Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how we connect, learn and express ourselves. Amidst the buzz, Bilawal Sidhu stands out as an AI expert and visionary creator, helping brands leverage AI to engage consumers more effectively.
Benzinga spoke with Sidhu to gain insights into his journey and thoughts on the future of AI. Below is a lightly edited version of the conversation that transpired.
Nice to meet you, Bilawal! I hear such great things about you. Care to start with an introduction?
I’m a third culture kid that grew up across India, the U.K. and the U.S.
The computer graphics bug bit me at 11, and it’s been a passion of mine since. This fueled my interest in creative technology and set a foundational theme in my life — the quest to blend the physical and digital worlds. I studied engineering and business at the University of Southern California. From then on, I spent a decade working in augmented and virtual reality, or AR and VR, primarily at Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG-owned Google.
I’ve had the privilege of building products and experiences with world-class teams that shattered the physical and digital divide. Along the way, I’ve been flexing my creative muscles on social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where I have over a million subscribers.
What was it like working as a product manager at Google?
My work at Google has been on 0-to-1 products built on unique datasets. When I started, AR and VR were nascent mediums, and we were laying the foundational building blocks. We created new ways to capture the world, model it with greater realism and understand what’s in it.
Later, we combined those primitives together to help users explore the world around them in an immersive fashion.
Younger generations have spent their formative years in immersive 3D worlds like Roblox Corp RBLX, and their expectations go far beyond the paper maps you and I grew up with.
For instance, if you’re planning your weekend escape, you want to view the best hotels, restaurants and parks. Right now, that’s a painfully chaotic, multi-tab browser endeavor. Today's users want to explore a place remotely and figure out where and when to go.
The immersive view combines Google’s understanding of the real world to let you do that vibe check with just a few taps.
Any experiences that have altered the way you view the world?
My work on 3D mapping in the Geo team takes the cake here. I can no longer walk around a city without seeing a machine-readable 3D model in my head.
We re-mapped the world with satellites, planes and ground-level sensors. We then fused these data sources together to create a ground-up 3D digital twin — perhaps the most ubiquitous model of this pale blue dot we call home. This digital twin connects the world of bits and atoms and powers everything from navigation to flood forecasting, even turning the world into a 3D canvas for AR developers.
Anyone can now build apps that understand where they are, and what they’re looking at and annotate the world around them with remarkable accuracy. This is a fundamental building block for AR experiences anchored in the real world — whether it’s to help you park your scooter or catch a Gorillaz concert in Times Square.
Of course, it’s mobile AR today, but as headsets come online, services like this will be fundamental to the future.
What’s the motivation for staying on platforms like YouTube and TikTok?
Do you know that flow state you get when you lose track of time? It happens to me when I’m creating content.
First and foremost, it’s been a creative outlet that allowed me to recharge and rejuvenate after a week filled with context-switching and a boatload of meetings.
The second is receptivity. In 2016, I started on YouTube with a video that blew up to 52 million views. It’s become a fun outlet for me to try new creative tools and techniques, and with YouTube Shorts and TikTok, the feedback is immediate. Now, I don’t need to make a 10-minute video that’s perfectly scripted and edited. Instead, I can start with an idea on a Saturday and finish a 15-second, scroll-stopping video by Sunday.
Do you create meaningful relationships and income from being online?
The community and network I’ve built are fantastic. But the reality of income from creation alone is challenging. There were weeks when I was doing 10 or 15 million views daily on TikTok. However, I received little by way of their Creator Fund.
Similarly, my TikTok AR filters have garnered nearly 100 million views, and I'm in the top 1% of effects creators, but you get no payout from that.
Luckily YouTube AdSense is a different story. It’s no surprise that YouTube continues to be the gold standard for creators and the place everyone wants to graduate to.
But to make real income as a creator — you need to convert that organic reach and monetize it with brand money or your products and services.
Collaborating with companies like Autodesk Inc ADSK to elevate their brand and showcase 3D innovation was a blast. To get asked to share my creator journey for a 3D tool I grew up learning and get paid to do it was a definite “oh crap” moment for me.
After you leave Google, what will your focus be?
I’m going head first into what is called being a creatorprenuer. The creator economy is the economy, and I sit in a unique place. You can create monetization opportunities by building organic reach and having subject matter expertise.
So, on the one hand, I’ll be scaling up my content creation and building my digital products. On the other hand, I’ll be taking on brand collaborations and a small number of advisory roles with companies I’m genuinely excited about.
The opportunities cut across industries too. Think about the IKEAs of the world that may want to amp up the digital worlds they’re building. Thus far, you’ve needed large 3D teams of artists and technicians. Now, you can use Generative AI to build these worlds at a fraction of the cost and stage virtual photoshoots for that summer catalog.
Talk about the rate at which these AI technologies are being released.
Timelines have shrunk and creators in this space are exhausted. There are multiple new releases almost every week. Think about the Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL·E 2.
No longer is innovation moving like a tanker in the sea. The cycles are so compressed, making you think about how we’re reaching users.
For instance, we have AI selfies. This makes the technology real and attainable for people. They’ve taken over social media.
Google released DreamBooth, and we use that to fine-tune Stable Diffusion. Immediately following this release, many websites optimized products for the layperson. You can upload photos and get some neat results.
What interests you most in this current wave of generative AI?
Large language models (LLMs) are the most interesting to me from a technology perspective. Unsurprisingly, a vast majority of the venture capital money being allocated goes to these text generation models, then to visual media, and finally, a long tail of vertical-specific models.
Given my background, I’m all in on visual media. My sweet spot is the potential to democratize creativity by infusing AI into existing tool chains and imagining entirely new creation tools.
Funnily enough, all these generative AI models tend to hallucinate or make stuff up. Naturally, this isn’t desirable for fact-oriented use cases, but when it comes to creative applications, this hallucination is a feature, not a bug.
So I’m seeing many startups and established players increasingly shifting their focus to creator use cases. However, few have walked in the shoes of a creator, and even fewer have gained any level of notoriety with their content. Combined with my experience creating products that have reached billions of people, I believe this is where my unique value lies.
How do you keep up with all of the information?
Gosh, it certainly is a firehose. Twitter and newsletters are great. We have these AI Twitter Spaces every Friday around 3 p.m. Eastern Time where all the creatives will huddle for two-or-three hours. You have people across the creative and tech ecosystem coming up, and we help each other drink from the firehose and summarize the week that was.
Talk about your social media growth.
Around 2016, I agonized about whether I was too late to start taking social media seriously. It took me a few years to get 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. In contrast, I got to 150,000 in months on TikTok around 2020. It may be the right place and time. Now at 950K+ on TikTok and 350K+ on YouTube — I'll say it’s never too late to get started!
What are you most optimistic about?
We are shifting away from a world where many studios make one-size-fits-all media for mass consumption. This current wave of AI is unique in that it allows machines to understand and create.
While the Web 2.0 era democratized text, visual creation has remained elusive. Even YouTube creators we’ve had to master skills such as market research, scripting, video editing, lighting, audio recording, mixing, packaging and more. As machines automate away the drudgery, I’m optimistic that it will result in more fulfilling jobs and change how we co-create with technology.
The shift towards TikTok and short-form video was the tip of the iceberg. As creative barriers crumble every few months, soon, anyone will express themselves in any medium — witty words, melodic music, mesmerizing movies, or immersive games. The 1% game becomes anyone's game — all you need is a vision and an ability to work in concert with these large (AI) models that distill our documented knowledge and creativity. We are stepping into the co-pilot era.
It is incredible how fast innovation is with each new generation, right?
The next Disney will no doubt be a modern-day influencer. Take Mr. Beast, for example. He makes killer content. His version of "Squid Games" on YouTube broke records and helped many people discover the Netflix Inc NFLX show, even though it wasn’t officially sponsored by Netflix! He’s out there creating content, a cloud kitchen startup, a chocolate brand and more.
Regarding the speed at which these creators are moving, Logan Paul and KSI are an excellent case study. They partnered, given their reach across geographies, and in the process unlocked a brand new market to launch a beverage company gunning for PepsiCo Inc PEP-owned Gatorade.
These creators are building massive businesses, and AI can help them automate and adapt their content for the increasing plurality of consumption platforms.
What are you most pessimistic about?
With the rise of short-form platforms like TikTok, Reels and Shorts — the sheer volume and velocity of content has skyrocketed.
Remember the ice bucket challenge? Trends that lasted months, now explode to ubiquity and then vanish within a week.
Generative AI is going to make the shift look like a footnote in history. I worry that creators will construct an exhausting treadmill of their own design just trying to keep up with this insane pace.
Simultaneously, consumption platforms and their discovery algorithms must prioritize the well-being of creators and viewers as much as the massive monetization opportunities AI will obviously generate. So I'm all for embracing new technology, but we also need to tread carefully.
As we stand on the cusp of this new era, let's take a deep breath, as we must wield these new AI capabilities responsibly, crafting a future that elevates the human experience and enriches the cultural landscape. The future of creative expression hangs in the balance.
Read Also: Now Entering The Co-Pilot Era: Generative AI Is 'A Gold Rush,' Google Veteran Says
Courtesy photo.
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