00:01:41 · Jae Lee
[00:01:41] S9: If you try to accommodate all of the advices that you get from your mentors, your company will most likely become like an underwear company. Totally different from what you wanted to build. Having some fundamental, like, foundation for yourself and for the company and be able to say thank you for your advice, but no thank you. Right? So having that... The gut to say no to someone that you you respect. As a founder, I think I grew a lot. Hi, EO. My name is Jae. I'm one of the cofounders and CEO of Twelve Labs. Twelve Labs is an AI research and product company based here in San Francisco and Seoul. We're building video foundation models for developers and enterprises, building video centric product. We basically build humongous AI models that can understand videos like humans, and we serve it to developers via APIs that are looking into building really powerful semantic search or classification or summarization into their products. We currently have a little over 20,000 developers that are actively using our search API. We have the largest creators of the world adopting Twelve Labs, as well as media entertainment and large sports organizations and law enforcement. So I was born in Seoul. I spent about ten years in Seoul. I had a chance to move to The States. I moved when I was 11, so went through elementary and middle school in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was able to pick up a lot of the culture and things like that. I was very interested in expanding my perspective and exploring the new world. My first experience with software engineering, or at least coding, was MATLAB. My uncle was actually getting his PhD at the University of Tennessee. So I see him kind of like plotting distribution graphs and things like that, which made me curious what he was doing. That's how I got into playing around with, like, small data sets and doing the same thing that he he was doing because I wanted to be relevant and I wanted to talk to him about a bunch of things. He probably thought what I was doing was pretty cute, which sparked my interest in learning more about how do we capture all this data and be able to create a system that can really understand the distributions of the things of the world. And it just kind of felt like if you had the understanding of that, it gives you power to predict anything.
00:03:59 · Jae Lee
And I went to Berkeley for college and studied computer science, so I really geeked out on AI and software engineering. So I spent about fifteen years in The United States, so half of my life in Seoul and in The States. I was drafted into this organization called Korean Cyber Command where like minded people were already there with incredible knowledge in software engineering and and and AI. I joke about it. You know, I served the country with keyboards rather than than than a rifle. I was really fortunate to have met my chief architect, SJ, and then Aiden kind of also joined in. He was... You know, I still clearly remember Aiden with his buzz cut coming in from from boot camp. But from day one, we knew we had this common interest in AI. And what can we do as a as a young scientist really, like, push the frontier of AI development. And we've spent a lot of times reading papers, discussing, arguing, and it turned out there were two clear paths. One was after military, we go pursue a career in academia, go become a professor, or start something of our own. And looking back, what we realized is that we were spending so much time together. And military is this really special setting where, you know, you're basically jamming in fifty to hundred twenty year olds, right, with testosterone. And what we thought was, you know, if we're having this much fun in military, imagine what we can do when we go out. So it was pretty clear to us that we're gonna start. I think we've spent about year and a half really thinking about what is the next frontier for AI and how can we contribute to pushing that boundary. There's this seminal paper called attention is all you need, which some people call it the trans
00:05:42 · S0, S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S7
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00:07:05 · S7, S6, S8
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00:07:22 · Jae Lee
[00:07:22] S9: Former paper, which is making a lot of impact now. But when it was published in 2017, at least for text and image based, you know, foundation models, probably capital was going to be a moat, whoever raises most amount of money. What we realized was, there's still a lot of unexplored research areas for multimodal video understanding. There, rather than capital, is probably going to be really passionate, smart, but also slightly dumb people that's, like, dumb enough to start it will have really good chance of succeeding. And also, we've realized that with the explosion of that video and and other complex multimedia data is going to be the infrastructural data for the Internet. And we realized that probably developers and enterprises need something better than object detection or or transcription to make sense of all all this video data that the humanity is creating. So it was like a no brainer to start building for video understanding. The model that Twelve Labs is building, it's basically trying to map human language into whatever that's happening in video content. So if you can map precise human language to whatever that's happening within video content, gives you this emergence capabilities like being able to search for things really well or being able to classify things or summarize. You know, we didn't all join the Korean Cyber Command at the same time. So SJ was already like six months ahead of me, then Aiden was six months behind. So like, okay, we decided we're gonna start this company. But then SJ is leaving next year, and then I'm leaving the year after, and then Aiden is six months after. So how do we do it? So it was genuinely very scary. So we had our ideas. I remember SJ was discharged on Thursday, and he came back to the military base Saturday of that week with our laptops and he took us out. In front of our military base, there was a bagel shop called Las Bagel and that was like our office where SJ would bring all of our laptops and we would do our research and do some little bit of prototyping. We did that for six months. And then I got discharged and I did the whole laptop carrying and and taking out Aden. So we did that for like a good year so that everyone is out. And then we had a bunch of friends that were working in AI and crypto and blockchain and and and Web three was just booming.
00:09:35 · Jae Lee
And we had a mutual friend, like the founders had a mutual friend that had, like, a really nice office in Seoul, he was like, oh, you guys can come in and and use our office space. So that's what we did. And then after, three weeks, that company went bankrupt. And then really scary, like, people started coming in and and we had, our desktops and our GPUs all set up there, we got really scared. So we brought everything back out and we found, like, really tiny, tiny office, probably like the size of a dressing room. That's where, like, all five of us kind of spent, the next six months, before, we raised our proper seat ground. Looking back, if we were to do it again, I don't know if we'll be able to do it, but some people say ignorance is bliss. And I think we were just like really naive and just really excited about building this company. I guess not knowing what was ahead allowed us to kind of do what we did.