Don't you wish everything was more rewarding? With Rakuten, almost everything is. You can earn cash back on those new shoes you've been wanting. You can save on the next trip you book.
You can cash in on groceries. Just join, shop your favorite brands, and save. Sephora, Old Navy, Timu, Adidas, PetSmart, Expedia. The list is long.
Save online at over 750 stores. And when it's time to redeem those rewards, get your money exactly how you want it. Choose Interact, PayPal, or a check. So go ahead, take a trip, fill a card, order dessert.
Rakuten is a world of rewards. Join today for free. Go to rakuten.ca or get the app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N.
When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like, all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet.
Track your cha-chings from every channel, right in one spot. And turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new world. Switch to Shopify.
Start your free trial today. Today on the podcast, I'm going to be giving you a walkthrough, a breakdown, and an update on AI Box, everything that my software company has accomplished over the last number of months, as an update to our over 500 investors from our crowdfunding campaign for the $500,000 that we raised, all the progress, everything we built, where we're at, all the drama around our recent cease and desist we got for Box.com, how the progress of all the development, developers, launch dates, all of that exciting stuff, this will be the episode for that if you're interested. So the first thing I wanted to cover as far as a little bit of housekeeping is the recent drama that we had with Box.com that recently sent us, a number of months ago, I recorded a podcast episode where I kind of talked about this, but they sent us a cease and desist, essentially saying, you know, they were unhappy that if you search for Box AI, their AI product, we showed up in the Google search results because we're called AI Box. And so they're upset about this and we're infringing on the trademarks, et cetera, et cetera, because we had Box in our name.
So, you know, I recorded an episode about this and talked a lot about, you know, why I thought it was kind of bogus, et cetera, et cetera. And I got a lot of amazing feedback from you, the listeners. So actually I'm very grateful for everyone that messaged me over on LinkedIn and commented and responded with good feedback. I got a ton of amazing recommendations of IP attorneys.
And by the way, I will say that if anyone's watching this episode on Spotify, there's a video where I'll be showing screen shares and slides. Otherwise it's on YouTube and there's a link in the description to this podcast if you're on Apple or something where you can check out the YouTube. I'd recommend that because I'm going to show slides, show demos of our product and a lot of hands-on stuff. I mean, I'll explain it all if you're listening, but I would recommend watching this episode if you're an investor and if you're interested in seeing a visual of what we've created and what we're working on.
So in any case, with all the drama that went on with this cease and desist letter, we found a great recommendation on an attorney that is representing us from Newman LLP. And essentially we sent a response to them. I won't give you like the full document, which is quite extensive, but the gist of it is that essentially we told them that because the US trademark office has already allowed a bunch of other marks that include the term box, including ones that are in the computer software market. And because it is of its widespread use by third parties that have the term box in their mark, it's not distinct as it's first.
So because of that, box is not entitled to claim its box mark as a quote unquote family. And it is also not able to claim that it has a monopoly on all marks, including the term box, especially when box is the selected later part of the mark as an AI box. And there's a great precedent for this in a lawsuit that happened between box and Dropbox, which are literal competitors doing literally the exact same thing. And they ended up settling the lawsuit so they're both able to use their name because neither of them wanted to lose the trademark in that lawsuit.
So I think box eventually just settled with Dropbox. In any case, because of this precedent and a lot of other cases and companies, we believe we're in pretty good standing. And so essentially we told them we'll be continuing to use the name and they're not entitled to this. So that's currently where this stands.
And if more happens, I'll definitely keep you up to date. There's a lot of interesting things in our legal tool belt, but yeah, that's where it stands today. And I hope that we can keep a great relationship with box because it's a great innovative company and I'm sure we can both coexist. Okay, so with that all out of the way, definitely that took some time and resources to get this settled.
And it was a bit of a speed bump for us in our launch and our plans because the big concern here is right as we're about to do a launch, if we had to change our name, this was going to change a lot about how we have to do this launch. You can imagine that for over the last year talking about this project on the podcast with this name and thousands of people on our wait list was pretty important to us. So once that is all out of the way, I want to give you a little bit of a progress update on our development. And the big thing that we've just essentially accomplished is building out a very robust backend that's very focused on security, encryption, and making this as secure as possible.
So we have an incredible team that has helped with backend, but this has been one of the more challenging aspects of our project thus far. So to be honest, we have an amazing architect for our backend who has worked extensively at AWS and corporate security and backend security and the contracts for big companies in Silicon Valley. And the problem was finding people in-house that could help fulfill this vision of backend architecture. We hired multiple people in a row who would be around for about four weeks before we realized they just weren't able to keep up.
And so eventually, our team member who architected the backend decided that he would do the build out and built this all out for us. So a really big shout out to our team member, Nick Benio, who helped us architect and ultimately build out a lot of this backend. So our backend is now built and secure for our project. And in order for us to adequately test everything that we need to go into this, we also built out a admin panel for AI Box.
So one of the tricky parts with what we're doing and interacting with so many different AI models and companies was essentially keeping track of tokens, usage, data storage on a platform basis, but also on a user-by-user basis. And another issue is that a lot of these AI models, for example, that we could get API access to, not all of them do essentially a bill as you go where you pay for some tokens, you use them as your account's getting low, it's automatically buying them. Some of these platforms make you purchase your tokens ahead of time. It puts it into like a bank, essentially tokens.
And then as it gets depleted, you're in charge of like refilling that manually. So in order to essentially facilitate for that and make sure that we weren't, you know, having like some sort of AI model run out of its tokens and all of a sudden it's not working on the platform, we had to build something that tracked and monitored the usage all of that has been tracked on platform and user level as well as we've created, we're essentially tracking all of our users' token usage. So month to month, your tokens will expire and when you have a subscription you get a certain amount of tokens. If you're on the annual plan, you can keep your tokens for the full year.
So if you're worried about tokens expiring, I just recommend getting on the annual plan and you got everything for a whole year, you can use as fast as you want. If you use them all, just go to a higher tier, you get more tokens. So, but in any case, this is an important metric for us to track as you know, knowing how many tokens people are using. The platform becomes more profitable if tokens are burnt and not used.
This is all just important for us to know for forecasting. And in addition, we're tracking all of our users' storage. So you can imagine someone went and created, you know, a thousand images or was taking up, you know, a hundred gigs of storage. It'd be very expensive for us to store all of their data, all of their assets that they create with their AI tools.
So we have a panel where we can see how much everyone's using and it goes along with whatever subscription tier you're on. If you're on a really low subscription tier but you've got a ton of storage, kind of like Google Drive, if you're using too much storage, you've got to either delete your files or upgrade to a higher tier. So, you know, that's just a cost thing that, you know, unfortunately we pay for that. So we have to make sure that that's included in kind of our costs and what users are getting.
So our launch timelines right now, we have built a brand new product called the AI Box Playground. I'm really excited to give you a demo and explain to you all a little bit about what that is and why we are launching this first. We're shooting for a November 24th launch next month of this platform and shortly after we'll be focusing on rolling out the full AI Builder platform. And anyways, I'll give you a demo of what the Playground is and then I'll explain the differences between the two platforms, why we chose to launch a Playground first, what that helps us accomplish and all the reason behind that.
So the next thing I wanted to talk about is the AI Box Playground, this new tool that we have built. So this is essentially a platform where you can go and access all of your favorite AI models all in one platform and you can chat with them all in one chat. We built something called AI Box Default which essentially uses AI to help determine, depending on your query, which AI model would be best for answering your question. So an example of this is if you said, you know, something like write me some code in HTML for a Hello World website, right?
So obviously something basic could be a lot more complex stuff with code. But if you're doing something simple like this, the model would actually go and pick a model to, you know, it knows it's generating code, it knows it's an image, or it's an audio or something like that and it's going to go and generate something that can essentially create the text or the code for this. It's gone ahead and it decided to pick O1 Preview to generate this code. And we also have built-in code, essentially code panels that you can see just the code that it generated.
So, you know, something that kind of annoys me with chat with the other models sometimes is like the code is mixed in with their explanation on how to use this code and so you've got to try to copy just the right place. We have a simple copy code element, so that's great. So in any case, maybe you're like, okay, it picked this. I didn't really love doing it with O1 Preview.
I wish I could do it and so you have essentially all of these different models writing this code and you have essentially in the chat like a tab where you can tab between all the different models. The other thing you can do is open up a compare panel so you can look at the two models side by side or different multiple models side by side to see the code that it generated and this is super cool and useful with code but this works for text documents this works for images on different image models this works for audio on different audio models so this is fantastic and you can also go and just choose exactly what model you want to use. So for example, if I was like, okay, you know, this website's great but I want 11 Labs to say the words, you know, hello world to invent on my website I mean more likely you're probably going to get it to do some sort of voiceover clip for a video or a podcast but you can get 11 Labs to generate that and the real power is that you can then go rerun the same thing with OpenAI's voice model as well and then you can also pull up the compare tab and see both of these audios side by side to see which one you prefer you can listen to them both. The other cool thing that we've integrated is settings, the I-model settings and all this so, you know, right now I just ran a test where I had OpenAI's model do the Fable voice but they have like five or six different voices so maybe I'm like, okay, well I want to try Nova's voice to, you know, also essentially run the same prompt and so you can go and have it run the, you know, do a voiceover for the same text as before but now with the Nova voice and you can open up the same side panel to compare, you know, Fable's voice versus Nova's voice and you can listen to the two side by side to determine which one you like better.
This is incredibly powerful for comparing different AI models, different outputs, deciding what you like or getting it to rewrite it or even doing something like you get chat GPT's O1 preview to write the first draft of a document but you're like, I want the tone to be better so then you get Sonnet to, you know, rewrite it and just focus on the tone but maybe you wanted O1 preview because it did a little bit better of a job with adding bullet points and facts and then you move it over to another model. So really great with model collaboration as well. In addition to all that, we also have a media uploader so you can upload an image, a PDF, an audio file, any type of media and you can ask it, you know, what is the text in this image and it's able to do image inference, see kind of what is written down in that actual model and something interesting is that when you upload this, you can upload so many different types of media so this is kind of what you expect. I think in my demo, I accidentally asked it while it was open to OpenAI's audio model so this again is a great reason why I would recommend using our default is because on the default model, it's able to determine what the best model is for this but in any case, you can image inference.
You can also go, okay, the other feature that I absolutely love with this because yes, you also got all the settings, you can change your temperature, your top P, your max tokens, context, length limits in all of, you know, for all AI models that you're using so this is phenomenal. I'm looking at the settings for some of the other thing that I absolutely love about this platform is we create something called media storage. Now this solves a problem that I personally have had a ton of these two weeks ago like there's no way to scroll back and find it. We have a media storage that every piece of media, whether that's audio file or images that you've ever created shows up in here.
You can go click on the image or whatever asset you created. You can see the prompt you used to create that. You can see the model that was used to create that, how many tokens it took. You can either delete it or download it or click to view the chat so you go directly back to the chat where this asset was actually created.
You can see kind of the conversation that you're having before and after and everything else. You can see that in this chat I was doing, I uploaded an image and you know, said what is this YouTube video about and it's kind of talking about what's inside of the YouTube video based off the thumbnail I uploaded. So that's the image inference I was referring to before. The code, the audio, all of this is really easy to find and especially with this, especially with the media storage, it makes this a phenomenal option.
So this is essentially the new product that we'll be launching. The AI Box Playground that I'm super excited to be rolling out shortly, getting all of your AI models in one platform and it's all for the same price as ChatGPT but you get everything there. So all of your favorite models. So this is, and we're adding new models all the time.
So this is something we're super excited about. I wanted to talk a little bit about what some of the benefits on our waitlist right now and to roll out everything we've built essentially to everyone. Rolling out this Playground first allows us to test five key areas. Number one is account management.
So our whole user account creation workflow makes sure that's all optimized. All the authentication, AWS Incognito, integrations for secure user authentication, all our payment processing, our Stripe, how we handle all of our transactions, all of our backend infrastructure. So we're using Amplify, Lambda functions, GraphQL API testing, token management via Lambda and DynamoDB interactions, all the AI service integrations throughout ECS. So we're really able to run our backend infrastructure.
Everything that we have built for this Playground is built for our full platform. So this is kind of allowing us to test it on a smaller scale before we unroll iterations which we'll talk a little bit about later. But the fifth thing I want to mention is the data storage specifically. So we have S3 buckets on AWS to store images and audio and all of our media, but making sure that we have that rolled out correctly, our MongoDB storage solution verification with all our media storage.
So I want to talk about some of the strategic benefits of specifically testing this. The first is that we're able to have a really focused development so we're concentrating on just the core functionalities before we start scaling some of the more complex features in the builder, but we're able to essentially test the core development of the platform. while getting essentially uh we'll be essentially testing all of our core things to make sure it's strong enough for the next phase so we're also able to do a lot more efficient debugging um we're able to optimize our resource allocation so how much money we're spending to develop this the nice thing launching the playgrounds that we'll be able to meet start making money all the risk mitigation um all of the iterative improvements we'll be able to start focusing on that so i want to talk a little bit about um the development focus distribution which essentially just means uh where we're at what what sort of we focused on for each project so in this current release of this playground about 70 of the work that went into this from development standpoint was on the back end the back end was incredibly robust incredibly secure focusing on encryption security and privacy and all of that and building out something very very powerful that can scale to the entire platform so about 30 of it was front end work um and a solid 70 was just the back end making this work now once we switch now that this is the back end is all built out and ready to launch this we're testing it once we switch to the next phase which is the builder platform which is of course a much more complex platform the back end is already done and tested and so our our builder launch is just going to shift to focusing essentially on front end emphasis making sure all the features and everything's polished up on that and i'll talk a little bit about the status of the builder where we're at on this um but essentially this back end focus phase right now is really to optimize performance and reliability of some of our key components before we expand to some of the user facing um features so i want to talk about a couple things that we're still um that we're just finishing up before this november launch so you know why we're launching in november we do have people coming on immediately like we've already had some people coming on right now doing beta testing we'll be rolling out more people if you're on the waitlist which i recommend you can be on the waitlist i will be um you know first come first serve and we have a long waitlist but we'll be rolling this out and we would love to get access if you're on that waitlist i'll look out for email the things we're focusing on right now is our stripe and lambda webhooks so that's essentially implementing all of the payment processing our token lambda service so essentially our centralized token management every single ai api model has a different cost um associated with it so we have to convert those into our own token on our platform and managing all of that uh is you know an exciting project to say the least the last thing is our cloudfront hosting this is really just preparing aws cloudfront for hosting and launching the application so those are three things we're currently working on um the other thing i want to talk a little bit about is some of our progress updates so the builder designer output view home page components are all 90 complete i'll talk about each of those so the builder is essentially where you link together different ai models this is our drag and drop platform um and that we're calling builder the next phase once you kind of link together all your models and figure out what you want to build we have what we call the designer which is a phase where you essentially design what a user that's going to use your ai tool what they see you can change the colors you can change the backgrounds we have a lot of interesting things adding photo backgrounds and your logos a lot of different stuff um is all determined in the designer after that we have the output viewer and that is what your actual asset looks like so if you're creating a document how the document is formatted um is the output viewer you can actually manipulate that so that a user gets exactly what they're looking for and then you of course have to publish that to the marketplace so that's gonna be the home page component so all of those four components were about 90 complete on the overall builder platform um one of the bigger holdups was finishing all the back and making sure everything was secure and um all the security and privacy was all um a big enough focus and was all done right so now that is completed for this for this uh playground that we're launching this is about 90 complete and we'll be working on launching this shortly after remaining tasks we have for this are some ui element finalization um some functionality debuggings we have to transition our our code to a consistent snake case convention because some of the tools are back and need that so that's just you know housekeeping essentially um by prioritizing this playground launch right now with a really focused approach we're setting a really strong foundation for future development and making sure that a more stable and reliable system is available as we start to scale this we're also um essentially putting ourselves on a really good path for a smooth integration of a lot more complex features uh boxes and other things will be launching subsequent phases so this is essentially what we are what we're currently working on and the reason why we're focusing on this playground launch um and testing before we do our full builder rollout so this is something that i have been working on for a very long time i'm incredibly passionate about this obviously um if you're interested in getting on the waitlist to use this product and you're not already go to aibox.ai this will be rolling out next month um so i'm super excited for anyone that was an investor in the um aibox republic crowdfunding campaign um depending on the level of investor and where you invested at we have different perks and we'll be sending emails out to people that are whitelisted for the beta um and essentially having people come on and test and get early access to it uh as well so super excited to get the update if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me over on linkedin and again if you um are interested in watching this and some of the demos if you were just listening there's a link to youtube in the description where you go check out all of that thanks so much for tuning in and i hope that you all have an incredible rest of your day