Yerzat Dulat on Higgsfield AI, Diffuse, and generative video

A long-form interview has been published with Yerzat Dulat, a pioneer of our community and an outstanding AI researcher also widely known as higgsfield.

Yerzat and his team at Higgsfield AI successfully raised $8 million in the United States for their new Diffuse platform. The mobile app lets users create video content from a text prompt from scratch, using either ready-made clips or their own photos.

Highlights from the interview:

• Education and early career:

“After school, I studied computer science for about two or three years. Later, though, I got bored and started looking for something new. That is how I discovered machine learning. In 2016, the field was still far from the hype. In fact, Kazakhstan barely had any machine-learning specialists at the time.”

• Conversation with OpenAI:

“OpenAI reached out to me in 2018. After I published one of my machine-learning papers, company co-founder John Schulman emailed me and invited me to join the team. But I decided to work on my own projects.”

• Higgsfield AI's competitive advantage:

“Sora targets Hollywood producers, while we target marketing departments at companies that need to create large amounts of social-media content. We can help them reduce costs significantly.”

• Raising investment:

“I told investors that we are an Asian country with a strong school of mathematics inherited from the Soviet era. That appeals to Americans because they like working with Asians.”

• The future of generative AI

“Within a year, AI services will be able to generate content indistinguishable from content made by people.”