where WorkOS comes in. With easy to use and flexible APIs that help you ship enterprise features on day one without slowing down your core product development. Today, some of the hottest startups in the world are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know like Perplexity, Vercel, Jasper, and Webflow. WorkOS also provides a generous free tier of up to one million monthly active users for user management, making it the perfect authentication and authorization solution for growing companies. It comes standard with rich features like bot protection, MFA, roles and permissions, and more. If you're currently looking to build SSO for your first enterprise customer, you should consider using WorkOS. Integrate in minutes and start shipping enterprise plans today.
Hello, and welcome back to the cognitive revolution. I'm Nathan's AI avatar, created on HeyGen, and I'm here to introduce Nathan's conversation with Joshua Xu, founder and CEO of HeyGen, a leader in AI-powered video creation, and Victor Lazarte, general partner at Benchmark, which recently invested $60 million in the company. Over the last two years, while generative AI for images and text were crossing critical thresholds for usefulness and hitting mainstream adoption, AI-generated video has remained, for the most part, a future promise, something that AI watchers could clearly see coming, and which has provoked much speculative analysis, particularly about the future of the entertainment industry and the risks associated with convincing deep fakes. But still, for practical purposes, a novelty technology that produces uncanny value outputs. That has started to change recently with OpenAI showing off Sora's general world modeling capabilities, Google previewing Vio, China's Qishu technologies debuting their Kling model, and most recently, Runway's Gen 3, among many other options starting to hit the market. But even today, these products remain quite unwieldy and inconsistent, and, as a result, impractical for most people to actually use in their day-to-day work. Against that backdrop, HeyGen's success stands out all the more. By focusing their product development work on practical business needs, emphasizing the value drivers of quality, consistency and control, while taking a best tool available approach to technology, ensembling their own AI avatar models with best-in-class tools for script writing and text-to-speech, they've established a market-leading position in the generative AI for video space, and are now serving more than 40,000 businesses and earning $35 million in annual revenue. In this conversation, we discuss what customers are using HeyGen for today, which includes creating new video content that wouldn't otherwise have been possible, translating video into more than 100 local languages, and personalizing video down to the individual viewer level, and Joshua and Victor paint a picture of a world where video content is not just more easily produced, but fundamentally transformed. Imagine immersive video experiences that adapt in real time to viewer interactions, or AI avatars that can engage in live, dynamic conversations. These aren't just disruptive alternative production methods that allow us to make the same content with fewer resources. They are potential paradigm shifts in how we think about video in general. As someone who's spent much of the last three years applying AI to video creation at Waymark, with business results that, while not as explosive as HeyGen's, are objectively strong in their own right, I can say that such reminders to zoom out and challenge oneself to think bigger and stranger are always worthwhile. As it happens, we had a recording issue in this episode that turned out to be the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the power of HeyGen's product. For whatever reason, Joshua's video track, which looked fine while recording, was corrupted. We considered releasing this episode in audio-only form, but ultimately decided to recreate Joshua's portion of the video with HeyGen. After this intro, the video you'll see of Nathan and Victor will be real, and the video you'll see of Joshua will be created with his HeyGen avatar, based on the transcript of the original conversation. I have to say, it came out amazingly well. Toward the end of the episode, we also discuss HeyGen's industry-leading approach to trust and safety. At a moment when most AI application developers are just trying to make their products work, and many are ignoring risks of misuse and abuse entirely, HeyGen has done an outstanding job of taking the responsibility that comes with the power of their product seriously, and has implemented robust consent mechanisms to protect famous people from being impersonated and other safeguards designed to protect the public from political misinformation and scams. Their thoughtful approach demonstrates that rapid innovation and ethical considerations can go hand in hand, and I recommend that any entrepreneur or AI product builder looking for inspiration in this area check out HeyGen's product experience, or read my red teaming and public thread that breaks down their defense-in-depth strategy. And by the way, if anyone listening would be interested in contributing to the red teaming or other safety testing of public and soon-to-launch products, please send me a DM. The red teaming and public project has been a bit quiet lately, as another team member has taken the lead and is building some foundational infrastructure behind the scenes. But we are still very much interested in connecting with folks who enjoy testing and breaking AI product guardrails. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify, or just share online with your friends. Of course, we always welcome your feedback and your AI advisor and AI engineer resumes via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, and you can always DM me on your favorite social network. For now, I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the transformative potential of AI-powered video with Victor Lazarte of Benchmark and Joshua Xu of HeyGen. Joshua Xu, founder and CEO at HeyGen and Victor Lazarte, general partner at Benchmark. Welcome to the Cognitive Revolution.