The Pixel Revolution Part 2 with Suhail Doshi, Founder of Playground AI

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hey everyone, Eric here. I'm hiring across the board at Turpentine, and for my personal team on other projects I'm incubating. I'm hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Network, Head of Special Projects, and Investment Associate for my personal team.
At Turpentine, I'm hiring for roles in newsletters, events, and more. I have a list of JDs and other projects at erictorenberg.com. If you think you're a good fit for any of the above roles, please reach out.

**Suhail Doshi** (0:25)
I try to sometimes put myself in the shoes of, you know, let's say the artist or the people making these images, the photographers, whoever. We were the first site ever, and I think the only site, where if there was a prompt on our site and someone references his name, we directly link back to his page. It might be generally okay to make things. In fact, many brands are perfectly fine with fan art or whatever. There's kind of this question of commercial use.
That's where things kind of like stop. If this whole thing is very gradual, then I think probably society would find like some way to assimilate to it.
If it's vastly faster than that, then I think that we definitely need to do something about that. I think that it's impacting very much needs to be considered. Some craft that they've been doing for a decade or two. You can't ask people to evolve enough skill.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:10)
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, Eric Thornburg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. My guest today is Suhail Doshi, founder and CEO of Playground AI. This is a special episode for me because Suhail was our very first guest on the show almost a year ago. And today he returns as roughly our 100th guest.
Of course, it's been a busy year for everyone in AI, and Suhail and team have been hard at work building and releasing a huge number of new features designed to help anyone create and edit images like a pro.
Most recently, they've trained and open-sourced a new foundation image generation model called Playground V2, which is preferred to StableDiffusion XL some 70% of the time, while being built on the same exact architecture. A decision that Suhail made so that the open-source community can easily adapt and apply all the surrounding tools that they've already developed. If you're wondering how it makes business sense for a company like Playground to give the fruits of such a major investment away for free, Suhail's perspective on the state of AI art in general and on image generation in particular might surprise you. Because yes, of course, it's undeniable that the state of the art has continued to advance, and today not only Mid Journey and Dolly3 but also Stable Diffusion XL and Playground V2 can generate excellent quality, merely photorealistic images with increasingly fine-grained prompting controls.
And yet, in Suhail's analysis, we're still only at roughly the GPT-2 stage of image generation AI development, just scratching the surface of all the promise that AI-based image manipulation still holds.
Most of the use cases, as Suhail has come to understand them in talking to Playground users, are not very well served by existing models, and the leading AI artists use a mix of models and different complementary tools to achieve their best results, meaning that things overall are still a bit too complicated for everyday casual users. So what's missing from this picture? A unified vision model that can do it all. Understanding, generating, and also manipulating images in all sorts of useful, discrete ways. This does not yet exist, and the leading large language model developers don't seem to be really focused on it. So Suhail and team are setting out to build it over the course of 2024 As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd ask that you take a moment to share it with friends. It has been incredible to see how the show has traveled and how the audience has grown, entirely through word of mouth. And I think this episode would be perfect for both the artists and the application developers in your life. Now, I hope you enjoy this conversation about the state and future of AI vision and image generation with Suhail Doshi of Playground AI. Suhail Doshi, founder and CEO of Playground AI, online at playgroundai.com. Welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.