Plai Labs has unveiled its AI-powered text-to-video tool called PlaiDay for making personalized 3D-animated videos.
The startup is the latest venture of entrepreneurs Chris DeWolfe, Aber Whitcomb and Jim Benedetto. Plai Labs is launching a new first-of-its-kind personalized text-to-video generator called PlaiDay — available today on Discord.
It’s the first of many products. This novel product is built on the company’s proprietary AI platform internally codenamed Orchestra. While the company is currently using Orchestra as an internal platform, Plai Labs plans to share the development platform with the world in the coming months.
Plai Labs was started to create blockchain-based games such as Champions Ascension, which was spun out of DeWolfe’s and Whitcomb’s previous company Jam City. But now it has added PlaiDay as a new product line based on generative AI technology.
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DeWolfe said the company will continue to support both businesses in the future under Plai Labs for now, but it would likely make more announcements in the future.
PlaiDay enables users to effortlessly transform text into 3D-animated videos and personalize them with their likeness, effectively putting them in the spotlight.
Plai Labs’ mission is to empower individuals worldwide to tell their unique stories, recognizing that personal storytelling has been somewhat overlooked in the ongoing AI revolution. This groundbreaking text-to-video product redefines the way stories are told and promises to set new standards in AI video generation by allowing users to integrate their own likeness directly into the narrative.
PlaiDay’s journey begins by leveraging the power of the company’s proprietary AI platform, which simplifies the creation of new AI workflows for both technical and non-technical users. With this platform, the development of AI is no longer limited to machine learning experts, but is open to a broader group of contributors, fostering innovation, Whitcomb said.
AI-generated videos + personalization
The heart of PlaiDay’s innovation lies in its AI-powered video generator, which empowers users to create CGI-quality stories simply by typing a few words. The tool generates unique, high-quality videos in minutes, for free, allowing users to bring their quirky, hilarious, and original ideas to life.
I sent a prompt to the generator on the Discord channel with these words: “portrait of a Japanese American man wearing a GI uniform from World War II, smiling while holding his helmet.” It didn’t quite get the uniform and holding the helmet part right, but it was pretty good for a matter of seconds.
But you can pretty much put anything you like into it. Imagine a prompt like: “1970’s, male, disco dancer, smiling, blonde hair, close up.” Within a short period of time, a three-second video will be ready. Want an “English Bobby, 1800’s style, streets of London, close up, life-like”? It’s there too.
With PlaiDay’s personalization technology, users can insert their photo into these videos, merging their likeness seamlessly with the generated content. The platform comprises a versatile set of tools with reusable code blocks, enabling users from diverse backgrounds to create and deploy innovative AI applications swiftly, regardless of their industry.
Even designers and product managers can harness complex AI capabilities without needing a highly technical engineering team.
Developing for the past year
DeWolfe and Whitcomb worked together across multiple startups in social media (MySpace) and games (Jam City) while Benedetto sold a company to AOL and has been working for the last decade in AI.
“We’ve gotten back together with the best teams and we rounded up all the best people to create this company,” said DeWolfe in an interview with GamesBeat. “And this particular company PlaiDay focuses solely on AI.”
In an interview Benedetto said that the tech is AI agnostic, and it can integrate its own AI model that is not being powered by a large language model.
“The Orchestra platform has the ability for us to query any large language model if we wanted to,” Benedetto said. “But over half the modules in this neural net were developed internally. Every one of these videos is absolutely unique, with content that has never been created before.”
The team has been working on this idea for about 11 months, and they believe it will impact the way we create and interact with AI, DeWolfe said. “What that means is you can write sentences for a prompt and create a beautiful backdrop, upload a picture of yourself, and create a real story” and imagery.
The company has been playing around with the AI platform Orchestra since the beginning of the year. DeWolfe believes that it will enable creators to rapidly innovate and iterate on social storytelling using AI, and the company hopes to open it up to third parties. Orchestra has a dozen neural networks underlying it and it enabled the team to pull together a product quickly.
DeWolfe foresees applications in the prosumer space, with marketing campaign automation or other complex workflows in organizations.
He also sees people sharing these images on social networks in the future and using them to tell stories that can go viral. The company will have AI and human moderators that will filter out any not safe for work (NSFW) content or hate speech. It also has a privacy policy in place. It will use similar means to prevent the copycatting of copyrighted content.
Whitcomb said in an interview with GamesBeat that managing infrastructure is in the team’s DNA. They have created an elastic graphics processing unit (GPU) cloud that can scale up and down on the AI processing as needed, as consumer-based AI tools can require a lot of computing power.
“We’ve done a lot of optimization in the background to get the best experience to the user at the best cost,” Whitcomb said.
Meanwhile, the company is limited the videos at the moment to three seconds of content, and that also saves on costs.
The company is communicating with a core group of fans on Discord. The company has about 80 people and it will likely unveil a freemium model with paid tiers in the future.
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