‘The Ultimate Goal Is to Make More Movies,' Says CTO of Stability AI, the Tech Company for Which James Cameron Serves as a Board Member
Hanno Basse — chief tecnology officer of AI tech developer Stability AI, whose board members include James Cameron — discussed his company's work and the evolution of generative AI in filmmaking during this week's HPA Tech Retreat, saying, 'The ultimate goal is to make more movies.' Pointing to the years it can take to make a Hollywood movie such as Cameron's blockbuster 'Avatar' films, he said, 'We heard this from a number of other filmmakers as well: 'We wanted to make more films in the past, and the time it takes for us, that's the problem.''
During his talk at the annual Palm Springs event, where AI took center stage, Basse weighed in on subjects such as data provenance and budgets, and spoke about progress being made in filmmaking, predicting that in 'probably two years, we're going to have very high performing open source foundation models.'
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Stability AI develops generative AI models for image, video, 3D, audio and language, including its flagship model, Stable Diffusion. 'Our guiding principles, basically, are that generative AI needs to be part of the production process and not replace it,' Basse said, noting that Stability AI supports an 'artist centric' approach and also a 'task centric' approach, with some of its latest developments being 3D tools and a prototype for aspect ratio conversion.
Stability AI also involves some notable leaders from the Hollywood community. In addition to Cameron — who Basse said is 'really actively involved' — Stability AI's board chairman is entrepreneur and Napster co-founder Sean Parker, and the company's CEO is Prem Akkaraju, the former CEO of VFX company Weta. Basse himself served as CTO at Fox (prior to Disney's acquisition of the studio) and at VFX studio Digital Domain.
Basse shared his perspectives on several notable AI subjects during his talk. 'I don't know anything that's impossible in the industry today, especially with the advancements of visual effects. So I don't think [AI] is about the impossible,' he said. 'It is really about making things faster and cheaper. If you look at your budgets today, whether it's TV or film, 87-90% of that budget is human labor. And I'm not talking about putting people out of work, but there's a lot of that labor is not as fun to do.'
At the retreat, there was also a lot of attention on text to video, which Basse suggested is a 'fad' because filmmakers need the 'highest level' of control. 'When it actually comes to producing a two-hour movie with high production value that a lot of people will want to go and see, I think we're very far from that in terms of generative AI being able to do that,' he asserted.
Basse also weighted in on data provenance. 'I actually think that, going forward, the provenance issue is going to be less of a problem than we all think it is now,' he said, noting that production will require 'very specific' data. 'We're not going to get that data from scraping YouTube or whatever. We're going to get that data only from people like [Hollywood professionals], and we're already negotiating training data deals with people. And there's term sheets; there's very clear conditions as to what this data can be used for.'
He added, 'We are here to play ball, and to play by the rules of the industry.'
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