Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440

so I was trying to figure out how to do photo realistic AI photos and it was stabil diffusion by itself is not doing that well like the faces look all mangled y um and it doesn't have enough resolution or something to to do that well so but I started seeing these these um base models These Fine tun models and people were training on porn and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic they would have bodies that actually made sense like body uh Anatomy um but if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now still there's still core porn there like of naked people so I need to prompt out the nak and everybody needs to do this with AI startups with imaging you need to prompt out the naked stuff you have to keep reminding the model you need to put clothes on yeah don't put naked because it's very risky I have Google Vision that checks every photo before it's shown to the user to like check detor oh nfw detector because you get the journalists get very angry the following is a conversation with Peter levels also known on X as levels IO he is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed programmed shipped over 40 startups many of which are hugely successful in most cases he did it all by himself while living the digital Nomad life in over 40 programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch using vanilla HTML jQuery PHP and SQL light he builds and ships quickly and improves on the fly all in the open documenting his work both his successes and failures with a raw honesty of a true Indie hacker Peter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are hopefully useful for people this was an honor and a pleasure for me this is Alex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Peter levels you've launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products as you say most failed but some succeeded what's your philosophy behind building the startups that you did I think my philosophy is very different than most people in startups because most people in startups they they build a company and they raise money right and they hire people and then they build a product and they find something that makes money and I don't really raise money