A YouTuber-turned tech executive is launching an AI media lab that is betting on interactive video as the future of entertainment.
Ben Relles, who channeled a career as an early YouTube creator into an executive role at the video platform, is launching Make Believe, an AI lab that will focus on creating tech that enables videos that can talk back to viewers, betting that it will enable forms of entertainment never previously possible.
“A lot of the conversation in Hollywood is around how AI will make things cheaper and faster for movies and TV, and I would say for us we’re more focused on what formats were impossible before AI existed,” Relles tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview.
Imagine, for example, a cooking video where you can ask the chef questions as you prepare the dish at home, or a fitness creator who can critique your form, or a guitar coach helping guide you as they teach you a song.
“Some of this we can already do, and some of this we need to build the tools to be able to do it, but I would say that general idea that platforms like YouTube have been such a great place for people to learn to do new things, I think can be really multiplied by what interactive video enables when the video can adapt to you, and it can see what you’re doing,” he explains. “For 100 plus years video has been something you watched. We think part of the next era of video is something that is genuinely interactive.”
