We’re continually inspired by our customers and the complex data challenges they’re overcoming to make the previously impossible possible. In this blog series, we’ll spotlight the stories of some of our newest customers and why they chose WEKA.

AI may feel like it’s reaching the peak of its hype cycle, but here at WEKA, we get to see firsthand how AI innovators are finding new ways to transform our world.

One of the most exciting areas we are seeing AI’s immediate impact is its ability to enhance and expand the frontier of human creativity. We are constantly dazzled by the tools and services that Generative AI researchers around the world are developing to unleash their creativity and accelerate creation across every genre. 

One such GenAI trailblazer is our customer Synthesia.

Why They’re Cool

Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Synthesia is on a mission to empower everyone with the ability to create professional-grade video content – without the need for expensive cameras, audio equipment, or studios.

Imagine being able to create a polished product explainer video or an informative how-to video and all you have to do is write a script (and there are plenty of AI tools out there that can help you with that, too). Synthesia’s AI-powered video creation tools make it possible. The company is also pioneering new techniques to create photo-realistic synthetic actors that look and sound like real people, taking the concept of avatars to a whole new level.

The best part? Synthesia develops its technology using safe, responsible, and ethical AI model training practices and a people-first mindset to ensure its tools unleash the best aspects of human creativity, putting consent and control at the heart of technological progress — a societal imperative we at WEKA are strongly aligned with.

Why They Chose WEKA

As is the case with many organizations looking to harness the power of GenAI to fuel innovation, legacy data management and storage approaches were hampering Synthesia’s R&D efforts and costing them precious time in the race to get their solutions to market.

A major pain point they were looking to address was developer productivity. Prior to implementing WEKA, Synthesia’s data environment was composed of a mix of cloud-based services that delivered poor file-system performance and instability due to LOSFs (lots of small files), which are a big obstacle for legacy data architectures in the AI era. The company was wrestling with slow data delivery and performance bottlenecks that caused poor GPU utilization, slowing critical R&D processes and causing headaches for its AI researchers and data scientists.

With the WEKA Data Platform deployed, Synthesia’s GPUs are fully maximized, and its R&D processes are firing on all cylinders so its engineers can focus on developing groundbreaking technology instead of constantly triaging their AI infrastructure.

“R&D is vital to our business,” said Sash Stasyk, Machine Learning Platform Engineering Manager at Synthesia. “During AI model training, the WEKA Data Platform fully saturates our GPUs with data, helping us get more performance from our AI infrastructure and scale when needed. WEKA has given our engineering team peace of mind and saved us a massive deployment effort that would have delayed bringing our product to market.”

Watch this Space

Synthesia is leading the way in democratizing the future of video communications with AI, which we believe will be a game changer, empowering businesses and creators around the world. WEKA is proud to support Synthesia in its mission and can’t wait to see what comes next now that its own R&D team’s creativity has been unleashed.

Want to dive deeper into Synthesia’s story?

Read the Full Case Study Here