Hello and welcome to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

Today is Friday, October 3rd. I can't believe it's already October. And I am Kirsten Koresk,

transportation editor here at TechCrunch. And I'm joined by senior AI reporter Max Zeff and weekend

editor Anthony Ha. And you guys, before we get into deals, I really want to

talk about Max's new favorite actress, Tilly Norwood. Max, what do you love about her?

Oh, God. This is a great way to start the show. No. You're just going to get so much hate email from, you know, the actresses and creatives of the world.

Yes.

No, this is great because I'm actually, my girlfriend is an actress.

So Tilly Norwood is an AI generated actress with 40,000 Instagram followers that caused a stir this week because, well, she's not real.

And actresses were upset about kind of the level of attention that it was getting.

I think that this is especially interesting with the launch of SORA that happened this week,

opening eyes image generation app, opening eyes video generation app, sorry. And we'll talk about that more later on the show. I think it's fair to say that it was obviously kind of a stunt, that basically this startup, Shakoya, they went on stage at the Zurich film festival, and they said, hey, we have this AI-generated actress, we're looking for representation. Obviously, they wanted a lot of press coverage. They wanted people to sort of, you know, they wanted some back and forth about it.

And I think they got that maybe more negative commentary than they were expecting, as Max

alluded to SAG AFRA, which is like the main actors union in the US.

And I think a bunch of other kind of industry groups basically universally

kind of condemn this. Then the, you know, the startup had to then kind of walk it back a little.

It's like, hey, hey, hey, we don't see this as a replacement for human actors, but just a tool

for human creativity or something like that. I will say this. I think that it really struck a chord

throughout all creatives about, hey, these are these really cool tools. But, wow, I am potentially replaceable. And I think that the bigger, broader question for society is, do we want that? Maybe we can do it, but do we want to do it? Too big of a question to get into on this show.

But Max, what else are we talking about today?

Yeah, so later on the show, we're going to get into deals of the week from periodic labs, a new AI lab, as well as lithium Americas, which is an interesting deal with the U.S. government.

Then we're going to get into some big themes that we're talking about, including AI

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