After earning Ukraine startup Looksery in 2015 to supercharge animated selfie lenses in Snapchat — arguably altering the filters game to total social video and photo apps Snap has created different acquisition including sources in the country, co-founded by one of Looksery’s founders, to provide a big boost to its video abilities.
Victor Shaburov, the founder of Looksery who then moved on to grow Snap’s director of engineering — going in May 2018 to found and head AI Factory — failed to comment on this story.
Cameos, propelled last month, allows you to take a selfie, which is then automatically “animated” and inserted into a short video.
The reading of videos, currently around 150, is produced by Snap, with the complete concept not unlike the one underpinning “deepfakes” — AI-based videos that seem “real” but are items that nevermore actually occurred.
From what I know, while AI Factory has offices in San Francisco, the bulk of the team of almost 70 is based outside of Ukraine. Part of the team will relocate by the contract, and part will stay there.
Snap must also be an investor in the AI Factory.
Part of its initial interest would have been because of this track record about the talent connected with the startup: lenses have been a tremendous benefit for Snap — 70% of its regular working users play with them, and they not exclusively take in fresh users but increase holding and bring in funds by way of sponsorships or users buying them — so building new specialties to give users more ways to play around including their selfies is a good bet.
It’s not obvious whether AI Factory will be generating a plan to insert selfies into any video, or if the character will be parallelled just to particular videos allowed by Snap itself, or whether the videos will continue behind the timing of a GIF.
It’s also not clear what else AI Factory was going on: the company’s site is offline and there is the very little message about the company behind its mission to make more AI-based imaging tools into mainstream apps and usage.
The company says in LinkedIn that AI Factory “provide[s] multiple AI business solutions based on image and video recognition, analysis and processing,” so while the organization will become under Snap’s wing, there may be scope for the team to make some of its technology toward more innovative ideas for businesses to use the Snap platform in the future, too.
