MySpace Co-Founder DeWolfe’s New Firm Uses AI to Create Videos

 MySpace Inc. co-founder Chris DeWolfe unveiled his latest social-media product, which uses artificial intelligence to turn text into videos.

PlaiDay creates three-second clips for free after a few prompts. Typing in “1970s male disco dancer,” for example, generates a prancing animated video. Add your photo, and the dancer looks like you.

“When we started MySpace in 2003, the average person could not create a website,” DeWolfe said in an interview. “AI is the next iteration for community and storytelling.” 

DeWolfe is a serial entrepreneur, best known for the social networking site MySpace, which he sold to News Corp. in 2005 for $580 million. He and his team, which includes Chief Technology Officer Aber Whitcomb, also founded Jam City, a mobile gaming company.

Plai Labs Inc., their new company, raised $32 million in January in a funding round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Coinbase Global Inc. and United Talent Agency also participated.

The product has competitors. Midjourney has over 13 million users on the chat app Discord. It allows people to type sentences like “a cat dancing in a hat with a red baseball bat,” generating an image of one. Pika Labs, another AI-based text-to-video generator, has 424,000 users on Discord. DeWolfe said PlaiDay is different because it allows personalization.

AI processing is extremely expensive. Plai Labs plans to charge power users on Discord for premium features or eventually make the AI platform available for other businesses to use.