Sumir Singh is a graduate of Harvard University.
photograph: Offering
A New Zealand-Indian Harvard graduate who once vied for the title of New Zealand's smartest teenager claims to have used artificial intelligence to completely automate the process of creating videos for social media.
Soumil Singh founded a platform called Unfaze.ai that uses AI to create video content for individuals and brands.
The company was backed by several investment funds, including Y Combinator, Hack VC, Soma Capital and Pioneer Fund.
Singh, a New York resident who studied applied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University, said that while TikTok has a 93% higher engagement rate than other social media networks, the need to create so much fresh content is resource-intensive and often too costly.
“This creates an access barrier for many content creators, influencers and small businesses in New Zealand,” Mr Singh said.
“While producing a single video can take an agency weeks to complete and cost thousands of dollars, recent advances in machine learning mean that content creators can simply ‘instruct’ artificial intelligence to produce video content to their specifications.
The cost of the campaign [on social media] Focus on each piece of content production. To produce effective results, you need to test multiple different versions, and even then, you can't reuse a video indefinitely.
“This is one of the reasons why many businesses don't have a short-form video content strategy and instead rely on paid media advertising platforms.”
Singh said low-budget New Zealand businesses could benefit from using AI to remove this barrier.
“We believe this technology has the potential to be transformative for thousands of small businesses around the world, providing them with nearly unlimited access to video content that they can use to market their products,” he said.
Singh said the platform has raised $5.5 million and will use the funding to further develop its technology and support its video creation software, which is scheduled to launch in July on its existing online platform.
He said the research brings them closer to producing AI-generated videos that are indistinguishable from manually created content.
“While the current version of the technology enables the creation of entertaining content for individual creators, the new suite of features, due to be released in the coming weeks, will make this the first platform to enable companies to use generative AI models to generate images of their products in multiple contexts and then transform those images into short-form video content,” he said.
