The Pixel Revolution with Playground AI 's Suhail Doshi

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Suhail Doshi** (0:45)
It's like that moment in mobile where it was just a complete like Wild West gold rush, and nobody had a clue what was going to work.
And so just all the thousands, tens of thousands of experiments occur simultaneously. And you end up getting things like Uber, and some things like grow really rapidly and then fall because they fall out of relevance, they have good retention, and some things just have this incredible lasting power for a decade. So feels like that will happen again.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:17)
In one short year, image generation technology has achieved multiple breakthroughs and revolutionized the world of creativity and art. Today, with mere words, in just seconds, anyone can generate all sorts of high-quality images, and dedicated AI artists can create top-notch, award-winning art.
Nathan, how did we get here?

**Nathan Labenz** (1:36)
Well, Eric, do you remember where you were when you first saw the Dali avocado chair? That was the original Dali, announced two years ago in January 2021
Dali never launched to the public, but OpenAI did open source the image classifier clip. Which turned out to be all that the programmer artist community needed to make some incredible breakthroughs. Within months, we started to see clip-guided image generation models. And by late 2021, they were producing amazing results. The core idea, known as denoising, was, like many AI breakthroughs, both simple and profound. The world already contained massive data sets of images and captions, and it's easy to degrade images by adding a bit of noise. So if an AI model could be trained to answer the question, what would this image look like if it were just a little less noisy and a little more like the user's request?
It would in theory become possible to go from pure noise to high resolution images simply by denoising over and over again.
Sure enough, it worked. And in April 2022, OpenAI, building on the open source community's work, launched Dali 2 They were very careful at first. For a while, you couldn't even generate realistic human faces. But their monopoly position and the editorial control was short-lived because just four months later, Stability AI dropped the weights of stable diffusion, which roughly matched Dali 2 in capabilities and unleashed an unprecedented wave of experimentation and creativity worldwide. Since then, image generation has scaled faster than almost any technology in human history. It's inspired entirely new products and become ubiquitous in familiar products as well.
Artists have been split on the topic. Huge numbers of creative people have developed all new workflows, techniques, and styles, which were either previously impossible or prohibitively expensive. But many have also felt understandably threatened. After all, what happens to artists when anyone can create art?

**Erik Torenberg** (3:50)
And it's precisely this wave of change that our guest, Suhail Doshi of Playground AI, has dove into. While working to build a computer in the cloud with MyD, Suhail noticed the take-up and AI capabilities and just couldn't look away. A few months later, he declared that he was going all-in in AI and Playground AI was born. Playground AI is one of the highest-performing AI image creators in the world today, with one of the most generous free plans anywhere. Suhail's vision is to give users complete control over pixels. Not just text to image, but what you think is what you get for image, video, and 3D.
The Cognitive Revolution podcast is supported by Omneky. Omneky is an omni-channel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms with the click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data to generate personalized experiences at scale.
Suhail, welcome to the Cognitive Revolution podcast. Stoked to have you. By way of introduction, why don't you talk about the evolution for you? What was the AI moment for you when you realized, I have to go all in on this? What was that moment like and why don't you give a background as to what you're up to in the process?