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Get the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash vox. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Vimeo CEO Philip Moyer. You probably know Vimeo from its beginnings as an artier, more creative competitor to YouTube. But over the last few years, and especially after run public in 2021, Vimeo has really turned itself into an enterprise software company.
selling video hosting services to companies of all sizes. I got to tell you, I was pretty excited to talk to Philip because this episode is a particularly fun full circle decoder moment. I interviewed Philip's predecessor, Anjali Sood, both when she was CEO of Vimeo and again more recently in her new gig as CEO of Vimeo.
Tubi. So I had a sense of how Hanjali ran Vimeo, what strategies she took to Tubi, and then it was fascinating to close the loop and see how Philip wanted to change Vimeo after taking over himself. Especially because the entire ecosystem of online video is itself changing incredibly rapidly.
You'll hear Philip be very complimentary of what Anjali accomplished at Vimeo, but now he's pushing to make Vimeo grow into a very different kind of YouTube competitor, one that can support everything from independent creators to huge corporations. It's a shift from the strategy that Anjali used to reset the company and take it public, and there's a lot of interesting nuance to it.
It turns out everyone wants to put videos on the internet, but only some of those people want them to be ingested by YouTube's advertising and recommendation systems. What's interesting about this is that Philip has experience at Google. He worked at Google Cloud. In fact, he has experience at a lot of places. He's worked at Amazon and Microsoft as well. And he's deep in the weeds on both the tech and the business.
You'll hear us talk about Google and YouTube in particular quite a bit in this one, but we also get into TikTok and what it means that the incentives of algorithmic video platforms have drastically influenced both creators worldwide and the culture we all consume.
Of course, we also talked about AI, which is upending every platform in different ways. Vimeo markets itself now as an AI-powered video platform. So I wanted to know how Philip is thinking about Vimeo's history as a creator-focused platform. It's present as an alternative to the YouTube algorithms and how all of that collides with the pitfalls of AI-generated video. A lot of creators and a lot of consumers do not like AI-generated content.
But there's still a place for these tools to make some parts of the video process easier. And Philip and I talked a lot about where those lines might be. I also asked Philip about a pretty simple supply and demand math problem I've been wrestling with recently, one that seems like it will change the creator economy drastically in the years to come. If the total amount of video on the internet explodes because of AI,
While the total amount of time we can spend watching that video remains relatively fixed, well, how is anyone going to make any money at all? This is a fun one. You can tell that Philip and I could have kept going for a long time. Okay, Vimeo CEO Philip Moyer. Here we go. Philip Moyer, you are the CEO of Vimeo. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you, Neil A. It's great to be here.
I am very excited to talk to you. I got to tell you, just structurally, this is one of the very first truly full circle decoder episodes because we had your predecessor, Anjali, on as CEO of Vimeo. And then we had her on in her new job as CEO of Tubi. And now we have you on as her replacement. It's full circle. It's full circle for a show that's about structure and decision-making and organizational culture. This is as good as it gets for me.
So thank you so much for joining us. That's fantastic. I have a lot of respect for Anjali and have to say a big thank you to her for all she built here. So it's wonderful to hear. Yeah, I'm very curious. You know, Anjali, you know, when we talked about Vimeo and when she was there, she was in the middle of executing a big pivot, right? People know Vimeo is what it started as a consumer video service, kind of the artier competitor.
YouTube. She pivoted it to a SaaS business. She was very open. This is now a SaaS company. We're doing a lot of enterprise work. We're a video hosting provider to a lot of people. We are a video creation tool for small businesses. That was several years ago. I talked to her three years ago.
about Vimeo. You're the new CEO. What do you think of Vimeo today? You know, I think in a lot of ways, I mean, a little bit of what she started and a lot of, you know, what we're continuing here is going back to the roots of what Vimeo is known for. you know people came to us because at the time you know 20 years ago it was hard to upload video i kind of call that i'll say the second or third epoch of video
was right around that time period where video files were getting bigger. It was hard to stream video. They were no longer just a single file. We were starting to get multiple formats. And so people came to us because of the quality.
of our transcoding and then ultimately our ability to be able to serve it directly to the person you know that was most important that they wanted to provide that video to And a lot of what we're doing right now and what we've kind of taken that Anjali had started and extended pretty significantly is it turns out that lots and lots of organizations and individuals around the world want to be able to keep a video private.
or they want to be able to serve it only to an intended audience. They don't want to have someone collect data. They don't want to have an algorithm that tries to send them down a rabbit hole. Instead, they want to just literally be able to provide that video. We're seeing video today is about 82% of the world's internet. And we're seeing that same concept arrive inside of with private individuals, with doctors, with educators, with large organizations.
And so, yes, I would say that what we're really becoming now is our goal is to become the largest private video distribution platform in the world, because we think that there's an increasing demand that video doesn't have to be public or it doesn't have to be algorithmic. but instead it can be very personal and delivered at the right moment at the right time to the right individual.
let me try to just understand that in context there was the beginning right you're saying this is there are several epochs of video there's the beginning which is literally ios had a send to youtube button at the operating system level Because no one thought that public videos were a big deal, right? You just needed some place to watch videos and YouTube was that. And then YouTube grew into the social media juggernaut it is now. TikTok exists, all that's there.
The initial reaction was it's very hard to compete with that will be for enterprises, right? Business customers have video needs. We'll service them. You're saying there's some kind of middle ground in the middle of the spectrum between. big algorithmic consumer video platforms and enterprise where just a lot of regular people want private video sharing? You know, we have hundreds of thousands of school districts that use us.
teachers you know want students to be able to upload video assignments especially in the world of chat gpt and ai they want to see that the student is actually doing the assignment we've got Tens of thousands of medical professionals that want to be able to send a video to a patient without having some algorithm capture the fact that their disease state or the question that they have.
We've got lots and lots of marketing organizations that want to be able to serve their video over to an individual inside of a big company or to their client, and they don't want it to be public. And then what we're also finding is on the YouTube front. I think organizations that were hosting entire YouTube sections of their website, they're finding that YouTube is redirecting their customers over to some other place. I was meeting with a really large financial services company.
CEO and the chief economist, I said, I took him to the website and I said, let me show you, uh, your chief economist speaking. And I clicked on the video and before the video. played we had to watch some advertising on some you know bitcoin or something and then we had to go over and like on the right hand side it said here's how the top three credit rating organizations are trying to control the world this is the video you should watch next And we're just trying to watch the economists video.
And so organizations are kind of getting tired of being redirected or having their data captured. And so a lot of organizations, you know, are starting to bypass what I call the big walled gardens. And in a lot of ways, we're kind of in the back of the MSN and AOL era.
for websites that's where we are with video right now and people like want to be able to go directly to their consumer they want to be able to serve the message you know in an unfederated way and then ultimately whether they just want to be able to ensure the highest quality and the most personalized experience and so
We're seeing tremendous demand for those kinds of scenarios. And again, it's everything from the school teacher, the fitness instructor, in some cases, the faith institution, all the way up to some of the biggest companies in the world. And I do mean literally the biggest companies in the world are becoming customers.
I think the thing that I'm keying on there is there's the consumer-facing video platforms, and then you have a bunch of enterprise video needs. And you're kind of in some way describing a bunch of core enterprise customers, right? Large school districts.
The company's big enough to have a chief economist. I think those are classic enterprise customers. And then somewhere in the middle, those companies actually want to go reach consumers without participating in algorithmic media. And that consumer surface... vimeo has kind of gotten away from are you saying you're kind of you're pushing back towards it you know we get about a hundred billion views of video a year on vimeo and only 20 percent of those on vimeo.com we show up in
e-commerce platforms you know i was meeting with a a physician he's an independent practitioner fertility doctor and he records a video before his patients come in he sends that video over to to uh you know the his patients in the fertility clinic and so
have individual proprietors you know we have individuals that want to be able to share a family video or you know something that they learned you know if they had been into a doctor's visit or otherwise and so we've lots and lots of people that are using individuals now on the filmmaker side
What is most amazing to me right now is the sheer number of filmmakers that I have coming to me. And this has really started kicking up since I've become CEO. I would tell you it's been a trend in about this past six months. I have so many filmmakers that are coming to me saying. We don't like the deal.
We don't like the deal that we have, you know, with the big studios. We don't like the fact that, you know, if we go to YouTube, as an example, they take 45 cents of every advertising dollar. Or if we want to try and, you know, go onto, you know, one of the big platforms, they'll take like as much as 50 cents of every dollar.
is there a way for me to be able to sell tickets to my audience? In some cases, some of these filmmakers that come to us, they have audiences that are bigger than they might get on one of those platforms. And so we're finding people want to go direct.
Our streaming business is like that. You know, when you post on some of these big platforms, I really encourage people to look at the terms of service of the big major consumer-based video platforms. It says in their terms of service, they're able to monetize your content any way they want to. they can reuse your content you know they can serve the content and quite frankly they're capturing 45 cents every dollar you know in that process
And so a lot of these organizations want to be able to bypass those kind of economics and those kind of IP. So is that you building a consumer interface? You're saying it's only a small percentage that's coming to Vimeo.com. Where are they finding audiences? Is it all on their own websites? Is it in other?
people's platforms, where is that audience actually going? You know, it's been interesting because there is just this trend among streamers in particular, where they'll go to the large platforms, they'll get some following, and then when they want to be able to serve premium content.
That's where they'll come over and say, you know, we want to put SVOD. We want to be able to put a gate in front of this content. Or they may want to go live and they may want to go asynchronous. And so they'll come to us and say, look, you know, we want to be able to have a... library so that people can see past live events.
Plus they want to be able to serve new content. In some cases, we're getting some organizations that want to do more interactive. So like clickable videos as an example. And so it's a whole variety of creators that are kind of saying, look, we might not want to adhere to the requirements or the...
Let's call it the compliance requirements or the economic requirements or the IP requirements of the big platforms. Give us an environment that we can control ourself. And that environment lives on their websites. Exactly. Like I'll give you an example. Sidemen is a great example of a group. They're one of the biggest followerships over in the UK. They sold out Wembley Stadium in like two hours and they famously played a soccer match where when a yellow card was shown.
and one of the sidemen held up an Uno reversi card to the ref, and it blew up the internet over in the UK. They serve on Vimeo. They have both content that they put on a YouTube or they put on Instagram, but then some of their more extended content they actually put on Vimeo. And then that library lives on us as well, you know, for a lot of things. Dropouts is a great example of that. Try Guys is a great example.
that Zeus Networks, Martha Stewart, where they want a little bit more control over the content and they want control over the monetization more so than what the traditional platforms give you. I'm going to ask you a question and you're just going to have to bear with me on sort of the mathematical nature of this question. Hopefully it makes sense. I have a lot of CEOs of web hosting companies on the show because I'm...
Very curious about the web in the age of platforms. How will it grow? Where will the audience come from? The last great referrer of web traffic, as everyone knows, is Google Search. Google Search is undergoing some sort of gigantic AI-powered...
at any crisis. Who knows what's going on over there, but it's changing. And so I have the CEO of Squarespace or the CEO of Wix or whatever other hosting platform I'm on. I say, why does anyone build a website? Why would you do that instead of starting a TikTok channel now if you're a small business or an individual creator? And they all kind of say, well, it's to do e-commerce, right? And embedded in that is some sense that...
okay, you've built a following on some platform. Now you want to sell something to your audience and you're going to, you got to sell the spoons somewhere. So you're going to start spoons.com and that's going to be hosted on Squarespace. And that's the way it goes. You're describing.
the content itself being valuable, right? Being more valuable when it's hosted on Vimeo, maybe you're selling it, maybe you're doing subscriptions, whatever you're doing, but that's happening on a website because you can't transact that way on YouTube or TikTok. You can't make the content valuable.
But you're still stuck with how do you get audience to come to the website, right? That's still just some fraction of a search audience or some fraction of conversions from one of the social video platforms. And that, this is the math, that seems like the upper. bound of your growth, right? Because some number of people have to come to the website, some number of people have to choose to transact on a video from the Try Guys, and that can only grow insofar as all of those individual customers.
can get people to come to websites. Do you see that the web is the limiter in that way? No, not at all. I've worked for Google, Amazon and Microsoft in my life. You know, most recently, you know, Google, I've worked in all manners of businesses and data problems.
And I have this foundational philosophy that there's actually more data behind firewalls and paywalls than there is in front. There's more information behind those firewalls and paywalls than in front. And when I take a look at the enterprise market for video, You know, in the past you'd have like a marketing video and it was hard, or you might have like a couple product videos, like for e-commerce, or you might have, you know, for example, the CEO's message.
Video is coming to literally every single element of business. In the same way it's 82% of the internet, it's coming in. And so whether or not it's that e-newsletter, whether or not it's for sales, like you'd look at an organization like Seismic or Gong that records sales calls and then helps the code. coach individuals.
If you watch a video, you're 67% more likely to buy a product. And so we've got very large e-commerce customers where they now have millions of videos on us that are serving to every single product on their website. And so what I'm seeing... is quite frankly that there is an explosion of video it's such an engaging media like when you watch a video you have 91 better retention than when you read something
So what I'm seeing is that a lot of the stuff that's behind the firewall and behind the paywall is now getting video enabled and that it's going across every single division inside of an organization. And it actually dwarfs what I'll call kind of a lot of the content.
We're going to see video show up in so many different ways and in so many different businesses. People are starting to use video to be able to determine efficiencies, like inside of quick service restaurants. They're starting to use video to be able to evaluate what's on a shelf and whether or not there's a stock out. in the shelf. And so when I think about this, I don't think about it just in terms of like one segment.
of our organization i actually you know the beauty of vimeo is that we're able to live inside and outside the firewall and there's very youtube does not live inside of the firewall Like we're able to hook in and sign a BIA, you know, like an agreement to do HIPAA for a doctor. YouTube's not going to do that. And then you think about all the interactions in the healthcare industry, you know, that actually can be video enabled. And so.
Our upper bound to growth is, you know, I actually kind of feel like it's a, it's, it's a larger opportunity than what YouTube is focused on right now. I see. I mean, YouTube right now is focused on video podcasts. It's like very, they've picked their shot and they're going to take it. By the way, every time anyone says that stat about video retention, I feel like a dinosaur because I need to read. for as much video podcasting as I literally do. I am a reader to the core. I'm an underliner.
I'm an underliner. I learned to highlight in five colors in law school. It's still where I'm at. And maybe the future is video. And that's why we do a video podcast, but still a reader to my core. There's like three parts of.
just sort of the video business. We've talked a lot about distribution where you might distribute that video. It sounds like that's where you think there's a lot of growth across organizations, even to consumer in some new way. Then there's monetization, which I want to get to.
But the first part is the hardest and I think undergoing the most change in terms of what we expect videos to be, and that's obviously creation, right? You need to make a video, you need to distribute it, you need to monetize it. Creation of video right now is super interesting because you have, in particular, not just the young generation, but everybody learning to speak the language of TikTok.
TikTok, I think, is most importantly expressed to people as a video editor, not just a scrolling video tool. It's a very powerful video editor that you can also use in CapCut. Then there's AI, which is making it a lot easier to make all kinds of videos in all kinds of ways. And then there's like the sort of like smaller AI components, right? That it's going to write a script for you that you can read.
And like, maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but it's all just in the mix, right? Like everyone is expecting the tools to guide them. You can see in particular how TikTok tools like challenges and filters and templates create a kind of culture that builds upon it. Are you thinking of that component of it? Like, we need to build an enterprise TikTok editor for people in order to just bring them in the pipeline? You know, I think...
There's a couple of dynamics that are happening right now, and this is what gets me so excited about this. This is one of the biggest things that brought me here. is the barriers to video creation are dropping so dramatically which leads to that like mass proliferation of video and then the difficulty in being able to manage at that scale like that's just foundation like the market forces that are behind us
I always pause for a second. I always tell people, you know, I can, I'll be able to talk to you for a long time about artificial intelligence in a couple of seconds, but let me talk to you about like what's happening in video formats. You're a hundred percent right.
Right now, mobile video, we're kind of in that era where mobile video is becoming much easier. People are becoming more comfortable. COVID really helped us get comfortable with dogs barking in the backgrounds and babies being inserted into frames. And basically I'll just call it more casualness. Before, it was highly scripted, if you recall. And so, culturally, people are getting much more comfortable shooting video.
tools has been extraordinary. Now we made some acquisitions of the past, you know, like Magista was an example of this because we really felt that we had to make it easier and easier to be able to create video. Well, I have been thrilled. with the proliferation of tools we shot a video for our reframe conference i should say shot a video we actually like created a video using 16 ai tools
That didn't exist 18 months ago, and it was over $15 billion of venture capital had gone into creating those tools. That's just one small set of tools. But you're absolutely right, is that you've got all these tools that are being created. And so we were thrilled about that. But simultaneously, the format of video is also proliferating. And so you've got traditional like 1068, you've got 4K that's starting to become more commonplace.
8K is arriving. And when you do 8K, it's roughly about six times the size of a 4K. Well, 16K and 32K televisions are on the horizon right now. You've got widescreen formats. You've got square formats for podcasting. You've got rectangular formats. And then we just recently released Apple Vision Pro support to be able to stream on Apple Vision Pro, which is 8K per eye, 36 frames per second.
simultaneously while the tools are proliferating, the format types are also proliferating. And so your ability to be able to both accept video from any format you know in some cases you accept something that's an old old format you know that you have to have improved or whether or not it's a super high quality giant widescreen format that needs to be cut up for all the different areas that you're going to serve that video
What I would tell you is that it's becoming more complex on the creator about which tool to use when, and then how do I ensure that the right format gets served at the right moment? And so the two simultaneous things that are happening in our business are creative tools and formats are exponentially growing right now. They're exponentially growing the amount of video that a creator has to deal with.
What's growing the fastest? You know, it's really interesting. As you can imagine, I think square format is popping up a lot. We are seeing a lot of demand for 4K. 4K, you know, in live formats and in serving formats. I think people are...
you know people are starting to use demand that format more which is obviously for us we have to move more bits we have to store more bits we've got to you know transcode more bits and so i would tell you that's probably the thing that we're seeing spike the most in terms of like consumption
like the traditional mobile stuff is going to be there and it's going to be constant i think it's kind of almost like growing at the speed of you know just i'll call them mobile phones basically but like i'm actually surprised about how many people are coming to us asking for 4k
What do you think that is? I look at the broader industry and you see the big streamers are pushing everybody to basically 1080p with ads. That's sort of the default for Macs or Netflix. And then you've got to pay extra for 4K. Are you seeing that demand in the same way they do, which is people will pay extra for it? Or are you seeing that demand as this is now the understood industry norm? It may be the place that we sit in the industry.
you know as i mentioned at the top of our talk was that people have always come to us for quality you know and so It may just be that because we actually are, you know, we've been known for quality, we've been known for the quality of our transcoding, the quality of our stream, the quality of the serve that we do. It may just be that people are not finding that kind of support elsewhere and coming to us for it. But I would just say, I think.
that people are experimenting with those formats i've been pleasantly surprised with the sheer number of people that have come to us since we've launched the apple vision pro and are coming to us with really interesting film projects um to do 8k per eye you know stitching all the camera work together so there's also some like really interesting stuff
And you'll see us talk a lot about this at South by Southwest, about what we think. I'm seeing some good excitement in those 8K formats as well, is all I'll say. But it might just be the position that we sit in the industry. It's so interesting to see the rest of the industry basically insist that consumers don't care about 4K. You and I are talking two days before the Super Bowl.
And for all of Fox's talk about 4K, they're still producing that in 1080p and then upscaling it. And it's kind of fascinating to see the consumer side of the market land at one sort of standard quality level while you're saying the enterprise of the market.
The more discerning part of the market is now not just assuming that 4K will exist, but that you will support 8K per eye, 36 frames per second in the Vision Pro. I don't know. When there's 16K for TVs out, I think people will be buying them. Is that... That's a lot of cost, right? You're talking about moving an enormous amount of data.
Are you just getting ahead of it because that's what the customers expect? You have a background in cloud services and big data. Is that something where you say, okay, this is just scalable. We can just solve this problem with the tools we have, or is it we have to re-architect the systems?
I'll use the corollary of what's going on with token size inside of AI models, where everybody knows that, you know, the very first version of ChatGPT was maybe, I don't know, 100 million tokens, and then it popped over to a billion tokens.
will be up to a trillion tokens. The cost to be able to deliver all of that is going to come down over time. The cost of storage comes down, the cost of bandwidth comes down, and then even the innovations that are in the televisions, those costs are going to be coming down. When you think about the quality of the TVs we have now. versus even just 10 years ago. It's so discernibly different. And I think that as those costs come down, somebody has to serve that content.
and you know our infrastructure we we have the infrastructure to be able to do it and so some of us we have we have to stay slightly ahead so that we are that place that's always viewed as quality and so yeah i guess it's just it's part of our it has to be part of our dna that we're always to support those cutting edge formats. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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We're back with Vimeo CEO Philip Moyer. Before the break, we were discussing the kinds of opportunities that still exist for online video distribution and the types of tools that are dramatically changing video creation. But before we really got into AI... I wanted to ask the big decoder questions about structure and decision-making and how Philip is changing Vimeo now that he's in charge. We've opened the door to AI, and I definitely want to talk about that.
In particular, using AI as a creative tool and how your customers might be thinking about that and their relationship to it. But first, I just want to get to the decoder questions. We've talked a lot about how you're thinking about growing Vimeo's business. What would you say is the most tangibly different thing you're doing than your predecessor, Anjali? There's a couple things. Anjali, she was supporting a lot of different businesses. I'll say as you went through COVID.
And as you went through kind of when video was hard, and I would say it wasn't as culturally ingrained as it is right now, I think she had to make a lot of decisions around the business. When I got here, a lot of people asked me this question, like, well, do we serve the consumer? Or do we serve the enterprise? Do we serve the filmmaker? Or do we serve the physician?
When I really spent time down with who our customer was, I really had to get deep, deep, deep down inside and go, who really uses this? Show me the type of company. Show me the names of the companies, the industries that we're in. You know, it was very clear to me that we serve the creator that is professional, somebody that is using video for their business, like professionally. It's not a hobby. It's actually like to get a job done. So being able to consensus around that creative pro.
not trying to go and create a YouTube competitor or trying to create a low cost tool for the hobbyist, but truly that we serve that professional creator and then being able to describe very succinctly.
You know, the fact that all of that comes together, that sometimes a professional creator wants to just be able to serve a single video. Sometimes they need to be able to manage thousands of videos. Sometimes they want to be able to go live. Sometimes they need a high quality. Sometimes they need help to be able to divide it.
cut it up into rectangular or square formats. I think one of the core things I did when I got here was really obsess around the customer. Every meeting we start, we start by telling a customer story. I learned a lot of this, I would tell you, between Google and Amazon. Amazon is, I would say, renowned for this. But we really tell the stories of who our creators are.
And then really building the ability to be able to move quickly and listen to those enterprise requirements. You know, when you start a company and I, you know, I started at Microsoft in the very early days of Microsoft. It wasn't an enterprise company then, believe it or not. Amazon, you know, when I got there.
There weren't a lot of financial services companies using the cloud. I went through that transition. In Google, it wasn't really known as an enterprise-grade cloud when I first got there. and so i've been through this transition and when you start you know when you start a product that is going to serve the enterprise you know what i always tell people is it's easier to get more complex but it's really hard to get
be complex and get easier and so we were starting from these roots as a kind of a consumer and filmmakers product and a lot of what i've focused on is really listening quickly you know to not just our individual customers but like the entire spectrum and being able to say yes to those requirements.
I also come with a tremendous amount of experience. As you can imagine, you could look at my background, it's years of enterprise experience. And so I also, I know what's required to be able to do HIPAA. I understand what it is to be able to do GDPR. I understand.
compliance requirements and so when we go into things like artificial intelligence or we go into storage and distribution like i have you know a lot of um instincts around that and so spending the time to explain where we're going as a company to be able to serve both inside and outside the firewall and then the requirements that we're going to have architecturally and just explaining that to the organization and weaving together
hey, that filmmaker wants their content protected the same way that maybe the largest retailer in the world or that CEO wants their content protected. And weaving those two messages together and building a product roadmap that is going to serve both, I would tell you. I feel like probably the biggest thing that I've probably done since getting here is unify the vision into a single cohesive vision. And then the second thing is that really making sure that all of us are telling the stories. Hey.
Did you know that this fertility clinic is using us in this way? Did you know that this school teacher is using us in this way? Did you know that this faith organization uses us in this way? Do you know that this, you know, the largest retailer uses us this way? Getting people to tell the stories internally.
I think was an important, the last thing I'll tell you is that, you know, the company kind of like, there was a little bit of a shine that came off the company after the IPO. And I think, um, given the company confidence.
and saying let me tell you who's actually using us i don't think that a lot of people really realized internally even the broad array of customers and i put this in our shareholder letter where we have you know eight out of the top eight big box retailers you know we've got air of the top eight media companies
that are using us internally. We've got huge numbers of insurance and financial services companies, companies that could use anybody. And I said, they're using us for a reason. And so getting some confidence back into the company that we actually are an incredibly valuable tool in a world. of increasing complexity, I think has given the company a lot more confidence to be even bolder as we go forward.
You're talking a lot about culture change, renewed focus. Kind of the thesis of this show is that comes out of structure. I'm just looking at our notes here from the producers. In the past few months, you've named a new chief marketing officer, a new chief information officer.
security officer, a new people officer, a new revenue officer. You're obviously making some changes in the organization. How was Vimeo structured and how are you restructuring? You know, we had, in some cases, our technology organizations were incredibly siloed. how we did trust and safety as an example you know in some cases how we did data in some cases who owned what parts of engineering they were actually broken up
in a lot of ways. I think oftentimes our marketing organization had a mandate while the sales organization might have had another mandate. A lot of, I would tell you what was really important to me, like one of my first hires was the chief technology and product officer, you know, Bob Petroselli, bringing an individual in that unifies product engineering.
and you know is able to have like single threaded leadership over top of parts of the business that are that important they have to be working together well
You know, some of the things that we're doing in trust and safety, we actually think we can turn around and expose that to our enterprise customers because it turns out they probably don't want things on their platform the same way that we don't want certain things on our platform. And so getting that kind of like any internal function can become an external function.
and getting that kind of view that we all serve the customer in some way, shape or form, super important inside of our product and technology organizations. One of the most important things I had to do as well, you know, our chief marketing officer that came in, you know, he has a really extensive experience in Charlie Ungersik in being able to both do marketing to individuals as well as to enterprise.
we are going out and talking about how we can protect videos as well as serve videos as you know as well as um provide ai to that entire audience and so we had to get an individual that was able to to oversee part same both parts of the business i've also done some recent restructuring
put an individual completely in charge of what we call our self-service business and to be able to move even faster in that part of the business and obsess on everything from the top of the funnel all the way through, you know, when a subscriber comes in right down to what are we actually using in the product. And this is a big element as well. And we'll tell you one of the other changes I didn't mention is that we're obsessing on use, like right down to the feature level.
where i look at those kind of reports on a weekly basis like how many people are using our edit feature how many people using our live feature how many people applied permissions to a video you know did that increase week over week what did we do and so that self-service leader is really now single threaded leader.
And we just, you know, we had as well a single-threaded leader around our streaming business. And we really started seeing, you know, some of the results from that internally inside of the company. So giving single-threaded leadership, I will tell you, it is talked about a lot. But, oh my God, it's beautiful to actually be able to call up somebody that owns the number, that owns the resources, that worries about it as much as you do, like every single day.
Single-threaded leadership is an Amazon concept. You've worked at all the companies so I can pick out where the concepts come from. It's pretty fun for me. That's a classic Amazon concept. You need to have a pretty small team that owns the thing and there's a leader who's responsible for the whole stack. That is...
how you get silos. You can look at Amazon's product and say, oh, there's a bunch of single-threaded leaders here. This is not necessarily cohesive. Everything is running as fast as it can, but the holistic vision of the Amazon product...
suffers for it, right? It's scale at the end of that. You started out talking about having too many silos, and we're talking about single-threaded leaders. How are you managing that tension? I was asked one time to give a talk on what it was like to work at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
you know i got an opportunity to work directly with gates and bomer directly with jassy and then certainly with um thomas curry and sundar one of the most important lessons i learned very early on you know at microsoft was around having like really establishing a strong
single sentence vision for the entire company about what we're trying to do in the future. And you know, you wake up every single morning. And I mean, I was there in the early days when the vision was a PC on every desktop in every home.
now that was like extraordinary at the time now we have a pc in every you know pocket at this point but we all knew that what we were trying to do was unlock information for the world by putting this powerful computing device in someone's hands and so regardless of the divisions or otherwise it all feathered into a common vision And it was a lot of what I had to do when I got here was I owed the company a strong agreement.
among everybody in the company of what we're trying to build. Are we trying to build the best live stream product? Are we trying to build the best marketing platform? Are we trying to build just a product for filmmakers? We settled on this common vision.
and then you know being able to say okay this is the individual you know that owns this part of the business there's a huge portion from our individual business where people swipe a credit card and start using us or that register for free huge number of those customers actually end up as enterprise customers.
You know, I called up one of the top retailers and I said, you know, I started talking to him about, you know, Vimeo. And he said, well, first of all, he goes, you don't have to tell me who you are. He goes, my son is on your, on Vimeo every weekend. He's an independent filmmaker. He goes, so I know who you are. He goes, why are you calling me?
And I said, we have 2,600 accounts, self-service accounts that are on us. We should do an enterprise agreement. And so being able to explain to the organization how the two sides work together and being able to make decisions in a room.
between where we're applying more features maybe in one part of the business or another and how those features actually feather how we might start them for an individual but they have to grow to be you know for an entire enterprise really really really important and so i would
you these starting with a strong vision that everybody buys into that they understand their piece of it really critical and then each one of those those leaders i expect them to have a strong vision for how they're going to contribute to the overall vision that's a really that's another important thing
You can't let their vision exist in the absence of the rest of the company's vision. So you have to actively stitch those visions together. You brought up decisions. That's the other classic decoder question. I will warn you, this is a honeypot for former Amazon executives because when you ask Amazon executives how they make decisions, everybody sings chapter and verse. But you've been a bunch of places. You are now the CEO of this company. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?
The other company I didn't talk about that I learned a lot from was Google. And one of the things that I would tell you that Google gave me was. i think they've managed something like 10 out of the top 11 billion user products in the world and really like thinking big actually like giving uh an organization like incredibly lofty goals that sometimes you only make like 80 to 90 percent of them.
one of the things that that i do you know first and foremost is that i you know i really am a believer that you've got to set these very high goals you've got to have this vision and you've got to be willing to like put yourself out there to set extremely high goals And then backing into that from a decision making process, I would tell you that we've had to make a number of decisions around what products we focus on, what areas we deprecate. I come back to the customer.
and one of the things i really try to hold people accountable to and i think it's really important i think i learned a lot of this both at google and at amazon but actually explaining the customer problem that we're trying to solve And there's all kinds of studies that you can do. There's user studies, there's data and so forth.
But truly being able to assess on what that workflow looks like. You know, what are we trying to solve? What is the most challenging thing for the customer? What is actually frustrating the customer most? And really having a strong sense for your customer and the customer anecdotes, as well as what we call, you know, Google, we called it customer empathy, like actually putting yourself in the shoes of the customer.
One of the things that we ask all of everyone inside of Vimeo to do is be a user of the product. And so the things that are frustrating us, we actually are elevating. those things into our decision-making process. And so we both bring the voice of the customer in, we bring our own voice in, and then we also are saying, okay, well, what's going to help us grow?
know what's going to grow the next million users for us or what's going to grow us to 10x and so i can't just kind of tell you it's like one thing it's a it's a little bit of a framework of the customer making sure we're tethered to big ideas and really make sure that we're being innovative enough in how we push the team
Well, I applaud you for being the only former Amazon executive to not talk about one-way and two-way doors when I ask that question. You've done it. You've achieved escape velocity. Well done. I mean, I appreciate the one-way and two-way doors. I'm just saying. I get it. I don't know that I'd buy that. Google, I think they've proven that there's not a lot of one-way doors. Fair enough. Google's interesting. We've talked kind of a lot about YouTube during this conversation. Vimeo is...
come out against YouTube, right? You have entire blog posts about how your search capabilities are better than YouTube search capabilities, or you're a better platform. You've talked even in this episode about wanting things to be private, not being part of the algorithmic ecosystem or the advertising ecosystem. YouTube. Google is big. They think so big that sometimes they let opportunities just slide away because they think it's such massive scale. How are you thinking about competing?
with a youtube at that scale when they seem to own so much of the attention space in video i'll say it again you know i don't think that a lot of product companies love the fact that you got to go to youtube to get some customer support for one of their products and meanwhile one of their competitors could get be rolling right next to you when i look at youtube you know i was at i was at google and
I spent a lot of time with customers and, you know, I really foundationally believe like I love YouTube. I'll watch, you know, YouTube as much as the next person. And I think that what they're doing, you know, for I'll call it kind of the attention economy for what they're doing around content for democratizing access to more and more content. I think it's absolutely wonderful. And quite frankly, as I said, a lot of our customers are great YouTube customers as well.
You know, people will house their videos on Vimeo and post on YouTube in a lot of ways. But I really do think, you know, that there is in the same way that, you know, you don't do a lot of your business on Facebook or you don't do it on LinkedIn. You kind of do it behind closed.
walls. I think that a lot of the economy runs behind firewalls and paywalls. And so I think that we can go directly at that. The other thing I'm going to say is that, you know, think about what happened in content and why some of these platforms rose.
you know think about and you know again i'm old enough to remember msn and aol the reason why we went there was because news had to be consolidated it was hard to create websites it was difficult to find information it had to be curated well you know netflix and youtube were born in an era where it was really hard to categorize content to say hey this video is about a cat this video is about how to um i don't know plug a hdmi cord in the back of your lgtv
And so there was categorization that had to take place. There was standardization of the data and the metadata. And then recommendations engines, I don't know if you remember them, but Netflix famously paid a million dollars to be able to write their recommendation engine. They went out and said, builds the best recommendation engine will win a million dollars. Well, you know, with an AI model, I can like categorize content in seconds now.
with a recommendation engine, I can buy recommendation engines off the shelf. And quite frankly, the metadata that we can produce now out of a video is extraordinarily more detail than a human being can even write like i can tell you precisely when the purse like went left the beach and like you know who was carrying the purse and what the brand was of shoes that the individual was wearing you know all stuff that may be missed in a traditional human being have to entering all that
data and so what i see is that you know there is going to be kind of a democratization of content classification and content recommendation and context discoverability There has been a single search place that you go to be able to get your...
content and your videos and your maps and you know pick your favorite things but i think that there's billions of dollars going into another part of you know in other ways to be able to find and interact with information and so I think that Vimeo can serve that kind of information.
outside of like a traditional google search in a lot of ways whether or not you're inside an internet inside of a company whether or not you're inside an ai model and you don't want to leave the ecosystem of the ai model you know we can provide an answer to a question as well
And so I guess what I'd say to you is that I think YouTube is fantastic. I love it. But I think that the, you know, discoverability, accessibility, indexing and recommendations is there's a whole new era coming and we intend to be part of. There's another piece of that dynamic. that I'm wondering if you are considering, which is that Google is a huge company that is under an enormous amount of pressure right now.
And maybe so much pressure that it will be hard for the company to execute, right? There's an antitrust trial in this country that has resulted in the government suggesting that Google break itself up and sell Chrome.
There's a Donald Trump in the mix who may or may not make some sort of deal. There's a Donald Trump in the mix who's done a tariffs regime with China that has resulted in a Chinese entry trust investigation of Google, which is amazing because Google doesn't really operate in that country. There's Europe exists much to the chagrin of many of our tech companies.
There's just a lot going on, right? There's a lot of pressure on Google to not flex that dominance. And then there's competitive pressure from the AI products, right? From ChatGPT, from SearchGPT. from Bing to whatever extent that Microsoft believes that Bing is a real competitor to Google. Does that create an opening for you? Do you see that as a real opening or is that just, well, if those doors open, you'll be ready? Yeah.
It absolutely does. I mean, I would tell you, I have a lot of friends at Google. I really enjoyed my time there. You know, I don't wish them ill in any way. And I really hope they, you know, sail through this, you know, this era right now of challenge for them, like in a really great way. I came here from Google because I saw the opportunity. I really did see the opportunity that we're about to go through a seismic shift.
in accessibility of information in new ways to access you know to to go and access it whether or not you're using chat gpt you're using anthropic you know whether or not you're using you know mistral there are so many different ways to be able to discover information and the you know the notion of like
common crawl on the web, the ability to be able to crawl the whole web, index it, and then be able to ingest it into these models, it's just kind of showing that it's democratizing access to that information discovery. Video is a very important element of video. And you can't imagine, I mean, I think you'd agree, you can't just imagine only one platform is going to serve all the video answers, you know, in the world. And so that's where I just see it's such a super opportunity.
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We're back with Vimeo CEO Philip Moyer discussing what generative AI might do to video creation and how the attention economy can possibly sustain an even larger amount of AI-generated content. Let's talk about AI. I want to start by... Again, asking sort of a mathematical question. One of my theses for the year is that the creator economy is under an enormous amount of pressure.
not just from AI, but just from what you're describing, this huge shift to video, you can see that there's just an exponential increase in supply. video on all these platforms, right? More and more kids are making videos. More and more people are choosing to communicate in video-first ways. More enterprises are doing it. And then you have AI, which is just making it easier and easier to produce.
a massive amount of video so that the platforms are getting flooded with supply there's not as much ad revenue as there is increasing video supply so just You do the division, you're like, well, the ad rates are going to go down. And then attention is sort of fixed, right? There's only so many people with so many hours in a day, and presumably they do have to eat and do productive work. So attention is kind of fixed, right? It's just like a fixed number that you can capture.
That all just seems like it's a bubble that's going to pop, right? You flood an ecosystem that has been pretty stable for a few years with an enormous amount of supply. The ad rates go down. Attention stays fixed. Something happens in there. And it seems like to me...
AI is the most important component of that because it's the thing that can change the economics of the supply the fastest, right? You just say, make 50 videos about my product, and now we have 50 videos about the product on whatever platform. Is that an opportunity for you that this whole sort of the creator economy or the video creator economy as we know it seems like it's going to go just a pretty basic shift in its economics? You know.
It's a huge question. To me, it feels like the question of 2025. Like, if you ask me, what is the version of the cover in 2025? There's... there's elon and doge and then there's what happens the creator economy yeah you know i mean i think the creator economy we are i think we are reaching saturation i mean i don't know what we're going to get to the post mobile phone error like but this is not a way we're going to live for the rest of eternity so as human beings and so on the creator side
Yes, there is a saturation point, but I also think that people are looking for a little bit of a higher quality experience. I think people are getting tired of the doom scrolling. I think the mere fact that we name it, the fact that we are now acknowledging that we get sent down rabbit holes.
I do think that people will like storytelling. I do think there's going to be really different opportunities. I get asked all the time, when will AI be able to take my favorite book and turn it into a movie? Now think about that. Think about how wonderful that would be. Think about being able to take your child's favorite book and, you know, be able to turn it into a video as an example for them that has like an extended storyline.
I think storytelling is as old as humanity and it's going to continue forward. Wait, can I just stop you there for one second? I know the Decoder audience fairly well. A lot of people just started screaming at you in their car. Because they think that's a bad outcome. You think it's a bad outcome? I have a young child, right? The idea that we're going to read The Wild Robot and then some AI tool is going to make the movie The Wild Robot instead of the beautiful actual movie made by people.
wild robot i would argue that that's a bad outcome i think it is for a for a class um like here's what i here's what bugs me the most right now you know last year the big six studios only put out 88 movies 88. Right, because the economics of video have collapsed on them, right? They don't have a distribution monopoly. And I think there's like so many stories to be told. You know, if the creator of, you know, the giant robot gets paid.
you know, for having a now movie and is able to have be monetized, you know, and someone should perform in a really beautiful way. I actually think we're supporting storytellers in a foundational way. I think that's a decade away. You know, I would say maybe five to seven years away. and so you know first and foremost i do think that ai is going to help people create more stories i think they are i think they're going to be able to illustrate more stories let's put it that way
I talk to a lot of creative types that tell me that like, look, you know, AI is fairly disjointed right now. It's indeterministic. I don't know what I'm going to get out of it. Human curation of AI creation is going to be a necessity. The same way that shooting a green screen and then being able to put in a background for a movie is indeterministic until the human being decides what's on that green screen.
i'm not you know when i say this what i'm saying is that like i do think that longer form stories are going to be more compelling i think people are going to want to stay inside of a story a little bit longer that doesn't mean that the creator is going away It doesn't mean the human curation is going away. I just think that we're going to be able to tell more beautiful stories in more ways.
So I'll park there because we are pro creator. We are pro filmmaker and we serve a lot of them and they're not going away. We're going to, we're going to uplift them and make them faster. So I think this is a real tension. And I see it expressed all the time. I've heard it from your peers on the show when they tell me about the tools that people use in Photoshop, right? Generative fill in Photoshop, according to...
Shantanu Narayan and Adobe is like 100% usage rate. But then everyone yells about Phil existing. And there's a real mismatch between consumer expectations and how people feel about AI and then the creatives actually using the tools at high rates. I get all that. But I also think there's a mismatch between you saying you're for filmmakers and how marketers want to use AI. I think we're careening towards a world of basically custom creative being shown to individual users, right?
uploads their assets to a video platform and literally ads get assembled for you in AI for you, a specific user targeted to your interests. We're headed there. The big platform's already talking about it. But those really commercial uses of AI, we're going to make a whole bunch of ads. And we're going to do some of the most creative filmmaking that exists. They don't seem like they're happening at the same rate or with the same level of acceptance.
Or even like they should happen with the same tools. And you have every piece of the puzzle in front of you. Where do you see the biggest growth and where do you see the biggest pushback? One of our creators, Jake Olson, recently shot Currents for Apple Vision Pro. and when you shoot for an apple vision pro you know you have to maintain perfect stillness in the camera you'll shoot four to six cameras and by hand you have to stitch all these things together
If you get an opportunity to watch Currents, it's absolutely stunning. You kind of look at it and go, oh my God, I've seen the future of filmmaking. I truly have. This is where I kind of say that I think we're going to get in a post mobile phone error. for watching content and creativity. And I think that we'll experience film in new ways. We'll experience stories in new ways. I would tell you that I think that the best creators are going to, I'm seeing them blend together.
you know the content blend together ai usage you know with traditional techniques to make something incredible most filmmakers that i talk to start with something they've shot and then enhance it with ai One of the things that is most interesting to me as well is in the marketing world, the thing that's taking off the most right now are not avatars.
and avatars i like to call them like nobody wants to talk to a robot it's actually people that are kind of sitting there going hey i just bought this piece of furniture this looks really cool let me show you what it looks like inside of my house and it's like actually authenticity in a world of robots i think is actually like i'm already seeing it like we've offered to a number of our customers hey would you like us to do some avatars
and then we've also offered to them hey we have this like super like down and dirty create tool where you can record we can put a teller prompter up in front of you so you can like do your own script and we can either make the avatar look perfect or you can kind of like you know, be sitting in your living room and do this quick thing about your product or about your service. And inevitably, all of them go to the real human being doing this. And it's just...
I'm just going to tell you point blank, I'm not seeing the robots take off. I'm not seeing it. And we've tried to serve both. humans have always kind of risen above like they've always kind of brought through the authenticity they've always brought through you kind of know when you're getting something and when you're not like even in the chatbot world you're like
how many people get frustrated when they're like talking, you know, when a chat bot online, they quickly want to talk to a human being. And so I don't know how to say it to you, but like, there's, we sense that there's no ghost in the machine. So. I don't know how to say it to you anyway. I studied artificial intelligence for a long time and I'm very confident in the beauty of the human soul in the context of creativity.
I feel like I'm more cynical than you, but I spend more time on the social platforms, it feels like. And the problem generally is you can sense it. Some people can feel it. And a lot of people cannot, right? Or they just let it wash over them. And then you end up in sort of interminable fights about. metadata or labeling or Google just rolled out synth ID for images that you edit in Google Photos. And none of that stuff seems to have landed, right? It's certainly not landed in a universal way.
Vimeo has some labeling features. You have some ideas about how you might show people AI-generated content or expose that metadata to people. Do you think that's working? Is that something you're going to continue? Is that something that you think needs to be expanded? When I was at Google, there were about 42 different regulatory bodies that were working on AI legislation. The last we checked, there's over a thousand on a worldwide basis.
And I'm raising that to kind of say that like when you do translations in certain states inside of the United States, like Illinois or Texas, you can't actually modify people's lips and put words in their mouth. And so that's like one of the, just one of the regulations. Over in Europe, you actually do have to identify that something's been AI enhanced or modified. I think we as humanity are wrestling with kind of like, when do we want to know that something's not real?
The mere fact that that's coming from all over the world, that you're seeing that kind of desire to know when something's not real. I can't say whether or not that's good or bad, but I can tell you that it's actually a human desire.
Getting something done like changing the credit card on my telephone bill, I'll deal with a bot to do that. But if I'm like really having a problem with my elderly father's, you know, father-in-law is having a problem, I actually do want a human being to pick up the phone and just talk him through it.
I guess what I'd say to you, so I think in filmmaking as well, we've always used tools to tell our story. You know, it's been the invention of so many tools to be able to tell stories. AI is just another tool to be able to help us tell the stories. I would certainly like to know when characters aren't real. This is the hardest question. This is like an existentially philosophical question, but...
Where do you draw the line? Where do you personally think the line should be for when you have to put the label on, right? I'll give you two examples. I think I stabilize this video with AI does not require that. I think I'm talking to a deep fake avatar of a creator that is photorealistic that is just lying to me probably requires that, right? I've replaced products in this movie with other products. Maybe requires it.
Right. Where do you think the line is? You know, I haven't been asked this question for, but as I reflect on it, you know, for me, I would like to know that a particular character or a particular animal or something that's in that film is actually not real.
that's completely made up now you can tell that in animation but like in a real film if i know that a certain character or a certain scene is actually like completely fabricated with a single individual in it i probably would like to know that or when there's dialogue involved where something's talking back to me that's not for real like you know i probably want to know about it you know when i look at some of the marvel movies clearly then you start crossing the line well you know
Does the fox in Guardians of the Galaxy do it? We all know. I mean, the latest Marvel movie, they just announced Fantastic Four. They made the poster with AI, and there's fan backlash to it. Yeah.
And so I'm just wondering, do you see the norms moving faster than the psychology or slower or right? I mean, you are shipping these products and you have such a direct line to creators. It feels like you're caught up right in the middle of, oh, where do we put the labels? Yeah. I mean, I got to tell you, like the thing.
that really does bother me right now is like these uh the influencers that don't even exist if i'm looking at something that's clearly animated i'm okay with it you know i would love to know that somebody's voice was actually used for real in that by that individual It's going to be complex. And I wonder out loud, you know, will we stop caring? You know, and at what point, you know, will we become comfortable that basically we're being, the whole thing is simply animated.
Like, cause that's really what we're talking about. We're just creating like animation that's higher and higher fidelity in a lot of ways. But I, you know, I think it should probably be noted that at some point the human doesn't exist. I kind of feel like that's probably where I'd cross the line or that that dog doesn't actually exist.
Yeah. Especially the dog's a main character. So you might end up doing it based on the classification of the importance of the character and, you know, whether or not there's actual true existence there and like how much modification was done to the individual based on the class of character in the story. I asked that question three different ways and pushed on it again because it feels like the pressure on the creator economy and the social platforms is just going to go up.
Meta, Mark Zuckerberg is out there openly saying we will have AI content in people's social feeds on Facebook and Instagram. How they choose to label it, whether or not the mean dogs have labels. I don't know what Mark Zuckerberg is going to do. No one can see into his soul. But it's pretty obvious that if he could get a bunch more cute cat videos on Facebook using AI, he's going to do it. It's obvious why he would do that.
Does that create opportunity for you to say Vimeo is for real content or real people? Is that something you would lean into? Because you do have the AI tools. When you open the website today, it says you're an AI-powered video platform. There's a lot of conflation between we can do better classification and better recommendations and we can do better marketing videos and we're going to steal everyone's data and make cat videos for Facebook attention spans.
And peeling that apart seems hard. I think I kind of like, as I sit here and protecting the Vimeo brand, I aspire to actually like be that place that people trust. When I first got here, we were approached to basically crawl our content. You know, as many companies were approached and we talked to the creators and creators said, listen, don't replace us, just uplift us and protect us. Make sure that we're always, that Vimeo is always a place where we're protected.
And that's why we come to you and that's why we want to continue to come to you. And so we made a decision not to allow that crawling. And then we very quickly, like shortly thereafter, had to like say, anytime you use AI on Vimeo, that we're going to actually guarantee that none of the AI models will actually improve based on your usage of it. Unless you say improve based on my usage.
you know, understand my storyline or understand my, you know, my filters or understand, you know, my dialogue, my style of dialogue. We'll do that for you as an individual creator. We'll create your own private AI. Then we were actually approached as well to say, listen, we need you. A number of the creators said, we want you to help us identify when content has been generated by AI.
we do a lot of business over in the eu and so we said yes well we're going to do that as well you know the thing that i i describe about ai was um you know back when um in the era of the production line humans stopped being able to keep up in a lot of ways and so we started creating robots we started you know creating machines that that turned on screws and so forth and next year at this time there's going to be more information created
in the next year than there has in the history of mankind coming up until this point. Humans are starting not to be able to keep up with the production line of information. And so we've invented these machines. I also think AI is going to help us identify these things and help us be able to filter and help us be able to say this is AI generated or this content cannot be verified from the source. We have to do some work around what we call KYC, like know your creator.
In some jurisdictions that we operate in, we have to actually say, yes, this is a human being that created this. This is the company that created this. I actually think we have an opportunity to serve as that, as like being a, yes, this was created by a real human, which actually stands out in a world. robots and so i think there's a lot of opportunities to protect the viewer and protect the creator as well as you know serve them in in helping them produce stories faster
There's a lot of talk about cost right now in the AI world, right? There's Deep Seek, which might have brought down the cost of training. There's all this argument about whether the cost of inference will drop. That's at the same time Sam Altman is saying he's going to build $500 billion for the data centers all around the world with SoftBank.
You use these tools, right? You're deploying these tools against large data sets in video, which is where the costs tend to go up the fastest. Where do you think that is? Is that working out for you? Are you making more money on the use of AI than you're spending on it right now? The sure answer is yes. I would tell you that I expect the cost of inference to drop dramatically.
you know we were experimenting you know with some of the exact same things that deep seek claimed to do to be able to use like really low cost chips to be able to do imprints and i do expect inference the cost of inference is going to go through the floor
I used to joke to say, you know, if I need to order a Frosty and a double burger at Wendy's, I don't need to wade through all of Taylor Swift's boyfriends and songs to be able to get through that. So distillations of models to be able to serve like at the exact moment of time that's not. Like whatever the language is or whatever the function is, I think that you're going to see.
Distillation will help with this. The most recent Blackwell chips that came up from NVIDIA were about a 4X more efficient. Lighter weight models are super important to us. We're going to solve a lot of the inference problems and the cost associated with inference. And I'm seeing it drop dramatically for what we do. And so it'll be very manageable over time. I think that the real big cost for a lot of these companies is the training of some of this stuff.
And that is going to come in line as well. like we're we'll get to a point of like kind of diminishing returns that like do you really need to go to 10 trillion parameter models or do you need something that's just lighter weight to be able to do chemistry to be able to do biology or to be able to do you know security you know
coloration as an example. So I just, I think right now we're in the air of big models and I don't think that'll last. Do you think we need to spend $500 billion on data centers all around the world? I'm a Google Cloud executive. Do we need to spend $500 billion in data centers all around? We need to lay down a new infrastructure of silicon. The silicon that's around the world right now is highly optimized for general compute, and this is a new mathematical model that has...
be supportive with silicon otherwise we'd actually consume more power if we didn't have specialized chips that run this this math equation and so all that's happening right now is that yes we got to run our current compute And then we have a new algorithm we have to run, and we're going to have an optimized silicon to be able to run that extra algorithm. So short answer is that we actually do have to duplicate the silicon around the world.
Is that something that you can drive, Vimeo? We talked about needing to serve 8K and the price of storage and compute for that falling on a pretty predictable basis. We need to invent new silicon to support AI workloads. That's like a whole of industry effort, right? And the pressure is all in maybe a handful of companies and one foundry to pull that off. Like, how do you make those bets?
You know, I would tell you that we're doing a lot in evaluating quality across a whole spectrum. Like one of the things that, as I said to you at the very start, like we're obsessing on like how, how do our creators really want to use AI? They don't want to be replaced. And so what we're doing is we're picking each one of these areas.
actually establishing quality frameworks internally inside of Vimeo where we're saying, hey, this is high quality translation or this is what we need to do to be able to support understanding what changed frame to frame. So a lot of what we're doing is that we're saying, okay, what's the best model for the job that our creators are going to need to get done?
And then under the surface, we're stitching all that together. So the creator doesn't even know there might be multiple models that are supporting them. And we've established quality and then also handoffs.
you know for that creator because as i said we're creating ai that's going to be unique to that creator and so we're going to remember whether or not it's over here in the translation world or whether or not it's over and ask a question or indexing or otherwise we kind of stitch it all together for the creator so they don't even know
that might be using multiple AI, but it's establishing quality bars for each one of those things. And then also, you know, economics, like making sure we get the best economics and also the best performance, like queries per second from the model providers, you know, for that area that they can serve our. massive minutes of video and our number of creators. So we're managing performance, cost, and quality on behalf of the creator across multiple models. Yeah.
Well, Philip, as you can probably tell, I could talk to you forever, but we are out of time. What's next for me? I'll let people give people a preview of what's coming up next and we'll let you get out of here. I'm probably most excited right now, as I mentioned to you about the massive formats that are coming at the creator.
i'm super excited about what can be done with immersive formats you know i'm also starting to see a lot of people that want to kind of go back into these like sphere-like experiences and i do think that that's going to be exciting and you'll see us continue to push the edge there
You're going to see us invest more in the filmmaking community. Like on Monday, I'm headed over to the Berlin Film Festival after hopefully my Philadelphia Eagles do well in the Super Bowl. And so you're going to see us even do more around staff picks and celebrating filmmakers in every geography.
we serve around the world. I mean, it's been a fairly US-centric, and you're going to see us get a lot more global and supporting filmmakers. And then also, just I would tell you, as we look over at our enterprise customers, we think we can support customers in their customer journey, this mass proliferation video.
every part of the organization in the service of customers we're going to do really well at just-in-time videos serving just the right video to just the right person at the right moment of the customer interaction And so you'll see us really come out with some exciting things about that between the format and the AI that we can do to transform storytelling.
Amazing. Well, we'll have to have you back when we do just-in-time immersive video 8K to both eyes at the same time. Phil, thanks so much for being on Decoder. Okay. Thank you. I'd like to thank Philip Moyer for taking the time to talk to me, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it.
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