Demi G. and Chenlin Meng
Demi G. and Chenlin Meng, the dynamic duo leading Pika Labs as CEO and CTO, respectively
Demi G. and Chenlin Meng, the dynamic duo leading Pika Labs as CEO and CTO, respectively.
Pika Labs, founded in April 2023, is a generative AI startup that made the news last year with impressive growth and video generation quality. Offering a user-friendly AI-to-video generator, it gained over 500,000 users and saw its valuation jump to $200-300 million in just 6 months.
I've tried Pika Labs by giving it some scene prompts and the short movies it created were pretty incredible. Just thinking about how much time and money it would save marketing, advertising and film production companies in conceptualizing, testing and producing ideas!
Both its founders had a creative streak and highly technical backgrounds:
→ Guo was interested in creative writing, while Meng had an interest in animation, forming the perfect duo to build an easy-to-use text-to-video platform.
𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐢 𝐆𝐮𝐨 - 𝐂𝐄𝐎
With a Mathematics degree from Harvard University and a master's in computer science, she was the youngest research engineer at Meta AI Research during her time at Harvard. She has also worked as a software engineering intern at Microsoft (Bing) and Google.
A recipient of the 2018 National Center for Women & Information Technology Collegiate Award, she also worked as an Algorithm Coach at Alpha Star Academy in 2018, teaching high school students about algorithms and data structures.
𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐞𝐧𝐠 - 𝐂𝐓𝐎
She is a Stanford University alumni with a deep-seated interest in generative AI and diffusion models.
Her notable contribution includes pioneering work on De-noising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM), now a standard method in content generation, applied in projects like OpenAI's DALLE-2, Google's Imagen, and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion. She has also co-authored more than 28 research papers on generative AI in the past three years.
Her dedication to academia is evident through accolades like the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship in 2022 and the Cadence Women in Technology Scholarship in 2022.
𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭:
Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng founded Pika Labs after their AI-savvy team faced setbacks in a video-making competition by Runway. Dissatisfied with existing video generation tools, they identified a gap for a more user-friendly platform.
Pika Labs simplifies the video-making interface, allowing users to type text into Discord and receive AI-generated videos. The recent web expansion adds video editing features and text embedding.
The founders focus on constant improvement, positioning Pika as a dynamic player in #AI. Their vision is simple: “to enable anyone to be the director of their stories and to bring out the creator in all of us.”
Don't forget to play with Pika at Pika.art. I'll share my short video and would love to see yours!