Building AI that can search inside videos (and photos and audio too)
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How did Apu’s childhood love of film lead to a career in AI?
This is a bit a sort of a childhood passion. My father was a filmmaker, so he was a cinematographer and then turned director. So I grew up in a place where visuals were always getting made.
This is a Pooh Shadi, a machine learning engineer at Dropbox.
I liked sitting behind my computer and coding stuff up. So I thought, okay, fine, how can we sort of connect the art of uh visual storytelling and computer science?
Before coming to Dropbox in 2025, Apu co-founded a startup called Mobius Labs. They wanted to make it faster and easier for computers to understand the world around us. Something he's been studying and thinking about for the last 20 years. Of course, his approach has evolved a bit from when he was younger.
My vision back then was to create a robot like uh Data in Star Trek. Oh wow. Uh so if you think about all the robots in Isegasimo or or Data in Star Trek, it's seeing the visual world, it's hearing the visual world and navigating around the world essentially. So this was sort of the childhood fantasy.
Unfortunately, Apu isn't building robots for Dropbox yet, but what him and his team are doing is almost as amazing. So most AI tools today work primarily with text, you know, web pages, documents, emails, PDFs. But at Dropbox, Apu and as Mobius Labs co-founder Hicham Bhadri want to make it easier for you to work with photos, video, and audio too.
In creative workflows, especially when people want to edit, people wants to tell a new story, a lot of time is spent searching and finding that right clip. For example, one of the sequence in Jurassic Park where um dinosaurs are uh being viewed by uh the two main characters for the first time and there's a sense of awe, etc.
Imagine having to find that scene yourself with no prior context. It would probably involve a fair amount of poking through folders and scrubbing through footage, and that's assuming all of your assets are nicely labeled and organized, which come on, we know they're not.
But now I can just type in, okay, seeing the dinosaur for the first time, characters surprised, and and comes that particular moment.
Which is pretty darn cool. And I'm not just talking about the dinosaurs here. I'm Matthew Braga, and this is Working Smarter, a podcast from Dropbox about how AI is changing the way we work and get stuff done. Today we're talking about audio and video and photos and all the things that Dropbox is doing to make your content searchable and understandable and more useful with the latest and greatest in multimodal AI. Apu and Hicham are going to explain how we got here, how they got here, and what kinds of things are possible when you can say search within a video or ask questions about an audio recording. Or find that one perfect photo in a folder of files with names like IMG underscore zero zero one.
That's coming up next on this episode of Working Smarter.
I'm always very interested in actually building technology and making it usable for uh end users because that I feel that's when technology becomes really important.
Why is searching inside videos and photos a challenge for Dropbox users?
At Mobis Labs, we have been always been interested in visual search from day one. So our product was a set of computer vision algorithms which can analyze images and later audio and videos. That can be used by media companies to search through large collections of images or video collections. So our clientele were a lot of stock photo companies, et cetera. And Dropbox also had very similar problems. A huge set of Dropbox users are this media and creative user-based where searching Through large content of video and audio and images is a profound problem. And solving search for these users is very important. So how do you do that? When you think about search, you also have to think about different kinds of file types.
Typically, people have docs, they might have Jira tickets, they might have videos, they might have audio files, etc. So search has To work across all of these different uh files drives. It's kind of hard to know what is inside what is happening inside a video document. So we run certain models uh to look inside the video.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Apu’s childhood love of film lead to a career in AI?
0:00–3:33
2
Why is searching inside videos and photos a challenge for Dropbox users?
3:33–7:36
3
What is multimodal search and how does it understand video content?
7:36–14:00
4
How does Dropbox extract and summarize visual and audio information from media files?
14:00–19:00
5
What models are used to process video, audio, and text, and how are they combined?
19:00–23:17
6
How does the team make these large models run fast and cheap at Dropbox scale?
23:17–27:18
7
Why is open‑source work important for building and improving these AI systems?
27:18–30:29
8
What are the future goals for AI‑powered media search at Dropbox?
30:29–31:46