Team 8

Stephan Sinn
Apolonia Bokszycka

  • 19.12 Tutorials

    By

    Apolonia Bokszycka

    and

    Stephan Sinn

    Timeline

    • Y Combinator receives pitches in so-called Batches. The next one is Spring 2026 Batch, for which deadline is the 9th of February.

    We decided to look for pitch competitions within the span of the semester.

    • Unfortunately there are no pitch competitions before the 20th of January.
    • The closes to date is AI festival in Milan, which happens on 21st-22nd of January and hosts pitch competition. It connects start-ups, venture capitalists and investors.
    • The only option, which is not ideal, is a business management conference in Salzburg (3rd of January) or London (15th of January) – however we are not sure if the audience suits design of our project? How fitting must the audience be?

    Strategy & Business Model

    According to Y/C in orderd to prepare a pitch we need to ask ourselves the following questions:

    1. What do you do?
    2. How big is the market?
    3. What’s your progress?
    4. What’s your unique insight?
    5. What’s your business model?
    6. Who’s on your team?
    7. What do you want?

    Competitors Analysis: Unique Insight

    We did competitors analysis and on this basis decided on the niche we want to fill in – modeling wealth redistribution trough progressive wealth taxation (proposed by Thomas Piketty) as none of the competitors implement this.

    Business Model:

    Value Proposition 


    Target Market

    Public and private actors: policy designers, government analysts, local and state finance departments, funding organizations, lobbying institutes


    Revenue Streams (How we earn money)

    Subscription based software service (modeled on Palantir)


    Cost Structure


    Key Activities & Resources


    Channels

    Next

    1. What do you do?
    2. How big is the market?
    3. What’s your progress?
    4. What’s your unique insight?
    5. What’s your business model?
    6. Who’s on your team?
    7. What do you want?

    Ad.2. We still need to research how many potential users of our product there would be.

    Ad.6. Jakub Pieszczek, the ML engineer we consulted, agreed to appear in our company’s online presence. We still need to look for an economist.

  • 12.11 Tutorials

    By

    Stephan Sinn

    Recap

    “what does the further execution of the effective accelerationist agenda mean for our social and intellectual abilities?”

    A project by “technopositivists” for those still to be convinced.
    In taking on this role, to show the absurdity of this ideology


    From here:

    Looking for a persona to use as a vessel for our narrative

    Interacting with the community– quite dead.

    while trying to interact with the discord community, we asked ourselves, “how does one even become a member?”


    This led us to the topic of indoctrination.

    We decided to investigate different ways to communicate this notion.

    Unfortunately, through analysis of twitter activity which was more prominent than the discord, we realized that communication is very simple and not attempting to manipulate, as propaganda would.

    Simultaneously, we had brainstorming of visualization methods.

    Ideation: 1st attempt

    Army recruitment stand– combining the fascist nature of a futurist ideology speaking in absolutes and the indoctrination required for such movements to succeed.

    Adopting this visual language to create an e/acc recruitment stand

    Disagreements: lacks criticality and would just be staging a scene. What role would the people play that we interact with? Are we simply messing with them? Why should a digital community engage with people offline?

    Ideation: 2nd attempt

    2 Truths and a Pitch

    research of personas and investment projects

    A community based on innovation:
    what innovation?

    Disagreements:
    the goal of coming up with something more absurd to show how absurd this ideology is, is quite difficult.

    All of our brainstormed ideas sounded plausible and couldn’t beat the mosquito drone

    Conclusions
    What would be we gain by imagining another absurd product.
    We are living in such an absurd era, that our ability to shock and provoke is
    a) limited, and
    b) not as powerful as we thought.

    The Onion problematic post-Trump


    Language of absurdity is not the way to go.

    Going forward:

    Using contrast as a method as opposed to reinforcing.

    Absurdity = playing into e/acc tropes
    Contrasting = communicating our disagreements and being critical

  • Team 8– AI Film Workshop

    By

    Stephan Sinn

    Process: Wan 2.2 First/Last Frame Video Fast

    Photoshopped fake Elon Musk Nick Land Joe Rogan Experience episode of effective accelerationism to feed to the Wan model

    Process: Veo 2 with Google AI Studio

    Prompt: Bearded man in black t-shirt is sitting on a couch in a living room watching a podcast on his phone. Phone in left hand, in his right hand he has VR goggles. Living room is very dark, looks like an abandoned office. Around him there a multiple empty black cans of energy drink with green logos on them. The couch is ragged and there are stains on it. Used tissues on the floor.
    Prompt: A video of man putting on a vr headset in his studio, walls covered in wood cladding. Cut to a shot of him wearing the headset very close up.
    Prompt: A very futuristic garden of Eden. Everybody is on their phones, and everything looks very modern and sleek. A lot of technology mixed with greenery. Almost sterile. Everybody has an uncanny smile. Everybody is very athletic and looks like a supermodel.

    Failed generation– only women generated
    Tweaked prompt (for the video we ended up using): A very futuristic garden of Eden. Everybody is on their phones, and everything looks very modern and sleek. A lot of technology mixed with greenery. Almost sterile. Everybody has an uncanny smile. Everybody is very athletic and looks like a supermodel. Equal mix of men and women appear
    Prompt: Bearded man with black t-shirt lying down on a cloud floating in the sky with dark gray vr glasses on with a big smile on his face.
    Message to model, “Can you generate me the same except with hell as the background?”

    Result above. No edits made on the “floating in the sky” prompt.
    Prompt: Bearded man with black t-shirt lying down on a volcano in hell with dark gray vr glasses on with a big smile on his face.

    Final Shot

    Used Nano Banana in Google AI studio to edit last frame of first shot, then put this into Veo 2 as the inspiration to replicate first shot.

    Final Edit