Today, EquipmentShare (YC W15) goes public. From Missouri to 373 locations nationwide, they've built the operating system construction has been missing—built by contractors, for contractors. Congrats to Jabbok, Willy, and the EquipmentShare team on a huge milestone.
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We have been learning quickly from how people are using Sora and taking feedback from users, rightsholders, and other interested groups. We of course spent a lot of time discussing this before launch, but now that we have a product out we can do more than just theorize. We are going to make two changes soon (and many more to come). First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls. We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of "interactive fan fiction" and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all). We assume different people will try very different approaches and will figure out what works for them. But we want to apply the same standard towards everyone, and let rightsholders decide how to proceed (our aim of course is to make it so compelling that many people want to). There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn't, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration. In particular, we'd like to acknowledge the remarkable creative output of Japan--we are struck by how deep the connection between users and Japanese content is! Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we want both to be valuable. Please expect a very high rate of change from us; it reminds me of the early days of ChatGPT. We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly. We plan to do our iteration on different approaches in Sora, but then apply it consistently across our products.
We are launching a new app called Sora. This is a combination of a new model called Sora 2, and a new product that makes it easy to create, share, and view videos. This feels to many of us like the “ChatGPT for creativity” moment, and it feels fun and new. There is something great about making it really easy and fast to go from idea to result, and the new social dynamics that emerge. Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase. Even in the very early days of playing with Sora, it’s been striking to many of us how open the playing field suddenly feels. In particular, the ability to put yourself and your friends into a video—the team worked very hard on character consistency—with the cameo feature is something we have really enjoyed during testing, and is to many of us a surprisingly compelling new way to connect. We also feel some trepidation. Social media has had some good effects on the world, but it’s also had some bad ones. We are aware of how addictive a service like this could become, and we can imagine many ways it could be used for bullying. It is easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed. The team has put great care and thought into trying to figure out how to make a delightful product that doesn’t fall into that trap, and has come up with a number of promising ideas. We will experiment in the early days of the product with different approaches. In addition to the mitigations we have already put in place (which include things like mitigations to prevent someone from misusing someone’s likeness in deepfakes, safeguards for disturbing or illegal content, periodic checks on how Sora is impacting users’ mood and wellbeing, and more) we are sure we will discover new things we need to do if Sora becomes very successful. To help guide us towards more of the good and less of the bad, here are some principles we have for this product: *Optimize for long-term user satisfaction. The majority of users, looking back on the past 6 months, should feel that their life is better for using Sora that it would have been if they hadn’t. If that’s not the case, we will make significant changes (and if we can’t fix it, we would discontinue offering the service). * Encourage users to control their feed. You should be able to tell Sora what you want—do you want to see videos that will make you more relaxed, or more energized? Or only videos that fit a specific interest? Or only for a certain about of time? Eventually as our technology progresses, you will be should to the tell Sora what you want in detail in natural language. (However, parental controls for teens include the ability to opt out of a personalized feed, and other things like turning off DMs.) * Prioritize creation. We want to make it easy and rewarding for everyone to participate in the creation process; we believe people are natural-born creators, and creating is important to our satisfaction. * Help users achieve their long-term goals. We want to understand a user’s true goals, and help them achieve them. If you want to be more connected to your friends, we will try to help you with that. If you want to get fit, we can show you fitness content that will motivate you. If you want to start a business, we want to help teach you the skills you need. And if you truly just want to doom scroll and be angry, then ok, we’ll help you with that (although we want users to spend time using the app if they think it’s time well spent, we don’t want to be paternalistic about what that means to them).
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