Pieter Levels
speaker
696 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Aug 2024
Pieter Levels’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think it started because Stability Fusion came out. So Stability Fusion is the first generative image model, AI model. And I started playing with it. You could install it on your Mac. Somebody forked it and made it work for MacBooks. So I downloaded it and cloned the repo and started using it to generate images. And... it was like amazing.
Like it would, I found it on Twitter because you see things happen on Twitter and I, I would post what I was making on Twitter as well. And you could make any image, you could write a prompt. So essentially you write a prompt and then it generates a photo of that or image of that, um, in any style. Like they would use like artist names to make like a Picasso kind of style and stuff. Um,
And I was trying to see like, what is it good at? Is it good at people? No, it's really bad at people, but it was good at houses. So architecture, for example, I would generate like architecture houses. So I made a website called thishousedosnotexist.org. And it generated like, they called like house porn in that one. Like house porn is like a subreddit.
So, and this was Stable Diffusion, like the first version. So it looks really, you can click for another photo. So it generates like all these kind of non-existing houses.
But it looked kind of good, you know, like especially back then.
Now things look much better. It's really, really well done.
And it also generates like a description.
This is very scrappy. In the bottom, there's like a ranking of the most upvoted houses. So these are the top voted. And if you go to all time, you see quite beautiful ones. Yeah. So this one is my favorite. The number one. It's like kind of like a... How is this not more popular? It was really popular for like a while, but then people got so bored of it.
I think because I was getting bored of it too. Like just continuous house porn, like everything starts looking the same. But then I saw it was really good at interior. So I pivoted to interiorai.com where I tried to like upload first-generation interior designs.
And then I tried to do, like it was a new technology called image-to-image where you can input an image, like a photo, and it would kind of modify the thing So you see, it looks almost the same as photo. It has the same code essentially. So I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived and I would ask like, change this into like, I don't know, like maximalist design, you know?
And it worked, and it worked really well. So I was like, okay, this is a startup, because obviously interior design, AI, and nobody's doing that yet. So I launched this, and it was successful and made like, within a week, made 10K, 20K a month, and now still makes like 40K, 50K a month. And it's been like two years. So then I was like, how can I improve this interior design?
I need to start learning fine-tuning. And fine-tuning is where you have this existing AI model, and you fine-tune it on the specific goal you want it to do. So I would find really beautiful interior design, make a gallery, and train a new model that was very good at interior design. And it worked, and I used that as well. And then for fun, I uploaded photos of myself And here's where it happened.
And to train myself, like, and this would never work, obviously. And it worked. And actually it started understanding me as a concept. So my face worked and, and you could do like different styles, like me as a, like very cheesy medieval warrior, all this stuff. So I was like, this is another startup. So now I did avatarai.me. I couldn't get to .com. And this was... Is it still up?
Yeah, avatarai.me. Well, now it's forwards to Photoi because it pivoted. Got it. But this was more like cheesy thing. So this is very interesting because this went so viral. It made like, I think like 150K in a week or something. So most money ever made. And then big, this is very interesting, the big VC companies like Lenza, which are much better at iOS and stuff than me. I didn't have iOS app.
They quickly built an iOS app that does the same and they found technology. And it's all open technology, so it's good. And I think they made like $30 million with it.
They became like the top grossing app after that.
I think it's amazing, honestly. And it's not like... You didn't have like a feeling like, oh, fuck. No, I was a little bit like sad because all my products would work out and I never had like real fierce competition. And now I have like fierce competition from like a very skilled, high talent, like iOS developer studio or something that... And they already had an app.
They had an app in App Store for, I think, retouching your face or something. So they were very smart. They add these avatars to there. It's a feature. They had the users. They do a push notification to everybody. We have these avatars. Man, I think they made so much money. And I think they did a really great job. And I also made a lot of money with it.
But I quickly realized it wasn't my thing because it was so cheesy. It was like kitsch, you know? It's kind of like... me as a Barbie or me as a, you know, it was too cheesy. I wanted to go for like, what's a real problem we can solve? Because this is going to be a hype. This is going to be, and it was a hype, these avatars. It's like, let's do real photography.
Like, how can you make people look really photorealistic? And it was difficult. And that's why these avatars worked because they were all like in a cheesy, you know, Picasso style. And art is easy because you interpret the, the, all the problems that AI has with your face are like artistic, you know, if you call it Picasso.
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