Hedra

Did you know that you can now decide on the weather you want? And even choose what kind of weather ?? ?? ??? ?? you want with the press of a button? Well, not really ??, but I have entered the Hedra character competition. One of the entries was to create a commercial for a product. This is very simple, so it is hardly 'the winner,' but it was fun to create something like this and to test Hedra's lip-sync feature (which I think works great). So here it is, the "Weatheraizzer". The link to my entry: https://lnkd.in/d_FHC8K8

So I’m working on a little (actually big) project that is essentially a trailer for the Kat Kelly series and when Hedra's Character-2 was released yesterday it was the perfect time for me to test it out by generating this exchange between “Kat” and “Sunny.” For me as a creator, the idea isn’t to replace actors with Ai. It’s to create examples of my writing and sales tools for it so that someone will give me the money to hire the actors I want. To this end, I really loved working with Character-2 on this exchange. The images themselves are generated in Leonardo.Ai because they're part of a project that's already been started. But the video generation and lip synching was all done in Character-2 and I was really impressed. They've really mastered head and eye movements, adding nods and tilts as if it understands where to punctuate the comedy. The tech is so quick it allows me to keep generating takes until I get the one that I want which allows me the freedom to think like a director and go deeper into what works with the scene. I could spend time listening to voices and “readings,” thinking not only about what worked well on its own, but together as a scene; which versions matched each other in tone and energy.?People who know me know that I often hate the sound of my own voice. (Yes, despite a lifetime of stand up and performance and phone banking to the contrary.) But ultimately the Ai voices available didn’t give me what I wanted in "Kat" to match "Sunny," (which was ElevenLabs) so I did it myself.?(And added a Virtual Me in there, too.) Character-2 really delivered on its promise and I really look forward to what I'm going to do with it on the rest of this project. That's me, getting ready to clock off for this week. Happy Friday!

Twenty years ago, I was about to pitch LinkedIn’s Series B to Greylock and other investors. I remember going through slides at Starbucks, equipped with a PowerPoint deck, a game plan for growth, and what I thought was a solid pitch. But there were, of course, challenges and uncertainties to address. More than just building a company, our team was trying to create a category. Some were calling us "Friendster for business," but the concept of professional networking was more or less untested. Our pitch deck had a vision I believed in deeply—enough to stake my career on it—but that didn’t make it easy. Knowing what I know now, what I would tell myself back in 2004, during that pivotal moment for me and for LinkedIn? What advice would I give younger Reid? What reassurances or warnings would I deliver? I’ve created a new Reid AI—20 years younger—to pitch the real, present-day me on the 2004 LinkedIn plan. To clarify: What you are watching is an attempt to use the latest AI tools to replicate some of my younger self’s curiosity and revisit an exciting moment for the company I co-founded—which is also an interesting test of how this technology can be used more generally. When we created “Reid AI”—my present-day avatar—a few months ago, we did so by training it on 20 years worth of books and interviews. We had a 4K video interview to train a video model, and we were able to use voice replication tools to replicate my voice. To create Reid AI 2004, my team had to get creative. It’s a custom GPT trained on knowledge up to 2004, including my own writing. Using Hedra, UNSHUT, and other tools, we relied largely on an image-to-video process that doesn’t require any training video but can generate video from AI-generated images. Overall, hearing myself pitch LinkedIn to myself was a bit surreal. I remember that early entrepreneur. This conversation between past and future selves feels not only like a reflection on how much has changed, but also on what remains constant: The core values of trust, integrity, and community that were pivotal in some of the startup's earliest pitches remain at the heart of LinkedIn today. I believe I would still invest in that idea. But I'm also amazed by how much 2004 Reid is about to see the world and technology change.? What do you think? What would you tell the younger you from a decade or two ago?

Twenty years ago, I was about to pitch LinkedIn’s Series B to Greylock and other investors. I remember going through slides at Starbucks, equipped with a PowerPoint deck, a game plan for growth, and what I thought was a solid pitch. But there were, of course, challenges and uncertainties to address. More than just building a company, our team was trying to create a category. Some were calling us "Friendster for business," but the concept of professional networking was more or less untested. Our pitch deck had a vision I believed in deeply—enough to stake my career on it—but that didn’t make it easy. Knowing what I know now, what I would tell myself back in 2004, during that pivotal moment for me and for LinkedIn? What advice would I give younger Reid? What reassurances or warnings would I deliver? I’ve created a new Reid AI—20 years younger—to pitch the real, present-day me on the 2004 LinkedIn plan. To clarify: What you are watching is an attempt to use the latest AI tools to replicate some of my younger self’s curiosity and revisit an exciting moment for the company I co-founded—which is also an interesting test of how this technology can be used more generally. When we created “Reid AI”—my present-day avatar—a few months ago, we did so by training it on 20 years worth of books and interviews. We had a 4K video interview to train a video model, and we were able to use voice replication tools to replicate my voice. To create Reid AI 2004, my team had to get creative. It’s a custom GPT trained on knowledge up to 2004, including my own writing. Using Hedra, UNSHUT, and other tools, we relied largely on an image-to-video process that doesn’t require any training video but can generate video from AI-generated images. Overall, hearing myself pitch LinkedIn to myself was a bit surreal. I remember that early entrepreneur. This conversation between past and future selves feels not only like a reflection on how much has changed, but also on what remains constant: The core values of trust, integrity, and community that were pivotal in some of the startup's earliest pitches remain at the heart of LinkedIn today. I believe I would still invest in that idea. But I'm also amazed by how much 2004 Reid is about to see the world and technology change.? What do you think? What would you tell the younger you from a decade or two ago?

Recruiters don't always get me. So I generated some AI advocates *with faces* for an elevator pitch. Pointing Google's NotebookLM at my personal/work website led it to generate a 12 minute audio podcast, with two hosts enthusiastically discussing highlights. I edited the file to create a separate track for each host and then used Flux and Hedra to give them talking heads.?Then I used Kapwing to run the videos in sync and record the clip you see here. More info on how it's done and why I'm excited about a Google product for the first time in years at https://lnkd.in/gmCZWKC5 #google #ai #technology #transformation #hedra #flux #kapwing