Investing in Synthetic Media

How “we” at Betaworks are thinking about this emerging market

Betaworks is building a rich and diverse portfolio of tech companies that are working on cutting edge technologies to solve real world problems.

Now we can try to solve these problems, but we may never have the right tools, the right solutions, or the right perspective. We might still think of the world differently, but we might not always be able to communicate the full meaning of our words. The Turing Test, while not asking us to believe in a universal “true” form, asks us to think about how we communicate our ideas to one another, our experiences, and our ideas about ourselves. This is an important task, and one that we cannot solve with the kind of answers that we receive from our current tools. We cannot communicate with machines simply because they can, and we cannot communicate with them simply because they understand us. We must try to understand it from multiple perspectives, to hear it in our dreams, in our fears, in our memories.

I don’t think we can talk about this in terms of a Turing Test without discussing the rise of artificial intelligence. For better or worse, AI has been getting faster, smarter and less human. Artificial intelligence — intelligence‒ is gaining more and more capabilities with each passing year. Today, we can build a bot that can tell us when a car is going to roll up the driveway, or if two people are texting, or whether their children have a heart attack or are in the hospital, or if our favorite TV show is “just watching.”

What’s next?

We must recognize the emerging trends in artificial intelligence and synthetic media, especially as they pertain to our most promising AI projects. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we must be prepared for an increasingly complex situation of Artificial Intelligence, as well as a massive increase in artificial intelligence’s capabilities. But there are also challenges. The potential of synthetic media is enormous, yet this technology is still at the very early stages, with the potential to advance at a faster rate. This brings us to a key question: What is the best way to leverage these developments to grow our industry and make the most of these new advancements?

So what do we want to create? What are the key metrics that we want to measure?

We believe it’s important to take a step back and look at the broader context that’s happening in the digital media space. In the digital age, our content is increasingly being consumed; as we move beyond the static, linear, and focused media we’ve seen for decades, new platforms are emerging to connect consumers and creators with content and relationships. While this means more and more content will be shared, it also means more and more platforms to create for those shared stories. To us, that means creating for “all ages,” for each platform and culture — both traditional and emerging.

To us, that means creating for “all ages,” for each platform and culture — both traditional and emerging.

We want to build products that enable people to build stories and relationships across all sorts of media. We want to create tools that enable producers to collaborate with creators through shared experiences. We want to create product-specific experiences with specific content (a story, an artist, a subject, a genre) across all platforms — from the digital to the print to the television and digital home. And we want to create a system of communication between creators and audience that includes and extends beyond the traditional broadcast networks, newspapers, and magazines.

So who are we looking for and where are we looking for them?

We’re looking for talent that can help us build the tools and systems to create and distribute the content you create. We’re looking for teams that are driven by a desire to build a new generation of innovative content that connects and connects with other creators, and we’re looking for teams who can create for this generation of creators. We’re also looking for teams who can contribute to the growth of both our new generation of creative tools and our new generation of content. And we’re looking for teams with a love for the future of digital media.

To be clear: this is a team about doing things differently, about building something different.

— sarah@betaworks.com

Addendum: This post was written entirely by an algorithm, a narrow application of AI.

It was made using a transformer-based language model (gpt2) the seed was this post — every word after “market” in the headline was written by the transformer. It's an experiment in synthetic media. If you are interested in testing this you can do simple sentence completion with this transformer that Hugging Face posted this week.

“We” found this experiment instructive — all forms of media, text, audio, images and yes videos are colliding with machine learning requiring whole new systems and frameworks for trust. That is what we actually do want to invest in.