 What we're doing at Invoke is enabling our open source work with this kind of sustainable business model. And I think open source projects have largely struggled to strike that balance and really make themselves able to sustain for the long term and build a viable business model around supporting the product. And I think one of the big pieces of advice that Abby gave early on that I think has been kind of foundational on how I view this is really being open and transparent with the community about what you're building, setting expectations about where you want it to go and how you want to sustain that over the long term and getting their buy-in on that direction. Hi, this is Yohoslapin Bhartian. Welcome material for Let's Talk. And today we have two guests. Of course, once again, Abby Kerns, board member of Invoke AI and also as I used to call her Queen of the Cloud and Ken Kersey, founder and CEO of Invoke AI. Abby, Ken, it's good to have you both on the show. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. It's always fun to be back here, Swapnel. It is. It's my pleasure to host you folks again. Ken, we talked a few weeks ago. Of course, we went deeper into what the company does but it's always a good idea to just give a quick recap about the company. What do you folks do? We evolved out of the stable diffusion ecosystem and are helping creative teams at scale deploy custom models and accelerate their creative pipeline. So we're working with both our open source community where we release our product for free and in addition to that, extend that into the cloud with enterprises deploying that for large teams of hundreds to thousands of users. Abby, we have known each other for a very long time. I want to know first of all, we have not spoken for a bit, there has been a gap. So I just want to get an update on you. What are you up to these days? Well, these days I get the unique pleasure of spending time with amazing founders and CEOs like Kent. I am on a few boards and I also spend some time actively angel investing and advising. But I am super excited about getting the opportunity to spend more time with Kent and the Invoke team because I am really excited to see what comes next in this generative AI hype that we're all seemingly talking about. And Invoke is one of the few companies that I think are poised to do something really interesting in this space. And you have been in this space for a very long time. AI, we have been using AI ML for a very long time but it kind of became boring after a while but generative AI, Chai GP, it kind of rekindled our interest in AI. So as you said, hype, of course, I talked to a lot of companies who are now using generative AI in production. They are building services which users are using. It's kind of just like we used to talk about Docker and all those container technologies, they pass the hype cycle and then production. What has been your perception because you work with a lot of new companies as well and also you're part of this larger industry ecosystem where you talk to a lot of folks what do you think there is generative AI heading? I think we're in the figure it out phase of the evolution, which is like, let's try all the things and see what lands. But I do think there is a ton of opportunity to see how we can build the next generation software development on top of this. So there's a lot of different investments happening across the breadth of the ecosystem. There's a lot of innovation happening from everything from low-level automation to agent-based work to orchestration of that automation. But I do think what Invoke is doing and the reason I was so excited to get involved with Kent and the Invoke team is they're really trying to figure out when we look at development of art and we've been talking, obviously art was the big thing that really sucked our imagination in when GPT-3 and GPT-4 rolled out. We got so excited about seeing all the visual creations that come out of it. And it also ignited a massive conversation around artist rights in IP. And we're talking a lot about regulatory environment these days. And the work that Invoke has done to really capture both that zeitgeist of the moment around artist rights, IP and artist development, but also be able to build a product that can ride the regulatory wave that we all know is coming with super exciting and thrilling. And that was one of the reasons I was so excited about what Kent's vision for Invoke, because I think it was one of the few products out there that was gonna be able to capture this moment. Abby hit the nail on the head with the commentary about an evolution and intellectual property. And I think what we're seeing right now is there are these foundational models that are really going to serve as the basis for training and customizing, fine-tuning, this technology to specific applications. And I think we're seeing that play out really, really well in the LLM space. We see a lot of this kind of focus on building these pipelines and agentic workflows. You've got vector databases. I mean, like that technology is sprinting ahead. And that is what we're doing in the creative field. We're finding ways to really tailor the technology to a specific creative pipeline for an enterprise. You might talk to a large game studio or a film studio. And they're looking at using this technology in a specific project, right? And so you have to have that specialization and customization in order to deliver that. And so really what we're seeing in the creative space is an emergence of looking at the model as IP. And that's what we are focused on is helping artists recognize that where they can fit into this ecosystem and also helping enterprises protect that and doing so in a way that complies with the evolving regulatory environment. And when we have artists, there is already a strike going on in Hollywood, you know, the writers, they are worried about AI. And we had this discussion again that sometimes these are like tools like Photoshop. It made more people being able to produce photography. We did not take a lot of jobs. We actually created more jobs. So when you look at, you know, Genetic AI, is it, how is it like, should artists look at it as a threat or should they look at it as a tool that is going to make them more capable because it will take a lot of mundane thing that they have to do versus enterprises looking at a means to replace employees. So this is a complicated question, but I want to hear both from Abby and from Kent here. I mean, obviously this is a hot topic right now. There's a lot of this is still being debated around, you know, I think the larger theme here is AI coming for all of our jobs, which is, I don't think it's the case. I view AI as a tool for all of us, no matter what field we're in. I think AI can be a force multiplier versus a wholesale replacing people and opportunity. You know, as Kent pointed out, there's a couple of fantastic use cases that invoke is really seen come to the table, which is obviously gaming studios, helping game developers be that much faster on developing the game and the aspects of the game and the visual arts of the game to add tech to even, you know, e-retail. There's a ton of opportunity to leverage AI to general, you know, to really aid artists and content developers to really accelerate their time to market and their time to be able to put something out in front of us and really take us to whole new heights. I mean, if you see some of the art that the invoke community creates, it's just mind blowing how fantastic it is. And it really allows a lot of people to kind of go into their artistic side and create some amazing art. And I'm actually, for one, really excited to see the next evolution of gaming once this really gets into the mainstream and is really able to develop some amazing visual arts and games and content. Yeah, and I agree with that. I think the, you know, the looking at the broader strategic picture here with AI, I think, you know, the strike in Hollywood is largely a combination of how are we generating content and how are we distributing content? There's been large scale disruptions in how content gets distributed with streaming and creators have largely been left out of that kind of royalties model. And that's kind of where a lot of the frustration comes from. So I think what we're looking at with AI is a democratization of access to the generative capabilities that larger studios have previously had because they had AAA budgets. But we're also going to start to see new forms of distribution and new ways of creators getting that content to end users. And, you know, I think Spotify is a great example of how music has evolved over the past decade. I think there's a lot of songs, you know, I go back to the 2000s and all the songs that I like remember from that decade and they're all radio songs because it was popular and I was listening to what everyone else was listening to but Spotify really changed that. And the 2010 to 2020 era of music for me, I don't really share as much as I did with other people that I know and it's because Spotify made it very personal. I could go find that band that spoke to me, that one song that I really wanted to listen to. And I think that that distribution change is what we're going to start to see in other forms of media as well as creators have the ability to do these bold kind of creative works with a smaller team and a smaller budget. As a board member, how are you guiding or, you know, with your extensive experience in this field? I just want to understand your involvement with Invokei here. And of course, after that, I'd like to hear from Kent. How is she helping the team? Well, hopefully I'm in that ad. Hopefully Kent will validate that. But at the end of the day, I think where, you know, Invoke is right now and really where Kent and I really hit it off was largely around how to take Invoke, which is a commercial product, built on top of an amazing open source community. How does Kent really walk that line between both continuing to invest in and engage with the community that is huge and continuing to grow? Like I could blown away by how big the Invoke open source community is, you know, which is also a segment of the larger stable diffusion ecosystem. But, you know, how engaged the Invoke community is, but how also the opportunity to build an amazing enterprise grade product on top of that is. And so my hope is I'm able to help Kent really navigate that fine line between the open source opportunity with the community as well as the commercial opportunity with Invoke is a enterprise grade product and how to kind of straddle those two spheres, which is obviously a space I spent a long time in in the last decade. And you and I talked a lot about that over the years swap as well. Abby is absolutely a net add. I think, you know, for me, what we're doing at Invoke is enabling our open source work with this kind of sustainable business model. And I think open source projects have largely struggled to strike that balance and really make themselves able to sustain for the longterm and build a viable business model around supporting the product. And I think, you know, one of the big pieces of advice that Abby gave early on that I think has been kind of foundational on how I view this is really being open and transparent with the community about what you're building, setting expectations about where you want it to go and how you want to sustain that over the longterm and getting their buy-in on that direction. And I think we've done that really, really well. I know that we wouldn't have executed on that as well without Abby's guidance. But foundationally, what we're doing is building a product that is gonna make this tool and this technology accessible to everybody. And I think that is critical in the age of AI is really providing accessibility and ensuring that the technology can be used by the people whose livelihoods it's affecting. Kent, Abby, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about Invokei, all the possibilities that are there. Thanks for all those insights and I'd love to chat with you folks again. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.