Just in time for this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Adobe has announced that it is working with multiple studios, directors, and talent agencies to develop a “private, IP-protected” Firefly Foundry Gen AI “omni-model.” According to the company, the Firefly Foundry model is intended to “accelerate creativity without destroying ownership or creative intent”, while generating a wide variety of assets such as audio-aware video and 3D/vector graphics that can be seamlessly integrated into workflows using other Adobe products such as Premiere.
Unlike other models on the market, which are fed large datasets extracted from the Internet, Firefly Foundry models – which are being marketed to businesses as opposed to regular consumers – are unique to each of Adobe’s customers and trained only on IP to which customers own the rights. What Adobe is offering is similar to the general idea behind genAI startup Asteria. But as a legacy company with decades of experience building these types of products, Adobe is in a far better position to be able to actually accomplish this.
Adobe says this ensures that the Firefly Foundry model enables “responsible AI adoption at every stage of production”, from pre-visualization to final stage editing. And the company is relying on its legacy of creating some of the entertainment industry’s most widely used creative tools to sell customers on the idea of ​​adopting this new technology.
talking to The VergeHanna Elaskar, vice president of GenAI New Business Ventures at Adobe, explained that Firefly Foundry was born out of the company’s previous work with larger companies that were using Firefly’s older, less customizable models. In those instances, models were limited in their ability to generate assets beyond static images, or understand the fine details of customers’ IP. Those limitations were rooted in the fact that Adobe’s more basic generation AI models were trained only on inputs that Adobe had purchased the rights to use. But that wasn’t enough to create the kind of wealth that Adobe’s customers wanted going forward.
“Global companies like Home Depot and Disney said they needed more,” Elaskar said. “They needed a creative world that understood multiple products, characters, and the physics of how those characters moved – for both video and 3D. That’s where Firefly Foundry comes in.”
To promote Firefly Foundry, Adobe is already collaborating with talent agencies including Creative Artists Agency, United Talent Agency and William Morris Endeavor. Also working with the company suicide squad Directors David Ayer and Jaume Collet-Serra black adam fame. In addition to partnering with production houses B5 Studios, Promise Advanced Imagination, and Cantina Creative, Adobe has partnered with Parsons School of Design and Whistling Woods Film School to “develop research, educational resources, and curriculum focused on the role of AI in creative fields.”
Firefly Foundry seems like an approach to generative AI that megacorporations might be willing to adopt to avoid any potential IP violations that can occur with regular models. And with the next generation of creative professionals focused on getting early access to these tools, the company could be setting itself up to be a long-term winner in the AI ​​arms race.
