And this diversity of communities happened by design, beginning with rebranding efforts in recent years that have taken the app beyond its initial focus on gamers. (For reference, chat platform Slack has an estimated 32M MAUs.)ĭiscord users rely on this platform to organize study groups, run meetings, watch movies together, plan community events, and more. As users flocked to online communities during the Covid-19 pandemic, Discord saw usage soar - reaching around 19M weekly active servers and 150M monthly active users (MAUs) as of July 2021, an impressive rise from 56M MAUs in 2019. Millions of people from gaming and non-gaming communities alike use Discord to connect, socialize, and work. But since launching in 2015, it has become so much more. “I think it definitely would’ve helped a lot,” she said.Online chat platform Discord was initially built to give gamers a home online. “What we’re trying to do is something more for everyday consumers - people like me and who are creators at heart, but not that professional.” If there had been a tool like Pika a year ago, Guo says her Stanford team might have had a fighting chance in the AI Film Festival. “We’re not trying to build a product for film production,” she told Forbes. That’s also how Guo plans to differentiate Pika from its bigger rivals. Monetizing the product, which is currently free, isn’t a key priority yet, though she says the company may eventually introduce a tiered subscription model (pay more for access to more features) for consumers. With new funding in hand, Guo says she plans to expand Pika’s team to about 20 people next year, most of them engineers and researchers. “Right now that’s still very exploratory,” Guo said. Meanwhile, the company is hard at work tinkering with algorithms to further improve the model, and also developing ones for filtering copyrighted materials that have tripped up rivals and dragged them into costly IP litigation. It’s meant to perform better and allow for more refined editing, adjusting the aspect ratio of a video, for example. Pika is now leasing a few hundred GPUs - some from Friedman’s Andromeda cluster, some from other cloud providers - which it used to build a new version of the AI model it debuted today. What we’re trying to do is something more for everyday consumers.” “We’re not trying to build a product for film production. And when Mignano brought up the idea of a web app earlier in November, Guo took it as a directive to deliver the product that same month. Indeed, within weeks of Pika’s founders telling Friedman realistic video was far too difficult a task for them to pull off, they did just that. The Information was first to report that Lightspeed was in talks to invest. Lightspeed partner Michael Mignano, who invested in September, sees this as a crucial edge for Pika: “A startup’s biggest weapon and biggest advantage is speed, and this is honestly the fastest moving team I’ve ever seen,” he told Forbes. “It was part of what persuaded me to do the next investment,” he says. Friedman recalls being shocked initially, but he soon realized this “very intense” pace was typical of the team. He received a text message back at 3 a.m. One summer afternoon, Friedman suggested they add a way to embed text into videos. But Guo and Meng’s rapid pace of development surprised investors - and themselves. Then, there was Adobe, a $280 billion public market behemoth that was moving quickly to add AI functionality to Creative Suite. The founders told Friedman that taking on AI generation of realistic videos would be too difficult, given that larger well-funded companies like Runway and Stability AI already had significant headstarts. In its early days, Pika focused only on generating anime. That helped supercharge Pika’s efforts to build a proprietary AI model for video, similar to OpenAI’s text-based GPT-4 or Midjourney’s image-based models. Friedman and frequent coinvestor Daniel Gross have amassed a 2,500-plus GPU cluster they call Andromeda which they make available to startups in which they invest. He told Forbes he was impressed by an early demo version that Guo and Meng had cobbled together using a single graphics processing unit (GPU), the hardware chips which power most AI computing tasks. Nat Friedman, who has emerged as one of the leading solo investors in the AI space since he departed GitHub in 2021, first invested in Pika back in April.
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