Suhail Doshi, a YC alumni who previously founded Mixpanel and Mighty, has created a state-of-the-art (SOTA) AI image diffusion model with Playground. The app allows you to talk to it like a graphic designer and helps you create imagery and text for a wide variety of use cases. In this episode of Lightcone, Suhail sits down with the hosts to talk about his experience building Playground with his team, and what it takes to make a SOTA model.
Try Playground: https://playground.com/design
Read Playground V3 Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10695
0:00 Intro
1:07 What is Playground?
1:47 What Garry was able to make using Playground
7:04 The focus on text accuracy
10:44 Building a marketplace for Playground
16:00 Prompts are like HTML for graphics
22:25 Creating new design professions
26:13 Using tailwinds of what is happening in language
30:06 Problems with aesthetics evals
32:42 The commercial applications
33:54 When the users you get are not the users you want
40:30 Reflections on going through YC twice
48:30 Running a research lab/startup hybrid vs a pure startup
53:35 What it takes to make a state of the art model
55:09 Outro
