Luma AI Bets on ‘Hybrid’ Future for Hollywood

AI startup, Luma AI, says the technology could actually help bring production back to Los Angeles by lowering costs and making ambitious projects faster and easier to produce without sacrificing creative control. Luma AI COO Caroline Ingeborn joins us now. You and I, were listening to to mister Affleck together last night. His view on AI's role in the filmmaking process or the the the creative process. Obviously, Luma believes AI has a role. Just explain what Luma does and and and and how you make a role in Hollywood. So so Luma started out as a frontier research lab. That's right. What we are today is a full stack company. So what that means is that we do research on multimodal AI models. But then what... Where our product is and how we go to market is focused on AI for creative work. Yeah. And so if you look at this of how the how the industry has evolved, it is... First, like, you need these models to be able to do anything. Right? But if you only use the models, they are very unruly. Right. And you saw this in the early user behavior. And so the second layer of this is building products for creative professionals so that they can access the models, but also, like, retain control. And the third layer is having forward deployed creatives and engineers so that adoption really actually takes place. Yep. We're familiar with the concepts of the forward deployed engineer generally Yeah. In in the field of AI. You know, in my conversation with George Stroudopoulos in... You know, just a minute ago, I kinda outlined what the the original vision was, but the prompt and the output is a full feature length film. That's not the reality. Right? No. That is not... No. That is not the reality. And I would say, like, that's not the goal. What is the goal? The goal is not to have, like, a prompting input. This is a tool at the end of the day. And what I'm seeing that is so exciting is when... Sorry. Can I take this? Yeah. Please pull it out. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Thank you. What I'm seeing that is so exciting is this is a tool as all other tools that we have seen, and Hollywood is, like, built on technology shifts. This is a new technology shift. So far, I haven't seen any technology shift having as a goal to... It's it's a collaborative process. Well, on that collaboration, so I find the Luma agent interesting because you start as a frontier lab. Right? But, really, what the the agent does is direct the project to the best underlying model for that project. Yes. And it could come from OpenAI. It could come from from another partner. Yes. Explain why that's important. It's very important because in the in the creative field today, and I would argue in in many fields today, that there is no model to rule them all. There is no model that can make a movie even though I don't think any video AI company has that as a goal. But there's no one to Rings reference, by the way. But There is no one through through limits. And so what that means is that as the creative professional, as our user, we serve them. And so we want... Our creative agent is trained to give you as the creative professional access to the best model for what you are trying to solve for. And so sometimes that means, like, yes, you should go to the absolutely latest video model to get the highest quality output. But if you're in the ideation phase and you wanna generate a lot of content, you don't need to pay for that highest, most prestige. You want to be able to generate a lot and quite fast. We're still talking about tokens. Yes. We're still talking about tokens. Last night, the Netflix co CEO, Ted Sarandos, talked about filmmaking in America, content in creation in America, and in particular, Los Angeles. And he talks about three specific projects Mhmm. 400,000,000 worth of production spend. Luma also has this this argument that AI brings energy, activity back to to LA. What what is that about? What is your point of view? I think there's, like, two very clear cases here. One is, like, if you if you are in LA today and you spend time in the community, it's fantastic. There are so many, like, people that have dived into this new technology, and they're collaborating. They're supporting each other. They're making more content. They're sharing. Like, the Internet is filled with people just sharing, like, hey. I found out how to do this. I found out how to control this. It's a very generous, excited, and curious community. Generous token spend? It's a generous token spend, but, ultimately, like, they're also finding a bunch of hacks of how to optimize the token spend and get the most out of your out of your token spend. The other one, which is a very clear example, is our collaboration with John Urban. Yes. And so what he has shown with a with a project called... If if... A TV show at Amazon called Moses is that what he was able to do... So he spent years making TV shows abroad because that's how he could get the most out of the investments that he was doing and to tell his story. And that's, like, the constraint that you see if you're, like, at the, you know, the biggest director there in the world or if you're a YouTuber starting out, at the end of the day, you want to be able to tell your story. And so capital comes into that storytelling. But what John was able to do with Moses is in Manhattan Beach, on a stage, hundreds of people working together to make Moses happen, and he was able to do that by hybrid filmmaking. Yeah. So is it AI? Is it not AI? No. It's hybrid. And so they're real actors. There is a bunch of people using AI to move these actors from the stage in Manhattan Beach into any environment that you want. And this, like, retains the actor's performance. It enhances it. It's a... If you speak to the actors, it's a lot more fun than any green screen has ever been, and the end result is fantastic.