Spotify: A Product Story
Spotify
Recent Episodes
2023 may be a year that people still speak about 100 years from now, the year computers passed the Turing test! You know what these things can do, but do you actually understand how they can do it? How is it that we have services like Chat GPT that can write entire novels, and services like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney that can create amazing images or even music from just a text description or even white noise?
Straight from the halls of Spotify, this is an educational talk from an internal executive offsite that we’re sharing with the world. The premise of this talk is that AI is made to seem harder to understand than it actually is, and that after this presentation, you will feel like you understand how all of what’s now happening is possible - even if you don't work in tech and you don’t know a lot of math.
00:00:00-Intro
00:04:01-What is an LLM?
00:20:09-What about Creativity?
00:24:00-How do you steer it?
00:34:26-Why did no one see it coming?
00:39:00-Everything is a vector!
00:57:44-What is a neural network?
1:05:53-Intelligence is compression!
1:15:12-Diffusion Models - Generating Images, video and music
1:21:10-Conditioning on text
Sources used to build the talk:
- www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/21/10267
- openai.com/blog/chatgpt?ref=assemblyai.com
- blog.acolyer.org/2016/04/21/the-amazing-power-of-word-vectors/
- https://aclanthology.org/N13-1090.pdf
- www.researchgate.net/figure/Perceptron-neuron-with-three-input-variables-with-a-single-output-0-or-1-The-inputs-are_fig1_338989845
- www.researchgate.net/figure/Schema-of-Autoencoder-architecture_fig1_33899555
- www.this-person-does-not-exist.com/en
- developer.nvidia.com/blog/improving-diffusion-models-as-an-alternative-to-gans-part-1/
There are great resources available, for anyone interested to dig deeper
What’s Spotify up to next? Tune in to the season finale to hear about Spotify’s plans for the future of audio and the brand new formats that we’re launching today and in the near future. As always, when building something new, we don’t know how it’s all going to play out yet, or exactly what the product strategy lessons will be. But we do know which bets we’re making, and why we’re making them.
This episode features interviews with Spotify insiders Michael Mignano and Nir Zicherman (Anchor founders), Howard Akumiah (Locker Room founder), and Maya Prohovnik (Head of Product for Spotify’s Creation Platform team).
You can find the transcript here
This is the story of Backstage -- a “platform of platforms”, built by Spotify and open to anyone as open source software.
Tune in to hear insights about when to build vs buy - and when to open source - or not! Interviews with Jeremiah Lowin, CEO of Prefect.io, a company that runs on what is called an open core model, as well as from Spotify insiders like Pia Nilsson, Director of Engineering and Tyson Singer, Head of Technology and Platforms.
How do you go “from zero to one”? In this episode, you’ll learn how Spotify managed to enter a market late: a market that was already dominated by a single player - our biggest competitor in music. This is the story of how we entered podcasts. Daniel Ek, Dawn Ostroff, and Sten Garmark shed light on the insights that led Spotify into the podcast arena. Tune in as we explore Spotify’s bet on podcasts, the shift to audio-first and four hard-won lessons in product strategy.
The transcript is available here.
Thanks to Dan Willis for letting us use a clip from his YouTube video