Three AI Apps That Deserve the Hype
Plus, Zynga founder Mark Pincus and Carta founder Henry Ward offer contrarian takes on minimum viable products and the secret for pitching investors
Online conversations about AI can get heated quickly.
Log on to your social media platform of choice and odds are good that you’ll see viral posts declaring that “The AI critics have been proved right about basically everything” right next to a post titled “ChatGPT saved my life.”
Even many leaders on the forefront of AI development have mixed feelings about AI systems in their current form. Last week AI pioneer Dr. Fei-Fei Li told a class of founders at a16z speedrun that she finds some current GenAI models “deeply unsatisfying” because of the way they strip creative control from humans.
And yet, there are teams shipping AI-powered tools that just about everyone can agree are unambiguously good—apps that people actually want to use.
This week, we spoke to the creators of three such apps.
1 - VLC Goes Multilingual
Take, for instance, the beloved open-source VLC video player, which last week announced an AI-powered update to its software that will enable automatic subtitling and translation in over 100 languages—all locally-running and offline enabled.
“I wanted something truly open source that works even if the online-service goes down,” Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the president of the non-profit VideoLAN foundation, told speedrun.
And, of course, it had to be free. Kempf says he sees VLC’s mission as in part to act as a “force to keep other services/players in check, and be sure that video technology was available everywhere for free.”
The response to VLC’s announcement of the AI subtitling feature was effusive.
“Finally an actual useful consumer application of AI,” wrote one Reddit user. Others in the comments pointed out that AI tech is also already helping blind people to “see” again and making movie dialogue easier to hear, not to mention accelerating the discovery of potentially life-saving drugs.
But we’ll leave all that aside—if you can get Reddit to say something nice about your AI app, you’ve gotta take that W.1
And VLC is more popular than most would suspect. “For the last 15 years, people have told me that VLC was dying because of Netflix/Disney/Prime,” Kempf says, “but what we see is an increasing number of downloads and active users around VLC.”
The company recently celebrated its 6 billionth download. So how many people actively use VLC?
“We're talking about north of 500 million users,” Kempf says.
After shipping the new subtitling feature, Kempf says he hopes to be able to someday deliver “Full dubbing… with lip modifications and synchronizations.” Kempf believes this will happen, though as of today he thinks we’re “very far” from realizing that dream, “because this requires way more complex models that are hard to embed in VLC.”
Kempf predicts that in the near and mid-term, the world of video is ripe for disruption. “We're going to see the video landscape change again,” he says, “because there are too many services, and navigating them is really a pain. What is sure is that VLC will still be around, in one way or another, for a long time.”
2 - Adobe’s Magical Audio Enhancer
What if you could make any audio recording sound like it was recorded in a podcast studio?
That’s the promise of Adobe’s Enhance Speech tool, an AI-powered app that strips out background noise to turn just about any recording into professional-sounding audio.
Mark Webster, the Head of Adobe Podcast, says that his team’s goal is to build tools “that allow anyone to quickly create professional sounding content.” So a natural starting point for the team was to build tech that can make existing recordings sound better. They began by gathering good data to train a model on.
“We got a budget to go out and get a whole bunch of proprietary recordings,” Webster says. “So now it knows what professional audio looks like and sounds like. When you upload something, it looks at that and says, what would that look like had it been professionally recorded?”
Webster explains that instead of attempting to remove background noise, the app does the opposite—identifying the voice in the recording and “extracting it out” to produce an audio waveform that sounds more studio-grade.
Breakthroughs in AI image generation were actually crucial to enabling this technology, Webster says. “It’s a little bit more complex than this, but it’s basically generating an image spectrogram of what the audio is, and then turning that into audio. The way you train models on images is a big part of what has helped unlock some of this stuff.”
But, while the Enhance Speech tool is generating spectrograms, it’s not generating original audio. “We're not generating any voices or anything. Webster says. “So it's language agnostic.”
The Adobe team has just released a “v2” of the app, which gives users a slider to bring back in background noise if they like—if for instance they recorded an interview on a busy convention show floor and want a radio-authentic background hum of conversation.
Webster points out that while the initial versions of these applications are cloud-based, they don’t have to be. “Enhance Speech in Adobe Premiere actually runs on device,” Webster says. “In theory you can also put it on a device and run it locally. All the building blocks are there.”
So ultimately, are we moving into a world where everything, including live phone calls, can sound studio quality?
“Yeah. I think that's inevitable,” Webster says.
But in the meantime, the Adobe Podcast team is working on a roadmap of AI-powered features—things like automatic removal of filler words—that Webster says he hopes will “chip away at all of the time-consuming tasks that are normally required to create professional-sounding audio.”
3 - Neal Agarwal’s Infinite Game
When Google published its “Year in Search” for 2024, the chart for the most searched games of the year included hits you’d expect like Palworld, Black Myth: Wukong, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6—but not at the top of the chart. Instead, the top two rankings were claimed by New York Times daily gaming standbys Connections and Strands.
The #3 most-searched game was Infinite Craft, an LLM-powered web game by Neal Agarwal. And it’s likely the first breakout hit game with GenAI as a core mechanic.
The premise of Infinite Craft should be familiar to anyone who has played “alchemy” games like Doodle God—you’re given various elements (fire, water, earth) which you can combine to create surprising combinations. The difference with Agarwal’s game, as you might guess from the title, is that it’s literally infinite. The game is powered by an LLM with no theoretical limit on the number of possible combinations of elements players can create.
The result: players are able to pull off feats of linguistic combinatorics like creating every character from Super Smash Bros.
Agarwal—who has produced other viral hit games like the comically frustrating Password Game and, more recently, the overwhelming and hilarious Stimulation Clicker—says that it required some technical feats to get Infinite Craft working at scale.
“The hardest part with Infinite Craft was managing costs and scaling,” he says. “It’s definitely an interesting challenge since there aren’t many best practices yet for a game built on LLMs.”
The game’s novel LLM implementation continues to surprise players. Just this past week, Infinite Craft players discovered that OpenAI’s new Operator agent seems to be extremely competent at the game right out of the box. One user prompted it to go play infinite craft on neal.fun until you create "city,” and recorded the process as the AI got the combination right on the first try.
Perhaps Infinite Craft’s table of combinations and outputs was in the agent’s training data? Or could it be that OpenAI’s agent naturally intuits the thought process of the LLM underlying the game? It’s hard to say, but apps like Agarwal’s function as a way to explore AIs and interact with their thought process in a way totally different from the usual text prompt-based interfaces. This sort of joyful, humor-filled exploration of the internet lies at the core of Agarwal’s ongoing project as a game designer.
“I like poking fun at the internet because I really love it and I know it can be better,” Agarwal says. “I think the web is one of the best creative mediums ever made, up there with paintings and movies, and somewhere behind the enshittification lies so much potential and I want to explore that.”
As for the future, Agarwal says, he’s interested in exploring more AI related projects and games. ”There are plenty of ideas I’d like to try that are not quite possible yet,” he says, “but hopefully will become feasible as models progress.”
Mark Pincus and Henry Ward offer contrarian takes on minimum viable products and pitching investors
Speaking in-person to a16z speedrun founders last week, Zynga founder Mark Pincus offered a contrarian take on “minimum viable products,” saying that while “it was a great idea for a while… it’s not going to serve us any more.”
“How many of us want to use a minimum viable product, when I could use a maximum launchable product?… When you use a product, look at yourself in the third person and think: what is my experience? Is it resonating, or am I forcing myself to [use it] because it’s my job or whatever? When something really speaks to you, become a student of that, because that’s true signal.”
—Mark Pincus, Founder and Executive Chairman of Zynga
Carta Founder and CEO Henry Ward says that when he was first learning to pitch for funding, he was so bad at it that he once “got escorted out through the fire escape.”
Experiences like these can be devastating for founders’ confidence, and it can be tempting to think that a lack of natural charisma is at the root of the problem. But Ward explained why he no longer believes this is the case:
“After I got good at this, I could tell within five minutes whether they were going to invest. Because the litmus test of whether you were going to invest in a cap table software company was if you cared at all about cap tables… A lot of founders do three pitches, and they get 'No's, and they’re like I must suck. But it’s just that they didn’t connect to your problem set.”
—Henry Ward, Founder and CEO of Carta
🗞️ News From the Future
🤖 The tech world reacted with shock on Monday in response to the reveal of a world class Chinese LLM, DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model. Our own Marc Andreessen called R1 “a Sputnik moment” for AI firms, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to X to argue that improvements in AI compute efficiency will only drive more demand—an example of the Jevons paradox.
🚫 Also on Monday, DeepSeek temporarily limited new registrations for users outside China after it experienced what it called “large-scale malicious attacks.”
✈️ Supersonic aviation startup Boom will attempt to break the sound barrier for the first time on Tuesday, potentially paving the way for a new era of commercial supersonic international travel.
🎮 Xbox chief Phil Spencer reaffirmed his team’s commitment to making future Xbox games multiplatform last week, telling a podcast host that “To keep games off platforms... that's not a path for us. It doesn't work for us."
💼 There are currently over 400 open jobs listings across our portfolios. Join our talent network for more opportunities. If we see a fit for you, we'll intro you to relevant founders in the portfolio.
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That said, Kempf is unusual in that people on Reddit often say nice things about him, as they have for years. We asked him: How much Reddit karma do you think people have farmed by reposting this old pic of you? “I think we're talking about dozens of millions of karma. It's insane,” Kempf responded. “I will do an AMA on Reddit soon, we'll see what happens.”
Adobe Enhanced Speech is efing unbelievable. Thank you very much for posting this info.
“I like poking fun at the internet because I really love it and I know it can be better,” Agarwal says. “I think the web is one of the best creative mediums ever made, up there with paintings and movies, and somewhere behind the enshittification lies so much potential and I want to explore that.”
Why did this make me a little bit emotional