Most conversations about AI and music collapse into two camps: fear that it will replace artists, or excitement about how much money there is to be made. Lucas Cantor sits outside both.
Lucas is a venture investor at Mindset Ventures and an Emmy-winning composer who got his start at Hans Zimmer’s studio before going on to finish Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony using AI, a project that became a live orchestral premiere in London. He’s also the author of Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Larry talks with Lucas about what it actually took to complete a 200-year-old symphony with machine learning, why he thinks Suno’s multi-billion dollar valuation rests on a fundamentally wrong premise about what music is, and why, after spending a career building tools that make creation easier, he remains convinced that the hardest and most valuable skill in music has never been technical at all.