Jay Neo, the former creative lead behind some of MrBeast’s most viral moments, has quietly launched Palo AI, an analytics platform that treats YouTube videos the way hedge funds treat stock charts. Together with ex-Microsoft and Palantir engineer Shivam Pankaj Kumar and long-time collaborator Harry Jones, Neo built a tool that dissects every frame, hook, cut, and retention dip of a creator’s content and spits out a 40-page report telling you exactly why the algorithm loved (or hated) it.
Upload a Short or a long-form video and Palo scans pacing, hook strength, average percentage viewed, click-through rate patterns, facial-expression heatmaps, even micro-drops in viewer attention at the 0.3-second mark. It then hands you a prioritized list: “Move the explosion 1.7 seconds earlier,” “Add a second pop-up text at 00:08,” “Your face is too neutral between 00:14–00:17, exaggerate surprise by 34 %.” The same engine can auto-generate scripts for vertical Shorts, spit out shot-by-shot storyboards, and suggest thumbnail concepts ranked by predicted CTR.
But Palo isn’t stopping at diagnostics. The team is quietly building a private creator network inside the platform, a LinkedIn-meets-Upwork for the algorithm generation, where 6-figure creators can find niche collaborators and where brands can directly bid on product placements with hard performance forecasts attached.
The pitch worked. In a seed round that closed earlier this fall, PeakXV (formerly Sequoia India), NFX, EdgeCase Capital, and a handful of angels, including Rohan Kumar, MrBeast’s former head of verticals, wrote checks totaling $3.8 million. That’s real money for what is essentially a very expensive mirror that tells creators, “Here’s exactly how mediocre you have to become to win.”
For months Palo was invite-only and restricted to creators with at least one million subscribers. Last week they dropped the threshold to 100,000 and announced the upcoming pricing: $250 per month when the full product ships in early 2026. At that price, even mid-tier creators will feel pressure to recoup the cost through extra views, which means following Palo’s recommendations even more religiously.
And that’s the quiet tragedy.
Tools like this don’t reward originality; they reward obedience. The algorithm has never cared about art, only about predictable dopamine hits delivered at maximum frequency. Give it a thousand videos and it learns that a certain eye-widening expression at the 8-second mark lifts retention by 11 %. Palo simply codifies that into a commandment. Do it again. And again. Until every creator in the niche looks, sounds, and edits the same way.
More content will indeed become “better” in the only metric platforms actually optimize for: time spent. But better in the way fast food is better than a home-cooked meal when you measure strictly by calories per minute. It’s optimized, efficient, soulless.
The great Casey Neistat once ended a vlog with a simple middle finger to the entire view-chasing industrial complex: “F*ck the views.” Eight years later, a former MrBeast lieutenant is selling the most sophisticated view-chasing machine ever built, and thousands of creators are lining up to buy it.
The future of online video is apparently a perfectly optimized cage. And we’re all volunteering to lock ourselves in.
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