Happy Monday! Welcome back to the Leaderboard. In today's edition: AI voting, yet another image and video generation tool, and a product that could make the first chart-topping AI song. Let's dive in.
VoteGPT: An AI assistant that helps you clear the noise on election candidates.
I was reluctant at first to trust an AI assistant to give people unbiased information for making important voting decisions. But I can see the huge value in clearing out the bias, noise, and misinformation you’d run into if you were searching the web yourself and surfacing only the facts. It feels geared more toward people who are under- or misinformed rather than voters who already have a solid understanding and want to dive deeper into the issues or have more nuanced discussions. Right now, it’s very focused on presidential candidates (understandable, since the U.S. election is tomorrow!), but the other topics are pretty sparse. I can see a case where VoteGPT could really help people make better decisions on the whole ballot, not just for the president—like representatives or ballot measures.
KLING AI: An AI-powered creative studio by Kuaishou Tech.
Kling is an impressive text-to-video tool — it lets you create AI-generated images and videos for a fraction of the price of big competitors like RunwayML. Style-wise, I don’t see a huge difference between Kling’s images and videos and those of Runway/Luma/MiniMax — all still appear distinctively computer-generated and feel uncanny valley (at least to my eye). Will one company eventually establish a monopoly in the space? Probably, but they’ll need major proprietary tech advantages and the ability to convince the public that we should choose them over their competitors. Expect fierce undercutting until then.
Sunos Personas: Create personas from songs and reuse them for new creations
Suno keeps surprising me! I usually mess around with it just for fun, but it’s also become a source of inspiration for my music. The new Personas feature is pretty cool—you can grab the vibe and style of any track, and it keeps the vocals perfectly consistent across new songs. That really helps create a cohesive feel, which can be tough to achieve with AI. I spent my morning playing around with it and ended up with a few Personas I know I’ll keep coming back to. Plus, you’re not stuck in just one style; you can take a punk Persona and remix it into something completely different. It makes creating music so much more accessible. As a musician, that can feel a bit scary, but honestly, a tool is only as good as the person using it. I’m excited to see where this goes!
In an era where AI is reshaping how businesses operate, the journey of building an early-stage startup has never been more dynamic—or complex. How do founders navigate finding product-market fit, delegation, and scaling, all while adapting to technological innovations?
Join on January 14 at 3 pm PT for a fireside chat with Christina Cacioppo, CEO and Co-founder of Vanta, and Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Founder of LTSE, as they explore the journey of the modern startup founder.
Eric and Christina will discuss: