Will we see a new film or tv franchise discovered due to AI in 2024?

🔥 Op-Ed

Will we see a new film or streaming franchise discovered on social media in 2024?

Just as music megastars like Justin Bieber (Youtube, 2008), The Weeknd (Youtube, 2011), Calvin Harris (Myspace, 2006), Adele (Myspace, 2006) and more recent breakouts like Mae Stephens (Tiktok, 2023) were scouted, we will see incredible world-building hitmakers emerge seemingly overnight.

This will largely be thanks to newfound tools like generative AI which will empower creatives to unlock new narratives— enabling them to create immersive worlds without having to pitch to traditional gatekeepers or having sizable production budgets.

Visuals convey complex narratives at lightning speed, much quicker than the written word. My bet is that they’ll be found through a visual platform like Instagram or Tiktok. This might just give Meta its first true artist-discovery platform.

Plot twist: Instead of IP holders being protective against AI, I believe the trend will shift towards AI generating a greater number of intellectual property creators. Game on.

Here are five of my favorite worlds being built right now. Think any of these will blossom into a hitmaker?

🔥 Latest News

1. Anamorph’s generative technology reorders scenes to create unlimited versions of one film: The startup, founded by filmmaker Gary Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes, revealed its innovative technology at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival when it debuted its first documentary, “Eno”, based on musician Brian Eno. 

2. AI start-up Anthropic challenges OpenAI and Google with new chatbot: The high-profile AI start-up Anthropic released a new version of its Claude chatbot, saying it outperforms other leading chatbots on a range of standard benchmark tests, including systems from Google and OpenAI. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive and co-founder, said the new technology, called Claude 3 Opus, was particularly useful when analyzing scientific data or generating computer code. Anthropic claims that its Claude 3 Opus technology outperforms both GPT-4 and Gemini in mathematical problem solving, computer coding, general knowledge and other areas.

3. Google’s ScreenAI can ‘see’ graphics like humans do: Google introduces ScreenAI, a multimodal vision-language model that can understand & answer questions about graphical content while also summarizing, annotating, & navigating user interfaces

4. StabilityAI releases TripoSR in collaboration with TripoAI. TripoSR is a new image-to-3D model capable of creating high quality outputs in less than a second. The new model is designed to cater to the growing demands of entertainment, gaming, industrial design, and architecture professionals, with responsive outputs for visualizing detailed 3D objects.

🔧 New Tools

• Wix introduces a new AI chatbot that builds websites in seconds based on prompts

• OpenAI adds ‘Read Aloud’ voiceover to ChatGPT, allowing it to speak its outputs

• DeepMind alumni unveils their AI-powered video generation model Haiper, raises $13.8M in seed funding from Octopus Ventures

• Vimeo introduces Vimeo Central, an AI-powered video hub for enterprises

• Adobe introduces new GenAI music tool called Project Music GenAI Control, a new tool that can easily generate and edit audio with AI – allowing creators to craft custom music tracks using text prompts

• Morph Studio lets users create films by describing desired scenes in prompts for each shot

• H2O AI releases Danube, a super-tiny LLM for mobile applications that comes with 1.8 billion parameters 

• Deepdub introduces its AI-based Accent Control technology that enables content creators to precisely control the accents of characters when dubbing content into another language

• Lightricks launched LTX Studio, an AI-powered filmmaking studio that enables creatives to automatically generate scripts, editable storyboards, and short video clips

💰 Latest Startup Fundings

• Midjourney rival Ideogram raises $80M in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, rolls out a new version of its text-to-image model with a new feature called Magic Prompt to help with creating prompts

• Moonhub raises $1.4M led by Unconventional Ventures to expand its VR-based training platform

• Ema, a ‘Universal AI employee,’ emerges from stealth with $25M

• Chinese AI startup MiniMax raises $600M at $2.5B valuation led by Alibaba

• Topsort, an AI and machine learning-based responsible advertising technology company, raises $20m in Series A funding

• Perplexity poised to become latest AI startup to hit unicorn status: Perplexity AI is reportedly nearing completion of a funding round that will give the AI search startup a unicorn valuation of around $1 billion.