ens more in foreign languages (the city’s population was 41% foreign-born at the time).
In the 21st century, we’ve again seen innovations accelerate the production of content and information. It’s now been over two years since I made this graphic, but it still captures the arc toward democratized video creation tools:
It’s becoming easier to create quality content without specialized knowledge or expensive equipment. Standalone apps like the free editing app CapCut further push forward ease of production: CapCut, which powers hundreds of TikTok trends, was the 9th-most-downloaded app globally in 2021 with 255M downloads, wedged between #8 Messenger and #10 Spotify. (CapCut is also owned by Bytedance, after Bytedance bought CapCut’s predecessor, Viamaker, for $300M in 2018.)
This trend of democratized production is years in the making. Back in 2015, Steven Johnson wrote in The New York Times:
The cost of consuming culture may have declined, though not as much as we feared. But the cost of producing it has dropped far more drastically. Authors are writing and publishing novels to a global audience without ever requiring the service of a printing press or an international distributor. For indie filmmakers, a helicopter aerial shot that could cost tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago can now be filmed with a GoPro and a drone for under $1,000; some directors are shooting entire HD-quality films on their iPhones. Apple’s editing software, Final Cut Pro X, costs $299 and has been used to edit Oscar-winning films. A musician running software from Native Instruments can recreate, with astonishing fidelity, the sound of a Steinway grand piano played in a Vienna concert hall, or hundreds of different guitar-amplifier sounds, or the Mellotron proto-synthesizer that the Beatles used on ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’’ These sounds could have cost millions to assemble 15 years ago; today, you can have all of them for a few thousand dollars.
This is pretty remarkable. And it continues to hold true: Parasite, the 2020 Best Picture winner and my current answer for favorite movie (it changes every week), was cut on Final Cut Pro.
The same concept extends to 3D creation. Minecraft and Roblox have broadened the definition of game developer. Overwolf makes it easy to build in-game apps and mods.
And we’re now seeing AI drive a Cambrian explosion in creativity. Jasper.ai, Copy.ai, and Lex give writers superpowers. Midjourney lets anyone with a Discord account create beautiful AI-generated images—and v4 is dramatically better than v3. As my colleague Cat shared last week, in these v3 (left) and v4 (right) outputs for the same prompt—“A penguin in Venice”—we get much better results in v4. We no longer have penguins with two beaks and three legs.
Ben Thompson had Midjourney’s David Holz on Stratechery recently for an interview. Holz shared that about 10% of cloud costs are going into training, while 90% are going into the inference to the users making images. Midjourney is using more than 10,000 GPUs, making it one of the largest GPU users in the world.
I found this excerpt particularly interesting:
Holz: Our inference usage is weird in that some users are willing to wait and some don’t have to wait and some won’t wait. And then there’s a large latency, but the usage pattern is really weird. So we did a lot of innovative logistics stuff early on to make the costs low. So right now, if you make an image, there are eight different regions of the world that the image might get made in, and you have no idea. It might get made in Korea or Japan or the Netherlands or something. It’s going to eight different regions that the GPUs are balancing between. Where it’s really cool is because we’ll use a lot of the GPUs in Korea while it’s nighttime and everyone’s sleeping there, no one’s using them. We can kind of load balance. You can basically race the darkness of the night across the earth.
We’re still in the early innings of AI applications, and every year leaps are being made. GPT-3 came out less than three years ago with ~200 billion parameters;