Can AI replace the camera? with Joshua Xu from HeyGen

**Sarah** (0:05)
Welcome, Joshua. We're so excited to have you here today. How are you?

**Joshua Xu** (0:09)
Hey, Sarah, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me today.

**Sarah** (0:13)
It's our pleasure. Let's get started.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Sarah Guo, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the School of Medicine.

**Joshua Xu** (0:28)
Hey, Sarah, I'm so confused. What's going on here?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:30)
Is this thing on?

**Sarah** (0:31)
Today, we're here to discuss how AI can benefit your health and what medicinal properties the technology holds.

**Joshua Xu** (0:38)
Sarah, I'm so lost. Isn't this the No Priors podcast where you interview technology superstars like Gary Tan and Alexander Wang?

**Sarah** (0:47)
No, that's only for humans.

**Elad** (0:49)
We're really excited to have you. Welcome, Joshua.

**Joshua Xu** (0:51)
Yeah, excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

**Elad** (0:54)
Let's start with a little bit of backstory. You started this company, HeyGen. It's had this amazing growth trajectory and is being used by millions of people now.
What's the story of starting the company?

**Joshua Xu** (1:08)
Hello, everyone. My name is Joshua, co-founder and CEO of HeyGen. We founded the company roughly three and a half years ago, and before that, I was working at Snapchat for about six and a half years there. I started robotics at Carnegie Mellon and joined Snap back in 2014 there. I initially worked on machine learning in Snapchat ads as ranking and recommendation, then I spent my last two years at Snap working on AI cameras.
So, you know, Snap leveraged a lot of AI technology to enhance the camera experience. If you look at, you know, 2018 Snapchat released a baby filter and Disney style filter. That was the first time I saw a computer can actually create and generate something that does not exist in the world. I was just so fascinated by the technology back then, and I had a feeling that that would potentially change the way how people create the content.
So, you know, Snapchat is a camera company and everybody created content through the mobile camera. But we wanted to replace the camera because we think AI can create the content and AI could become the new camera. And that's how we get started with HeyGen and our mission is to making visual storytelling accessible to all.

**Elad** (2:20)
I love it. The greatest minds of our generation, you know, inspired by, you know, your face is a cute kitten or whatever.
What does replacing the camera mean to you? Like, why do we need to do that? I use my camera a lot.

**Joshua Xu** (2:33)
I kind of grew up my career in the whole, you know, mobile camera space where we work on a lot of the software and technology to enable people to feel comfortable and make it easier for people to create content through the mobile camera. But, you know, there's still lots of people are not able to create good content using the camera today.
And we felt that if we can replace the camera, that means we can remove the barrier for visual storytelling, for visual content creation. And that will help us to step ahead in terms of the whole content creation space.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:07)
What are some of the areas that you think, you know, the technology that you developed is applied to? Because I think you've started with different forms of like virtual avatars so that you can take a video of yourself and then turn it into an avatar that you can then feed text to, it can speak in your voice, it can do all sorts of really interesting things for different areas. How did you both decide to start with avatars and then where do you think the main applications are?

**Joshua Xu** (3:29)
When we initially started the company, we tried to like disassemble the whole video production process. There's really about camera and then editing. So camera is more about a role, which represents the human spokesperson, the avatar piece.
Editing is more about B role, adding different assets, voiceover, music, transition, animation, stuff like that. So editing, we just learned from customer that editing is not that expensive because it's a pretty standard service, but camera is super expensive.
And imagine, you know, as a CEO of a company, he wants to recall something. We probably need to schedule that ahead of two weeks of time. We need to bring in the camera crew, have a studio to actually record it. And even for two minutes of footage, sometimes we need to record it for 20 minutes because people need to remember the script. And that's the piece that blocking a lot of business, create new content. So that's how we get started from, you know, trying to replace that piece of the process and make an avatar to replace the camera for the video production.