Year: 2018

Snap screwed it all up jumbling messages and Stories, banishing creators to Discover, and wrecking auto-advance. Prideful of his gut instincts, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel refused to listen to the awful user reviews and declining usage. Now a YouGov  study shows a 73% drop in user sentiment towards Snapchat, the app’s user count shrank in March, and its share price is way down.

Yet the re-redesign Snapchat is finally rolling out today in response won’t fix the problems. The company still fails to understand that people want a predictable app that’s convenient to lay back and watch, and social media stars are more similar to you and me than they are to news outlets producing mobile magazine-style Discover content.

There’s a much better path for Snapchat, but it will require an ego adjustment and a bigger reversal of the changes — philosophy be damned.

Snapchat’s impression amongst US users fell off a cliff when the redesign was rolled out early this year

Here’s what Snapchat was, is becoming, and should be.

The Old Snapchat

Snapchat’s best design was in September 2016. It lacked sensible Stories sorting, and got some questionable changes before the big January 2018 redesign, but the fundamentals were there:

• Left: Messages in reverse chronological order
• Right: Stories from everyone in reverse chronological order with a carousel of ranked preview tiles in a carousel above or below Stories
• Auto-Advance: Automatic and instant

The Broken Snapchat

Snapchat’s big January 2018 redesign did two smart things. It added more obvious navigation buttons to ease in new and adult users. And it made the Stories list algorithmically sorted so you’d see your best friends first rather than just who posts most often, as TechCrunch recommended last April.

But it introduced a bunch of other problems like pulling creators out of the Stories list, turning the inbox into chaos with ad-laden Stories, and breaking auto-advance so you have to watch an annoying interstitial between each friend. Spiegel stubbornly refused to listen to the poor feedback, saying in February “Even the complaints we’re seeing reinforce the philosophy. Even the frustrations we’re seeing really validate those changes. It’ll take time for people to adjust”. That quickly proved short-sighted.

• Left: Messages and Stories from friends mixed together, sorted algorithmically
• Right: Discover, sorted algorithmically, with influencers and people who don’t follow you back mixed in
• Auto-Advance: Interstitial preview screens

The Re-Redesigned Snapchat

Users hated the redesign, initial reviews were mostly negative, and Snapchat’s growth fell to its lowest rate ever. After some tests, Today Snapchat tells us it’s rolling out the re-redesign to the majority of iOS users that’s a little less confusing. Yet it doesn’t address the core problems, plus makes the Discover screen more overwhelming and ditches the smart sorting of friends’ Stories:

• Left: Messages sorted reverse chronologically
• Right: Friends’ Stories at the top sorted reverse chronologically, then subscriptions to creators sorted algorithmically, then Discover channels sorted algorithmically
• Auto-Advance: Interstitial preview screens

The Right Snapchat

While the re-redesign makes Snapchat’s messaging inbox work like it used to, it reintroduces the problem of an unsorted Story list that’s dominated by whoever posts most often. It also leaves auto-advance broken out of a misguided hope of ensuring you never watch a frenemy or ex’s Story by accident and show up in their view counts. But that’s not worth ruining the laid-back viewing experience we’ve grown to love on Instagram Stories, and could be better solved with a mute button or just getting people to unfriend those they can’t be seen watching.

That’s why I recommend Snapchat move to a hybrid of all its designs:

• Left: Messages sorted reverse chronologically
• Right: Stories from all friends and creators, displayed as preview tiles, sorted algorithmically to preference close friends
• Further Right: Discover, with preview tile sections for subscriptions, publishers, and Our Stories/Maps/Events [This whole screen could be crammed into the Stories page if Snap insisted on just one screen on the right]
• Auto-Advance: Traditional instant auto-advance without interstitials, plus a mute button to hide people

This design would make the inbox natural and uncluttered, ensure you see all your closest friends’ Stories, keep influencers from being buried in Discover, give publishers and Snapchat’s own content recommendations including new creators room to breathe, and let you easily relax and watch a ton of Stories in a row.

Snapchat could have slowly iterated its way to this conclusion. It could have done extensive beta testing of each change to ensure it didn’t misstep. And perhaps facing an existential crisis from the exceedingly viable alternatives Instagram and WhatsApp, it should never have attempted a sweeping overhaul of its app’s identity. Twitter’s conservative approach to product updates looks wiser in retrospect. Instead, Snap is in decline.

Facebook’s family of apps have survived over the years by changing so gradually that they never shocked users into rebellion, or executing major redesigns when users had no comparable app to switch to. Snapchat calls itself a camera company, but it’s really a “cool” company — powered by the perception of its trendiness with American kids. But as ephemeral content proliferates and Stories become a ubiquitous standard soon to surpass feeds as the preferred way to share, they’ve gone from hip to utility. So if its features aren’t cool any more and are offered in a slicker way to a larger audience elsewhere, what is Snapchat anymore?

The three-axis tourbillon is one of the most complex watch complications in the world. Originally based on a design by watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet, this type of tourbillon – literally “whirlwind” – rotates the balance wheel of a watch in order to ensure that gravity doesn’t adversely affect any part of the watch. It’s a clever, complex, and essentially useless complication in an era of atomic clocks and nano materials but darn if it isn’t cool-looking.

Based on this original, simpler model, this new three-axis tourbillon is available for download here. It consists of 70 potentially fiddly parts and runs using a basic motor.

As you can see, the main component is the balance wheel which flips back and forth to drive the watch. The balance wheel is contained inside a sort of spike-shaped cage that rotates on multiple axes. The balance wheel controls the speed of the spin and often these devices are used as second hands on more complex – and more expensive – tourbillon watches. Tourbillons were originally intended to increase watch accuracy when they were riding in a vest pocket, the thinking being that gravity would pull down a watch’s balance wheel differently when it was vertical as compared to being horizontal. In this case, the wheel takes into account all possible positions leading to a delightful bit of horological overkill.

Let’s talk events… TechCrunch events: we’re confirming five more names for our upcoming blockchain show on July 6.

Joe Lubin, a co-founder of Ethereum and the founder of ConsenSys, Enigma CEO and co-founder Hicham Oudghiri, Monaco CEO and co-founder Kris Marszalek, EximChain CEO and co-founder Hope Liu, and Jim Fruchterman, CEO and founder of Benetech, will all join us for the show — the first TechCrunch event dedicated to the topic of blockchain.

TC Sessions: Blockchain takes place in Zug, the Swiss Canton located just outside of Zurich, which has come to be known as ‘Crypto Valley.’

Zug isn’t just a regulatory haven where startups come to file paperwork and leave, it’s becoming a destination that blockchain startups are moving into to take advantage of the growing community and a forward-thinking, fast-moving regulatory approach.

Beyond these fives names announced today, the event will also feature the following speakers:

• Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum
• Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance
• Balaji Srinivasan, CTO of Coinbase
• Roham Gharegozlou, the founder of smash-hit blockchain game CryptoKitties
• Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Hyperledger Project
• Leanne Kemp, founder and CEO of Everledger
• Jun Hasegawa, CEO and founder of Omise and OmiseGo
• Mona El Isa, CEO and co-founder of Melonport
• Colin Hanna, associate at Balderton Capital
• Galia Benartzi, co-founder and head of Business Development at Bancor
• Gert Sylvest, co-founder of Tradeshift and GM of Tradeshift Frontiers

You can get your hands on tickets for the event — they’re priced at 495 Swiss Francs, or around $500 — from the website here.

Jim Fruchterman — founder and CEO of Benetech

As founder and CEO of Benetech, Fruchterman is focused on exporting tech innovation outside of Silicon Valley. He is a former rocket engineer who founded two machine intelligence startups that were acquired by public companies.

Under Fruchterman’s leadership, Benetech has created and scaled multiple software for social good enterprises spanning human rights, education, and environmental conservation. Fruchterman continues to explore and develop new and exciting ways that software and data can address unmet needs and create lasting social change.

Hope Liu — co-Founder and CEO of EximChain

EximChain is a software development company focused on supply chain applications. From supplier credit to inventory management, Eximchain helps businesses connect, transact, and share information more efficiently and securely. Eximchain’s mission is to provide blockchain-enabled tools to transform the global supply chain by integrating SMEs and increasing transparency.

Liu has a B.A. from Peking University and MBA from MIT. Previously, she handled cross-border transactions at UBS Asia for 6.5 years. She is the Lab Lead of the North America Blockchain Association and has been working on Eximchain from the MIT Media Lab since 2015.

Joseph Lubin — co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys

New York-based ConsenSys produces developer tools, decentralized applications, and solutions for enterprises and governments that tap into the potential of Ethereum.

Lubin graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His past work has included stints with the Princeton Robotics Lab, Blacksmith Software Consulting and Goldman Sachs, while he has worked on projects that include the development of autonomous music composition tools, and autonomous mobile robots for a private research firm.

Lubin also spent time in Kingston, Jamaica, where he worked on music industry projects. Two years into that, he co-founded the Ethereum Project and he has been working on Ethereum and ConsenSys since January 2014.

1 May 2018; Joseph Lubin, Co-Founder of Ethereum & CEO, ConsenSys, on the Center stage during day one of Collision 2018 at Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Photo by Diarmuid Greene/Collision via Sportsfile

Kris Marszalek — co-founder and CEO of Monaco

Monaco is developing a crypto-enabled debit card and digital banking app. The company raised over $25 million in an ICO in 2017 and it says it is “rolling out” to Asia, Europe and North America. Monaco began offering its service in a closed beta in March, with plans to offer a Visa card and, further down the line, credit and investment products tied to crypto.

Hong Kong-based Marszalek previously exited two companies, including e-commerce platform BeeCrazy (sold to iBuy Group in 2013) and location-based platform YiYi, which was bought by Motorola in 2010. Following the BeeCrazy sale, he joined the management team of iBuy, which later became Ensogo.

Hicham Oudghiri — co-founder and CEO of Enigma

Enigma is a blockchain-based protocol that uses privacy technologies to enable scalable, end-to-end decentralized applications. The company was incubated at MIT Media Lab, and it raised around $45 million in an ICO last September.

Prior to Enigma, Oudghiri managed a private sustainable finance program in Africa at BMCE Bank in partnership with the World Bank Group. He spearheaded project finance initiatives and created energy models for large-scale alternative energy projects in Africa and developed a rating system and software for environmental and social risk management across the bank’s entire commercial loan portfolio. Oudghiri holds a B.A. from Columbia University, where he studied Philosophy and Mathematics, and he started his career at an energy fund in Dallas.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-themed podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Matthew Lynley, Connie Loizos and myself were joined by Villi Iltchev, a partner at August Capital.

It was good that we had a full crew on deck, as the news flew thick and varied this week. In honor of the news cycle, we took on as much of it as we could inside a single episode.

And as we’re sure that you guessed, we had to talk about the Flipkart-Walmart deal first. The staggering transaction sees the American IRL commerce giant with a proven appetite for e-commerce players bring the India unicorn into its fold. This is the second multi-billion-dollar startup deal for Walmart in recent memory. (Jet.com was the first unicorn to find new nest in the Walton’s rafters.)

Amazon, naturally, was the loser in the final deal. Now it will have to win alone if it can.

But we couldn’t repine, as there was more to do. Next up we talked our way through the new Robinhood round. Raising more than $350 million for a valuation of more than $5 billion, Robinhood has put itself nearly out of the range of acquisition, instead seemingly betting its future on independent success. Does the firm have a shot at growing into its valuation?

One company that did manage precisely that, Dropbox, reported its first quarter’s performance as a public company this week. In fact, it happened about 37 minutes before we hit record. But despite beating known expectations, it seems that the public markets were really hoping for a bit more. Dropbox shares sank in after-hours trading after besting both top and bottom lines.

To take us out, we riffed on MoviePass’s continued troubles. Sparing you the details, things look bad. Again.

We had to leave the Glassdoor deal behind so that we didn’t run too long, but we’ll be right back. Stay cool!

Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-hailing service, has suspended its Hitch, one of its carpooling services, for one week as it investigates the murder of a passenger.

The victim was a 21-year-old air stewardess identified only as Ms. Li. State-run news agency Global Times reports that the incident took place in the evening of May 5, when she used Hitch — which lets people headed to the same destination take a ride together — to summon a ride home from Zhengzhou airport, Henan Province, after finishing work. The publication cites police reports that say Li was murdered by her driver using a weapon.

Didi has used facial recognition technology to verify its drivers since 2016. The technology is used to speed up registration of drivers when they initially sign-up, and also to prevent fraud when they log in to start a shift. The idea is that the app will only unlock when the driver account owner takes a selfie which should match with the record Didi has.

In the case of this tragic incident, that safeguard collapsed.

The suspect — who has been named as Liu Zhenhua — is not registered on its platform, according to Didi, but he was able to access it, and take rides, using a verified driver account belonging to his father. Didi said it did not prevent this because its facial recognition feature was “defective” that day.

It looks like there was a warning sign, however. The company said that the account had received a sexual harassment complaint before the incident — it isn’t clear if that was from the father, or his son accessing the account — but Didi was unable to reach the account despite trying to make contact an apparent five times. Yet, despite the complaint, the account was allowed to log-in and take rides.

“Due to the imperfection of the arbitration rules of the platform, the complaint was not handled properly in subsequent days,” Didi admitted in a statement.

Hitch is an inter-city carpooling service focused on commuting and distance-traveling that lets passengers cover the cost of fuel and a driver’s basic costs. Didi’s commercial carpooling services are not affected. The Hitch suspension starts tomorrow — May 12 — and Didi said it will use the time to review all of its registered drivers for “any cases involving mismatch of drivers and vehicles.”

The company also pledged to revamp its operational approach and customer support system.

In a prior statement provided to TechCrunch, Didi expressed its “deep remorse” at the incident which it said it has “undeniable” responsibility for. The company added that it must “step up to win the trust of our users.”

We are deeply saddened by and sorry about the tragedy that happened to Ms. Li while using DiDi Hitch. No words can express our deep remorse in the face of such an enormity. We give our sincere condolences and apologies to the family of Ms. Li. We need to step up to win the trust of our users. Our responsibilities in this case are undeniable.

Our special task force is working closely with law enforcement agencies with the utmost effort. The murderer needs to be brought to justice; and Ms Li and her family deserve a just answer.

We apologize again to the family of the victim and the public. Please be assured we will review thoroughly all our business practices to prevent such an incident from happening again.

Global Times reported that Didi is offered a reward of one million yuan (just over $150,000) for information about the alleged murdered, although Didi did not confirm that when we asked.

Didi is facing pressure from rival Meituan Dianping, which started out in local services but recently introduced ride-sharing services and moved into dockless bikes with the acquisition of Mobike.

This is not the first time that Didi, which became China’s single-largest ride-hailing company when it bought out Uber’s local business in 2016, has dealt with the murder of a customer. Two years ago, a woman in Shenzhen was robbed and murdered by a Didi driver.

Uber and Lyft have had fatal incidents, too.

In the U.S., those range from a seven-year-old girl being run over by an Uber driver in San Francisco in 2014, to a driver in Michigan murdering six people while on duty for the ride-hailing service in 2016. Other fatalities have taken place in Australia, Lebanon, Singapore and India.

This year, Uber’s autonomous vehicles have also been involved in civilian deaths. In March, a woman died after being struck by a self-driving Uber SUV in Tempe, Arizona. While police said Uber wasn’t responsible for the incident, the company paused its autonomous vehicle testing following the fatal crash.

The UK housing market has cooled down on the heels of the EU/Brexit referendum vote, but that hasn’t stopped M&A activity around property market companies. Property portal Zoopla — a leader in the UK market with 50 million visits across its apps and sites, and 25,000 business partners integrated with its platform — has announced that Silver Lake has made a cash offer of 490 pence per share for the company, equivalent to about £2.2 billion ($3 billion at current rates).

The figure represents a doubling of the company’s valuation since it went public in 2014 at a valuation of $1.5 billion (it trades as ZPG on the London Stock Exchange). It’s also a 30 percent premium on the company’s last closing price.

Zoopla will still have to put the offer to the vote of shareholders and meet other regulatory approvals before the deal is sealed, and if all goes as planned it will close in the third quarter of 2018, Zoopla said. So far, the company directors — led by CEO Alex Chesterman, who founded the company in 2007 — and significant shareholder DMGT (the Daily Mail group), which owns about 30 percent of Zoopla — have both endorsed the offer.

“Silver Lake is the global leader in technology investing and I am firmly of the belief that ZPG will benefit from their technology expertise and global network which will help accelerate our growth,” Chesterman said in a statement. “The terms of the Acquisition represent an attractive premium that recognises the quality of ZPG’s businesses and the strength of its future prospects and allows shareholders to realise today in cash the potential future value of their holdings. I am very excited about the opportunity this offers to our employees, customers and partners as we move to the next stage of ZPG’s development and growth.”

Zoopla said that Silver Lake first entered negotiations with it on April 16. The two parties kept the deal very quiet. There has been a surge in Zillow’s share price last week, although this might have been due to the company selling the Australian division of one of its analytics subsidiaries, Hometrack, to Australian group REA for £71 million.

In its acquisition offer announcement, Zoopla did not provide any updated figures on its financials. It is due to report half-year results on May 23. In fiscal year 2017, Zoopla reported £244.5 million ($331 million) in revenues, up 24 percent on the year before, with £37.4 ($51 million) million in profit.

As a point of comparison, this puts Zoopla at a just over a quarter of the size of its similarly-named US counterpart Zillow, which this week reported revenues of $299.9 million for the previous quarter. The US company has a market cap of $7.32 billion and is trading slightly up before the market opens.

“ZPG is a great growth technology company,” said Simon Patterson, MD of Silver Lake, in a statement. “It has established strong positions in property classifieds, home and financial services markets by innovating in product and marketing. We are delighted to partner with Alex Chesterman, one of Europe’s leading and most accomplished technology entrepreneurs, to invest in ZPG’s continued growth.”

Zoopla is one of the biggest property portals in the UK, with several other brands including uSwitch, Money, PrimeLocation and SmartNewHomes under its wing.

Competing against the likes of Rightmove, the company grew quickly by tapping into the UK house-buying and selling boom, particularly in London and the southeast, and by the huge shift that we’ve seen in the property market, where people start their initial searches both for homes — and to figure out the many other aspects of moving (such as what you can afford, purchasing insurance, finding mortgages and more) — online.

Like Zillow in the US, Zoopla’s primary business lies in providing a portal where people can search for homes and commercial property to buy or rent in the UK and abroad. It gets a cut on referrals and for providing service to real estate agents, who use the service to help their properties get more visibility. 

In addition to this, the company offers other property related services such as valuation calculators, property market analytics and other business intelligence tools for those in the property industry, such as business leads. Other brands in this second category include Hometrack, Calcasa, TechnicWeb, Ravensworth, Alto, Jupix, ExpertAgent, PropertyFile and MoveIT. 

LightTag, a newly launched startup from a former NLP researcher at Citi, has built a “text annotation platform” designed to assist data scientists who need to quickly create training data for their AI systems. It’s a classic picks ‘n’ shovels move, in that the bootstrapped Berlin-based company is hoping to take advantage of the current boom in AI development.

Specifically, LightTag aims to solve one of the main bottlenecks of ‘deep learning’-based AI development: what you get out is only as good as the labeled data you put in. The problem, however, is that labelling data is laborious, and since it’s a job carried out by teams of humans it is prone to inaccuracy and inconsistency. LightTag’s team-based workflow, clever UI, and in-built quality controls is an attempt to mitigate this.

“What I’ve taken from [my previous positions] to LightTag is an understanding that labeled data is more important to success in machine learning than clever algorithms,” says founder Tal Perry. “The difference in a successful machine learning project often boiled down to how well the gathering and use of labeled data was executed and managed. There is a huge gap in the tooling to consistently do that well, that’s why I built LightTag”.

Perry says LightTag’s annotation interface is designed to keep labellers “effective and engaged”. It also employs its own “AI” to learn from previous labelling and make annotation suggestions. The platform also automates the work of managing a project, in terms of assigning tasks to labellers and making sure there is enough overlap and duplication to keep accuracy and consistency high.

“We’ve made it dead-simple to annotate with a team (sounds obvious, but nothing else makes it easy),” he says. “To make sure the data is good, LightTag automatically assigns work to team members so that there is overlap between them. This allows project managers to measure agreement and recognise problems in their project early on. For example, if a specific annotator is performing worse than others”.

Meanwhile, Perry says acquiring labeled data is one of the silent growth sectors in the recent AI boom, but for many sector-specific industries, such as medical, legal or financial, outsourcing the job is not an option. That’s because the data is often too sensitive, or too specialist for non-subject experts to process. To address this, LightTag offers an on-premise version in addition to SaaS.

“Every company has huge text datasets that are unstructured (CRM records, call transcripts, emails etc). ‘Deep Learning’ has made it algorithmically feasible to tap that data, but to use Deep Learning we need to train the model with labeled datasets. Most companies can’t outsource labelling on text because the data is too complicated (biology, finance), regulated (CRM records) or both (medical records),” explains the LightTag founder.

Operating in various pilots and in private beta since December 2018, and publicly launched this month, LightTag has already been used by the data science team at a large Silicon Valley tech company that wants its AI to understand free-form text in profiles, as well as by an energy company to analyse logs from oil rigs to predict problems drilling at certain depths. The startup has also done a pilot with a medical imaging company labelling reports associated with MRI scans.

Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker that’s looking to raise as much as $10 billion in a Hong Kong IPO, is continuing to grow its presence in the American market after it announced plans to bring its smart home products to the U.S..

The company is best known for its well-priced and quality smartphones, but Xiaomi offers hundreds of other products which range from battery chargers to smart lights, air filter units and even Segway. On the sidelines of Google I/O, the company quietly made a fairly significant double announcement: not only will it bring its smart home products to the U.S., but it is adding support for Google Assistant, too.

The first products heading Stateside include the Mi Bedside Lamp, Mi LED Smart Bulb and Mi Smart Plug, Xiaomi’s head of international Wan Xiang said, but you can expect plenty more to follow. Typically, Xiaomi sells to consumers in the U.S. via Amazon and also its Mi.com local store, so keep an eye out there.

Smartphones, however, are a different question.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun — who stands to become China’s richest man thanks to the IPO — previously said the company is looking to bring its signature phones to the U.S. by early 2019 at the latest.

There’s no mention of that in Xiaomi’s IPO prospectus, which instead talks of plans to move into more parts of Europe and double down on Russia and Southeast Asia. Indeed, earlier this week, Xiaomi announced plans to expand beyond Spain and into France and Italy in Europe, while it has also inked a carrier deal with Hutchinson that will go beyond those markets into the UK and other places.

You can expect that it will take its time in the U.S., particularly given the concerns around Chinese OEMs like Huawei — which has been blacklisted by carriers — and ZTE, which has had its telecom equipment business clamped down on by the U.S. government.

Hat tip Android Police

Whoever thought we would leave telemarketing behind in this brave new smartphone world of ours lacked imagination. Robocalls are a menace growing in volume and even a massive $120 million fine leveled against a prominent source of them by the FCC likely won’t stem the flood.

The fine was announced today during the FCC’s monthly open meeting: a Mr Adrian Abramovich was responsible for nearly 100 million robocalls over a three-month period, and will almost certainly be bankrupted by this record forfteiture.

“Our decision sends a loud and clear message,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in a statement. “This FCC is an active cop on the beat and will throw the book at anyone who violates our spoofing and robocall rules and harms consumers.”

That sounds impressive until you hear that these calls took place in 2016, and meanwhile there were 3.4 billion robocalls made last month alone. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel applauds the fine, but questions the practicality of pursuing damages when actions need to be taken to prevent the crimes in the first place.

“Let’s be honest,” she wrote in a statement, “Going after a single bad actor is emptying the ocean with a teaspoon.”

She points out that a set of rules designed to prevent robocalls was overturned a couple months ago, and that 20 petitions to the FCC under those rules for legal exemptions and such have yet to be addressed. And a technology designed to prevent robocalls altogether, recommended in a report more than a year ago and currently set to be implemented in Canada in 2019, has no such date here in the States.

As someone who gets these robocalls all the time, I fully support both this fine and the more serious measures Rosenworcel suggests. And the faster the better, I literally got one while writing this story.

One year ago, I began working on an album. I write vocal melodies and lyrics, while my partner does the composition. We both work on instrumentation, and complement each other well. The only odd part of the relationship is…my partner isn’t human.

It’s AI.

The relationship was born out of curiosity. Fear-driven headlines had been dominating my news feed for some time….headlines like: AI will take our jobs, our data, and eventually, our souls.

The arguments left me wondering. What’s really happening with AI? I stumbled across an article chronicling how AI was now being used to compose music. After a quick Google search, I found that song creation was just the tip of the iceberg – AI was also writing poems, editing films, and synthesizing art…and passing the Turing test.  

Eager to learn more, I began to experiment with every AI music making tool I could get my hands on. Amper, and Aiva to start, then later, IBM Watson and Google Magenta (there are countless others on the scene – AI Music, Jukedeck, and Landr to name a few).

My side project quickly evolved into a full-fledged album (“I AM AI”) along with a series of virtual reality music videos exploring the tenuous relationship between humans and technology. Last September, I released the first full single I produced with Amper, Break Free, which grabbed the attention – and curiosity – of the larger creative community.

Many inquired: are you worried AI will be more creative than you? No. In many ways, AI helped me become more creative, evolving my role into something resembling more of an editor or director.  I gave AI direction (in the form of data to learn from or parameters for the output), and it sends back raw material, which I then edit and arrange to create a cohesive song. It also allowed me to spend more time on other aspects of the creation process like the vocal melodies, lyrics, and music videos. It’s still creative, just different. But technophobes, rejoice: AI isn’t a perfect companion just yet.

What the future of our co-evolutionary world looks like with AI is anyone’s guess… but I’m optimistic.

Since there is still a lot of mystery surrounding the process of collaborating with AI, a breakdown is a helpful way to baseline the conversation. Here are the primary platforms I’ve used and my takeaways from collaborating with each one:

1. Amper: co-founded by several musicians, Amper launched as a platform to compose original scores for productions. Currently free to the public, Amper has a  simple front-facing UI that you can use to modify parameters like BPM, instrumentation, and mood. No need to know code here!

Takeaway: Prior to working with Amper, I couldn’t recognize the sounds of different instruments, nor did I believe I had any particular musical preferences. Now, I recognize dozens of instruments, and have honed a particular creative style. For instance, I’m developed a strong taste for mixing electronic synthesizers with piano and deep bass, as you can hear in Life Support below, which I produced a 360 VR music video for.

2. AIVA: Aiva is an award-winning deep learning algorithm, and the first to be registered with an authors’ rights society. I first met one of the founders, Pierre Barreau, in London, and we became really excited about the opportunity of combining classical learning styles with pop/synth instrumentation. AIVA uses deep learning and reinforcement learning to analyze thousands of pieces of classical music in specific styles and compose new scores.

Takeaway: My first track with AIVA, Lovesick, was created from the analysis of thousands of pieces from the late Romantic Period (early to mid 1800s.) The result is a Westworld-esque piano piece that I arranged into a pop-funk track with electronic synth elements. Collaborating with such unfamiliar source material was incredibly fun because it forces out of the box thinking. When arranging the track, I really had to ignore a lot of my “pop style” conditioning instincts.

3. Watson Beat (IBM): While Watson Beat doesn’t have a front-end, the fine engineers at IBM gave me a few tutorials to get me started. For those who are more code confident, however, it’s a free, open source program you can download on GitHub. Within a few days, I was navigating the system, feeding it old time favorites to churn out dozens of stems of music with a stylistic twist (think Mary Had a little Lamb done in the style of a Peruvian Waltz?)

Takeaway: I was delighted to see the results of mixing various data inputs with unexpected genres, which also made me more aware of the underlying influences governing my own creative ideas. Because the output is MIDI (whereas Amper is a finished WAV or MP3 file), the artist has complete freedom over how the notes are transposed into instrumentation. I found my love of synthesizers by placing them on unlikely styles of music, and my first track with Watson Beat will likely be released this summer.

4. Google Magenta: like Watson, Magenta is free and open source on Github. Some tools have easy front-facing interfaces (i.e. AI Duets) and others require a bit more back-end coding knowledge. What’s cool is the scope and number of tools that Google offers in its arsenal. Probably the most robust program for programmers.

Takeaway: With Magenta’s tools, you don’t have to solely focus on composition, you can also analyze sound. NSynth, for instance, allows you to combine the sounds of two different instruments (try mixing a cat with a harp!) Google has algorithms for studying sound tone and vibrational quality, which has many exciting applications.

It’s no surprise that AI elicits a lot of questions about our “specialness” as humans…but perhaps we’re focusing on the wrong argument. Humans always evolve with technology, and it’s what we choose to do with AI that matters. I believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg – and it will unlock creativity we can’t yet imagine.

For the budding enthusiast who lacks formal music training, AI can be a compelling tool – not just for learning, but as an entry-point for self-expression. Now anyone, anywhere, has the ability to create music – and that desire and ability to express is what makes us human.