Victor Riparbelli
speaker
267 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Victor Riparbelli’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Do you want to learn music theory from a long book or from a video on YouTube that has audio? Do you want to listen to the news on a podcast on the way to work or fold out this physical piece of paper somewhere? Most people feel like this. But we all have this guilt. I have at least. I feel guilty when I watch videos and I listen to podcasts instead of picking up a good old-fashioned book.
You hear the commentary on this. Young people are unable to focus anymore. They need constant dopamine hits from cheap content that they scroll through on their social media apps. They don't get outside their room anymore. Exactly the same thing parents have been saying for 200 years. I have a prerogative idea. What if we're all just tired of overly dense, slow information?
Books with too many pages. Newspaper articles with filler. What if we become much more sensitive to the quality and the conciseness of the content that we consume because we now have infinite choice? What if the current generation of kids are able to learn and absorb information much faster because of technology, not despite it? Is the problem us, or is the problem text?
We still read a lot, right? We just read from many different sources every single day, not just a book and a newspaper. We read our messaging apps and our social media networks and our blog. We listen to long-form podcasts. It's very growing, right? But we still have this idea that books are morally superior in some sense. And even though I'm giving you this talk, I still very much feel it.
I don't know why that is. I'll let someone else do the research on that. But it's definitely very interesting how we psychologically attribute more value to the written word. So why is so much information still text if you really prefer video? It's pretty simple. The answer is cost. Cost in time and cost in money.
Today, we have to pick between the speed and scale of text or the accuracy and engagement of video content. And so there is this underlying economic incentive where only the content and the ideas and the knowledge we deem important enough gets converted into video and audio formats.
And so in the entertainment industry, this means that we get Fast and the Furious 278, rather than avant-garde cinema from film students. In the corporate world, this means that the Super Bowl ad is a video, but the fire safety video is a long, boring document. And This is about to change in a big, big way. AI will change that equation completely.
With AI, we can get both speed, scale, accuracy, and engagement. AI can create highly photorealistic content digitally. Computers can learn what the world looks like, and they can replicate it and remix it in amazing details. This is going to usher in a new wave of creativity, and it's not going to be driven by Hollywood.
It's going to be driven by YouTubers and young people with great ideas who take these tools and tell amazing stories. At Indesia, we focus on AI avatars, digital humans that sound and look like us. They can even be us if you make a clone of yourself. Today, our avatars already interact with millions of people every single day.
They teach school subjects, they onboard restaurant workers, provide health guidance, and sell products in more than 130 different languages. And they're getting really good. Very soon, they'll be very difficult to distinguish from reality. So with these technologies, we can create anything without the need for cameras.
We can bring our imaginations to life without the traditional barriers of skill and cost. But what's more exciting about all these new technologies is that they're going to make it extremely easy for anyone to create content. We've already seen how keyboards and computers turned all of us into writers. We've seen how PowerPoint turned all of us into designers.
And with AI, everyone is going to be able to be a director producing Hollywood-grade video without needing any training at all. At Syntheser, we've already turned more than a million people into video creators, and it's really fun to see all the things people make videos about, but they don't have to ask their boss because they can just log on and make the videos themselves.
Why do people make videos? It's not a very well researched area yet, but we've been working with UCL in London to figure out how do we learn differently with video and AI video versus text. We did a study with 400 participants. It's still ongoing. We plan to publish the results sometime next year. But there's some really interesting initial findings.
When you just ask people, do you prefer to learn with AI video or text, the results are pretty astonishing. 77% of people prefer to learn through video. So faster and easier content creation will be transformative. But with new technologies, we always invent new media formats. And right now, most AI-generated content is what I call a bridge genre.
We're using it to create old formats with new technologies. Just like the first newspapers, sorry, the first websites looked like newspapers on a screen, AI videos today are linear. They have a beginning and an end. They essentially emulate what we can record with a physical camera.
Once we combine AI video with reasoning systems like language models, we're going to unlock an entirely new type of media that's going to be interactive and personalized. It's going to be able to think and narrate and personalize content for us. If you're learning music theory, you'll have an assistant that knows your skill level, knows your taste in music, and build a curriculum around that.
All of your kids maybe will have their favorite celebrities teaching them math in school. And they'll do it in a context that's interesting for your kid. Maybe that's soccer or sci-fi or whatever. Education is going to be turbocharged with these new AI systems. Entertainment is going to change. It's going to be shaped by the viewers and by the world around it.
We'll probably have interactive films. We'll have TV series that never end. It sounds weird, but in many ways, this is what a social media feed is, right? It's just an endless story. Your TikTok feed is also an endless stream of personalized content just for you.
And when we combine this with new form factors like AR, VR, brain-computer interfaces, media is increasingly going to appear like real life. Maybe we'll be transmitting messages to our friends just via thought in the future. And our inbox is not going to be text. It's going to be videos of all your friends and your relatives' AI avatars talking to you.
It sounds weird, but I don't think it's that far off. And I promise you that your fire safety video at work will be a Spielberg-esque masterpiece in the not-so-distant future. These technologies open up a Pandora box of questions. There's ethical questions, there's political questions, there's design questions, and there's commercial questions. I'll leave you with a few provocative questions.
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