What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
How AI is Transforming the Way We Create Visual Content
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Imagine turning your biggest frustration into a business that serves millions. That's exactly what happened when Joaquin and his team got tired of spending hours hunting for quality images while designing websites back in 2010.
"The main idea was we're scratching our own itch," explains Joaquin, CEO and founder of Freepik. What began as a simple search engine for free images has evolved into a comprehensive AI-powered design platform that's revolutionizing how creative professionals work. Their user-centric approach has driven continuous innovation, from adding icons and photos to embracing the transformative potential of generative AI two years ago.
Today, Freepik offers a suite of sophisticated tools leveraging approximately twenty different AI models under the hood. Their video generation capabilities provide end-to-end production with integration to leading models like Glyn, VO2, and Runway. Their image generation suite features their proprietary Mystic model alongside Google's Image N3 and various Flux options, all enhanced by carefully curated visual styles. This technical sophistication is wrapped in an accessible interface designed to simplify complex workflows.
Most remarkable is their unwavering commitment to accessibility. Despite the computing costs associated with AI generation, Freepik maintains a strong freemium model, positioning themselves as the most affordable option in the market. "When you make something 10 times cheaper, you get a different use case," Joaquin notes, explaining how dramatic price reductions enable entirely new applications and ultimately expand the market.
As they navigate the complex ethical landscape of AI-generated content, Freepik remains committed to respecting creator rights, using only properly licensed images or those without explicit restrictions. Their enterprise solutions even allow companies to disable specific models based on their comfort levels with different technologies.
Looking ahead, Freepik continues innovating with new interface paradigms, team collaboration features, and intelligent assistants that orchestrate complex workflows automatically. For Joaquin, a technical founder who witnessed the early internet, today's AI revolution represents an even more profound technological shift with unlimited potential.
Want to experience how AI is transforming creative workflows? Visit Freepik today and discover tools that make sophisticated design accessible to everyone.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hi everyone. Fascinating discussion today, talking about the intersection of Gen AI with creativity and design, and so much more, with the CEO, founder of FreePic, joaquin how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Evan. I'm really intrigued by your journey and the mission at Freepik. Let's go back to the beginning. What was the big idea behind Freepik? And you've been at this for 15 years. That's quite a journey.
Speaker 2:What was the original vision. Yeah, it's making me old. We started in 2010, beginning of 2011. And the main idea was we're scratching our own itch, so to say. So we were making websites and at the time, the bottleneck for us to make a great website was to get great images. It was a slow process. We were all the time on the internet chasing for great images and we said, hey, why don't we make it faster so that we can just make better websites? And we did a little search engine for free images. We call it FreePic, very naturally, so you can think of it as originally, as kind of a Google for free images. It was in some vertical and we moved from there.
Speaker 2:Like we have been iterated since we launched it, like looking at what will make our product better for our users, like understanding that our core mission was to help people make great designs faster. Okay, so that was our motto let's help them make something great faster. We look at the main pain points. We added icons, we added photos and we created our own content and something we should down the search engine. And, of course, two years ago, we got Gen AI and we saw that we can completely change approach. We can, we could like reach something that was way more generic than the product that we had until then. We could make the images that the users needed, very specific and very bespoke images. So we started on the journey of GenEye Images two years ago, and it's been a wild ride since then.
Speaker 1:And you have quite an amazing, you know, value proposition here and the site looks incredible. You know, maybe describe AI, the role of AI. Now it's pretty central to many of your products. How do you see AI redefining, reinventing the creative process?
Speaker 2:Sure, listen at its core, like the first models that we got were something a little machine where you input some text and you get a little image in output. Fair enough. So we said, okay, this is a little bit simple, and people out there, especially professionals, they need more reverse workflows. They need sometimes they get an image but it's not quite there. That happens quite often. Very often the image that you get is 70% there, but it has glitches, it has things that you need to fix.
Speaker 2:What people did at the time was to download the image, to go to another software like Photoshop, change it, tune it, maybe go to Lightroom, fix the colors and then ship it. And we said, ok, can we just make this last mile edition kind of integrated in the generation? Can we make something that helps you generate that image and then redash it, upscale it? That was a huge problem with no good solution. Maybe changing the aspect ratio, all the things that the professional user needs.
Speaker 2:Can we put it all in a single product so at the end of the day, we don't have any more like one single model that we use. We have under the hood like 20 different models. I like to think of it like a computer. Inside a computer, you have many different microchips, you have a CPU and you have memory and you have the hard drive and you have the GPU many different things and you need to put them all together to make a product, to make something that people can use and like it or not, and they buy the best computer. They don't buy the best model, they buy the best workflow, they buy the best product and that's what we are doing.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and you have a kind of freemium model that serves both entry-level users, enthusiasts, as well as professional designers. How do you cater to such a diverse audience?
Speaker 2:Listen, freemium it's on our ethos, Like we started something that was created also to make the great design more affordable to people. So it's kind of on our DNA. So since the very beginning, we have always had a very strong freemium position. It's not something that is a small thing for people, it's something really that can stand on its own. But of course, the big difference between AI models, AI product and a stock product is that there is a marginal cost to create a new image. There's a very solid cost to do AI. So the premium product on the AI suite, I have to confess, is like lower. It's less generous than on the stock side because it's just impossible to make it with an acceptable margin, but it's still very approachable.
Speaker 2:It's something that we want to make very affordable. If you compare FreeBig even the paid product you compare it to our peers we are usually by far the cheapest in the market and it's not because we want to be cheap, but because it's on our DNA to make it accessible. We really want to make it accessible to everybody and we also believe philosophically that when you make something 10 times cheaper, you get a different use case. The difference is not quantitative, it becomes qualitative, it enables new use cases that were not available before, and very often those use cases, they are, like another magnitude bigger. So even though you have a lower margin, if you price it very low, you usually end up making more money at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:That's a great commercial approach. So you have on your website tools like Sketch to Image, ai, video generation, background remover, on and on. What are some of the features that have gotten the most buzz and feedback from customers?
Speaker 2:As you mentioned, video is a huge one. Our upscaler is a huge one. On video, you can go now, like all the way to the final product, like end-to-end. We even have an online video editor where you can stitch together multiple clips, add text, add static images. So this one is phenomenal Under the hood. It has access to all the latest models. So you have access to Glyn, to VO2, runway, luma Labs all of them.
Speaker 2:So that requires some expertise on the part of the user, because very often it's not trivial to know what is the best model for what they want to do, and that's something that we need to improve. We want to make it even easier for users so that, if you don't know exactly what model to pick up, we make a decent default choice for whatever you want to make. So video is going very, very high. The audio one is picking up steam lately. So we have a product that helps you make voiceover, helps you make sound effects, so you integrate video with sound effects, lip sync, and you have everything that you need to make great commercials. So that's a vertical use case that we are doing. That is working very well and, of course, the image generation site is huge. That's our traditional core expertise and it's the biggest one that we have.
Speaker 2:So, by image generation, we have again under the hood, like multiple models, to get an image generation. We have again under the hood, like multiple models, to get an image. We have our own model, which is Mystic, that delivers top-notch quality images. Then you have Image N3 from Google. You have Flux Flux 1.0, 1.1, flux Dev. You have many different visual styles that have been created by our team, so each one of them has been hand curated and we generated what is called a LoRa, which is kind of a specialization of a model. So this delivers exactly the visual style that you are looking at. So, in general, image generation will be first, video generation will be second.
Speaker 1:Fascinating and you have obviously to navigate very difficult ethical considerations, copyright issues that must take a lot of your time and effort to work through.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. We took a lot of time to get comfortable with the legality of the models, so we run multiple consultations to check the law in Europe and in the US. So I'm going to talk about the one that I'm more familiar with, which is the law in Europe, and it is very often the most restrictive set of laws. Very often, if you are good in Europe, you are good worldwide. So how it works in Europe is that you can use an asset to train a model if the author of the asset has not withdrawn the rights to use it to train models. So it's an opt-out model. So by default in Europe you can use any image where the author has not opposed to its use To make it work. In Europe it's mandatory and that's very recent. When you create a model, it's mandatory to list what are the copyright holders of the images that you are using so that they have an opportunity to oppose. But in general, all the models that we use, they have withdrawn all the images from all the stock sites and there was a project that was created so that artists can oppose to the usage of their images to train AI models and I think the number of images that it has where people have opposed is like one billion. So none of those images have been used in any of the models that we host.
Speaker 2:Now there are some models that take it one step below, one step beyond that. So we have some models that are compliant with that law, for example, flux. They are not using any image that has a post, so it's clean. Then there are some models that take it one step beyond. I'm talking about Google Image Entry. They use a slightly more restrictive policy, which is they only use images that they have licensed themselves, and that's also true for the model that we have developed. We only use images that we have licensed to use. So the modeling by Google, what they did is they paid the author of the images. In this case, there are multiple data sets that you can license to train those models, and ourselves we have many images that we have licensed and that we can use to train our models. So that has been our philosophy.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, and this space remains so dynamic and competitive. Every day there's a new model, a new announcement open source versus the big tech giants. How do you stay ahead of this wave? You know, how do you manage to leverage best-of-breed technology but stay ahead of the competitors. What's your philosophy there?
Speaker 2:Well, for the most part, we try to be in a position where we benefit from those tailwinds, so to say. Okay, so we are. As I mentioned, we are building the bridge between models. We are building all the scaffolding, all the infrastructure that people need to use the models. When you generate images, you need to be able to search past images easily. You need a place where you are storing them. You need to be able to share them with your colleagues. There is a lot involved into working with images, not just the pure generation, and that's where expertise is Now.
Speaker 2:Concerning the models, we have best in class state of the art, and when there's a new model, we usually integrate it in ours. So we are very, very fast to integrate the latest and best, and we're in a position where now, when there's a new model popping up, it actually reduces the number of bugs that people have with our product. When you look at complaints from people, the number one is hey, I'm trying to do this, I'm explaining it clearly, but it's not picking it up. That happens quite often. So every time there's a new model, the percentage of errors just goes down. So we have happier customers when there are new models popping up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really well said. What are your customers asking for? Next, you have so many designers enthusiasts. What are they asking for in terms of new features, new functionality, new services at the moment, Listen, the answer here is that it depends on the customer.
Speaker 2:We came from having a very core customer that was the graphic designer, the marketer. Now, with AI, the truth is that this has expanded to multiple expertise. We have people working on filmmaking, we have photographers, we have different kinds of professionals now, and each one of them has a different pet peeve. One thing that is common to many of them is you mentioned it before like legality, we want something that we can purchase at our company. So they want insurance and they want, like, the legal certainty that they can use the models that they have. So something that we have introduced. We are launching an enterprise subscription where admins can shoot down models that they are not comfortable with okay, even though, again, like we have checked all of them, according to our lawyers like all of them are not comfortable with okay, even though, again, like we have checked all of them, according to our lawyers, like all of them are legal to use. But different companies may have different opinions and we respect that. So that's one concern, like being more friendly to corporates. Another one is working in teams. So we launch projects, we launch sharing of projects, and then it's like there have been lots of different ways and an incredible amount of experimentation in the user interface on how you create images. So we started with, I would say, a relatively trivial it was not trivial but kind of trivial image generator, and now we are moving into experimenting. Ok, how about having an assistant? Because now we have so many tools? Can we have a central way to ask the machine for what they want and see how it uses the tools that it needs to pull it up together? Can we enable now, automatic workflows? Can we help the users? And now you have a place where you say, hey, I want to make this kind of image, maybe to make the particular image that you want. It's like combining six different steps and makes it by itself encapsulated in a single workflow. Now we are experimenting. Also, we have a visual representation of your workflow. That is great to work with group of images.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you want to cluster images and you want to say, okay, I want to use an image in the style of this cluster here and I want to use the object that is in this other cluster here and I want to take this cluster and want to upscale it. There are many things like that where, with the traditional UI, it will require many dynamic on-the-fly clustering and there is usually no record of what was the selection that you made. So you pick like 10 different images, you do your operation and the selection is gone and sometimes you need to do like multiple operations with those selections. So we are experimenting with new user interfaces to make it easier to work with groups of images. So there is I mean it's a long answer, but you know short answer is it depends on the user. Different users have different needs and we are trying to see what are the common themes on those things.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. Well, it's amazing to hear, looking at your biography, you're a technical co-founder, ceo, your first company was acquired by Google many, many years ago and you're a developer, I guess as well. What's it like staying on top of the tech stack? You're building Hardware, software, gpus, cloud. I imagine you have a lot going on there as well on the back end.
Speaker 2:It's super exciting. I often say that this is the best time I got in my career and I remember clearly when the internet was starting. I remember at university like the first email, the very beginning before the WWW, when we had GoFair. You know the good old days when the internet was like sprawling was starting and it was super exciting. And this is I think this is even bigger than that. It's like the feeling that I get.
Speaker 2:If you get back to the days of the internet early internet it was almost like almost everything that you tried that was new kind of clicked in the user because it was solving a huge problem that was distribution. It was difficult to distribute things okay, so you had this new shiny hammer that was useful, uh, and that you know. There were so many use cases that were applicable to that and, yeah, it's kind of the same. It's funny how many different things we try and the hit rate is super high. The hit rate of the number of things that we try versus the number of things that click to the user is huge. So I think that we are really at the very beginning of something that we'll redefine in the next 20, 30 years.
Speaker 1:Well, I can't wait to embark on that journey and it's exciting times, I agree, the most exciting time in my adult lifetime and you're doing amazing work onwards and upwards. Congratulations on all the success.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you. It's a work of a dream, and I want also to say thank you to my team. It's around 500 people that have been doing an amazing job, and I want to highlight that we have been through an amazing transformation. It was not trivial to move from a company that was working on an adjacent domain, like stock images, and was able to move solidly into Gen AI.
Speaker 1:And much more movement and transformation ahead. So exciting times. Congratulations. Take care, wakil. Thank you and thanks everyone for listening and watching. Take care.