AI, Design, and the Power of Open Models
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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It's not about how good a model is in the general sense. It's about how good is this model for my use case. For a lot of design and marketing use cases, we need editable design, not a single flat image.
It's super impressive, honestly, reaching the level of things like Nano Banana or GPT image with an open source model. Why did you think that was important?
We really want our models to have taste. Every artist, they can really customize this model to the nuances of their style, the texture of their canvas, and really get two ks output, and hopefully make that part of their workflow.
One thing we were always wondering is that this release, the open source model is so small. It's 9,300,000,000 parameters. Like previously, SOTA is probably like 80,000,000,000 parameters. It's like 9x of a difference. How did you do
Image generation has improved dramatically over the last few years. The next challenge is not simply creating images, but giving users more control over what gets created and how. That includes everything from typography and layouts to editing, customization, and workflows that fit into professional creative processes. Yoga Lee and Justine Moore speak with Ideogram founder and CEO, Mohamed Nouruzi, about image generation, open weight models, design tools, and the future of creative AI.
So today we're excited to have Mohamed, CEO and founder of Ideogram, a Toronto based generative AI company that just released their first open weights image model. Congrats on the huge release. Congratulations.
Thanks for having me.
We're really excited to talk through something that everyone has been buzzing about, which is the fact that the model is open weights. The previous ideogram models have been closed source, so would love to hear how you made the call to make it open this time.
What has happened is there has been a lot of progress in the industry, and we used to do everything. Basically, we had our own first party app as well as our own first party API, and model development itself is a lot of work, and we decided to focus a little more on the model side. We think that's where a lot of potential exists. We still want to continue to own the interaction with the users. We think there's a lot of important feedback we can get from the users directly, but then we want to focus more on building the model, and by releasing the weights, we're actually extending ourselves and
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