a16z interviews Hedra founder Michael Lingelbach: How generative videos are born from memes to create the next trend?

Hedra founder Michael Lingelbach discusses how generative AI has leapfrogged from viral memes to enterprise applications, demonstrating its transformative potential for virtual influencers and interactive content creation. This article is based on an interview with Michael Lingelbach with Justine Moore, Matt Bornstein, a16z, "Why AI Characters & Virtual Influencers Are the Next Frontier in Video ft Hedra's Michael Lingelbach, by Janna ChainCatcher collates, compiles and writes. (Synopsis: Breakthrough in multimodal video generation, what are the opportunities for Web3 AI? (Background supplement: Huang Jenxun Computex Speech "Generating AI" Revolution Industry and Producing Tokens into Humanity's Primary Work in Ten Years) Michael Lingelbach is the founder and CEO of Hedra, a former PhD student in computer science at Stanford University and a stage actor who combined technology and performance passion to lead Hedra in developing industry-leading generative audio and video models. Hedra is a full-body, conversation-driven video generation company that supports everything from virtual influencers to educational content, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for content creation. This article, compiled from a16z Podcast, focuses on how AI technology can leapfrog from viral meme content to enterprise applications, demonstrating the transformative potential of generative AV technology. The following is the dialogue content, compiled by ChainCatcher (with deletions). TL&DR AI is seamlessly bridging consumer and enterprise scenarios, such as this technology to generate baby ads to promote enterprise software, highlighting the enthusiasm of enterprises to embrace new technologies. Viral meme content has become a powerful tool for start-ups, such as "baby podcasts" to quickly increase brand awareness and show the ingenuity of marketing strategies. Full-body expression and dialogue-driven video generation technology fills the creative gap and greatly reduces the time and cost of content production. Virtual influencers such as John Lawa create unique digital characters through "Moses podcasts" that give content a strong personality and engagement. Content creators such as "mom bloggers" use technology to quickly produce videos, making it easy to keep brands active and connected to audiences. The real-time interactive video model opens a two-way conversation with the virtual character, bringing an immersive experience to education and entertainment. The character-centered video generation technology focuses on personality expression and multi-agent control to meet the needs of dynamic content creation. Platform strategies that integrate dialogue, action, and rendering create a fluid generative media experience that caters to the demands of high-quality content. The interactive avatar model allows dynamic adjustment of film sentiment and elements, heralding the next wave of innovation in content creation. AI convergence from memes to enterprise applications Justine: We see an interesting crossover between consumer and enterprise scenarios. A few days ago, I saw a Hedra-generated ad text on Forbes about a talking baby promoting enterprise software. But it also shows that we are in a new era, where businesses are quickly embracing AI technology and showing great enthusiasm. Michael: As a startup, it's our role to take inspiration from consumer usage signals and turn them into next-generation content production tools that business users can rely on. Some of the viral content generated by Hedra has garnered a lot of attention over the past few months, from early anime-style characters to "baby podcasts" to this week's hot trends — and I'm not really sure what they are. Memes are a very effective marketing strategy that quickly captures the minds of users by reaching a large audience. This strategy is becoming more common among new startups. For example, Cluey, another company in which a16z invested, gained significant brand recognition through the virality of Twitter. The essence of memes is that technology gives people the vehicle to quickly develop their creativity, and short video content has dominated cultural awareness. Hedra's generative video technology allows users to turn any idea into content in seconds. Why creators and influencers choose Hedra Justine: Explain why people use Hedra to make memes, how they use it, and what is the connection to your target market? Michael: Hedra was the first company to deploy full-body expression, dialogue-driven generative video models at scale. We've enabled users to create millions of pieces of content, and we've quickly gained popularity because we've filled a critical gap in the content creation technology stack. Previously, making generative podcasts, animated character dialogue scenes, or singing videos was difficult, costly, inflexible, or time-consuming. Our model is fast and inexpensive, which has led to the rise of virtual influencers. Justine: Recently, CNBC published an article about Hedra-powered virtual influencers. Can you give a few specific examples of how influencers use Hedra? Michael: For example, the famous actor John Lawa (who played Taco in The League) used Hedra to create a series of content from "Moses Podcast" to "Baby Podcast", which now have a unique identity. Another example is Neural Viz, which built a "metaverse" based on Hedra with character identity at its core. Generative performance is different from a pure media model, it needs to inject personality, consistency and control into the model, which is especially important for film performance. As a result, we see the unique personalities of these virtual characters becoming popular, even though they are not real people. Matt: I've seen a lot of Hedra videos on Instagram Reels, featuring newly created characters like aliens in the Neural Viz series, which used to be only possible with big Hollywood productions, and real people using these tools to expand their digital presence. Many influencers or content creators don't want to dress up, adjust their lighting, or make up every time. Hedra allows people like "mom bloggers" to quickly generate videos to get their message across, without spending a lot of time preparing. For example, they can generate conversations with the camera directly with Hedra. Michael: That's an important observation. Maintaining a personal brand is crucial for content creators, but staying online around the clock is very difficult. If a creator pauses updates for a week, they may lose followers. Hedra's automation technology significantly lowers the barrier to entry. Users combine tools like Deep Research to generate scripts, which Hedra generates video content and automatically publishes to their channels. We're seeing more and more workflows around autonomous digital identities that serve not only real people, but also completely fictional characters. Justine: A lot of historical films are popular on Reels right now. In the past, we...

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