Captions Hires DeepMind Alum to Head up AI and Acquires AlpacaML, Expanding AI Research Arm

At Captions, breakthrough AI research is at the core of everything we do. Whether instantly generating video from a prompt through AI Creator or dubbing videos into other languages with synchronized lip movement — these revolutionary features are built on our proprietary models, developed by our research and engineering teams. Today, we're thrilled to announce two major milestones at Captions that will empower us to continue pushing the boundaries of what's possible in AI-powered video creation: a Head of AI to lead our research arm, and the acquisition of AlpacaML.

Welcoming our new Head of AI

We’re excited to announce that Drew Jaegle has joined Captions as our Head of AI. Drew comes to us from Google DeepMind as a Staff Research Scientist, where he led efforts on multimodal representation and generative models for music and creative tools. He worked on projects like developing the Perceiver family of architectures, and building the AI music generation model, Lyria, just to name a few. Drew has spent years in collaborative research environments, contributing to advancements in AI and machine learning. His leadership will be pivotal as we expand our team of 15 talented researchers.

Expanding Our AI Research Team with AlpacaML

Our acquisition of AlpacaML solidifies our commitment to building a world-class AI research team. A pioneer in the AI space, AlpacaML offers an AI rendering engine that transforms visuals, thumbnails, and images into early concept sketches. The startup raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures.

We’re thrilled to welcome CEO of AlpacaML Will Buchwalter as a Research Engineer, where he will be leading efforts to scale our model training. Several team members from AlpacaML will also join our product engineering teams, merging their expertise with ours to push the envelope of what’s possible in generative video.

Investing in Our Vision

As part of our Series C announcement, we shared our vision to allocate $100 million into AI research here in New York City. Today, we remain as committed as ever to that investment. Drew, Will, and our expanded team will collaborate to continue developing our next-generation foundation models, with a focus on generating talking humans – and beyond. With these new investments in research and talent, we continue to redefine what’s possible with AI, creating a new age for creativity and communication.

Join Us in Building the Future

We’re excited for this next chapter… and if you’d like to build historic technology with us, we’re hiring. 

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