AI, Design, and the Power of Open Models

The a16z Show

a16z

Science, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Business, Innovation, Technology, Disruption, Software Eating The World

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2026

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yoko Li and Justine Moore speak with Ideogram founder and CEO Mohammad Norouzi about image generation models, design workflows, and the evolving relationship between AI and creative work. The conversation covers Ideogram's decision to release an open-weight model, the challenges of generating text and layouts within images, and why controllability has become an increasingly important area of research. They discuss prompting, customization, editing, and the tradeoffs between general-purpose models and systems optimized for specific creative tasks. Along the way, Norouzi shares his views on open-source AI, design tools, agentic workflows, and how image generation models may evolve as creators and enterprises seek greater control over their outputs.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's not about how good a model is in the general sense.
0:09.0	It's about how good is this model for my use case.
0:12.0	For a lot of design and marketing use cases, we need editable design, not a single flat image.
0:20.0	It's super impressive, honestly, reaching the level of things like
0:22.6	nanobanana or GPD image with an open source model.
0:25.6	Why did you think that was important?
0:27.6	We really want our models to have taste.
0:29.6	Every artist, they can really customize this model to the new
0:33.6	answers of their style, the texture of their canvas, and really get 2K output and hopefully
0:41.2	make that part of their workflow.
0:43.2	One thing we were always wondering is that this release, the open source model is so small.
0:47.5	It's 9.3 billion parameters.
0:49.5	Like previously, the SOTI is probably like 80 billion parameters.
0:53.7	It's like NIX of a difference.
0:56.0	How did you do it?
0:57.0	We focused on...
0:59.0	Image generation has improved dramatically over the last few years.
1:03.0	The next challenge is not simply creating images,
1:06.0	but giving users more control over what gets created and how.
1:10.0	That includes everything from typography and layouts to editing, customization, and workflows
1:15.9	that fit into professional creative processes.
1:19.0	Yoko Lee and Justine Moore speak with Ideogram founder and CEO Mohamed Noruzzi about image
	...

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