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When Forbes put Soyoung Lee of TwelveLabs on the Under 30 stage, it wasn’t just another tech pitch — it was a reminder that American ingenuity still solves real problems for everyday businesses and fans. Lee, who helped raise more than $100 million for TwelveLabs and has forged partnerships with the likes of NVIDIA and AWS, explained how her company’s work is already changing how organizations work with mountains of video. Conservatives who believe in backing American startups should applaud this kind of practical, job-creating innovation.
The practical problem TwelveLabs is attacking is painfully familiar to anyone who has worked in sports or broadcasting: hours of footage, tiny windows of relevance, and archaic tagging systems that slow productivity and waste money. Semantic search replaces brittle manual tags with models that understand the content of a clip — actions, faces, sounds, and context — so a producer can pull the exact moment they need without digging through tape. That’s not technobabble; it’s a productivity leap for teams who need results, not red tape.
Under the hood TwelveLabs has pushed multimodal models and new indexing techniques that let the platform analyze visuals, audio, and transcribed speech together, and even support entity-level search to find specific players or branded objects. Recent release notes show faster indexing, longer content support, and entity search features aimed specifically at sports use cases — meaning longer games and massive archives can be made searchable in practical timeframes. In short, the company is moving the industry from slow, manual clip assembly to near-real-time retrieval.
Those technical gains aren’t happening in a vacuum: TwelveLabs has announced cloud partnerships that will make its video models available through major platforms like Amazon Bedrock, speeding deployment for broadcasters and teams while cutting costs. Industry coverage notes the company’s claims of sub-second search speeds and its use of cloud scale to train and deploy models more efficiently, which matters when live broadcasts and highlight reels are on the line. This is the kind of private-sector scaling conservatives argue government shouldn’t hamper — we should let competition and American cloud infrastructure drive progress.
Let’s be clear: this is the market solving a problem the bureaucrats and legacy vendors ignored for years. Free enterprise delivered a tool that helps coaches review plays faster, editors make sharper highlights, and small sports outlets compete with giants by doing more with less. That strengthens local economies, supports American broadcasting jobs, and gives fans the sharper coverage they deserve without the taxpayer getting a bill for more government programs.
But innovation always demands vigilance. Powerful video-understanding tools can be used for good or mischief, and conservatives should lead on sensible privacy guardrails that protect Americans without kneecapping innovation. If Congress and regulators act like partners — not predators — we can keep American companies competitive on the world stage while ensuring these technologies serve citizens, not surveil them.
