[HN Gopher] Sora: Creating video from text
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Sora: Creating video from text
        
       Author : davidbarker
       Score  : 1580 points
       Date   : 2024-02-15 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (openai.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
        
       | cod1r wrote:
       | OpenAI is definitely cooking
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | > All videos on this page were generated directly by Sora without
       | modification.
       | 
       | I hope there is at least some cherrypicking here. This also seems
       | like some shots fired at some of the other gen video startups
        
         | palmfacehn wrote:
         | The example cat had two left forelegs.
        
       | senthilnayagam wrote:
       | samples look amazing , Looking forward for access, and hope they
       | price it competitively
        
         | treesciencebot wrote:
         | If we go from DALL-E 3, it won't be nowhere near competitive
         | while they have the superior ground. Generating a high quality
         | 1024x1024 image with costs around ~$0.002, but $0.08 on DALL-E
         | 3 (20x more expensive per-image). For videos with very high
         | computational needs (since each frame needs to be temporally
         | consistent, you need huge GPUs to serve this) I'm expecting
         | this to be so much more expensive than its competitors (Pika or
         | SVD1.1)
        
       | zemo wrote:
       | > Prompt: Historical footage of California during the gold rush.
       | 
       | this is the opposite of history
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | It's a test prompt to demo the model, not a clickbait social
         | media post.
        
           | zemo wrote:
           | yeah I think a tech company showing how their tech can be
           | used to cause damage to a humanities field as one of their
           | leading product demos is bad
        
           | diputsmonro wrote:
           | Yes, but the point is that in a few years, there won't be a
           | difference. Those clickbait accounts already exist for AI
           | generated images. How many impressionable or young people
           | have been fooled into believing history that never happened?
           | 
           | More importantly, how can these accounts subtly direct the
           | generations to instill modern ideology or politics into
           | "historical" images, giving them historical credibility?
           | Think of all the subtly white supremacist "retvrn" accounts,
           | for example, falsely recontextualizing inventions and
           | accomplishments to support their ideology.
           | 
           | We all need to be thinking much more creatively and cynically
           | about how these tools will be abused. The technology will get
           | better. The people who want to abuse it will get smarter. And
           | your capability to distinguish fake information is likely
           | much worse than you believe - to say nothing of younger
           | people who have less context and experience to form a mental
           | "immune system".
        
             | minimaxir wrote:
             | Granted, the blog post is about opening the model up for
             | red-teaming, so highlighting potential vectors for abuse is
             | actually the desired intent.
        
         | pimlottc wrote:
         | Yeah, my heart sank when I saw that.
         | 
         | Social media is really good at separating content from context,
         | things like this will distort people's understanding of
         | history.
        
         | zen928 wrote:
         | only if you consider "historical footage" to exclusively mean
         | the "[original] historical footage [stored in archiving]"
         | versus e.g. "historical[ly accurate] footage"
         | 
         | if "historical" is going to be used subjectively with no
         | further qualifying statements then the meaning of "history"
         | will be subjucated to the context it's being presented in, I
         | don't see it's use here as contradictory
        
           | zemo wrote:
           | I think most people consider "history" to mean "things that
           | have actually happened" and not "the aesthetic of the past"
           | as you seem to be suggesting.
        
       | hownowbrowncow wrote:
       | Amazing.
       | 
       | One wonders how you might gain a representation of physics
       | learned in the model. Perhaps multimodal inputs with rendered
       | objects; physics simulations?
        
         | ilaksh wrote:
         | Just lots of videos from Youtube probably.
        
       | zmk5 wrote:
       | These samples look pretty amazing. I'm curious the compute
       | required to train and even deploy something like this. How would
       | it scale to making something like a CGI Pixar movie?
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | Pretty sure you plus tier not be using this free, too much
       | processing power needed
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | I love the downvote, could be an OpenAI employee in the know.
        
       | anon291 wrote:
       | Wow!
        
       | dist-epoch wrote:
       | Totally a coincidence that it's announced immediately after the
       | new Gemini reveal.
        
         | stronglikedan wrote:
         | Timing is everything. Smart move
        
       | nuz wrote:
       | AGI at the quality of sora or dalle but for intelligence is gonna
       | be quite the thing to witness
        
       | treesciencebot wrote:
       | This is leaps and bounds beyond anything out there, including
       | both public models like SVD 1.1 and Pika Labs' / Runway's models.
       | Incredible.
        
         | Zelphyr wrote:
         | Agreed. It's amazing how much of a head start OpenAI appears to
         | have over everyone else. Even Microsoft who has access to
         | everything OpenAI is doing. Only Microsoft could be given the
         | keys to the kingdom and still not figure out how to open any
         | doors with them.
        
           | SeanAnderson wrote:
           | Eh. MSFT owns 49% of OpenAI. Doesn't really seem like they
           | need to do much except support them.
        
             | Zelphyr wrote:
             | Except they keep trying to shove AI into everything they
             | own. CoPilot Studio is an example of how laughably bad at
             | it they are. I honestly don't understand why they don't
             | contract out to OpenAI to help them do some of these
             | integrations.
        
               | SeanAnderson wrote:
               | Every company is trying to shove AI into everything they
               | own. It's what investors currently demand.
               | 
               | OpenAI is likely limited by how fast they are able to
               | scale their hiring. They had 778 FTEs when all the board
               | drama occurred, up 100% YoY. Microsoft has 221,000. It
               | seems difficult to delegate enough headcount to all the
               | exploratory projects of MSFT and it's hard to scale
               | headcount quicker while preserving some semblance of
               | culture.
        
             | frabcus wrote:
             | They don't own 49% of OpenAI. They have capped rights to
             | 49% of OpenAI's profits.
        
               | SeanAnderson wrote:
               | Apparently all the rumors weren't true then, my mistake.
               | 
               | I don't think what you're saying is correct though,
               | either. All the early news outlets reported 49%
               | ownership:
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#:~:text=Rumors%20of%
               | 20t...
               | 
               | https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/23/23567448/microsoft-
               | openai...
               | 
               | https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-antitrust-regulator-
               | cons...
               | 
               | https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/23/microsoft-invests-
               | billions...
               | 
               | The only official statement from Micorosft is "While
               | details of our agreement remain confidential, it is
               | important to note that Microsoft does not own any portion
               | of OpenAI and is simply entitled to share of profit
               | distributions," said company spokesman Frank Shaw.
               | 
               | No numbers, though.
               | 
               | Do you have a better source for numbers?
        
           | Voloskaya wrote:
           | Microsoft doesn't have access to OpenAI's research, this was
           | part of the deal. They only have access to the weights and
           | inference code of production models and even then who has
           | access to that inside MS is extremely gated and only a few
           | employees have access to this based on absolute need to
           | actually run the service.
           | 
           | AI researcher at MSFT barely have more insights about OpenAI
           | than you do reading HN.
        
             | Zelphyr wrote:
             | I didn't realize that. Thank you for the clarification.
        
             | toneyG wrote:
             | This is not true. Microsoft have a perpetual license to all
             | of OpenAI's IP. If they really wanted to they could get
             | their hands on it.
        
               | 93po wrote:
               | Yeah but what's in the license? It's not public so we
               | have no way of knowing
        
             | Jensson wrote:
             | Microsoft said that they could continue OpenAI's research
             | with no slowdown if OpenAI cut them off by hiring all
             | OpenAI's people, so from that statement it sounds like they
             | have access.
        
             | costcofries wrote:
             | I promise you this isn't true.
        
           | pcbro141 wrote:
           | Many people say the same about Google/DeepMind.
        
         | davidbarker wrote:
         | I'm almost speechless. I've been keeping an eye on the text-to-
         | video models, and if these example videos are truly indicative
         | of the model, this is an order of magnitude better than
         | anything currently available.
         | 
         | In particular, looking at the video titled "Borneo wildlife on
         | the Kinabatangan River" (number 7 in the third group), the
         | accurate parallax of the tree stood out to me. I'm so curious
         | to learn how this is working.
         | 
         | [Direct link to the video:
         | https://player.vimeo.com/video/913130937?h=469b1c8a45]
        
           | calgoo wrote:
           | The video of the gold rush town just makes me think of what
           | games like Red Dead and GTA could look like.
        
             | 93po wrote:
             | holy cow, is that the future of gaming? instead of 3D
             | renders it's real-time video generation, complete with
             | audio and music and dialog and intelligent AI conversations
             | and it's a unique experience no one else has ever played.
             | gameplay mechanics could even change on the fly
        
               | monlockandkey wrote:
               | Shove all the tech you mentioned into a VR headset and it
               | is literally game over for humans
        
               | Xirgil wrote:
               | Digital Westworld
        
               | rightbyte wrote:
               | You'd still get a headache after 20 minutes. No matter
               | how addictive, it wont be bad until you can wear VR
               | headsets for hours.
        
               | krapp wrote:
               | Even otherwise, and no matter how good the screen and
               | speakers are, a screen and speakers can only be so
               | immersive. People oversell the potential for VR when they
               | describe it as being as good as or better than reality.
               | Nothing less than the Matrix is going to work in that
               | regard.
        
               | trafficante wrote:
               | Yep, once your brain gets over the immediate novelty of
               | VR, it's very difficult to get back that "Ready Player
               | One" feeling due to the absence of sensory feedback.
               | 
               | If/once they get it working though, society will shift
               | fast.
               | 
               | There's an XR app called Brink Traveler that's full of
               | handcrafted photogrammetry recreations of scenic
               | landmarks. On especially gloomy PNW winter days, I'll lug
               | a heat lamp to my kitchen and let it warm up the tiled
               | stone a bit, put a floor fan on random oscillation, toss
               | on some good headphones, load up a sunny desert location
               | in VR, and just lounge on the warm stone floor for an
               | hour.
               | 
               | My conscious brain "knows" this isn't real and just
               | visuals alone can't fool it anymore, but after about 15
               | minutes of visuals + sensory input matching, it stops
               | caring entirely. I've caught myself reflexively squinting
               | at the virtual sun even though my headset doesn't have
               | HDR.
        
               | gdubs wrote:
               | That's why NVIDIA's CEO said recently that in the future
               | every pixel will be generated -- not rendered.
        
               | Keyframe wrote:
               | five years ago:
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayPqjPekn7g I'm eager to
               | see an updated version.
        
               | dartos wrote:
               | Sometimes, but for specific or unique art styles,
               | statistical models like this may not work well.
               | 
               | For games like call of duty or other hyper realistic
               | games it very likely will be.
        
               | yard2010 wrote:
               | The answer is most definitely YES. Computer games, and of
               | course, porn, the stuff the internet is made up for.
        
               | joegibbs wrote:
               | I think for the near future we'll see something like
               | this:
               | 
               | https://youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0
               | 
               | From a few years ago, where the game is rendered
               | traditionally and used as a ground truth, with a model on
               | top of it that enhances the graphics.
               | 
               | After maybe 10-15 years we will be past the point where
               | the entire game can be generated without obvious mistakes
               | in consistency.
               | 
               | Realtime AI dialogue is already possible but still a bit
               | primitive, I wrote a blog post about it here:
               | https://jgibbs.dev/blogs/local-llm-npcs-in-unreal-engine
        
               | notpachet wrote:
               | Lucid Dreaming as a Service.
               | 
               | See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_Sky
        
           | QuadmasterXLII wrote:
           | The diffusion is almost certainly taking place over some sort
           | of compressed latent, from the visual quirks of the output I
           | suspect that the process of turning that latent into images
           | goes latent -> nerf / splat -> image, not latent ->
           | convolutional decoder -> image
        
         | mizzao wrote:
         | Must be intimidating to be on the Pika team at the moment...
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | Where is the training material for this coming from? The only
         | resource I can think of that's broad enough for a general
         | purpose video model is YouTube, but I can't imagine Google
         | would allow a third party to scrape all of YT without putting
         | up a fight.
        
           | Zetobal wrote:
           | It's movies the shots are way to deliberate to have random
           | YouTube crap in the dataset.
        
             | cma wrote:
             | You can still have a broad dataset and use RLHF to steer it
             | more towards the aesthetic like midjourney and SDXL did
             | through discord feedback. I think there was still some
             | aesthetic selection in the dataset as well but it still
             | included a lot of crap.
        
         | xnx wrote:
         | It's very good. Unclear how far ahead of Lumiere it is
         | (https://lumiere-video.github.io/) or if its more of a
         | difference in prompting/setttings.
        
           | ehsankia wrote:
           | In terms of following the prompt and generating visually
           | interesting results, I think they're comparable. But the
           | resolution for Sora seems so far ahead.
           | 
           | Worth noting that Google also has Phenaki [0] and VideoPoet
           | [1] and Imagen Video [2]
           | 
           | [0] https://sites.research.google/phenaki/
           | 
           | [1] https://sites.research.google/videopoet/
           | 
           | [2] https://imagen.research.google/video/
        
           | vunderba wrote:
           | The big stand out to me beyond almost any other text video
           | solution is that the video duration is tremendously longer
           | (minute+). Everything else that I've seen can't get beyond 15
           | to 20 seconds at the absolute maximum.
        
         | drdaeman wrote:
         | Let's hold our breath. Those are specifically crafted hand-
         | picked good videos, where there wasn't any requirement but
         | "write a generic prompt and pick something that looks good",
         | with no particular requirements. Which is very different from
         | the actual process where you have a very specific idea and want
         | the machine to make it happen.
         | 
         | DALL-E presentation also looked cool and everyone was stoked
         | about it. Now that we know of its limitations and oddities?
         | YMMV, but I'd say not so much - Stable Diffusion is still the
         | go-to solution. I strongly suspect the same thing with Sora.
        
           | treesciencebot wrote:
           | The examples are most certainly cherry-picked. But the
           | problem is there are 50 of them. And even if you gave me 24
           | hour full access to SVD1.1/Pika/Runway (anything out there
           | that I can use), I won't be able to get 5 examples that match
           | these in quality (~temporal consistency/motions/prompt
           | following) and more importantly in the length. Maybe I am
           | overly optimistic, but this seems too good.
        
           | htrp wrote:
           | https://twitter.com/sama/status/1758200420344955288
           | 
           | They're literally taking requests and doing them in 15
           | minutes.
        
             | drdaeman wrote:
             | Cool, but see the drastic difference in quality ;)
        
               | z7 wrote:
               | Depends on the quality of the prompts.
        
               | golol wrote:
               | Lack of quality in the details yes but the fact that
               | characters and scenes depict consistent and real movement
               | and evolution as opposed to the cinemagraph and frame
               | morphing stuff we have had so far is still remarkable!
        
               | ShamelessC wrote:
               | There are absolutely example videos on their website
               | which have worse quality than that.
        
               | karmasimida wrote:
               | It has a comedy like quality lol
               | 
               | But all to be said, it is no less impressive after this
               | new demo
        
               | gigglesupstairs wrote:
               | Drastic difference in quality of the prompts too. Ones
               | used in the OP are quite detailed ones mostly.
        
             | minimaxir wrote:
             | The output speed doesn't disprove possible cherry-picking,
             | especially with batch generation.
        
               | djoletina wrote:
               | What is your point? That they make multiple ones and pick
               | out the best ones? Well duh? That's literally how the
               | model is going to be used.
        
               | dang wrote:
               | Please make your substantive points without swipes. This
               | is in the site guidelines:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
        
               | efrank3 wrote:
               | Who cares? If it can be generated in 15 minutes then it's
               | commercially useful.
        
             | timdiggerm wrote:
             | Looks ready for _Wishbone_
        
             | raydev wrote:
             | OpenAI people running these prompts have access to way more
             | resources than any of us will through the API.
        
           | og_kalu wrote:
           | It doesn't matter if they're cherrypicked when you can't
           | match this quality with SD or Pika regardless of how much
           | time you had.
           | 
           | and i still prefer Dalle-3 to SD.
        
           | sebzim4500 wrote:
           | In the past the examples tweeted by OpenAI have been fairly
           | representative of the actual capabilities of the model. i.e.
           | maybe they do two or three generations and pick the best, but
           | they aren't spending a huge amount of effort cherry-picking.
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | > Stable Diffusion is still the go-to solution. I strongly
           | suspect the same thing with Sora.
           | 
           | Sure, for people who want detailed control with AI-generated
           | video, workflows built around SD + AnimateDiff, Stable Video
           | Diffusion, MotionDiff, etc., are still going to beat Sora for
           | the immediate future, and OpenAI's approach structurally
           | isn't as friendly to developing a broad ecosystem adding
           | power on top of the base models.
           | 
           | OTOH, the basic simple prompt-to-video capacity of Sora _now_
           | is good enough for some uses, and where detailed control is
           | not essential that space is going to keep expanding -- one
           | question is how much their plans for safety checking (which
           | they state will apply both to the prompt and every frame of
           | output) will cripple this versus alternatives, and how much
           | the regulatory environment will or won 't make it possible to
           | compete with that.
        
             | karmasimida wrote:
             | Generate stock video bits I think.
        
             | theLiminator wrote:
             | I suspect given equal effort into prompting both, Sora
             | probably provides superior results.
        
               | dragonwriter wrote:
               | > I suspect given equal effort into prompting both, Sora
               | probably provides superior results
               | 
               | Strictly to _prompting_ , probably, just as that is the
               | case with Dall-E 3 vs, say, SDXL.
               | 
               | The thing is, there's a lot more that you _can_ do than
               | just tweaking prompting with open models, compared to
               | hosted models that offer limited interaction options.
        
           | blibble wrote:
           | they're not fantastic either if you pay close attention
           | 
           | there are mini-people in the 2060s market and in the cat one
           | an extra paw comes out of nowhere
        
             | dartos wrote:
             | The woman's legs move all weirdly too
        
           | ChildOfChaos wrote:
           | Stable diffusion is not the go-to solution, it's still behind
           | midjourney and DAllE
        
           | educaysean wrote:
           | Would love to see handpicked videos from competitors that can
           | hold their own against what SORA is capable of
        
           | throwaway4233 wrote:
           | While Sora might be able to generate short 60-90 second
           | videos, how well it would scale with a larger prompt or a
           | longer video remains yet to be seen. And the general logic of
           | having the model do 90% of the work for you and then you edit
           | what is required might be harder with videos.
        
             | sebastiennight wrote:
             | 60 seconds at a time is much better than enough.
             | 
             | Most fictional long-form video (whether live-action movies
             | or cartoons, etc) is composed of many shots, most of them
             | much shorter than 7 seconds, let alone 60.
             | 
             | I think the main factor that will be key to generate a
             | whole movie is being able to pass some reference images of
             | the characters/places/objects so they remain congruent
             | between two generations.
             | 
             | You could already write a whole book in GPT-3 from running
             | a series of one-short-chapter-at-a-time generations and
             | passing the summary/outline of what's happened so far. (I
             | know I did, in a time that feels like ages ago but was just
             | early last year)
             | 
             | Why would this be different?
        
               | throwaway4233 wrote:
               | > I think the main factor that will be key to generate a
               | whole movie is being able to pass some reference images
               | of the characters/places/objects so they remain congruent
               | between two generations.
               | 
               | I partly agree with this. The congruency however needs to
               | extend to more than 2 generations. If a single scene is
               | composed of multiple shots, then those multiple shots
               | need to be part of the same world the scene is being shot
               | in. If you check the video with the title `A beautiful
               | homemade video showing the people of Lagos, Nigeria in
               | the year 2056. Shot with a mobile phone camera.` the
               | surroundings do not seem to make sense as the view starts
               | with a market, spirals around a point and then ends with
               | a bridge which does not fit into the market. If the the
               | different shots generated the model did fit together
               | seamlessly, trying to make the fit together is where the
               | difficulty comes in. However I do not have any experience
               | in video editing, so it's just speculation.
        
             | Solvency wrote:
             | You do realize virtually all movies are made up of shots
             | often lasting no longer than 10 seconds. Edited together.
             | Right.
        
           | schleck8 wrote:
           | Wrong, this is the first time I've seen an astronaut with a
           | knit cap.
        
         | iLoveOncall wrote:
         | It is incredible indeed, but I remember there was a humongous
         | gap between the demoed pictures for DALL-E and what most
         | prompts would generate.
         | 
         | Don't get overly excited until you can actually use the
         | technology.
        
         | sschueller wrote:
         | Yes, but I am stuck in their (American) view of what is
         | consider appropriate. Not what is legal, but what they
         | determine to be OK to produce.
         | 
         | Good luck generating anything similar to an 80s action movie.
         | The violence and light nudity will prevent you from generating
         | anything.
        
           | Xirgil wrote:
           | I suspect it's less about being puritanical about violence
           | and nudity in and of themself, and more a blanket ban to make
           | up for the inability to prevent the generation of actually
           | controversial material (nude images of pop stars, violence
           | against politicians, hate speech)
        
             | wilg wrote:
             | No, it's America's fault.
        
             | SamBam wrote:
             | Put like that, it's a bit like the Chumra in Judaism [1].
             | The fence, or moat, _around_ the law that extends even
             | further than the law itself, to prevent you from
             | accidentally commiting a sin.
             | 
             | 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumra_(Judaism)
        
               | UberFly wrote:
               | Na. It's more like what he said: Cover your ass legally
               | for the real problems this could cause.
        
           | TulliusCicero wrote:
           | It's not a particularly American attitude to be opposed to
           | violence in media though, American media has plenty of
           | violence.
           | 
           | They're trying to be all-around uncontroversial.
        
           | throwitaway222 wrote:
           | I am guessing a movie studio will get different access with
           | controls dropped. Of course, that does mean they need to be
           | VERY careful when editing, and making sure not to release a
           | vagina that appears for 1 or 2 frames when a woman is picking
           | up a cat in some random scene.
        
             | Fricken wrote:
             | We can't do narrative sequences with persistent characters
             | and settings, even with static images.
             | 
             | These video clips just generic stock clips. You cut cut
             | them together to make a sequence of random flashy whatever,
             | but you still can't do storytelling in any conventional
             | sense. We don't appear to be close to being able to use
             | these tools for the hypothetical disruptive use case we
             | worry about.
             | 
             | Nonetheless, The stock video and photo people are in
             | trouble. So long as the details don't matter this stuff is
             | presumably useful.
        
         | jasonjmcghee wrote:
         | I agree in terms of raw generation, but runway especially is
         | creating fantastic tooling too.
        
         | jug wrote:
         | Yup, it's been even several months! ;) But now we finally have
         | another quantum leap in AI.
        
         | JKCalhoun wrote:
         | I know it's Runway (and has all manner of those dream-like AI
         | artifacts) but I like what this person is doing with just a
         | bunch 4 second clips and an awesome soundtrack:
         | 
         | https://youtu.be/JClloSKh_dk
         | 
         | https://youtu.be/upCyXbTWKvQ
        
         | rvz wrote:
         | All those startups have been squeezed in the middle. Pika,
         | Runway, etc might as well open source their models.
         | 
         | Or Meta will do it for them.
        
       | cuuupid wrote:
       | Not loving that there are more details on safety than details of
       | the actual model, benchmarks, or capabilities.
       | 
       | > That's why we believe that learning from real-world use is a
       | critical component of creating and releasing increasingly safe AI
       | systems over time.
       | 
       | "We believe safety relies on real-world use and that's why we
       | will not be allowing real-world use until we have figured out
       | safety."
        
         | diputsmonro wrote:
         | Yeah, it would be way better if they just released it right
         | away, so that political campaigns can use AI generated videos
         | of their opponents doing horrible/stupid things right before an
         | election and before any of the general public has any idea that
         | fake videos could be this realistic.
        
           | serf wrote:
           | you joke, but the hobbling of these 'safe' models is exactly
           | what spurs development of the unsafe ones that are ran
           | locally, anonymously, and for who knows what purpose.
           | 
           | someone really interested in control would want OpenAI or
           | whatever centralized organization to be able to sift through
           | the results for dangerous individuals -- part of this is
           | making sure to stymie development of alternatives to that
           | concept.
        
       | imbusy111 wrote:
       | I had a good laugh looking at the sliding and twisting legs in
       | the "Girl walking in City" video.
        
         | ummonk wrote:
         | I'm a little concerned that so many people in these comments
         | say they wouldn't be able to tell that it's not real.
        
         | kjqgqkejbfefn wrote:
         | Indeed @0:15, the right leg goes to the left and vice versa.
        
       | minimaxir wrote:
       | I do wonder why OpenAI chose the name "Sora" for this model. AI
       | is now going to have intersectionality with Kingdom Hearts.
       | (Atleast you don't need a PhD to understand AI.)
        
         | meitham wrote:
         | Sora is pictures or movie (visual) in arabic!
        
         | hk__2 wrote:
         | I'm confused as well because "sora" means "sister" in
         | Neapolitan.
        
           | GaggiX wrote:
           | I'm glad I'm not the only to have think of that, it's usually
           | used for insults. I thought it was kinda funny.
        
         | pavlov wrote:
         | "Scene-Oriented Rank Adaptation"?
         | 
         | I have no idea, just guessing...
        
         | yogorenapan wrote:
         | Hear me out: Someone on the team is a fan of Yosuga No Sora
        
         | starshadowx2 wrote:
         | Sora means sky in Japanese, their reasoning is akin to "the
         | sky's the limit".
         | 
         | > The team behind the technology, including the researchers Tim
         | Brooks and Bill Peebles, chose the name because it "evokes the
         | idea of limitless creative potential."
        
         | xandrius wrote:
         | It also means up/upstairs in some dialect
        
         | renewiltord wrote:
         | That's because it means AI Model in Wiltordian.
        
         | ristomatti wrote:
         | Obviously for it's meaning in Finnish, "gravel".
        
       | nerdjon wrote:
       | It is honestly quite concerning just how good these videos look.
       | 
       | Like you can see some weird artifacts, but take one of these
       | videos, compress it down to a much lower quality and with the
       | loss of quality you might not be able to tell the difference
       | based on these examples. Any artifacts would likely be gone.
       | 
       | Given what I had seen on social media I had figured anything
       | remotely real was a few years away, but I guess not...
       | 
       | I guess we have just stopped worrying about the impact of these
       | tools?
        
       | agomez314 wrote:
       | Imagine someone combining this with the Apple Vision Pro...many
       | people will simply opt out of reality and live in a digital
       | world. Not that this is new, but I'll entice a lot more people
       | than ever before.
        
         | pants2 wrote:
         | Basically the Holodeck.
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | I was just thinking that -- I used to think the Holodeck was
           | far-fetched. Now it seems like it's practically around the
           | corner (with VR/XR glasses).
        
             | ctoth wrote:
             | Presumably the Post-atomic horror set back technology for a
             | while, so we should be able to expect TNG-level technology
             | before the war. This also explains why Kirk's Enterprise
             | uses datatapes.
        
         | TechnicolorByte wrote:
         | Had the same thought. Seems like we're entering the era of
         | generative AI and mixed reality in a very real way very soon.
         | 
         | As much as I love the technology, I'm really not looking
         | forward to this becoming ubiquitous. Time and time again we've
         | allowed technological progress to outpace our ability to weight
         | the societal pros ands cons.
         | 
         | Smartphones and the rise of image-heavy social media has
         | rapidly changed social norms. Watch a video of people out in
         | public 20 years ago: no screen to distract them at bus stops,
         | concert events, or while eating dinner with friends. And if
         | that seems trite, consider how well correlated the rise in
         | suicide rates is with the popularity of these technologies.
         | 
         | Not sure if this makes me a luddite or if the feeling is common
         | in this crowd.
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | but you cannot walk/feel it, just watching. It's still a huge
         | gap to reality, less so, but you will still feel it's fake very
         | vividly because those senses are missing.
        
           | kuprel wrote:
           | chips will have to come a long way for this to be generated
           | in real time, but there's no reason a generated 3D
           | environment can't be interactive
        
       | supriyo-biswas wrote:
       | I wonder what served as the dataset for the model. Videos on
       | YouTube presumably, since messing around with the film industry
       | would be too expensive?
        
         | tinyhouse wrote:
         | How would they access youtube tough?
        
         | achr2 wrote:
         | Almost certainly troves of stock footage. The type of
         | exaggerated motion seen in these examples is very reminiscent
         | of stock footage. And it is heavily textually annotated for
         | search.
        
       | chasing wrote:
       | Yeah, you just can't let all media, all the cost and hard work of
       | millions of photographers, animators, filmmakers, etc be
       | completely consumed and devalued by one company just because it's
       | a very cool technical trick. The more powerful these services
       | become the more obvious that will be.
       | 
       | What OpenAI does is amazing, but they obviously cannot be allowed
       | to capture the value of every piece of media ever created --
       | it'll both tank the economy and basically halt all new creation
       | if everything you create will be immediately financially
       | weaponized against you, if everything you create goes immediately
       | into the Machine that can spit out a billion variations, flood
       | the market, and give you nothing in return.
       | 
       | It's the same complaint people have had with Google Search pushed
       | to its logical conclusion: anything you create will be anonymized
       | and absorbed. You put in the effort and money, OpenAI gets the
       | reward.
       | 
       | Again, I like OpenAI overall. But everyone's got to be brought to
       | the table on this somehow. I wish our government would be capable
       | of giving realistic guidance and regulation on this.
        
         | CooCooCaCha wrote:
         | It's funny, people dreamed of AI robots doing the shitty work
         | that nobody wants to do so that we are free to pursue things we
         | actually want to do.
         | 
         | But in reality it seems like the opposite is going to be true.
         | AI is automating the creative, intellectual work and leaving
         | the rest to us.
        
           | ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
           | Blue collar workers have the last laugh
        
             | Drakim wrote:
             | Turns out the only jobs robots can't take are the ones
             | where humans are specialized, such as cleaning staircases.
        
               | theultdev wrote:
               | It's just cheaper to put humans on tedious physical
               | tasks. See Amazon.
               | 
               | AI is cheaper than a high paid designer, developer,
               | writer, etc.
               | 
               | A robot is more expensive than a human laborer.
               | 
               | It's really funny to see the squirm from those thinking
               | truckers would be automated away, not them.
        
               | reducesuffering wrote:
               | > A robot is more expensive than a human laborer.
               | 
               | Not when intelligence is cheap and highly abundant.
               | Perfecting general robotics as an improvement on humans
               | will be quick. The upper limit of strength and
               | consistency is much higher.
        
               | theultdev wrote:
               | I mean today, in the real world.
               | 
               | It is currently more expensive to build a robot for many
               | tasks than it is to have a human do it.
               | 
               | > Perfecting general robotics as an improvement on humans
               | will be quick.
               | 
               | It has not been nor is there any indication it will be.
        
               | hansonkd wrote:
               | Today in the real world AI can replace very little of
               | designers, programmers, etc. Lots of potential and
               | extrapolation, sure. but hasn't happened. What has
               | actually been produced by AI has been panned as not quite
               | ripe yet.
               | 
               | Same with robotics. Lots of potential, but hasn't
               | happened yet. If you read the description, Sora, is based
               | out of trying to simulate the physical world to solve
               | physics based problems. Something that would be perfect
               | for the next leap in robotics.
        
               | theultdev wrote:
               | I use to pay designers for artwork, now I just use AI.
               | 
               | There's no physical task that robots have replaced humans
               | for me.
               | 
               | Hell, even the roomba sucks (pun intended) and my wife
               | has to pick up the slack.
        
               | nogridbag wrote:
               | Haven't you seen Migo Robotics? :)
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCKN8k-OFG8
        
             | prisenco wrote:
             | Plumbers keep winning.
        
               | Xirgil wrote:
               | What happens when anyone can put on their AR headset and
               | have AI diagnose and walk them through exactly how to fix
               | their plumbing problems?
        
               | prisenco wrote:
               | What happens when their AR headset gets wet?
               | 
               | Less glibly, no matter how good you are at following
               | instructions, tearing out a wall filled with water than
               | can destroy your home, fiberglass insulation that can
               | damage your lungs and electrical wiring that can kill you
               | will never be something I'd recommend a layman do. No
               | matter how good the ai tutorials are.
        
               | Vetch wrote:
               | Don't take tacit knowledge for granted.
        
             | throwup238 wrote:
             | This is the beginning of the end for many of them too. Look
             | at the opening line of the page:
             | 
             |  _> We're teaching AI to understand and simulate the
             | physical world in motion, with the goal of training models
             | that help people solve problems that require real-world
             | interaction._
             | 
             | Text-to-video is just the flashy demo that everyone can
             | understand after exposure to text-to-image. Once the model
             | can "simulate the physical world in motion" it's only a few
             | steps away from generic robotic control software that can
             | automate a ton of processes that were impossible before.
             | 
             | Humans still have the benefit of dexterity and precise
             | muscle control but in the vast majority of cases robots can
             | overcome those limitations with better control software and
             | specialized robotic end effectors. This won't soon replace
             | someone crawling under a house or welding in awkward
             | positions, but it could for example replace someone who
             | flips burgers or does manual labwork.
             | 
             | This could eliminate the limiting factor for automating
             | many manual processes. ( _ruh-roh_ )
        
             | karmasimida wrote:
             | Think about it. Sora demonstrate AI can understand real
             | world physics to a scary degree.
             | 
             | If you use Sora like models to imagine what actions needed
             | to be taken, then realize it, well, the only thing left is
             | to create an arm/fingers that can took action, then you are
             | done.
        
           | sho_hn wrote:
           | Just like it's far more likely for AI to replace middle-
           | management and stream instructions to meat-bots than replace
           | menial labor.
        
             | mwigdahl wrote:
             | Sounds disturbingly like "Manna"
             | (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1)
        
           | throwup238 wrote:
           | I'm sorry but as a large language model I must insist that
           | you get back in the kitchen and make me a burger.
        
           | CuriouslyC wrote:
           | It's bimodal. AI can automate a lot of low level knowledge
           | work, but as wide and deep as its knowledge is, it is also
           | incredibly superficial when it comes to logic and creativity.
           | What it's going to do is hollow out the middle class, as
           | creative people who know how to wield AI will become wealthy
           | while the majority of white collar workers are forced into
           | trades.
        
             | nopinsight wrote:
             | A major follow up to GPT-4 later this year is rumored to be
             | (far) superior at logical reasoning than GPT-4. What's
             | likely to happen if that becomes real?
        
               | CuriouslyC wrote:
               | That might let it encroach more into some fields like law
               | where it's almost good enough already. Shitty time to be
               | a junior lawyer, firms are going to hire and promote
               | people not for their legal skills but for their ability
               | to manage/attract clients.
               | 
               | In general though, I don't think the extra reasoning
               | ability is going to enable it to displace that much
               | farther than it already will, GPT lives in a box and
               | responds to prompts. When it's connected to multiple
               | layers of real-time sensor data and self-directing,
               | that'll be another story.
        
               | nopinsight wrote:
               | From last week: OpenAI shifts AI battleground to software
               | that operates devices and automates tasks
               | 
               | https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-shifts-ai-
               | bat...
               | 
               | There were independent efforts to create AI agents since
               | last year as well. AutoGPT and BabyAGI iirc. They didn't
               | go far probably because the LLM used was not good enough
               | for that.
        
           | dilap wrote:
           | Maybe we'll see a resurgence in live theater.
        
           | dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
           | Somehow, according to that logic, and in general the logic of
           | all AI danger hysteria, humans have no agency in determining
           | what the limits of what AI is fed and of its use and abuse.
        
             | diputsmonro wrote:
             | _Some_ humans do - the investors and executives in AI tech
             | companies (and the legislators who theoretically could
             | regulate them) , who all stand to make a lot of money from
             | every one of the  "AI danger hysteria" scenarios, and are
             | therefore highly motivated to bring them to fruition.
             | 
             | The rest of us have no choice. Despite millions of artists,
             | animators, etc. all being resoundly opposed to AI art, the
             | models that infringe their work are still allowed to exist,
             | and it seems they're fighting a losing battle.
             | 
             | A lot of people are being "hysterical" because a lot of
             | people _don 't_ have a choice.
             | 
             | To be clear, the problem of these scenarios is tightly
             | intertwined with the problem of unfettered capitalism and
             | wealth inequality in general. Food and shelter require
             | money, and we get money by working a job. If millions of
             | jobs disappear overnight, then of course millions of people
             | are going to be distressed over no longer having ready
             | access to food and shelter.
             | 
             | The idea of "just getting another job" doesn't scale to the
             | destruction of entire industries employing tens of millions
             | of people. This is how depressions are made.
             | 
             | The idea of "the depression will end someday" is not only
             | not necessarily true as wealth inequality skyrockets, but
             | is also cold comfort to the people who will lose their
             | houses and for some, lives, due to the disruption.
             | 
             | A different economic system could perhaps allow us to
             | appreciate these technological advances without worrying
             | about them displacing our ability to live. But the American
             | political system consistently and firmly rejects any ideas
             | not rooted in social darwinist capitalism.
             | 
             | For your sake, I hope your resume is _very_ impressive.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | If millions of jobs disappear overnight it means AI is
               | amazingly good, which means people will also have AI
               | empowerment on a whole new level as open source trails
               | companies by 1-2 years. Everyone will just order their AI
               | "take care of my needs", maybe work along with it. You
               | got to agree that we already have some amazing open
               | models and they are only getting better - that
               | empowerment will remain with us in times of need.
               | 
               | "Companies employing people" will be replaced by "people
               | employing AI". Open models are free, small, fast,
               | trainable and easy to use. They capture 90% of the value
               | at 10% the cost, and are private.
        
               | diputsmonro wrote:
               | "Companies employing people" getting replaced by
               | _anything_ is pretty dangerous in an economic system
               | where employment is synonymous with having food and
               | shelter. It won 't matter that AI could help me keep a
               | to-do list or generate pretty videos if I don't have a
               | job or income.
               | 
               | What we're looking at is a massive decrease in the
               | relative economic value of the average human's work. If
               | the economic value of a hundred people is less than what
               | the company can produce with a single human operator
               | running AI models, then those 100 people are economically
               | worthless, and don't get to eat.
               | 
               | We drastically need to tax the usage of AI models on the
               | huge windfall they're about to create for their
               | operators, and use that to fund universal basic income
               | for those displaced. Generally speaking, as automation
               | and wealth disparity skyrocket, UBI will be required to
               | maintain any semblance of the society we currently have.
               | I am incredibly pessimistic about the chances of that
               | happening in any real way though.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | We don't have any control because we don't trust each
             | other. Prisoner's dilemma
        
           | ajmurmann wrote:
           | Is it automating the creative part of the work or the
           | mechanical part of creative work?
        
             | whstl wrote:
             | It's automating a big chunk of the money-making part of
             | creative work.
        
             | Hoasi wrote:
             | It's automating some of the craftsmanship part, which is
             | substantial, but in a sense, it also threatens the creative
             | part.
             | 
             | It's already very tempting for large entertainment
             | businesses to create lazy remakes as it involves less risk.
             | Automating creative jobs will create a shift at the
             | production level but also on the receiving end: the public.
        
           | zemo wrote:
           | that would never happen because someone owns the robots and
           | rich people can afford more robots than poor people and rich
           | people aren't rich people if poor people aren't poor
        
           | croes wrote:
           | The problem, as long as people need money to live, every work
           | is necessary and every automation is a threat.
        
           | 93po wrote:
           | Robotics is going to catch up extremely fast
        
             | danavar wrote:
             | I would agree. While we are seeing all this creative work
             | get automated by AI, how big of an impact would that really
             | have on the economy?
             | 
             | Fully-functional autonomous driving will have a much larger
             | economic impact - and that's just the first area where
             | autonomous robots will come into our lives.
        
           | nerdix wrote:
           | I'm kind of excited to see how scifi authors will tackle the
           | generative AI revolution in their novels.
           | 
           | As of now, the models still need large amounts of human
           | produced creative works for training. So you can imagine a
           | story set in a world where large swathes of humanity are
           | regulated to being basically gig workers for some quadrillion
           | dollar AI megacorp where they sit around and wait to be
           | prompted by the AI. "Draw a purple cat with pink stripes and
           | a top hat" and then millions of freelance artists around the
           | world start drawing a stupid picture of a cat because the
           | model determined that it had insufficient training data to
           | produce high quality results for the given prompt. And that's
           | how everyone lives their lives....just working to feed the
           | model but everything consumed is generated by the model. It's
           | rather dystopian.
        
             | alex_suzuki wrote:
             | I would read that! But hopefully it won't be written by
             | ChatGPT.
        
             | dsign wrote:
             | I would say it's very profitable in terms of ideas...if you
             | put the work. The problem is that most main-market sci-fi
             | is not about ideas, but about cool special effects and good
             | vs bad guys.
        
               | dovin wrote:
               | Sure, 90% of everything is crap.
        
             | Hoasi wrote:
             | > As of now, the models still need large amounts of human
             | produced creative works for training.
             | 
             | That will likely always be the case. Even 100% synthetic
             | data has to come from somewhere. Great synopsis! Working
             | for hire to feed a machine that regurgitates variations of
             | the missing data sounds dystopian. But here we are, almost
             | there.
        
               | ItsMattyG wrote:
               | Eventually models will likely get their creativity by:
               | 
               | 1. Interacting with the randomness of the world
               | 
               | and
               | 
               | 2. Thinking a lot, going in loops and thought loops and
               | seeing what they discover.
               | 
               | I don't expect them to need humans forever.
        
               | Hoasi wrote:
               | Agreed, by some definitions, specifically associating
               | unrelated things, models are already creative.
               | 
               | Hallucinations are highly creative as well. But unless
               | the technology changes, large language models will need
               | human-made training substrate data for a long time to
               | operate.
        
             | mortenjorck wrote:
             | I have a novel I've been working on intermittently since
             | the late 2000s, the central conflict of which grew to be
             | about labor in an era of its devaluation. The big reveal
             | was always going to be the opposite of Gibson's Mona Lisa
             | Overdrive, that rather than something human-like turning
             | out to be AI, society's AI infrastructure turns out to
             | depend on mostly human "compute" (harvested in a
             | surreptitious way I thought was clever).
             | 
             | I've been trying to figure out how to retool the story to
             | fit a timeline where ubiquitous AI that can write poems and
             | paint pictures predates ubiquitous self-driving cars.
        
             | cubefox wrote:
             | It's ironic that you nonetheless think "scifi authors" will
             | be writing those novels, not language models.
        
           | Der_Einzige wrote:
           | This was known for a long time:
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
        
           | dingnuts wrote:
           | if it was actually AI, instead of a stochastic parrot, we
           | could ask it to design robots that could do the manual labor
           | that we still have to do, because we haven't been able to
           | design robots to do the manual labor.
           | 
           | Unfortunately, LLMs aren't intelligent in any way, so you
           | cannot ask them to synthesize any kind of second-order
           | knowledge.
           | 
           | This is why they won't take away the creative work, either.
           | They are fundamentally incapable of creating anything new.
        
           | golol wrote:
           | Come on, don't you see that the capability to understand the
           | physical world that sora demonstrates is exactly what we need
           | to develop those household robots? All these genAI products
           | are just toys because they are technology demonstrators.
           | They're all steps in the way to AGI and androids.
        
           | Hoasi wrote:
           | > AI is automating the creative, intellectual work and
           | leaving the rest to us.
           | 
           | Indeed, there is a risk it completely devalues creative jobs.
           | That's ironic. Even if you can still use AI creatively, it
           | removes the pleasure of creating. Prompting feels like
           | filling Excel sheets while also feeding a pachinko machine.
        
           | neilk wrote:
           | https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2
        
           | bsza wrote:
           | Machines have replaced a lot of blue-collar jobs alright.
           | It's just that most of it happened during the Industrial
           | Revolution, so we aren't even aware of all the shitty (and
           | not-shitty-but-obsolete-nonetheless) jobs that used to exist.
        
         | palmfacehn wrote:
         | Similar things were said about Internet piracy in decades past.
        
         | Geep5 wrote:
         | Your argument is used time and time again with technology's
         | progress.
        
           | hk__2 wrote:
           | That doesn't make it invalid. It's a tough question, there's
           | no easy answer.
        
           | tomtheelder wrote:
           | I really don't think that's true. Essentially the argument is
           | that these models are more or less just outputting the work
           | of others. Work already done- not theoretical future work,
           | which is what people usually criticize new technologies for.
           | 
           | The question here is really about whether it's sufficiently
           | transformative, or whether that's even the right standard to
           | be applied to generated media.
        
           | chasing wrote:
           | Yup! Technology is powerful. It impacts people's lives.
           | 
           | I love tech, but if you take the stance that it's okay to
           | hurt people for the sake of technical progress, you get into
           | some very dark and terrible places...
        
             | CooCooCaCha wrote:
             | It doesn't help that the tech industry is trying to make it
             | seem black and white. Like you're either endlessly
             | optimistic and let tech run rampant or you're a depressing
             | doomer pessimist. We should reject this framing whenever
             | possible.
        
             | hackerlight wrote:
             | > it's okay to hurt people for the sake of technical
             | progress
             | 
             | That's a strawman. The real view is that protecting jobs
             | that are made extinct by technology and automation is
             | historically a bad idea because it leads to stagnation and
             | poverty. It's better to let people lose their jobs, and for
             | those people to find other jobs, while supporting them with
             | a social safety net while they make the transition. Painful
             | for them but unfortunately very necessary for a prosperous
             | society.
        
               | throwanem wrote:
               | > for those people to find other jobs, while supporting
               | them with a social safety net while they make the
               | transition
               | 
               | This is the part that no one is expecting to see actually
               | happen, though. Without that addressed, your argument is
               | sound but footless.
        
               | Eisenstein wrote:
               | Instead of using this outrage and energy to push a
               | political will to grant something that benefits everyone
               | forever, we should use it to grant something that helps
               | prop up a few people in dying industries so that they can
               | stifle innovation which would lead to a creative
               | revolution?
               | 
               | What no one is asking is: 'it this makes it easy for
               | anyone to be an artist, a director, a musician... what
               | are we going to get, and will it be worse than what we
               | have now?
        
               | throwanem wrote:
               | > What no one is asking is: 'it this makes it easy for
               | anyone to be an artist, a director, a musician... what
               | are we going to get, and will it be worse than what we
               | have now?
               | 
               |  _Everyone_ is asking this.
               | 
               | But that's also not the only question. The one you're
               | ignoring here is: If these tools enable one artist to do
               | the work of a hundred, what happens to the other 99?
               | 
               | AI boosters have as yet offered no satisfactory answer
               | for this question. Given the intimate involvement some of
               | them have with politics at the national and global level,
               | this absence constitutes reasonable grounds for suspicion
               | that no answer is intended or forthcoming, and that
               | suspicion is what's asking here to be addressed.
        
               | Eisenstein wrote:
               | > If these tools enable one artist to do the work of a
               | hundred, what happens to the other 99?
               | 
               | Not really -- as people have gotten more efficient at
               | their jobs, we tend to just produce more/better things,
               | not impoverish a bunch of people. If one person can day
               | (8 hours) making a shoe by hand, and one person can make
               | a shoe in an hour using a shoe making machine, then we
               | don't have one less shoe maker, we have two people making
               | 16 shoes a day. As an effect, shoes are now much cheaper,
               | so they aren't only worn by rich people. If the one-shoe-
               | per-day maker refuses to use a shoe making machine, he or
               | she can upsell their 'hand crafted' shoes to rich people
               | who want to distinguish themselves.
               | 
               | Believe me, I am not a 'free market fixes everything'
               | person, at all, but in these cases, that is how it has
               | worked since the industrial revolution. This is not a new
               | process (automation making a task much more
               | accessible/efficient) and this is not a new complaint
               | (what happens to the people who made a living doing
               | task).
               | 
               | Change is scary -- and everyone has the right to be
               | afraid of an uncertain future, but I can't recall an
               | instance of the regressive approach actually working to
               | allay the fears of those who imposed it. Yet, we all see
               | huge reminders of how our lives have been improved by
               | making hard things easier and accessible to more people.
        
               | throwanem wrote:
               | The argument as presented so omits even the possibility
               | of harm being done anyone in this process as to seem as
               | if it seeks to foreclose the thought at root.
               | 
               | It would not surprise me if anyone called this
               | pollyannaish, or even Panglossian.
        
               | diputsmonro wrote:
               | The social safety net component of your idea is both
               | extremely important and not at all likely in the modern
               | ultra-capitalist, "even healthcare is socialist
               | extremism" political atmosphere.
               | 
               |  _Maybe_ mass unemployment will create a sea change in
               | that mentality, but most of the people who 's opinions
               | need to be changed will probably just laugh at "the
               | elites" getting screwed over.
        
               | cabalamat wrote:
               | It's a shame Andrew Yang isn't running this year, as his
               | 2020 platform of UBI because of AI is looking very
               | prescient.
        
             | sekai wrote:
             | > okay to hurt people for the sake of technical progress,
             | you get into some very dark and terrible places
             | 
             | Hurt is a very subjective word in this context, how many
             | people do you think the invention of the steam engine hurt?
             | Or the electricity?
        
               | joks wrote:
               | I think dismantling creative fields like this is
               | completely different from automating manual labor in a
               | way that makes humanity more prosperous. I don't see what
               | the upside is of this -- it's not making creative work
               | better, it's devaluing creative work and disenfranchising
               | creatives.
        
               | stale2002 wrote:
               | > I don't see what the upside is of this
               | 
               | The upside is that creative works are completely
               | democratized.
               | 
               | Now, anyone, with very little effort is fully empowered
               | to create creative works on their own and there is no
               | barrier to entry.
               | 
               | Yes, empowerment and democratization harms people who's
               | livelyhood depends on disenfranchisement.
        
           | paxys wrote:
           | Is it? What is another example of a technological leap that
           | made a certain class of workers redundant while also
           | continually relying on the output of these same workers to be
           | feasible in the first place?
           | 
           | The current batch of LLMs is in the same class of
           | technological revolutions as Napster and The Pirate Bay.
           | Immensely impactful, sure, but mostly because of theft of
           | value from elsewhere.
        
             | hansonkd wrote:
             | Isn't the Luddite movement an example?
             | 
             | The factories that replaced the artisans were only made
             | possible by the work of the artisans forging the way.
        
               | lewhoo wrote:
               | I don't think so. The main idea is that for AI to
               | continue to develop new data is needed. Skills of the
               | Luddites were no longer needed.
        
           | timdiggerm wrote:
           | Okay? That could just as easily mean this argument has been
           | right all along.
        
           | s__s wrote:
           | The argument should be brought up every single time. Each
           | major technological jump is a unique event completely
           | different from the last.
           | 
           | AI is nothing like anything we've seen, and is truly unique
           | in the dangers it poses to the world.
        
         | mring33621 wrote:
         | "Can't be allowed"
        
         | CuriouslyC wrote:
         | Things that can be easily reproduced already have little value,
         | the people who produce those things have adapted to focus on
         | brand, and that's just how it's going to be from now own.
        
           | sho_hn wrote:
           | Reminds me of an interview with a Korean pop music producer I
           | watched 15 years ago.
           | 
           | South Korea had a high % of broadband penetration earlier
           | than many Western countries, and as a result physical CD
           | sales crashed very hard, and very quickly. So he asked
           | himself, what's the most analog good I could sell? It's
           | people. And went the pop idol / personality marketing route
           | with great and lasting success.
        
           | chasing wrote:
           | > Things that can be easily reproduced already have little
           | value...
           | 
           | Nonsense. Also, my point is that it shouldn't be up to tech
           | companies to unilaterally decide what has value.
        
             | nicksrose7224 wrote:
             | I dont think they're saying its up to tech companies to
             | decide what has value, more that the development of new
             | technology itself ends up deciding for the rest of the
             | world how things are valued.
             | 
             | It's been this way for 10,000 years since the invention of
             | the wheel. New inventions change how things are valued by
             | making it easier for people do more work with less time.
        
             | stale2002 wrote:
             | It's not up to them.
             | 
             | Instead it is up to the consumers.
             | 
             | If consumers choose to give money to AI company, and not to
             | artists, then in the eyes of the consumer those artists do
             | not have value.
        
         | Mockapapella wrote:
         | The creators who create media can also use these tools to
         | create more media faster, as can novices. It's not like OpenAI
         | literally eats the media, never to be shared with the world
         | again.
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | Oh I see, they're not eating the media, just extorting the
           | creators into paying OpenAI in perpetuity to use the tool
           | derived from their own work, or face becoming uncompetitive
           | with their peers who do use it. What if landlords, but for
           | media creation, and they don't even have to pay for the land
           | in the first place. That's fine then.
        
             | Mockapapella wrote:
             | > pay a subscription to OpenAI in perpetuity in order to
             | remain competitive with their peers
             | 
             | This is how technology works in general and should not be
             | vilified. Someone comes up with a better way to do things
             | (in this case bringing creative ideas to life) and charges
             | a premium on top of that for their efforts. If the current
             | wave of creators doesn't like it, then they should instead
             | make something people want more than what their competition
             | has to offer.
             | 
             | Either way, this is why local open source models are
             | critical, so that everyone can benefit without needing to
             | pay any single party.
        
               | jsheard wrote:
               | If a company were founded tomorrow which allowed you to
               | stream unlicensed TV shows and movies for a monthly
               | subscription, undercutting Netflix and Amazons licensed
               | streams, that wouldn't be described as "a better way to
               | do things" just because their customers prefer it for
               | being cheaper and easier because all the content is in
               | one place. The difference between that and what OpenAI is
               | doing is just degrees of abstraction, either way they're
               | deriving value from others work without compensating
               | them, and actively undermining the ongoing creation of
               | the work they're appropriating, while simultaneously
               | relying on the ongoing creation of that work to keep
               | feeding their machine.
               | 
               | IP law has yet to decide whether my interpretation of the
               | situation is correct in the legal sense, but I find it
               | impossible to see "ChatGPT absorbs the work of
               | writers/journalists and sells a superficially reworded
               | version without attribution or compensation" as anything
               | but theft obfuscated behind lots of fancy math. It's only
               | going to get worse if LLMs end up displacing traditional
               | search engines, so one day you'll publish an article and
               | get exactly one impression from GPTBot which then turns
               | around and figuratively copies your homework.
        
               | diputsmonro wrote:
               | Forgive me for thinking that it may be difficult for
               | independent artists to compete against the trillion-
               | dollar groundbreaking plagiarism machine that is actively
               | plagiarizing their work faster than they can produce
               | original work, without consequence, and suffocating them
               | under a deluge of generated works.
               | 
               | This is an extremely different difference of scale, which
               | does constitute a meaningful difference from prior
               | technologies.
        
               | Mtinie wrote:
               | It's difficult for independent artists to live as
               | independent artists today, even without the specter of a
               | "trillion-dollar groundbreaking plagiarism machine"[0].
               | So far, we've still been producing original work,
               | primarily because it's what we do even when we're not
               | making money from it. It's a blessing and a curse.
               | 
               | This is not to dismiss the concern. I simply wanted to
               | state that artists will find ways to keep moving the
               | creative bar forward.
               | 
               | [0] I really like this turn of phrase, thank you for
               | sharing it.
        
             | brigadier132 wrote:
             | > extorting
             | 
             | That's not what extortion is. Stop abusing language.
        
           | overthehorizon wrote:
           | I create media for a living, painstakingly creating stuff
           | from scratch in 3D. This tool will not help me, it will help
           | clients avoid ever having to contract me. The main
           | beneficiaries of this are holders of capital
        
             | notimpotent wrote:
             | But doesn't this technology give you the same edge?
             | 
             | You can deliver more content, faster, cheaper.
        
             | MrNeon wrote:
             | This issue here is thinking you, holding the knowledge to
             | 3D model, are not also a holder of capital. Capital isn't
             | just money.
        
         | supriyo-biswas wrote:
         | People on HN like to split hairs and make muddled
         | juxtapositions about human rights and AI model capabilities.
         | But this is something that people and governments around the
         | world would have to reckon with very quickly, since the rate at
         | which generative AI technology is advancing, there could be
         | hundreds of millions of people who're unemployed and have no
         | way to find work.
         | 
         | The quickest way to address this would be an extremely high tax
         | rate on any generative AI model, say 500%, while the government
         | figures out what's the best way to sustain an economy (such as
         | UBI) with a diminishing set of consumers as more people are
         | pushed towards unemployment.
        
           | pstorm wrote:
           | 500%? So if the generative AI model created something worth
           | $1m, you tax it $5m? How do you tax a technology anyways?
        
             | cabalamat wrote:
             | I suspect what was meant is something like 500% VAT, where
             | if a generative AI charges a customer $6, then $5 goes to
             | the taxman and $1 to the AI company.
        
           | stale2002 wrote:
           | I can run these models on my home PC.
           | 
           | How are you going to stop me from doing that?
           | 
           | Even the free and open source stuff will destroy industries
           | and you can't confiscate everyone's consumer gamer PCs.
           | 
           | Taxing the big guys doesn't save creative industries. It's a
           | lost cause.
        
             | ndjshe3838 wrote:
             | Exactly, you can't put it back in the box
             | 
             | The only thing I can imagine is like limiting people's
             | compute power
             | 
             | But even then they'd just go do it in another country or
             | use an online service based in another country
        
         | m_ke wrote:
         | There will just be 1000x more content, with most of it hyper
         | personalized and consumed by individual users instead of by
         | masses of people.
        
         | dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
         | I think there is 100% chance it will be regulated to address
         | some of the points you raised. Copyright being essentially
         | neutered won't work.
        
         | niam wrote:
         | I see the validity of this concern in the short term, but long
         | term I feel like this is a bit doomsday. I don't want anyone's
         | livelihood to get shafted, but realistically I see this as
         | lowering the barrier to creating videos / proofs of concept--
         | which is a good thing (with a lot of caveats and asterisks).
        
         | moralestapia wrote:
         | >Yeah, you just can't let all media, all the cost and hard work
         | of millions of photographers, animators, filmmakers, etc be
         | completely consumed and devalued by one company just because
         | it's a very cool technical trick.
         | 
         | Oh man, how I miss it when ice was hauled from the Arctic in
         | boats.
        
           | chasing wrote:
           | You recognize the difference, right? Modern freezers don't
           | rely on people shipping ice from the Arctic. Generative AI
           | does rely on people continuing to create media.
        
             | moralestapia wrote:
             | It doesn't anymore. It sucks, but that's what it is.
        
         | fardinahsan146 wrote:
         | Sorry no. If there was even the remotest possibility that
         | everyone could be brought to the table, none of these would
         | even exist.
         | 
         | Training a massive model like this is a risk, and no one is
         | going to take that risk without some reward. You can complain
         | OpenAI is going to too much of the value, but its value that
         | would have otherwise never existed. It's value.
        
         | airstrike wrote:
         | > Yeah, you just can't let
         | 
         | Who's "you"?
        
           | VoodooJuJu wrote:
           | The middle class.
           | 
           | Automate away the lower classes all you want, just don't
           | touch the white collar class, that's a heckin' nono.
        
         | powera wrote:
         | I am getting sick of these "people can't be allowed to make
         | their own nice things easily, because of a pugnacious (and very
         | online) interest group that wants to keep getting money" takes.
        
         | mythz wrote:
         | Typical argument against technological progress "We should ban
         | technology to stop it doing what humans can do in a fraction of
         | time and resources".
         | 
         | Can see this create an explosion of new Content from aspiring
         | Film, Story tellers and cut scenes from Game creators that
         | previously never would have the budget or capabilities to be
         | able to see their ideas through to creation.
        
           | wnc3141 wrote:
           | If we had a safety net where career progression and
           | time/money invested in training was unnecessary to sustain
           | life, then maybe. Until then it feels like a bit of allowing
           | a few people to plunder and own the collective output of
           | millions.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | This moment seems like trade guilds revolting against free
             | craftsmen. What AI is essentially doing is learning skills
             | from people according to their works and then helping
             | everyone according to their needs. It's more rad than open
             | source.
             | 
             | This is not plunder, it is empowerment. Blocking generative
             | AI would be a huge power grab for copyright owners. They
             | want to claim ideas and styles, and all their possible
             | combinations.
             | 
             | Gen AI need only ensure it never reproduces a copyrighted
             | work verbatim. Culture doesn't work if we stop ideas from
             | moving freely.
        
               | karpour wrote:
               | Artists should be able to choose whether their work gets
               | used to train machine learning algorithms.
        
             | ls612 wrote:
             | "Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made
             | a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first
             | place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad
             | move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans."
        
             | educaysean wrote:
             | We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Yes, I want
             | artists and other creators to be compensated fairly for any
             | work that they contribute into training datasets, but
             | outside of that there is no moral responsibility AI
             | creators should feel towards those whose potential careers
             | would be impacted.
        
               | chasing wrote:
               | > ...there is no moral responsibility AI creators should
               | feel...
               | 
               | Yeah, this is why "AI creators" shouldn't be the ones
               | unilaterally deciding how this all plays out.
        
               | stale2002 wrote:
               | They aren't. Every person is free to use AI or not.
               | 
               | Go blame your fellow consumers if you don't like the fact
               | that they prefer AI.
               | 
               | These are choices that everyone makes. AI companies alone
               | aren't forcing everyone to use their cool new tools.
               | Instead, thats a decision that 10s of millions of people
               | are making every day.
        
         | thomastjeffery wrote:
         | They shouldn't get _exclusive_ rights to ignore IP law.
         | Instead, we should _all_ get that right.
         | 
         | Copyright should have ended decades ago. It has accomplished
         | nothing but harm.
        
         | throw4847285 wrote:
         | This has been shared before, but:
         | https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FadzEwVWAAYEyRW?format=jpg&name=...
        
         | wnc3141 wrote:
         | Research on creativity and competition points to this.
         | Essentially, creativity occurs when there is some expectancy of
         | increasing competitiveness. However when the expectancy of
         | value capture from your effort becomes less clear, or
         | diminished, creativity stops altogether.
         | 
         | (as pointed out in the "Freakonomics" episode highlighting this
         | reaserch)
         | 
         | https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/102/3/583/96779...
         | 
         | https://freakonomics.com/podcast/can-a-i-take-a-joke/
        
         | jsemrau wrote:
         | Interestingly a lot of movies flopped in 2023 not because of
         | bad visuals, but because their writing was bad. Hence, I
         | believe the demise of the movie industry is overstated. I can
         | see completely new forms of entertainment coming out of this.
         | Probably Youtube will be the biggest winner as the social
         | network with the highest monetization and reach.
        
         | wewtyflakes wrote:
         | Does it not just shift where we (as people) perceive value? If
         | the cost of content drops to effectively zero, it seems
         | reasonable that we would not value it so highly. If so, it does
         | not mean that people do not value anything, but it may mean we
         | start associating value with new or different things. While
         | this may disrupt industries, I do not think we have an ethical
         | or legal duty to those industries to remain profitable.
        
           | bbor wrote:
           | GREAT response imo, I'll try to remember this concise
           | phrasing. I think this highlights that people aren't worried
           | so much about changes coming to them as consumers, and are
           | much more worried about what "industries no longer remaining
           | profitable" means for them as a laborer.
           | 
           | Means for us :(
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | > just because it's a very cool technical trick
         | 
         | That's one big trick, almost magical.
        
         | malermeister wrote:
         | The limitation is with capitalism, not with the technology.
         | It's time we move on to post-scarcity communism, Star Trek
         | style.
        
         | bbor wrote:
         | capture the value of every piece of media ever created
         | 
         | In what way does "I have a computer that can make movies" mean
         | "I have captured the value of every piece of media ever
         | created?" What do you mean by "value"? In my biased view, this
         | amazing new technology couldn't possibly be a better time to
         | fix our insane notions of property, intellectual or otherwise
        
         | ComplexSystems wrote:
         | I don't disagree with your basic sentiment, but it's worth
         | pointing out that, on some level, the * _entirety of artificial
         | intelligence*_ is not much more than a  "cool technical trick."
        
         | strangescript wrote:
         | Meanwhile, I am going to take my horse and buggy down to the
         | local blacksmith to get some work done...
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | They could pay people to capture it. They could buy out one of
         | the stock video companies. this is not important
        
         | Krasnol wrote:
         | Never ever will there be everyone at the table. This is not how
         | the Internet works. It is not how the world and humanity work.
         | If OpenAI doesn't do it, the next big player will. China will.
         | Maybe it'll soon not even need China because it'll be so easy
         | to deploy.
         | 
         | There is no stop now. It's too late for that. Time to think
         | about the full development and how we'll handle that. How we as
         | people will be able to exist next to it. What our purpose in
         | the world is supposed to be. What the purpose of "value" is.
         | What the purpose of "economy" or "the market" is.
         | 
         | Exiting times.
        
         | wilg wrote:
         | It doesn't really matter, because if this is possible then it
         | will not be exclusive to OpenAI for long. It's simply just
         | something that can exist. There will be open source versions of
         | everything lagging 1-2 years behind or something.
        
         | bsza wrote:
         | Do you feel the same about the hard work of knocker-uppers
         | having been devalued by the invention of the alarm clock? Or is
         | it just the (relatively) highly paid intellectual workers that
         | "cannot be allowed" to be replaced with machines?
        
         | bottlepalm wrote:
         | You can't regulate it because it will just be outsourced to
         | another country.
         | 
         | Nope, we are headed towards deflation. Families that need only
         | a single worker to support everyone, and even support extended
         | family, and less time working overall.
        
         | resolutebat wrote:
         | It's worth remembering that "intellectual property" is an
         | entirely artificial and fairly recent construct. Humanity did
         | fine for thousands of years without it, and I'm not going to
         | shed too many years if OpenAI blows it up.
         | 
         | https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
         | 
         | https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
        
         | vunderba wrote:
         | Are you against records? Because the technology to record songs
         | and play them back at your leisure killed an entire industry of
         | live performers / instrumentalists?
         | 
         | The call for live music _drastically shrank_ when it became
         | trivial for any business or residence to play music on command.
         | 
         | Are you against automatic language translation? I can
         | positively guarantee that the training data that they used to
         | be able to create significantly better translation models was
         | not authorized for that purpose.
         | 
         | The entire translator industry has been steadily shrinking ever
         | since the invention of automatic language translation.
         | 
         | Etc etc etc.
         | 
         | There's obviously two aspects of this complex social issue
         | right now.
         | 
         | 1. Whether or not the usage of publicly available media as
         | training data is legal/ethical.
         | 
         | 2. Whether or not the output of these types of generative
         | systems ( _even if_ they 're trained on "ethical" training
         | data) which may result in the displacement of many jobs is
         | legal/ethical.
         | 
         | I'm neither for nor against AI (LLM, diffusion, video, etc),
         | but if you are going to take a stance, then you have to be
         | consistent in your view.
         | 
         | You don't get to cherry pick - I don't want to see you using
         | chatGPT, copilot, stable diffusion, DALL-E, midjourney, sora,
         | etc.
        
           | chasing wrote:
           | It's weird that a call for generative AI to be more equitable
           | towards the people whose creative work powers it is being
           | interpreted as somehow being against tech, against AI, or
           | that I think technological advancement should never make jobs
           | obsolete.
        
       | dietmtnview wrote:
       | oh man, we're going to be in The Running Man really quick.
        
       | hansonkd wrote:
       | Countdown to when studios licensing this for "unlimited" episodes
       | of your favorite series.
       | 
       | There was Seinfeld "Nothing, Forever" AI parody, but once the
       | models improve enough and are cheap enough to deploy, studios
       | will license their content for real and just have endless
       | seasons.
       | 
       | Or even custom episodes. Imagine if every episode of a TV show
       | was unique to the viewer.
        
         | htrp wrote:
         | Speedrunning Black Mirror
        
         | mbil wrote:
         | I imagine it's not long before we see hyper-targeted
         | commercials where the actors look like us, live in our city,
         | etc.
        
           | hansonkd wrote:
           | Custom AI commercials would be very interesting. Instead of
           | seeing strangers enjoying the benefits of the product, it
           | shows you. A car commercial would show you driving, etc.
           | 
           | Commercials and TV episodes could have a basic "story arc"
           | and then completely customized to the viewer.
           | 
           | Think about the simpson's or something. Imagine that the
           | story of the episodes were kept, but you could swap in the
           | characters and locations. So for instance if you lived in
           | Nashville TN, all the simpson's episodes could be generated
           | to show the settings as Nashville instead of Springfield.
           | 
           | Then you could have the AI switch out the characters to be
           | people you want. Maybe you want to replace Lisa with an AI
           | Simpsons version of you. Mayor Quimby with Nashville's actual
           | mayor, etc.
        
             | internetter wrote:
             | Oh lord no thank you
        
             | tavavex wrote:
             | > Custom AI commercials would be very interesting. Instead
             | of seeing strangers enjoying the benefits of the product,
             | it shows you. A car commercial would show you driving, etc.
             | 
             | I think it'd kind of defeat the point - I can't imagine a
             | person that'd want their likenesses to be used to market to
             | them. It'd be a disaster. Setting swaps are more realistic,
             | though at the point where things get good enough for that
             | to be possible, we may just see completely on-demand newly
             | generated media instead of modifying what already exists.
        
             | altruios wrote:
             | If I saw myself onscreen telling myself to buy a product
             | I've never seen or used: I would not buy that product or
             | use that service. It feels violating to have your image
             | used against your best interests (of not being manipulated
             | to be capitalism's bitch) like that.
             | 
             | That is a hell-scape (to me).
             | 
             | Inserting yourself into shows... that's feels different,
             | but my gut tells me advertisers will corrupt that idea
             | quickly. Product placement...
        
           | doabell wrote:
           | Wow, I would imagine this being very effective in election
           | campaigns (for better or for worse, probably for worse).
        
           | ex3ndr wrote:
           | Nothing stopped doing so before AI - just slam a photo of
           | your friends to the ad.
        
           | CSMastermind wrote:
           | There was some monitoring company that used to have creepy
           | web ads that would show the actual company you worked at in
           | the ads.
           | 
           | If anything it was a turn off and I was confused how they
           | knew where I worked.
        
             | easton wrote:
             | They were probably using the ASN for your IP, and your
             | company had its own.
             | 
             | I used to get ones that said "Comcast user you are
             | insecure" and stuff.
        
         | Zelphyr wrote:
         | I wonder if there is anything in the recent Hollywood strikes
         | that will prevent the studios from dong that?
        
           | nielsbot wrote:
           | I think that was one of the areas that SAG-AFTRA lost on.
           | 
           | Majority Report spoke to one of the negotiators and national
           | board member:
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E62k1ZsY1IU
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | One understated aspect of AI Seinfeld is that it took many
         | steps to differentiate it from the actual Seinfeld and create
         | its own identity, such as the 144p visual filter and the random
         | microwave. Those tweaks added to its charm.
         | 
         | If someone tried to do AI Seinfeld again in 2024, many would
         | criticze it for not being realistic enough now that the tools
         | to do so are now available.
        
           | suddenclarity wrote:
           | I assume you would still be able to do that, just better?
           | Like pixel art. Super Mario Bros. 3 look great despite being
           | 36 years old. Contrast this with 3D games for the original
           | PlayStation that have aged poorly.
        
         | ren_engineer wrote:
         | I'm not sure there would be much demand for purely
         | custom/individualized episodes beyond the novelty and maybe for
         | fun with a group of friends. Most of the reason people watch TV
         | or movies is for the shared experience that you can discuss
         | with others. It could definitely drive down production costs
         | though, hopefully HBO uses it to eventually redo Game of
         | Thrones post season 4
        
           | hansonkd wrote:
           | Well there is always your AI girlfriend and AI friend group
           | with the AI generated podcast breaking down the episode. (jk,
           | sort of)
           | 
           | > Most of the reason people watch TV or movies is for the
           | shared experience that you can discuss with others
           | 
           | I wouldn't say that. Most of the reason people watch TV is to
           | kill time.
           | 
           | To be honest, I find my discussions with friends about TV
           | shows on the decline just because of the fact that everyone
           | is watching there own thing. So many shows and people watch
           | them at their own pace. so most of the discussions go like
           | this "Hey have you seen that new Netlix show X?" "No I
           | haven't, maybe I'll check it out". Or "Oh yeah, i saw that a
           | year ago, Its good but I don't remember the details".
           | 
           | Before Streaming when you had a set schedule for TV, it was
           | way easier to discuss things because people were forced to
           | watch programs on a certain day and there was more limited
           | content. This led to "water cooler" conversations about what
           | the previous nights show.
           | 
           | I bet if you graphed (discussions had about tv shows) /
           | (hours watched of tv shows) that graph would trend down.
           | 
           | Think about little kids. My niece watches cocomelon all day
           | long. She doesn't need to discuss it with anybody. She just
           | wants an unlimited stream.
        
             | JKCalhoun wrote:
             | > I wouldn't say that. Most of the reason people watch TV
             | is to kill time.
             | 
             | How annoying to see something amazing and then not be able
             | to find anyone who also experienced it that you can ...
             | what word mean's commiserate but in a positive way?
             | 
             | I'm thinking now about the astronauts that walked on the
             | Moon and had only the few others. I think one of the
             | astronauts bemoaned having gone to this amazing place, like
             | some kind of wild vacation, but not being able ever to
             | return.
        
               | awfulneutral wrote:
               | You can just talk to your AI companion about it. If you
               | involve another human there's always a chance somebody
               | might be slightly bored or inconvenienced, so we want to
               | avoid that.
        
             | nuancebydefault wrote:
             | Indeed. That is why in our family we watch broadcast or
             | timeshifted tv and no netflix. Still it is hard to find
             | other families like that so little tv stuff to talk about
             | at work during lunch.
        
             | jakub_g wrote:
             | Same about music. In good ol' days, one would meet a friend
             | to listen to cool new music together, share CDs with mp3s
             | etc
             | 
             | It's actually really weird. I wanted to buy my niece some
             | CDs for Christmas to discover 90s music, but kids don't
             | listen music from CDs anymore. They don't have devices
             | even. Should I buy her a Spotify gift card and send her
             | links to Spotify via Whatsapp? It's so strange.
        
         | mempko wrote:
         | That would not work because that's now how people work. People
         | watch/play media to connect to others. How can you talk about
         | anything to anyone or have any shared culture when other people
         | will never see what you see?
         | 
         | Movies, books, games, are a collective culture, not an
         | individualist one. I don't know about you, but when I like an
         | experience, I want to share it with others.
        
         | kirill5pol wrote:
         | If this sounds interesting I'd highly recommend this short
         | story by Ken Liu
         | 
         | https://future-sf.com/fiction/1700/
        
         | jpeter wrote:
         | I am thinking of Stargate SG-1 Season 11. And remaking Game of
         | Thrones after Season 5
        
         | slothtrop wrote:
         | Actors had a strike in part over this recently.
        
         | woah wrote:
         | You could have ChatGPT create unlimited simulated forum threads
         | about news articles, but here you are on Hacker News
        
       | Janicc wrote:
       | I honestly expected video generation to get stuck at barely
       | consistent 5 second clips without much movement for the next few
       | years. This is the type of stuff I expected to maybe be possible
       | towards the end of the decade. Maybe we really are still at the
       | bottom of the S curve which is scary to think about.
        
       | EwanG wrote:
       | I have a book I've written (first three parts available free at
       | https://www.amazon.com/Summer-of-Wonders/dp/B0CV84D7GR). Is there
       | some way to feed this to the tool and get an animated version
       | out? Or this with some other tool(s)?
        
       | pknerd wrote:
       | So no APIs yet?
        
       | ilaksh wrote:
       | Holy %@$%! Abso%@#inglutely amazing! Also, now I see why we need
       | $7 trillion worth of GPUs.
        
       | uoaei wrote:
       | Visual sharpness at the expense of wider-scale coherence (see:
       | sliding/floating walking woman in Tokyo demo or tiny people next
       | to giant people in Lagos demo) seems to be a local optimum
       | consistently achieved by today's SOTA models in all domains.
       | 
       | This is neat and all but mostly just a toy. Everything I've seen
       | has me convinced either we are optimizing the wrong loss
       | functions or the architectures we have today are fundamentally
       | limited. This should be understood for what it is and not for
       | what people want it to be.
        
         | og_kalu wrote:
         | >Visual sharpness at the expense of wider-scale coherence (see:
         | sliding/floating walking woman in Tokyo demo or tiny people
         | next to giant people in Lagos demo)
         | 
         | Wider-Scale coherence is still much better than previous models
         | and has consistently been improving. It's not "visual sharpness
         | at the expense of coherence". At worst, the models are learning
         | wider-scale coherence slower.
         | 
         | Not everything is equally difficult to learn so it follows that
         | some aspects will lag behind others. If coherence weren't
         | improving you might have a point but it is so...
        
           | uoaei wrote:
           | Scaling laws operate in the limit but eventually practical
           | considerations dominate. There's a lot we haven't yet fully
           | appreciated about biological vision and cognition -- and
           | indeed, common sense as regards sensible video generation and
           | processing -- that have not made their way into this kind of
           | model. NeRFs are interesting and I hope to see more from that
           | side of things in the coming months and years.
        
             | og_kalu wrote:
             | Nature is great and all but looking to it as an example of
             | a lack of scaling and brute force is a bit ridiculous.
             | 
             | Your vision is hundreds of millions of years in the making.
        
         | dsco wrote:
         | Did you just recreate the infamous DropBox comment?
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
        
           | uoaei wrote:
           | That seems like quite the reach, but we will see if it really
           | is just "all you need is scale".
        
       | epberry wrote:
       | These looks fantastic. Very slight weirdness in some movement,
       | hands, etc. But the main thing that strikes me is the cinematic
       | tracking shots. I guess that's why they use "scenes". It doesn't
       | seem like a movie could be generated with this involving actors
       | talking.
        
       | mring33621 wrote:
       | I wanna see the rest of the knit hat spaceman movie!
        
       | Imnimo wrote:
       | https://openai.com/sora?video=big-sur
       | 
       | In this video, there's extremely consistent geometry as the
       | camera moves, but the texture of the trees/shrubs on the top of
       | the cliff on the left seems to remain very flat, reminiscent of
       | low-poly geometry in games.
       | 
       | I wonder if this is an artifact of the way videos are generated.
       | Is the model separating scene geometry from camera? Maybe some
       | sort of video-NeRF or Gaussian Splatting under the hood?
        
         | nuz wrote:
         | I saw similar artifacts in dalle-1 a lot (as if the image was
         | pasted onto geometry). Definitely wouldn't surprise me if they
         | use synthetic rasterized data to in the training, which could
         | totally create artifacts like this.
        
         | ethbr1 wrote:
         | Curious about what current SotA is on physics-infusing
         | generation. Anyone have paper links?
         | 
         | OpenAi has a few details:
         | 
         | >> _The current model has weaknesses. It may struggle with
         | accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene, and may
         | not understand specific instances of cause and effect. For
         | example, a person might take a bite out of a cookie, but
         | afterward, the cookie may not have a bite mark._
         | 
         | >> _Similar to GPT models, Sora uses a transformer
         | architecture, unlocking superior scaling performance._
         | 
         | >> _We represent videos and images as collections of smaller
         | units of data called patches, each of which is akin to a token
         | in GPT. By unifying how we represent data, we can train
         | diffusion transformers on a wider range of visual data than was
         | possible before, spanning different durations, resolutions and
         | aspect ratios._
         | 
         | >> _Sora builds on past research in DALL*E and GPT models. It
         | uses the recaptioning technique from DALL*E 3, which involves
         | generating highly descriptive captions for the visual training
         | data. As a result, the model is able to follow the user's text
         | instructions in the generated video more faithfully._
         | 
         | The implied facts that it understands physics of simple scenes
         | and any instances of cause and effect are impressive!
         | 
         | Although I assume that's been SotA-possible for awhile, and I
         | just hadn't heard?
        
           | msoad wrote:
           | On the announcement page, it specifically says Sora does not
           | understand physics
        
         | thomastjeffery wrote:
         | The model is essentially doing nothing but dreaming.
         | 
         | I suspect that anything that looks like familiar 3D-rendering
         | limitations is probably a result of the training dataset simply
         | containing a lot of actual 3D-rendered content.
         | 
         | We can't tell a model to dream everything _except_ extra
         | fingers, false perspective, and 3D-rendering compromises.
        
         | burkaman wrote:
         | Maybe it was trained on a bunch of 3d Google Earth videos.
        
         | downWidOutaFite wrote:
         | Doesn't look flat to me.
         | 
         | Edit: Here[0] I highlighted a groove in the bushes moving with
         | perfect perspective
         | 
         | [0] https://ibb.co/Y7WFW39
        
           | internetter wrote:
           | Look in the top left corner, on the plane
        
         | cush wrote:
         | Wow, yeah I didn't notice it at first, but looking at the rocks
         | in the background is actually nauseating
        
         | cush wrote:
         | The water is on par with Avatar. Looks perfect
        
       | sidcool wrote:
       | Even the videos with some physics anomalies are quite good and
       | entertaining.
        
       | bluechair wrote:
       | The signs are non-sensical but this is probably expected.
        
         | criddell wrote:
         | Why is that so difficult for these things to get right?
        
       | gzer0 wrote:
       | Truly stunning. Waiting on the research paper, says will be
       | published (soon). Can't wait to read on the technical details.
        
       | Delumine wrote:
       | This is insane. Even though there are open-source models, I think
       | this is too dangerous to release to the public. If someone
       | would've uploaded that Tokyo video to youtube, and told me it was
       | a drone.. I would've believed them.
       | 
       | All "proof" we have can be contested or fabricated.
        
         | standardUser wrote:
         | The key word there is "someone". The only way forward is to
         | care a _lot_ more about our sources. Trust is about to become
         | really valuable.
        
           | Delumine wrote:
           | We give too much credit to ordinary people. All these
           | bleeding-edge advancements in AI, code, databases, and
           | technology are things a user on HNews would be aware of.
           | However, most peers in regular jobs, parents, children, et
           | al., would be susceptible to being fooled on social media.
           | They're not going to say... "hmm, let me fact-check and see
           | if the sources are correct and that this wasn't created by
           | AI."
           | 
           | They'll simply see an inflammatory tweet from their leader on
           | Twitter.
        
             | standardUser wrote:
             | They're not going to fact check, they're simply going to
             | think "huh, could be AI" and that will change the way we
             | absorb and process information. It already has. And when we
             | really need to know something and can't afford to be wrong,
             | we'll seek out high trust sources. Just like we do now, but
             | more so.
             | 
             | And of course some large cross section of people will
             | continue to be duped idiots.
        
               | Delumine wrote:
               | Most people don't even know what AI is. I've had to
               | educate my parents that the technology to not only clone
               | my voice, but my face.. is in existence. Pair that with
               | number spoofing, and you have a recipe for disaster to
               | scam people.
        
         | brigadier132 wrote:
         | > All "proof" we have can be contested or fabricated.
         | 
         | This has been the case for a while now already, it's better
         | that we just rip off the bandaid and everyone should become a
         | skeptic. Standards for evidence will need to rise.
        
           | bogwog wrote:
           | If you rip off the bandaid too soon, there will be blood.
        
         | thepasswordis wrote:
         | "Proof" for thousands of years was whatever was written down,
         | and that was even easier to forge.
         | 
         | There was a brief time (maybe 100 years at the most) where
         | photos and videos were practically proof of something
         | happening; that is coming to an end now, but that's just a
         | regression to the mean, not new territory.
        
           | ctoth wrote:
           | Hmmm. Actually I think I finally figured out why I dislike
           | this argument, so thank you.
           | 
           | The important number here isn't the total years something has
           | been true, when talking about something with sociocultural
           | momentum, like the expectation that a recording/video is
           | truthful.
           | 
           | Instead, the important number seems to me to be the total
           | number of lived human years where the thing has been true. In
           | the case of reliable recordings, the last hundred years with
           | billions of humans has a lot more cultural weight than the
           | thousands of preceding years by virtue of there having been
           | far more human years lived with than without the expectation.
        
         | mzs wrote:
         | I guess you can't read Japanese.
        
           | volkk wrote:
           | maybe for now, only a matter of time before stuff like this
           | is fixed
        
             | serf wrote:
             | the world is getting increasingly surveilled as well, I
             | guess the presumption is that eventually you'll just be
             | able to cross reference a 'verified' recording of the scene
             | against whatever media exists.
             | 
             | "We ran the vid against the nationally-ran Japanese
             | scanners, turns out that there are no streets that look
             | like this, nor individuals."
             | 
             | in other words I think that the sudden leap of usable AI
             | into real life is going to cause another similar leap
             | towards non-human verification of assets and media.
        
         | a_wild_dandan wrote:
         | This changes nothing about "proof" (i.e. "evidence", here).
         | Authenticity is determined by trust in the source
         | institution(s), independent verification, chains of evidence,
         | etc. Belief is about _people_ , not _technology_. Always was,
         | always will be. Fraud is older than Photoshop, than the first
         | impersonation, than perhaps civilization. The sky is not
         | falling here. Always remember: fidelity and belief aren 't
         | synonyms.
        
           | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
           | Scale matters. This will allow unprecedented scale of
           | producing fabricated video. You're right about evidence, but
           | it doesn't need to hold up in court to do a lot of damage.
        
         | skepticATX wrote:
         | This is what lots of folks said about image generation. Which
         | is now in many ways "solved". And society has easily adapted to
         | it. The same will happen with video generation.
         | 
         | The reality is that people are a lot more resourceful / smarter
         | than a lot of us think. And the ones who aren't have been
         | fooled long before this tech came around.
        
           | diputsmonro wrote:
           | In what ways has image generation been solved? Prompt
           | blocking is about the only real effort I can think of, which
           | will mean nothing once open source models reach the same
           | fidelity.
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | all the news you see has zero proof unless you see it, you just
         | have to have a sense if it's real based on a concensus or trust
         | worthness of a reporter/outlet.
         | 
         | The UA war is real, most likley, but i havent' seen it with my
         | own eyes, nor did most people, but maybe they have
         | relatives/friends saying it, and they are not likely to lie.
         | Stuff like that.
        
         | 1970-01-01 wrote:
         | Weird hallucination artifacts are still giving it all away.
         | Look closely at the train and viaduct rendering, and you can't
         | unsee windows morphing into each other.
        
         | losvedir wrote:
         | That's interesting. It made me think of a potential feature for
         | upcoming cameras that essentially cryptographically sign their
         | videos. If this became a real issue in the future, I could see
         | Apple introducing it in a new model. "Now you can show you
         | really _did_ take that trip to Paris. When you send a message
         | to a friend that contains a video that you shot on iPhone, they
         | will see it in a gold bubble. "
        
       | reducesuffering wrote:
       | Apple Vision Pro VR + unlimited, addicting... I mean, engaging
       | video feed into your eyes. The machines will keep you tube fed
       | and your bowels emptied. Woe to the early 21st century techno-
       | optimism. An alien intelligence rules the galaxy now. Welcome to
       | the simulation.
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | will be super depressing once you take off the helmet and feel
         | the reality
        
         | superconduct123 wrote:
         | Imagine that but the loss function is measuring how "good" you
         | feel via brain signals
         | 
         | And the AI is optimizing the video feed purely for that
         | 
         | What would it generate?
        
       | jonplackett wrote:
       | No mention of how much they had to cherry pick right?
       | 
       | Interested to know what the success rate of such amazingmess
       | 
       | Pika have really impressive videos on their homepage that are
       | borderline impossible to make for myself.
        
         | aaroninsf wrote:
         | Totally agree, they can pay a lot of monkeys at typewriters,
         | 
         | but also? https://openai.com/sora?video=big-sur
         | 
         | made me literally say, out loud, "doesnt-matter-had-sex"
        
         | kredd wrote:
         | There's an ongoing thread on Twitter where Sam takes
         | suggestions from replies and shares the output. E.g.
         | https://x.com/sama/status/1758200420344955288?s=46&t=VQo1eLU...
        
           | slekker wrote:
           | Is there any alternative to Nitter?
        
             | burkaman wrote:
             | I think Nitter may still work if you self-host it, but
             | otherwise no, they have made it impossible to read without
             | an account.
        
           | usaar333 wrote:
           | Just from a quick scan, those are a lot worse than the ones
           | on the marketing page.
        
             | burkaman wrote:
             | Definitely a lot worse, but still an order of magnitude
             | better than every other attempt at generative video.
             | 
             | Even these may be cherry-picked though, he's only posted a
             | few and I'm sure he's gotten thousands of requests already.
        
             | jonplackett wrote:
             | holy crap. these are still amazing though.
             | 
             | I guess he might be generating 50 for each response and
             | posting the best, but that would seem deliberately
             | disingenuous which hasn't been openai's style.
             | 
             | even the worst is still orders of magnitude better than
             | anything else.
        
             | Kiro wrote:
             | I don't think they are a lot worse:
             | 
             | https://twitter.com/sama/status/1758218059716939853
             | 
             | https://twitter.com/sama/status/1758218820542763012
             | 
             | https://twitter.com/sama/status/1758219575882301608
             | 
             | https://twitter.com/sama/status/1758220311735181384
        
       | nuz wrote:
       | This is the second time OpenAI has released something _right_ at
       | the same time as google did (Gemini 1.5 Pro with 10M token
       | context length just now). Can 't just be a coincidence
        
         | Zelphyr wrote:
         | Not to mention, the Gemini 1.5 Pro announcement was almost all
         | technical talk whereas Sora is light on text and heavy on
         | demonstration.
         | 
         | I'm actually worried about the future of Google at this point.
         | They really seem to be struggling under their own weight.
        
         | nopinsight wrote:
         | What was released during the first time?
        
           | nuz wrote:
           | GPT-4 was released at the same time as Bard was announced I
           | believe (same day, same hour basically).
        
         | DylanBohlender wrote:
         | They absolutely sat on this and waited until a competitor
         | announced something, so they could suck the air out of the
         | room.
        
       | fardinahsan146 wrote:
       | This is insane.
        
       | sabzetro wrote:
       | Can't wait until we can generate feature length films with a
       | prompt.
        
       | rambambram wrote:
       | I like how the dalmatian puppy moves like a cat.
        
       | sebnun wrote:
       | This is amazing. My first thought was about the potential for
       | abuse. Deepfakes will be more realistic than ever.
       | 
       | Also, nicely timed to overshadow the Google Gemini 1.5
       | announcement.
        
       | aantix wrote:
       | This the killer feature.
       | 
       | " Sora can also create multiple shots within a single generated
       | video that accurately persist characters and visual style."
       | 
       | To create a movie I need character visual consistency across
       | scenes.
       | 
       | Getting that right is the hardest part of all the existing
       | text->video tools out there.
        
       | dom96 wrote:
       | This is going to make the latest election really interesting (and
       | scary). Is anyone working to ensure a faked video of Biden that
       | looks plausible but is AI generated doesn't get significant
       | traction at a critical moment of the election?
        
         | airstrike wrote:
         | They've released it but not made it GA
        
         | duderific wrote:
         | That just doesn't seem like a plausible scenario to me.
         | Obviously, if such thing happened, Biden would have an alibi,
         | since it's known where he is at all times.
         | 
         | The people who already hate Biden, probably already think he's
         | doing some weird shady stuff, and would point to some
         | conspiracy. The people who like Biden, would accept the alibi.
         | 
         | Ultimately it wouldn't move the needle.
         | 
         | What is concerning, is the technology being used against a
         | regular person, who may not have an alibi.
        
       | drcwpl wrote:
       | Wow - "All videos on this page were generated directly by Sora
       | without modification."
       | 
       | The prompts - incredible and such quality - amazing. "Prompt: An
       | extreme close-up of an gray-haired man with a beard in his 60s,
       | he is deep in thought pondering the history of the universe as he
       | sits at a cafe in Paris, his eyes focus on people offscreen as
       | they walk as he sits mostly motionless, he is dressed in a wool
       | coat suit coat with a button-down shirt , he wears a brown beret
       | and glasses and has a very professorial appearance, and the end
       | he offers a subtle closed-mouth smile as if he found the answer
       | to the mystery of life, the lighting is very cinematic with the
       | golden light and the Parisian streets and city in the background,
       | depth of field, cinematic 35mm film."
        
       | bogwog wrote:
       | My AI idea: Civil war as a service (CWaaS)
       | 
       | Prompt: poll worker sneakily taking ballots labeled <INSERT
       | POLITICAL PARTY HERE>, and throwing them in the trash.
        
         | aaroninsf wrote:
         | Srsly.
         | 
         | We were not able to handle applications of preexisting tools
         | for steering public sentiment, limited to static text and
         | puppet account generation etc.
         | 
         | We are not handling the current generation of text and image
         | generation, or, deepfake style transfer, or, voice cloning, etc
         | ad nauseum.
         | 
         | We will not be able to handle this.
         | 
         | GOOD. TIMES. AHEAD.
         | 
         | but oh that Spatial Video NeRF generated pr0n with biometric
         | feedback autotuning and a million token memory for what. I.
         | like.
        
         | rightbyte wrote:
         | You realize how easy it is to do that with actors, right?
        
       | wouldbecouldbe wrote:
       | It looks beautiful, however I thought openai's mission was
       | creating AGI, not become a generative ai content supplier.
        
       | thepasswordis wrote:
       | OpenAI demonstrating the size of their moat. How many multi-
       | million-dollar funded startups did this just absolutely obsolete?
       | This is so, so, so much better than every other generative video
       | AI we've seen. Most of those were basically a still image with a
       | very slowly moving background. This is not that.
       | 
       | Sam is probably going to get his $7T if he keeps this up, and
       | when he does everybody else will be locked out forever.
       | 
       | I already know people who have basically opted out of life.
       | They're addicted to porn, addicted to podcasts where it's just
       | dudes chatting as if they're all hanging out together, and
       | addicted to instagram influencers.
       | 
       | 100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with
       | Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or
       | podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at
       | them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser, etc.
       | 
       | These videos are crazy. Highly suggest anybody who was playing
       | with Dall-E a couple of years ago, and being mindblown by "an
       | astronaut riding a horse in space" or whatever go back and look
       | at the images they were creating then, and compare that to this.
        
         | aantix wrote:
         | That's an interesting take - podcasts have become a replacement
         | for companionship and conversation.
        
           | testfrequency wrote:
           | It's also more fuel for brain rot and toxic personalities to
           | spread.
           | 
           | Most podcasters are narcissists
        
           | zamfi wrote:
           | Same with TV decades years ago, and radio before that. Just a
           | different generation.
        
           | ggregoire wrote:
           | That's what Twitch has become too. The most popular Twitch
           | streamers do nothing other than watching YouTube videos and
           | providing a fake relationship to their 50,000 live viewers.
        
           | throw4847285 wrote:
           | I don't buy that. People form fan communities around these
           | podcasts where they talk with real people about how much they
           | love listening to minor internet celebrities talk about
           | nothing. Why would they do that if the podcasts served that
           | purpose already?
           | 
           | I think rather than replace real human contact, the internet
           | has created an increased demand for it. People need every
           | moment of their lives to be filled with human speech or
           | images.
           | 
           | If I were to take off my "reasonable point" hat and put on my
           | "grandiose bullshit" hat I'd say that in the same way drugs
           | can artificially stimulate various "feel good" parts of your
           | brain, we have found a way to artificially stimulate the
           | "social animal" instinct until we're numb.
           | 
           | I think the real risk of this kind of AI is not that people
           | live in a world of fake videos of their favorite celebrities
           | talking to them, but that entire fake social media ecosystems
           | are created for each individual filled with the content they
           | want to see and fake people commenting on it so they can
           | argue with them about it.
           | 
           | Everybody needs to read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
           | by Philip K Dick.
        
             | throw4847285 wrote:
             | I may be having a hypomanic episode, but I've been thinking
             | about it more, and it seems like the entire Internet Age
             | has been an attempt to more precisely synthesize the
             | substance which sates human social needs artificially, and
             | that when they perfect it, it's all over.
        
               | awfulneutral wrote:
               | I've been thinking along those lines too, but more from
               | the angle that our goal is to eliminate any need to rely
               | on other humans for anything. We consider the need for
               | interacting with other humans as a burden and an
               | inconvenience, and we're going to get rid of it, at the
               | cost of all the indirect benefits we got from being
               | forced to do it.
        
           | nomel wrote:
           | It looks like some people are just learning that introverts
           | exist. Maybe there's something interesting about how more
           | common it is, but none of this is _new_.
        
         | zer0tonin wrote:
         | $7T is more than the budget of the US federal government, a
         | third of the NASDAQ, or 2,3x AAPL market cap. Sam getting his
         | 7T is not actually possible.
        
           | justrealist wrote:
           | > or 2300x AAPL market cap
           | 
           | It's only 2x the AAPL market cap.
        
             | zer0tonin wrote:
             | Oops, you're right on that one
        
             | guywithabowtie wrote:
             | It is a future projected value of a company. You can not
             | realize it. If you start selling stocks, they will drop at
             | a rapid pace. The entire stock market is in a way
             | projection of all future money the stocks will potentially
             | make for a long time. This is not liquid cash that can be
             | injected for any other purpose.
        
               | justrealist wrote:
               | Cool.
               | 
               | However, the OP was incorrect, it's 2x the AAPL market
               | cap.
        
           | synergy20 wrote:
           | AAPL is 2.8T now, how is it 2300x AAPL equals to 7T.
           | 
           | 7T is actually possible, but yes it's huge.
        
             | timdiggerm wrote:
             | In some places, usage of , and . within numbers is revered
             | from what you use
        
               | Ukv wrote:
               | The comment they're replying to initially said "2300x",
               | but was fixed after it was pointed out
               | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39386997).
               | 
               | IMO HN should have an edit indicator, at least after
               | others have already replied.
        
               | kilbuz wrote:
               | I can respect that.
        
             | dilyevsky wrote:
             | You're comparing cash flow to a static pile of money spent
             | over decades
        
           | m3kw9 wrote:
           | is 7T over a period of maybe 20 years. 1T is enough to buy
           | out most engineers from TSMC, or maybe even buy out TSMC
        
           | figassis wrote:
           | Have you considered that he might not actually expect $7T,
           | but this ask makes us think $1T is relatively reasonable and
           | so he gets it?
        
             | Xirgil wrote:
             | It's called anchoring
        
             | ed_balls wrote:
             | yes, he is expanding his own personal Overton window.
        
           | jstummbillig wrote:
           | The current world economy is $85T/anno
           | 
           | If (the best) AI adds 10% to that, $7T is not only possible
           | but a bargain.
        
             | schoen wrote:
             | Per annum (the preposition per governs the accusation case
             | rather than the ablative case).
        
             | cabalamat wrote:
             | $100T in 2022 according to the World Bank.
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nom
             | i...
        
             | windexh8er wrote:
             | AI is more akin to a zero sum game. It won't add 10% to the
             | global economy (and if it did - it would be around "peak of
             | inflated expectations" and, likely, have a corollary slide
             | down into the "trough of disillusionment") because it will
             | both distract budgets and/or redirect budgets. That
             | hypothetical $7T is not coming out of thin air. I'd even go
             | as far to argue that this hype cycle will ultimately
             | detract from global economy over time as it's a significant
             | draw on resources that could have been / would have been
             | used on more productive efforts long term.
        
               | jstummbillig wrote:
               | This reads like it could be used to reason against the
               | industrial revolution or the first computer revolution or
               | any other significant advance in human history. Am I
               | missing something?
        
               | zer0tonin wrote:
               | James Watt didn't ask for 10% of the global GDP
        
               | educaysean wrote:
               | I assume his objection was regarding the AI being a
               | "zero-sum game", whatever that was supposed to convey
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | If he had, it would've been a bargain for the impact of
               | the industrial revolution.
               | 
               | Watt couldn't have asked, his engines specifically
               | weren't enough of a difference by themselves even though
               | the revolution as a whole was, and I strongly suspect
               | this is also going to be true for any single AI
               | developer; _however_ a $7T investment in _many unrelated
               | chip factories owned by different people and invested
               | over a decade_ , is something I can believe happening.
        
           | cabalamat wrote:
           | Or to put it another way, one month's worth of world GDP.
        
         | croes wrote:
         | He never mentioned $7T.
        
         | ren_engineer wrote:
         | seems like a significant chunk of the population may opt in to
         | the Matrix voluntarily.
         | 
         | on another note I find it funny they released this right after
         | Google announced their new model. Bad luck for Google or did
         | OpenAI just decide to move up their announcement date to steal
         | their thunder?
        
           | throwup238 wrote:
           | Only those that can afford it. The rest will be forced to
           | live in the real world, like 20th century peasants.
        
             | ren_engineer wrote:
             | actually the opposite imo, this stuff is the ultimate bread
             | and circus to distract poor people from worsening living
             | conditions. Much cheaper to provide VR goggles with AI
             | model access than housing and healthcare
        
               | throwup238 wrote:
               | As long as sex is the competition, I don't think that's
               | likely. Simulating orgasms will require the Apple
               | iPleasure Maxxx implant and expensive brain surgery &
               | recovery.
        
               | emmo wrote:
               | I'm not sure sex _is_ always going to be the competition.
               | More and more people are sexless (by choice or not).
               | 
               | There are already sex toys that you.. insert yourself in,
               | and then have scripts that sync up movements with VR
               | videos you are watching.
               | 
               | Crazy times coming in the next few decades.
        
           | IncreasePosts wrote:
           | If there is a high fidelity nice simulation of a pleasant
           | world, and the actual real world is a hellscape, what is the
           | problem with that?
           | 
           | If you were presented with the fact that whatever your life
           | is is just an illusion, and you are actually a starving slave
           | in North Korea, you would choose to "wake up"?
        
             | tmaly wrote:
             | This is like something out of Ready Player One
        
             | tomp wrote:
             | Why not just take cocaine to fake good feelings, instead of
             | seeking real-life experiences that generate good feelings?
             | 
             | (I mean, a lot of people do do that!)
        
               | thepasswordis wrote:
               | A lot more people would do that if cocaine was legal, I
               | suspect.
        
               | IncreasePosts wrote:
               | Well, there are huge downsides to using cocaine, whether
               | it is undesired health impacts, or addiction, or threat
               | of arrest, or mere cost, or even just social stigma.
               | 
               | I'm not sure there are downsides to living out your life
               | in a simulation while robots take care of your physical
               | form.
        
         | swalsh wrote:
         | "How many multi-million-dollar funded startups did this just
         | absolutely obsolete?"
         | 
         | The play with AI isn't to build the tools to help businesses
         | make money, the play is to directly build the businesses that
         | makes the money.
         | 
         | In practice this means, don't focus your business model on
         | building the AI to make text to video happen. Your business
         | model should be an AI studio, if the tech you need doesn't
         | exist, build it.... but if you get beat by someone with more
         | GPU's and more data, cool use the better models. Your business
         | model should focus on using the capability not building it.
         | It's proving quite hard to beat someone with more GPU's, more
         | data, more brain power.
        
           | loceng wrote:
           | Indeed, they're letting all of these businesses and
           | professionals subscribe to the gold mining equipment - but
           | retaining ownership of it, and they'll be able to undercut
           | those services and cut people off as they please.
        
           | downWidOutaFite wrote:
           | But then you're stuck playing in the model owner's playground
           | and if you're too successful they can yank the rug from under
           | you and steal your business any time they want.
        
         | dheera wrote:
         | OpenAI's moat is (a) talent (b) access to compute (c) no fear
         | of using whatever data they can get.
         | 
         | On the other hand, I think these moats will be destroyed as
         | soon as anyone finds a drastically more efficient (compute- and
         | data-wise) way to train LLMs. Biology would suggest that it
         | doesn't take $100 million worth of GPUs and exaflops of compute
         | to achieve the intelligence of a human.
         | 
         | (Of course it is possible that at that point, OpenAI may then
         | be able to achieve something far superior to human
         | intelligence, but there is a LOT of $$$ out there that only
         | needs human levels of intelligence.)
        
           | golol wrote:
           | Biology literally took a planet sized genetic algorithm with
           | nanomachines a couple Billion years to get to this point.
        
           | Eisenstein wrote:
           | > Biology would suggest that it doesn't take $100 million
           | worth of GPUs and exaflops of compute to achieve the
           | intelligence of a human.
           | 
           | Biology suggests that a self-replicating machine can exist by
           | ingesting other machines, turning them into energy and then
           | using that energy to power themselves. Biology suggests that
           | these machines can be so small that we cannot even see them.
           | 
           | How close are we to making one of those?
        
             | PeterisP wrote:
             | I believe that synthetic biology had succeeded already a
             | few years ago in making artificial cells with a fully
             | synthetic genome designed by us with what is sufficient for
             | the cell to eat, grow and replicate, se we already can
             | design and make such 'machines'.
        
         | Alifatisk wrote:
         | We say 7T$ as if it's nothing, am I the only one shocked by the
         | sum we are talking about?
         | 
         | This is close to what BlackRock is managing!
        
           | ben_w wrote:
           | I'm fairly sure $7T is a speculation bubble, and that's going
           | to pop like all bubbles pop. It's the combined GDP of Japan
           | and Canada. It's too big _for an investment_.
           | 
           | It's _not_ necessarily too big for a valuation, as a
           | sufficiently capable AI is an economic power in its own
           | right: I previously guessed, and even despite its flaws would
           | continue to guess within the domain of software development
           | at least, that the initial ChatGPT model was about as
           | economically valuable to each user as an industrial placement
           | student, and when I was one of those I was earning about
           | PS1.7k /month when adjusted for inflation, US$2.1k at current
           | nominal exchange rates. 100 million users at that rate is
           | $2.52e+12/year in economic productivity, and that's with the
           | current chip supply and (my estimate of) the productivity of
           | a year-old model -- and everyone knows that this sector is
           | limited by the chips, and that $7T investment story is
           | supposed to be about improving the supply of those chips.
        
         | ericzawo wrote:
         | I hate that this is true.
        
         | cabalamat wrote:
         | > 100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out
         | with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars
         | or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad
         | at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser,
         | etc.
         | 
         | I think immersive games will also be a big application. Games
         | AI will also benefit from being more strategically intelligent
         | and from being able to negotiate, in a human-like fashion, with
         | human and other AI players. The latter will not only make games
         | better, it will also improve the intelligence of AIs.
        
           | downWidOutaFite wrote:
           | Yep, since at least World of Warcraft millions of people have
           | already "opted out of life" to live in game worlds.
           | 
           | The thing that "The Matrix" style plots get wrong is that the
           | machines don't need to coerce us into their virtual prisons,
           | we will submit willingly.
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | > OpenAI demonstrating the size of their moat. How many multi-
         | million-dollar funded startups did this just absolutely
         | obsolete?
         | 
         | For posterity since the term has been misused lately, having a
         | very good product isn't a moat in the business sense. There's
         | nothing stopping a competitor from creating a similar product
         | (even if it's difficult), and there's nothing currently
         | stopping OpenAI's users from switching from using Sora to a
         | sufficient competitor if it exists.
         | 
         | Sora is more akin to a company like Apple/Google a decade ago
         | using their vast resources to do what a third-party does, but
         | better (e.g. the Sherlocked incident:
         | https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-
         | co...).
        
           | coffeemug wrote:
           | Being (a) first and (b) good enough is a moat. Nothing
           | stopped people from switching from google to bing all these
           | years other than not having any reason to.
        
             | sdenton4 wrote:
             | Google wasn't the first, as all those altavista investors
             | will unhappily attest.
        
               | ericd wrote:
               | They were the first to "good enough", which is what the
               | GP is talking about.
        
           | thepasswordis wrote:
           | OpenAIs moat is their massive access to capital and compute.
           | That's what I mean.
        
             | minimaxir wrote:
             | Again, that's not a moat.
             | 
             | The original "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"
             | leaked memo from Google that memefied the term focuses
             | explicitly on the increasing ease of competitors
             | (especially open-source) entering the ecosystem:
             | https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-
             | ne...
        
               | thepasswordis wrote:
               | First of all, the term moat comes from Warren Buffet, and
               | has to do with his investment strategy:
               | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-explains-
               | moat-...
               | 
               | Second: Massive capital expenditure, specifically in this
               | case the huge cost of building or leasing enormous GPU
               | clusters, is *exactly* what he means by this.
        
               | rvnx wrote:
               | Exactly, to create larger and better performing models,
               | there is no lack of ideas or techniques. The real problem
               | is to have the GPUs for that.
        
               | declaredapple wrote:
               | I disagree mainly because google, aws, apple, etc. All
               | have similar, or even more access to GPU compute and
               | funding for it, and in google's case also has been one of
               | the main research contributers, yet they still struggle
               | to touch GPT4's performance in practice.
               | 
               | If it was as simple as dropping 10's millions on compute
               | they could do that, yet google's bard/gemini have been a
               | year behind GPT4's performance.
               | 
               | That said I do agree that it's a moat for the startups
               | like stability/mistral, etc. They also have access to
               | $/compute, albiet a lot less. And you can see this in
               | their research, as they've been focused on methods to
               | lower the training/inference costs.
               | 
               | *I'm measuring performance by the chatbot arena's elo
               | system and r/locallama
        
               | declaredapple wrote:
               | > What we're trying to find is a business that, for one
               | reason or another -- it can be because it's the low-cost
               | producer in some area, it can be because it has a natural
               | franchise because of surface capabilities, it could be
               | because of its position in the consumers' mind, it can be
               | because of a technological advantage, or any kind of
               | reason at all, that it has this moat around it.
               | 
               | He didn't seem to have specific definition at all really.
               | 
               | I think most people attribute it to a "secret sauce
               | technology" in the case of OpenAI, I'm not sure if
               | "finances to lease a huge cluster of GPUs" makes sense
               | here because the main competitors (Google, AWS, Apple,
               | etc) also have access to insane compute as well yet have
               | struggled to get close to GPT4's performance in practice.
               | 
               | That said I do agree that it's a moat for the startups
               | like stability/mistral, etc. They also have access to
               | $/compute, albiet a lot less. And you can see this in
               | their research, as they've been focused on methods to
               | lower the training/inference costs.
        
               | Workaccount2 wrote:
               | I believe that Google actually has more AI compute at
               | their disposal than OpenAI. They have been building out
               | their TPU infrastructure for a while now. OpenAI is
               | reliant on Azure obtaining nvidia GPUs.
               | 
               | So at least in the battle between OpenAI and Google,
               | their moat right now are their models.
        
               | ericd wrote:
               | Moats have never been uncrossable, they just make it
               | harder to get to the walls.
        
               | frabcus wrote:
               | I agree it isn't a moat in the business sense - that
               | would be some kind of lock in network effect.
               | 
               | e.g. If ChatGPT being popular gives OpenAI enough extra
               | training data, they're locked in forever having the best
               | model, and it is impossible for anyone - even with
               | unlimited money, and the same technology - to beat them.
               | Because they don't have that critical data.
               | 
               | Yes, Google had the best search product, and got a huge
               | market share simply by being better. Their moat however
               | is that their search rankings are based off the click
               | data of which search results people use and cause them to
               | stop their search because they've found a solution.
               | 
               | They also have a moat to do with advertising pricing,
               | based on volume of advertising customers.
               | 
               | Bing spend a lot of capital, and had the tech ability,
               | but those two moats blocked them gaining more than a tiny
               | market share.
               | 
               | In this case, maybe OpenAI will have a video business
               | moat, maybe they don't...
        
           | neosat wrote:
           | "having a very good product isn't a moat"
           | 
           | It definitely is. Having the best product and being able to
           | maintain that best-in-class product status over time through
           | a firm's 'internal capabilities' is very much _a_ moat and a
           | strong one at that. A moat is the business strategy sense is
           | anything that enables a firm to maintain competitive
           | advantage. Having the best product in a category, and being
           | able to maintain that over releases is a strong competitive
           | advantage (especially when there is high willingness to pay
           | or price is a strong competitive dimension compared to the
           | value created).
        
             | cma wrote:
             | That's not a real moat except in one sense: if it is really
             | expensive to get to the level to compete, and you know a
             | competitive market would bring margins near zero, then no
             | competitor may actually step up. We see this in off-patent
             | drugs, where it may have 200X margins but no competitor
             | will go through the FDA manufacturing reapproval process
             | because they won't actually get those margins if they begin
             | competing on price, and then the sunk cost of getting to
             | the competitive level isn't worth anything for them.
             | 
             | I think OpenAI's big moats are in userbase feedback and
             | just proprietary trade knowledge after they stopped sharing
             | model details. They may have made some exclusive data
             | source deals with book/textbook and other publishers,
             | though it isn't clear a license is actually needed for that
             | until things work through the courts.
        
               | ij09j901023123 wrote:
               | Nah, this is gonna be the next big thing since the
               | Iphone. You're gonna see Sam surpass Elon in the next
               | decade
        
           | tomp wrote:
           | There is nothing stopping Wolkswagen from creating a product
           | similar to Tesla.
           | 
           | There is nothing stoping Microsoft from creating a search
           | engine as good as Google's.
           | 
           | There is nothing stopping Facebook from creating an iPhone
           | alternative, after all it's just engineering!
           | 
           | There is nothing stopping Google from beating GPT-4.
           | 
           | Shall I go on?
        
             | jstummbillig wrote:
             | To what end?
             | 
             | The point is that "moat" gets conflated with just being
             | ahead in the game. I don't find it a super interesting
             | point of contention, but there is a distinction alright.
        
           | TulliusCicero wrote:
           | Having a very good product can be a moat if it takes enormous
           | resources and skill to create said product.
        
           | janalsncm wrote:
           | > There's nothing stopping a competitor from creating a
           | similar product
           | 
           | This is like saying there's nothing stopping a competitor
           | from launching reusable rockets into space. Of course there
           | isn't, but it's hard and won't happen for the foreseeable
           | future.
           | 
           | Similarly with a physical moat, it's not impossible to cross,
           | but it's hard to do.
        
         | superjared wrote:
         | > 100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out
         | with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars
         | or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad
         | at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser,
         | etc.
         | 
         | This is the stuff of Brave New World. It's happening to us in
         | real time.
        
         | tmaly wrote:
         | Even with 7 trillion, he is still going to need a national grid
         | that can supply the power for the compute.
         | 
         | There is a lot that has to planned and put in place now to get
         | there.
         | 
         | As for people that have opted out of life. We would have a
         | better world if we started encouraging more dreamers/doers like
         | out of the movie Tomorrowland.
        
         | carbine wrote:
         | I agree with much of what you say, but I'm not sure the
         | dystopian conclusion is the main one I'd draw.
         | 
         | Improving your ability to connect with and enjoy/learn from
         | people all around the world is one of the main value props of
         | the internet, and tech like this just deepens that potential.
         | Will some people take this to an unhealthy degree that pulls
         | them too far out of reality? Yes. But others will use it to
         | level up their abilities, enrich their lives, create beautiful
         | things, and reduce loneliness.
        
         | zitterbewegung wrote:
         | Looks like they have made large progress in hand generation.
         | They still look like claws a bit but you didn't have to add a
         | workaround for the query to render correctly and I had to zoom
         | in to verify . When I was watching it the first time I didn't
         | even notice hand issues.
        
         | advael wrote:
         | I think there are people for whom the fundamental assumption
         | that someone will want "more" of stuff they already like does
         | not hold, and that while those people are a minority, recent
         | developments in the media landscape toward a constant stream of
         | increasingly similarity-curated media has caused them to
         | increasingly disengage from media consumption
         | 
         | That said, those people are by definition less relevant to
         | internet consumption metrics
        
         | jijijijij wrote:
         | I predict, this "AI" content generation will eat itself at
         | last. It will outcompete the low-effort "content" industry as
         | is. Then inevitably completely devalue this sort of "product".
         | Because it will never get to 100% of the real thing, the "AI"
         | content craze will ultimately implode.
         | 
         | I bet we won't get AGI as a progression of this very
         | technology. The impression of "usefulness" will end when "AI"
         | is starting to drink its own Koolaid on a large scale (copilot
         | lol), and when everyone starts using it as super inefficient
         | business interface. Overfitted mediocre mediocrity, on
         | steroids.
         | 
         | Hopefully, this sobriety happens before the economy collapses,
         | as a consequence of all dem bullshit jobs cleansed.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | Funny you chose the day of a huge leap in generative video to
           | proclaim generative model limitations.
        
             | jijijijij wrote:
             | I know, right? Incidentally, even in the same HN thread,
             | too!
        
           | neilk wrote:
           | I think this analysis is flawed. New technologies are usually
           | bad at substituting for things that already exist. It's 100%
           | true this will not substitute for the existing genre of film
           | and video.
           | 
           | New technologies change the economics of how we satisfy our
           | needs.
           | 
           | When search engines became good, many pundits confidently
           | predicted Google would never replace librarians or libraries.
           | It didn't. It shifted our relationship to knowledge; instead
           | of having to employ an expert in looking things up, we all
           | had to become experts at sifting through a flood of info.
           | 
           | When the cost of producing art-directed and realistic video
           | goes to zero it's hard to predict what's going to happen.
           | Obviously the era of video = veracity is now over. And you
           | can get the equivalent of Martin Scorsese and a million
           | dollar budget to do the video instructions for a hair dryer.
           | Instead of hunting for a gif to express how you feel,
           | captured from an existing TV show or something, you could
           | create a scene on the fly and attach it to a text message. Or
           | maybe you dispense with text messages altogether. Maybe text
           | is only for talking to computers now.
           | 
           | My personal prediction is that the value of a degree in art
           | history is going to go way, way up, because they'll be the
           | best prompt engineers. And just like desktop publishing
           | spawned legions of amateur typesetters, it will create lots
           | of lore among amateur video creators.
        
             | jijijijij wrote:
             | I didn't analyze anything.
             | 
             | I haven't seen a lot of use cases outside of productions
             | and businesses, which shouldn't exist in the first place
             | (at least to this extent).
             | 
             | Some of our "needs" are flawed, since "content" speaks to
             | evolutionary relicts developed in times of scarcity and
             | life in small groups. In the unbounded production of "AI",
             | there is no way to keep up the sense of _newness_ of input
             | indefinitely. I am already fatigued by  "AI" """art""". It
             | has no real relevancy. You can't trust any of it.
             | 
             | Every medium where "AI" content becomes prevalent, will
             | lose it's appeal. E.g. if I get the impression a
             | significant proportion of comments here were "AI"
             | generated, I will leave HN. Thing is, all these open
             | platforms can't prevent "AI" spam. So they will die. Look
             | at the frontpage of Reddit... it's _almost all_ reposts, by
             | karma farming bots. Youtube  "AI" spam already drowning
             | real content. This is what's going to happen to everything.
             | User content will die. "Content" will die. The web will
             | die. You won't even try, because of "AI" generated fatigue.
             | 
             | > My personal prediction is that the value of a degree in
             | art history is going to go way, way up, because they'll be
             | the best prompt engineers.
             | 
             | Lol. Yeah, "best prompt engineer" in the infinitely
             | abundant production economy...
             | 
             | You people really need to iterate the world you are
             | imagining a few times more and maybe think about some
             | fundamentals a bit.
             | 
             |  _If_ I am wrong, life will be hell.
        
           | zuminator wrote:
           | Do people care about 100% of the real thing though? Phone
           | photos are oversaturated and over-sharpened. TikTok and other
           | social media videos are more often then not run through
           | filters giving their creators impossibly smooth skin and slim
           | waists along with other effects not intended to look in any
           | way realistic. Almost every major motion picture has tons of
           | visual effects that defy physical reality. Nature
           | documentaries have for decades faked or sweetened their sound
           | production, staged their encounters with wildlife, etc.
           | 
           | People are more concerned about being stimulated than they
           | are about verisimilitude.
        
         | macrolime wrote:
         | >100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with
         | Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or
         | podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at
         | them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser,
         | etc.
         | 
         | All of these things are against the terms of service and
         | attempting them may result in a ban.
        
           | resolutebat wrote:
           | There are no terms of service for the open-source clone of
           | this that we'll have in 6 months.
        
             | raydev wrote:
             | Is there an open-source GPT4 equivalent right now? Doesn't
             | seem like anything has taken off and gotten rave reviews on
             | the level of OpenAI's offering yet.
        
               | resolutebat wrote:
               | Equivalent, no. Close enough for many uses, sure, and
               | it's getting better all the time.
        
         | treprinum wrote:
         | It's going to take a while to make this realtime as you
         | suggest. The lower the latency, the more $$$ it costs
         | (exponentially).
        
         | karmasimida wrote:
         | This is very impressive
         | 
         | But VFX isn't that big of a market by itself: Global visual
         | effects (VFX) market size was US$ 10.0 Billion in 2023
        
         | ben_w wrote:
         | > Sam is probably going to get his $7T if he keeps this up, and
         | when he does everybody else will be locked out forever.
         | 
         | I would be extremely surprised if he could get past the market
         | cap of all current corporations as an investment. That doesn't
         | mean "no, never"[0], but I would be extremely surprised.
         | 
         | $7T in one go would be 6.7% of global GDP, and is approximately
         | the combined GDP of Japan and Canada.
         | 
         | > These videos are crazy. Highly suggest anybody who was
         | playing with Dall-E a couple of years ago, and being mindblown
         | by "an astronaut riding a horse in space" or whatever go back
         | and look at the images they were creating then, and compare
         | that to this.
         | 
         | Indeed, though I will moderate that by analogy: it's been just
         | over 30 years since DOOM was released, and that was followed by
         | a large number of breathless announcements about how each game
         | had "amazing photorealistic graphics that beat everything else"
         | while forgetting that the same people had said the same things
         | about all the other games released since DOOM.
         | 
         | Don't get me wrong: these clips are amazing. They may not be
         | perfect, but it took me a few loops to notice the errors.
         | 
         | I'm sure there are people with better eyes for details than me,
         | who will spot more errors, spot them sooner, and keep noticing
         | them long after GenAI seems perfect to me.
         | 
         | But I also expect that, just as 3D games' journalism spent a
         | long time convinced the products were perfect when they
         | weren't, so too will GenAI journalism spend a long time
         | convinced the products are perfect before they actually are.
         | 
         | [0] a sufficiently capable AI _is an economic power in its own
         | right_. I previously guessed, and even with it 's flaws would
         | continue to guess, that the initial ChatGPT model was about as
         | economically valuable to each user as an industrial placement
         | student, and when I was one of those I was earning PS1k/month
         | (about PS1.7k/month when adjusted for inflation).
        
           | gwern wrote:
           | Yes, the 'special effects' effect will kick in. Within a year
           | or so, you'll spot this easily, quite aside from the more
           | obvious issues. (That Landrover captioned 'DANDOVER' - is
           | this _still_ using BPEs?!)
           | 
           | Aside from visual plausibility, there's also the issue of
           | physics: one of the things you would like to use video models
           | for is understanding real-world physics and cause-and-effect
           | for planning or learning _in silico_. Something may _look_
           | good but get key physics wrong and be useless for, say,
           | robotics.
        
         | patrickwalton wrote:
         | This comment just hit the charts of the black mirror scoreboard
        
       | IceHegel wrote:
       | Those samples are incredibly impressive. It blows RunwayML out of
       | the water.
       | 
       | As a layman watching the space, I didn't expect this level of
       | quality for two or three more years. Pretty blown away, the
       | puppies in the snow were really impressive.
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | i'm not surprised given what was there before, the stills from
         | stability was really good, and it's "just" generating new
         | frames.
        
           | Xirgil wrote:
           | Maintaining continuity of appearance, motion, etc does not
           | seem like a "just" to me
        
       | drcongo wrote:
       | This is actually mind-blowing.
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | Did anyone else feel motion sickness or nausea watching some of
       | these videos? In some of the videos with some panning or rotating
       | motion, i felt some nausea like sickness effect. I guess its
       | because some details were changing while in motion and I was
       | unable to keep track or focus anything in particular.
       | 
       | Effect was stronger in some videos.
        
         | _bramses wrote:
         | I do. My hypothesis is that there isn't really good bokeh yet
         | in the videos, and our brains get motion sick trying to decide
         | what to focus on. I.e. _too much_ movement and *too much
         | detail* spread out throughout the frame. Add motion to that and
         | you have a recipe for nausea (at least for now)
        
           | throwanem wrote:
           | You can shoot with high depth of field and not cause motion
           | sickness. Aerial videography does that every day, and it's no
           | more difficult in general to parse than looking out an
           | airliner window or at a distant horizon would be.
           | 
           | I suspect GP is closer to on the money here, in suspecting
           | the issue lies with a semblance of movement that _isn 't_
           | like what we see when we look at something a long way away.
           | 
           | I didn't notice such an effect myself, but I also haven't yet
           | inspected the videos in much detail, so I doubt I'd have
           | noticed it in any case.
        
         | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
         | I think part of it might be the slow motion / high frame rate
         | effect. I get this too sometimes with the Apple TV backgrounds.
        
         | charlotte-fyi wrote:
         | Yeah, these all made me feel incredibly nauseous. I was trying
         | to figure out what aspect of the motion was triggering this
         | (bad parallax?) but couldn't. The results are impressive but
         | it's still amazing to me how little defects like this can
         | trigger our sense of not just uncanniness but actual sickness.
        
         | hbn wrote:
         | I think I feel a bit of queasiness but more from the fact that
         | I'm looking at what I recognize as actual humans, and I'm
         | making judgements about what kinds of people they are as I do
         | with any other human, but it's actually not a human. It's not a
         | person that exists.
        
         | timeon wrote:
         | Perfect fit for VR.
        
       | DeathArrow wrote:
       | Goodbye, Hollywood!
        
       | idiliv wrote:
       | People here seem mostly impressed by the high resolution of these
       | examples.
       | 
       | Based on my experience doing research on Stable Diffusion,
       | scaling up the resolution is the conceptually easy part that only
       | requires larger models and more high-resolution training data.
       | 
       | The hard part is semantic alignment with the prompt. Attempts to
       | scale Stable Diffusion, like SDXL, have resulted only in
       | marginally better prompt understanding (likely due to the
       | continued reliance on CLIP prompt embeddings).
       | 
       | So, the key question here is how well Sora does prompt alignment.
        
         | golol wrote:
         | The real advancement is the consistency of character, scene,
         | and movement!
        
       | swayvil wrote:
       | It really makes me wonder if something like this is running
       | inside my head.
       | 
       | The prompt tho. Probably not text. Probably a stream of vibes or
       | something.
        
       | ummonk wrote:
       | Looked at the first clip and immediately noticed the woman's feet
       | swap at ~15 seconds in. My eyes were drawn to the feet because of
       | the extreme supination in her steps.
       | 
       | Looks like a dramatic improvement in video generation but still a
       | miss in terms of realism unless one can apply pose control to the
       | generated videos.
        
       | tzm wrote:
       | "so far ahead" "leaps and bounds beyond anything out there" "This
       | is insane"
       | 
       | Let's temper the emotions for a second. Sora is great, but it's
       | not ready for prime time. Many people are working on this problem
       | that haven't shared their results yet. The speed of refinement is
       | what's more interesting to me.
        
       | kevingadd wrote:
       | It's interesting how a lot of the higher frequency detail is
       | obviously quantized. The motion of humans in the drone shots for
       | example is very 'low frequency' or 'low framerate', and things
       | like flowing ocean water also appears to be quantized. I assume
       | this is because of the internal precision of these models not
       | being very high?
        
       | ugh123 wrote:
       | Imagine a movie script, but with more detail of the scenes and
       | actors, plugged into this.
       | 
       | The killer app for this is being able to give a prompt of a
       | detailed description of a scene, with actor movements and all
       | detail of environment, structure, furniture, etc. Add to that
       | camera views/angles/movement specified in the prompt along with
       | text for actors.
        
       | jk_tech wrote:
       | This is bananas. This is ahead of anything else I've seen. The
       | entire stock footage industry may be shut down over night because
       | of something like this.
       | 
       | And it is still not perfect. Looking at the example of the
       | plastic chair being dug up in the desert[1] is frankly a bit...
       | funky. But imagine in 5 or even 10 years.
       | 
       | 1. https://openai.com/sora?video=chair-archaeology
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | Impressive actually, i can actually see UI being real time
       | generated one day now.
       | 
       | You give it data like real time stock data, feed it into Sora,
       | the prompt is "I need a chart based on the data, show me
       | different time ranges"
       | 
       | As you move the cursor, it feeds into sora again, generating the
       | next frame in real time.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | How many of the video startups are shtting their pants right now?
        
       | break_the_bank wrote:
       | In less than a few hours Gemini 1.5 is old news. Sam is doing
       | live demos on Twitter while Google just released a blog.
       | 
       | Didn't think Google would be the first of the Facebook, Apple,
       | Google and Microsoft to get disrupted.
        
         | Alifatisk wrote:
         | I disagree, Gemini 1.5 is still impressive (if true) with the
         | 10 million context size!
        
           | umeshunni wrote:
           | It'll be impressive when I can use it.
        
             | alooPotato wrote:
             | you can't use sora either
        
               | joshua11 wrote:
               | At least you can see the demos. Google released a blog
               | post and was like, keep waiting
        
               | Alifatisk wrote:
               | There's also videos showcasing Gemini Pro 1.5, but
               | historically speaking, Google hasn't been fully truthful
               | with their demos.
               | 
               | Can't you access Gemini Pro 1.5 through Vertex Ai?
        
               | htrp wrote:
               | Whitelist only (talk to your GCP account rep)
        
             | joshua11 wrote:
             | Welp, I can't upvote. But this ^^^
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | There's not really too much to talk about Gemini 1.5 as it's an
         | iteration and there's not much to test around the new context
         | length.
         | 
         | The Sora demos are more interesting.
        
         | matsemann wrote:
         | Did they have this ready to go to upstage whatever Google would
         | release? Or just coincidental both things announced today?
        
           | Palmik wrote:
           | It's just as likely that Google knew OpenAI has their
           | announcement planned for today and wanted to preempt it.
           | Happens all the time.
        
         | thepasswordis wrote:
         | The fact that SamA just seems to go off the cuff on twitter
         | pretty frequently is such a breath of fresh air.
        
           | ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
           | Hes a real CEO, Sundar is just a political appointment
        
             | Xenoamorphous wrote:
             | As someone who just skims Hacker News and little else and
             | no skin in the game, I always get the impression that
             | Pichai is the weakest of the big tech CEOs, compared to
             | Satya, Cook, etc.
             | 
             | Is my impression correct? Or it's just that the anti-Google
             | sentiment is strong in HN?
        
               | ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
               | No hes bad. Very good politician at Google, did some
               | interesting moves with Chrome a long time back. Not a
               | visionary, and they are afraid of ai overtaking google
        
         | overstay8930 wrote:
         | I'm pretty sure everyone saw Google as a directionless pile of
         | money, there's a reason killedbygoogle exists.
        
         | karmasimida wrote:
         | I mean, why would this make google look bad?
         | 
         | Gemini is catching up, so OpenAI needs a new venue to market
         | itself to the investors. It is doing a soft pivoting if you ask
         | me, now GPT4 is like not that special anymore.
        
           | Oras wrote:
           | That's the point I guess. They are just catching up, not
           | really making leaps.
        
             | karmasimida wrote:
             | Fair
             | 
             | On the other hand, Video to google is much less relevant
             | than text. But if OpenAI figuring out something from it to
             | AGI, that would be a different story.
        
               | cma wrote:
               | Youtube? Someone's going to make a tiktok like quick-
               | feedback thing of purely generated stuff that learns what
               | you like and tailors the generations to you, and, despite
               | Google owning Youtube, OpenAI looks far closer to it than
               | them.
        
               | karmasimida wrote:
               | Youtube is a video hosting platform, its advantage is in
               | video delivery and ads. Why would a video generation
               | software disrupts business?
               | 
               | Creating _realistic_ video isn 't hard even today, you
               | can just do it on your phone and creating hours, hours of
               | cat/dog videos. The hard part is to find a story to make
               | it interesting. It could be possible in the future, like
               | automatic film making, from script to realization, but
               | that doesn't make YouTube's business go away either.
        
               | digging wrote:
               | > Why would a video generation software disrupts
               | business?
               | 
               | If those videos aren't hosted on YouTube.
        
               | rvz wrote:
               | YouTube is just another moat for Google to catch up to
               | Sora.
               | 
               | But this time, Google is finally showing their war face
               | instead of not trying hard to compete against Microsoft
               | and OpenAI.
        
       | VladimirGolovin wrote:
       | I did not expect this level of quality in the beginning of 2024.
       | Makes me think that we may see AGI by the end of this decade.
        
       | tropdrop wrote:
       | I see many possibilities for commercials, demos... not to mention
       | kids' animations, of course.
       | 
       | Actually, thinking of this from the perspective of a start-up, it
       | could be cool to instantly demonstrate a use-case of a product
       | (with just a little light editing of a phone screen in post). We
       | spent a lot of money on our product demo videos and now this
       | would basically be free.
        
         | unleaded wrote:
         | how will the AI know what your product looks like? You probably
         | already have CAD models, couldn't you import those into blender
         | and make something in an afternoon or two?
        
           | tropdrop wrote:
           | Sure, for a technical demo, that's no problem. I'm talking
           | about those more general kind of commercials meant to make
           | the product more approachable to a lay person - showing a
           | woman using the app on site to fulfill task X (this is where
           | the screen grab will be superimposed in post), showing a man
           | smiling and sitting down at a coffee shop and continuing to
           | work after task has been fulfilled, etc.
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | > how will the AI know what your product looks like?
           | 
           | Training an embedding/LoRA on the product and using it with
           | the base model, same as is done for image-generation models
           | (video generation models usually often use very similar
           | architecture to image generation models -- e.g., SVD is a
           | Stable Diffusion 2.x family model with some tweaks.)
           | 
           | Now, you may not be be able to do this with Sora when OpenAI
           | releases it as a public product, just like you can't with
           | DALL-E. But that's a limitation of OpenAI's decisions around
           | what to expose, not the underlying technology.
        
       | AbuAssar wrote:
       | Sora means picture or image in Arabic language
        
       | ilteris wrote:
       | Where is the tool that we can try?
        
       | OscarTheGrinch wrote:
       | How is this done technically? So many moving parts and the
       | tracking on each is exquisite.
       | 
       | My initial observation is that the camera moves are very similar
       | to a camera in a 3D modeling program: on an inhuman dolly flying
       | through space on a impossibly smooth path / bezier curve. Makes
       | me wonder if there is actually a something like 3D simulation at
       | the root here, or maybe a 3D unsupervised training loop, and they
       | are somehow mapping persistent AI textures onto it?
        
       | peterisza wrote:
       | holy ....
        
       | doakes wrote:
       | This is super cool. So many innovations come to mind. But it
       | makes me wonder what will come from having the ability to
       | virtually experience anything we want. It'll take a while, but
       | I'm hoping we'll eventually want to go outside more instead of
       | less.
        
       | thomastraum wrote:
       | I am a CG artist and Director and this made me so sad. I am
       | watching in horror and amazement. I am not anti AI at all, but
       | being on the wrong side of efficiency, for the individual this is
       | heartbreaking. its so much fun to make CG and create shots and
       | the reason its hard (just like anything) makes it rewarding.
        
         | superconduct123 wrote:
         | I'm conflicted though because on the flip side it could open up
         | filmmaking to way more people who don't have the
         | skills/money/time
         | 
         | Like what if any artist could make a whole movie by themself
         | without needing millions of dollars or hundreds of people
         | 
         | Similar to how you used to need a huge studio full of equipment
         | to record music and now someone in their bedroom with a DAW can
         | do it
        
           | Zelphyr wrote:
           | I can't help but worry that this will make it too easy to
           | create movies and the product will be of much lower quality.
           | There is precedence here in the music industry. A recent
           | report came out that said that about 70% of music sales was
           | catalog music, implying that people are buying less new music
           | than old. I personally feel that's because the new music just
           | isn't very good and one of the reasons is, it's too easy to
           | make and distribute music now.
        
             | Solvency wrote:
             | That is a ridiculous take. Look at the absolute SEA of
             | bottom-barrel content flooding every single streaming
             | platform. For people at the top of the studio system, they
             | are already living out their AI power trips, just in the
             | meatspace.
             | 
             | The entire industry is already turning out terrible shit,
             | but doing it by wasting hundreds of thousands of actors,
             | production teams, and studio dollars in order to churn out
             | that nonsense.
             | 
             | Meanwhile, there are millions of latent storytellers, who,
             | for whatever reason (but primarily: not born into extreme
             | wealth and nepotistic connections) could never express
             | their ideas in motion/cinema at such ambitious scales.
             | 
             | By putting this power in the hands of actually talented
             | writers and storytellers, you create a completely new
             | market of potentially incredible works of art.
        
               | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
               | Sure. But you have to admit that you also create a new
               | market of low effort garbage art. The question is which
               | is bigger, and where the money will ultimately go.
        
           | gcanko wrote:
           | I think an important skill in the future would be just having
           | good ideas. That's going to differentiate the winners from
           | the losers
        
         | manuka wrote:
         | Why the terror? Your job will change a bit but won't be gone.
         | You would guide the output and make prompts not with text but
         | your own video CGI shorts to make things 100% to your liking
         | and the AI will do the rest of the dirty work. You productivity
         | will grow and quality of your work too. You would be able to
         | make an AAA movie all by yourself on a laptop. Since everyone
         | would be able to do the same, the fight for the imagination and
         | inginuity in scripting and artists view would skyroket. :) IMHO
        
           | tasty_freeze wrote:
           | You are rather cavalier about other people's livelihoods.
           | There will be budget for maybe 10% of the people currently
           | employed, and yes, they will be making use of the new tools
           | and they'll adapt. The other 90% are going to be doing
           | doordash until they can figure out a new career.
        
           | ihumanable wrote:
           | The terror is because companies want to maximize profits and
           | a great way to do that is to minimize costs.
           | 
           | If you have a team of X people producing Y pieces, and now X
           | people can produce 10Y pieces, everything is fine as long as
           | the demand for pieces keeps up. But if your company really
           | only needs Y pieces or really any amount less than 10Y then
           | the easiest thing for a company to do is go, "We don't really
           | need X people, let's fire some"
           | 
           | Getting fired, in America at least, means loss of healthcare,
           | income, and if it persists long enough housing. Most people
           | are terrified of being homeless, broke, and without access to
           | medicine.
        
           | avisser wrote:
           | > Your job will change a bit but won't be gone. > You[r]
           | productivity will grow
           | 
           | This aren't compatible at scale. If productivity grows, there
           | will be less people doing the job.
        
             | VMG wrote:
             | Programmers are more productive than years ago and there
             | are many more of them
        
               | timeon wrote:
               | Sometimes it looks like the peek is ending. Who knows.
        
           | charlotte-fyi wrote:
           | Many people consider what you refer to as "the dirty work" as
           | precisely the point of creative practices.
        
         | __loam wrote:
         | I think it's okay to be a bit anti ai lol.
        
         | Keyframe wrote:
         | Ex colleague then! I'm kind of glad I went out of it all now
         | that I see all of this, but on the other hand it's also an
         | amazing opportunity unfolding, as long as it's directable. What
         | a great toolset! For what you've had to have army of people,
         | freezing ass on location, working with actors.. soon gone.
         | Well, if you want it to. On the other hand, look at what
         | happened to imagery, concept art in general. For the better
         | part it cheapened it. Turned it into this mass produced, easily
         | available thing that it's not special anymore. Skills are still
         | needed to produce exactly what you want, but the special flair
         | is kind of gone. It will need way more energy and creativity
         | now to stand out.
        
       | gigatexal wrote:
       | I am genuinely impressed.
        
       | crazygringo wrote:
       | This is insane. But I'm impressed most of all by the quality of
       | _motion_. I 've quite simply _never seen convincing computer-
       | generated motion before_. Just look at the way the wooly mammoths
       | connect with the ground, and their lumbering mass feels real.
       | 
       | Motion-capture works fine because that's real motion, but every
       | time people try to animate humans and animals, even in big-budget
       | CGI movies, it's always ultimately obviously fake. There are so
       | many subtle things that happen in terms of acceleration and
       | deceleration of all of the different parts of an organism, that
       | no animator ever gets it 100% right. No animation _algorithm_
       | gets it to a point where it 's believable, just where it's "less
       | bad".
       | 
       | But these videos seem to be getting it entirely believable for
       | both people and animals. Which is _wild_.
       | 
       | And then of course, not to mention that these are entirely
       | believable 3D spaces, with seemingly full object permanence. As
       | opposed to other efforts I've seen which are basically briefly
       | animating a 2D scene to make it seem vaguely 3D.
        
         | swamp40 wrote:
         | It's been trained on videos exclusively. Then GPT-4 interprets
         | your prompt for it.
        
         | Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
         | > Motion-capture works fine because that's real motion
         | 
         | Except in games where they mo-cap at a frame rate less than
         | what it will be rendered at and just interpolate between mo-cap
         | samples, which makes snappy movements turn into smooth
         | movements and motions end up in the uncanny valley.
         | 
         | It's especially noticeable when a character is talking and
         | makes a "P" sound. In a "P", your lips basically "pop" open.
         | But if the motion is smoothed out, it gives the lips the look
         | of making an "mm" sound. The lips of someone saying "post"
         | looks like "most".
         | 
         | At 30 fps, it's unnoticeable. At 144 fps, it's jarring once you
         | see it and can't unsee it.
        
         | isthispermanent wrote:
         | Pixar is computer generated motion, no?
        
           | minimaxir wrote:
           | With extreme amounts of man-hours to do so.
        
           | viewtransform wrote:
           | Main Pixar characters are all computer animated by humans.
           | Physics effects like water, hair, clothing, smoke and
           | background crowds use computer physics simulation but there
           | are handles allowing an animator to direct the motion as per
           | the directors wishes.
        
         | gerash wrote:
         | When others create text to video systems (eg. Lumiere from
         | Google) they publish the research (eg.
         | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.12945.pdf). Open AI is all about
         | commercialization. I don't like their attitude
        
           | y_gy wrote:
           | Ironic, isn't it! OpenAI started out "open," publishing
           | research, and now "ClosedAI" would be a much better name.
        
             | ionwake wrote:
             | TBH they should just rename to ClosedAI and run with it, I
             | and others would appreciate the honesty plus it would be
             | amusing.
        
               | polygamous_bat wrote:
               | However if you are playing for the regulatory capture
               | route (which Sam Altman seems to be angling for) it's
               | much easier if your name is "OpenAI".
        
               | tavavex wrote:
               | If you go full regulatory capture, you might as well name
               | it "AI", The AI Company.
        
               | ionwake wrote:
               | You never go "full" regulatory capture.
        
             | efrank3 wrote:
             | gottem
        
             | ShamelessC wrote:
             | Sick burn!
        
           | mtillman wrote:
           | OAI requires a real mobile phone number to signup and are
           | therefore an adtech company.
        
             | BadHumans wrote:
             | Might be one of the most absurd things said on here.
             | Requiring a phone number for sign up does not automatically
             | mean you are selling ads.
        
               | polygamous_bat wrote:
               | When the time for making money comes, if you don't think
               | OpenAI will sell every drop of information they have on
               | you, then you are incredibly naive. Why would they leave
               | money on the table when everyone else has been doing it
               | for forever without any adverse effects?
        
               | jstummbillig wrote:
               | If Google Workspace was selling my or any customers
               | information, at all or "forever", it would not be called
               | Google Workspace, it would be called Google We-died-in-
               | the-most-expensive-lawsuit-of-all-time.
        
               | Zacharias030 wrote:
               | They are currently hiring people with Adtech experience.
               | 
               | The most simple version would be an ad-supported ChatGPT
               | experience. Anyone thinking that an internet consumer
               | company with 100m weekly active users (I'm citing from
               | their job ad) is not going to sell ads is lacking
               | imagination.
        
           | jstummbillig wrote:
           | Not to be overly cute, but if the cutting edge research you
           | do is maybe changing the world fundamentally, forever,
           | guarding that tech should be really, really, really far up
           | your list of priorities and everyone else should be really
           | happy about your priorities.
           | 
           | And that should probably take precedence over the semantics
           | of your moniker, every single time (even if hn continues to
           | be super sour about it)
        
             | cloogshicer wrote:
             | I'd much rather this tech be open - better for everyone to
             | have it than a select few.
             | 
             | The more powerful, the more important it is that everyone
             | has access.
        
               | crazygringo wrote:
               | Do you feel the same way about nuclear weapons tech?
               | 
               | That "the more powerful, the more important it is that
               | everyone has access"?
               | 
               | Especially considering that the biggest killer app for AI
               | could very well be smart weapons like we've never seen
               | before.
        
               | spdustin wrote:
               | I feel this is a false equivalence.
               | 
               | Nukes aren't even close to being commodities, cannot be
               | targeted at a class of people (or a single person), and
               | have a minutely small number of users. (Don't argue
               | semantics with "class of people" when you know what I
               | mean, btw)
               | 
               | On the other hand, tech like this can easily become as
               | common as photoshop, can cause harm to a class of people,
               | and be deployed on a whim by an untrained army of
               | malevolent individuals or groups.
        
               | tavavex wrote:
               | An AI video generator can't kill billions of people, for
               | one. I'd prefer it if access wasn't limited to a single
               | corporation that's accountable to no one and is
               | incentivized to use it for their benefits only.
        
               | jstummbillig wrote:
               | > accountable to no one
               | 
               | What do you mean? Are you being dramatic or do you
               | actually believe that the US government will/can not
               | _absolutely_ shut OpenAI down, if they feel it was
               | required to guarantee state order?
        
               | tavavex wrote:
               | For the US government to step in, they'd have to do
               | something extremely dangerous (and refuse to share with
               | the government). If we're talking about video generation,
               | the benefits they have are financial, and the lack of
               | accountability is in that they can do things no one else
               | can. I'm not saying they'll be allowed to break the law,
               | there's plenty of space between the two extremes. Though,
               | given how things were going, I can also see OpenAI
               | teaming up with the US government and receiving exclusive
               | privileges to run certain technologies for the sake of
               | "safety". It's what Altman has already been pushing for.
        
               | Vinnl wrote:
               | Oof, imagine if our safeguard for nuclear weapons was
               | that a private company kept it safe.
        
               | iwsk wrote:
               | Should nukes be open source?
        
               | spdustin wrote:
               | I humbly refer you to this comment:
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39389262
        
               | jstummbillig wrote:
               | As long as destroying things remains at least two
               | magnitudes easier than building things and defending
               | against attacks, this take (as a blanket statement) will
               | continue to be indefensible and irresponsible.
        
             | creatonez wrote:
             | This is meaningless until you've defined "world changing".
             | It's possible that open sourcing AIs will be world-changing
             | in a good way and developing closed source AIs will be
             | world-changing in a bad way.
             | 
             | If I engineered the tech I would be much more fearful of
             | the possibility of malice in the future leadership of the
             | organization I'm under if they continue to keep it closed,
             | than I would be fearful of the whole world getting the
             | capability if they decide to open source.
             | 
             | I feel that, like with Yellow Journalism of the 1920s, much
             | of the misinformation problem with generative AI will only
             | be mitigated during widespread proliferation, wherein
             | people become immune to new tactics and gain a new
             | skepticism of the media. I've always thought it strange
             | when news outlets discuss new deepfakes but refuse to show
             | it, even with a watermark indicating it is fake.
             | Misinformation research shows that people become more
             | skeptical once they learn about the technological measures
             | (e.g. buying karma-farmed Reddit accounts, or in the 1920s,
             | taking advantage of dramatically lower newspaper printing
             | costs to print sensationalism) through which misinformation
             | is manufactured.
        
             | bamboozled wrote:
             | What a load...image if everyone else guarded all their
             | discoveries, there'd be no text to video would there?
        
         | omega3 wrote:
         | Out of all the examples, the wooly mammoths one actually feels
         | like CGI the most to me, the other ones are much more
         | believable than this one.
        
           | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
           | Possibly because there are no videos or even photos of live
           | wooly mammoths, but loads and loads of CG recreations in
           | various documentaries.
        
           | mikeInAlaska wrote:
           | I saw the cat in the bed grows an extra limb...
        
             | krapp wrote:
             | Cats are weird sometimes.
        
         | patall wrote:
         | I disagree, just look at the legs of the woman in the first
         | video. First she seems to be limping, than the legs rotate. The
         | mammoth are totally uncanny for me as its both running and
         | walking at the same time.
         | 
         | Don't get me wrong, it is impressive. But I think many people
         | will be very uncomfortable with such motion very quickly. Same
         | story as the fingers before.
        
           | Hoasi wrote:
           | > I disagree, just look at the legs of the woman in the first
           | video.
           | 
           | The people behind her all walk at the same pace and seem like
           | floating. The moving reflections, on the other hand, are
           | impressive make-believe.
        
             | kyrra wrote:
             | If you watch the background, you'll see one guy has hits
             | pants change color. And also, some of the guys are absolute
             | giants compared to people around them.
        
           | lukan wrote:
           | Yeah, it looks good at first glance. Also the fingers are
           | still weird. And I suppose for every somewhat working vid,
           | there were dozens of garbage. At least that was my experience
           | with image generation.
           | 
           | I don't believe, movie makers are out of buisness any time
           | soon. They will have to incorporate it though. So far this
           | can make convincing background scenery.
        
             | Solvency wrote:
             | I love these hot takes based on profoundly incredible tech
             | that literally just launched. Acting like 2030 isn't around
             | the corner.
        
               | bamboozled wrote:
               | We're glad you love them.
        
           | bamboozled wrote:
           | Agreed and these are the cherry picked examples of course.
        
         | djmips wrote:
         | I'm not sure I feel the same way about the mammoths - and the
         | billowing snow makes no sense as someone who grew up in a snowy
         | area. If the snow was powder maybe but that's not what's
         | depicted on the ground.
        
         | bamboozled wrote:
         | I'm a bit thrown off by the fact the mammoths are steaming, is
         | that normal for mammoths ?
        
       | golol wrote:
       | This does put a smile on my face
        
       | beders wrote:
       | Finally, a true Star Wars prequel is in reach. Everybody gets
       | their own :)
        
       | rafaelero wrote:
       | holy shit
        
       | kweingar wrote:
       | Obviously incredibly cool, but it seems that people are
       | _incredibly_ overstating the applications of this.
       | 
       | Realistically, how do you fit this into a movie, a TV show, or a
       | game? You write a text prompt, get a scene, and then everything
       | is gone--the characters, props, rooms, buildings, environments,
       | etc. won't carry over to the next prompt.
        
         | fassssst wrote:
         | It generates up to 1 minute videos which is like what all the
         | kids are watching on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, right? And most
         | ads are shorter than 1 minute.
        
           | Janicc wrote:
           | A few months ago ai generated videos of people getting
           | arrested for wearing big boots went viral on TikTok. I think
           | this sort of silly "interdimensional cable" stuff will be
           | really big on these short form video type sites once this
           | level of quality becomes available to everyone.
        
         | dragonwriter wrote:
         | > You write a text prompt, get a scene, and then everything is
         | gone--the characters, props, rooms, buildings, environments,
         | etc. won't carry over to the next prompt.
         | 
         | Sure, you can't use the text-to-video frontend for that
         | purpose. But if you've got a t2v model as good as Sora clearly
         | is, you've got the infrastructure for a lot more, as the
         | ecosystem around the open-source models in the space has shown.
         | The same techniques that allow character, object, etc.,
         | consistency in text-to-image models can be applied to text-to-
         | video models.
        
         | matsemann wrote:
         | It also seems hard to control exactly what you get. Like you'd
         | want a specific pan, focus etc. to realize your vision. The
         | examples here look good, but they aren't very specific.
         | 
         | But it was the same with Dall-E and others in the beginning,
         | and there's now lots of ways to control image generators. Same
         | will probably happen here. This was a huge leap just in how
         | coherent the frames are.
        
         | wilg wrote:
         | You wait a year and they'll figure it out.
        
         | superconduct123 wrote:
         | It doesn't need to replace the whole movie
         | 
         | You could use it for stuff like wide shots, close ups, random
         | CG shots, rapid cut shots, stuff where you just cut to it once
         | and don't need multiple angles
         | 
         | To me it seem most useful for advertising where a lot of times
         | they only show something once, like a montage
        
           | Boss0565 wrote:
           | I also see advertising (especially lower-budget productions,
           | such as dropshipping or local TV commercials) being early
           | adopters of this technology once businesses have access to
           | this at an affordable price.
        
           | planckscnst wrote:
           | And it would be magic for storyboarding. This would be such a
           | useful tool for a director to iterate on a shot and then
           | communicate that to the team
        
         | JKCalhoun wrote:
         | You could use it to storyboard right now. Continuity of
         | characters/wardrobe, etc. is not that important in
         | storyboarding.
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | tiktok
        
         | nprateem wrote:
         | It's pretty obvious they just need to add the ability to prompt
         | it with an image saying "continue in this style and make the
         | character..."
        
         | barbarr wrote:
         | Explicit video clips? 4chan is gonna have a field day with
         | this.
        
         | sethammons wrote:
         | What came to mind is what is right around the corner: you
         | create segments and stitch them together.
         | 
         | "ok, continue from the context on the last scene. Great. Ok,
         | move the bookshelf. I want that cat to be more furry. Cool.
         | Save this as scene 34."
         | 
         | As clip sizes grow and context can be inferred from a previous
         | scene, and a library of scenes can be made, boom, you can now
         | create full feature length films, easy enough that elementary
         | school kids will be able to craft up their imaginations.
        
       | void-pointer wrote:
       | This is the beginning of the end, folks
        
       | SushiHippie wrote:
       | I find the watermark at the bottom right really interesting at
       | first it looks like random movement and then in the end it
       | transforms into the OpenAI logo
        
       | M4v3R wrote:
       | > The model can also take an existing video and extend it or fill
       | in missing frames
       | 
       | I wonder if it could be used as a replacement for optical flow to
       | create slow motion videos out of normal speed ones.
        
       | mushufasa wrote:
       | Do you think they announced this today to steal attention from
       | Google/Gemini annuncement?
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | No, corporate announcements are very much planned in advance.
         | There's a lot of coordination that has to happen. This is just
         | coincidence, unless one of the companies had inside information
         | about the other's announcement and timing. But that's pretty
         | unlikely.
        
       | sorokod wrote:
       | Just in time for the election season. Also "A cat waking up its
       | sleeping owner demanding breakfast" has too many paws - yes I do
       | feel petty saying this.
        
         | matsemann wrote:
         | And the sleeper's shoulder gets converted to the duvet? And a
         | strange extra hand somewhere. It was also the one that to me
         | stood out as the worst. The quality was good, but it had the
         | same artifacts as previous generations of ai videoes where
         | thing morphs.
        
       | birriel wrote:
       | With the third and last videos (space men, and man reading in the
       | clouds), this is the first time I have found the resolution
       | indistinguishable from real life. Even with SOTA stills from
       | Midjourney and Stable Diffusion I was not entirely convinced.
       | This is incredible.
        
       | corobo wrote:
       | Oooh this is gonna usher in a new wave of GPT wrappers!
       | 
       | If anyone's taking requests, could you do one that takes audio
       | clips from podcasts and turns them into animations? Ideally via
       | API rather than some PITA UI
       | 
       | Being able to keep the animation style between generations would
       | be the key feature for that kind of use-case I imagine.
        
       | sys32768 wrote:
       | Game of Thrones Season 8 will be great in a few years.
        
       | gondo wrote:
       | This might be amazing progress, but I would never know as the
       | website is consistently crashing Safari on my iPhone 13.
        
       | ulnarkressty wrote:
       | To put it into perspective, the Will Smith eating spaghetti video
       | came out not even a year ago --
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQr4Xklqzw8
        
       | khazhoux wrote:
       | The focus here is on video motion, but I'm very impressed by the
       | photorealistic humans.
        
       | kuprel wrote:
       | Next they have to add audio, then VideoChatGPT is possible
        
       | torginus wrote:
       | I'm not sure about others, but I'm extremely unnerved about how
       | OpenAI just throws these innovations out with zero foreshadowing
       | - it's crazy how the world's potentially most life-changing
       | company operates with the secrecy of a black military program.
       | 
       | I really wonder what's going to come out of the company and on
       | what timeline.
        
         | superconduct123 wrote:
         | That's what's mindblowing to me
         | 
         | It doesn't feel like a slow incremental progress, the last AI
         | videos I've seen were terrible
         | 
         | Its like suddenly a huge jump in quality
        
           | Jackson__ wrote:
           | It is a sudden jump in quality. A mere _month_ ago, this is
           | what googles SOTA was: https://lumiere-video.github.io/
        
       | throwitaway222 wrote:
       | What in the flying f just happened.
       | 
       | I guess we've all just been replaced.
        
       | partiallypro wrote:
       | These are insanely good, but there are still some things that
       | just give them away (which is good, imo.) Like the Tokyo video is
       | amazing, the reflections, etc are all great, but the gaits of
       | people in the background and how fast they are moving is clearly
       | off. It sticks out once you notice it. These things will
       | obviously improve as time marches on.
       | 
       | The fear I have has less to do with these taking jobs, but in
       | that eventually this is just going to be used by a foreign actor
       | and no one is going to know what is real anymore. This already
       | exists in new stories, now imagine that with actual AI videos
       | that are near indistinguishable from reality. It could get really
       | bad. Have an insane conspiracy theory? Well, now you can have
       | your belief validated by a completely fictional AI generated
       | video that even the most trained eyes have trouble debunking.
       | 
       | The jobs thing is also a concern, because if you have a bunch of
       | idle hands that suddenly aren't sure what to believe or just
       | believe lies, it can quickly turn into mass political violence.
       | Don't be naive to think this isn't already being thought of by
       | various national security services and militaries. We're already
       | on the precipice of it, this could eventually be a good shove
       | down the hill.
        
         | bottlepalm wrote:
         | Why aren't you more afraid of ASI? We're clearly just dancing
         | around it at this point.
        
           | partiallypro wrote:
           | Real AGI is farther away than I think people think, and the
           | tendency for mankind to destroy itself is much better
           | demonstrated than machines doing that even when that time
           | comes.
        
         | kilbuz wrote:
         | This is like seeing the first packets ever sent on the internet
         | and noting that latency is high, lol.
        
       | ulnarkressty wrote:
       | I do hope that they have a documentary team embedded in this
       | company, like DeepMind had. They're making historical
       | advancements on multiple fronts.
        
       | tehsauce wrote:
       | It's fascinating that it can model so much of the subtle
       | dynamics, structure, and appearance of the world in
       | photorealistic detail, and still have a relatively poor model of
       | things like object permanence:
       | 
       | https://cdn.openai.com/sora/videos/puppy-cloning.mp4
       | 
       | Perhaps there are particular aspects of our world that the human
       | mind has evolved to hyperfocus on.
       | 
       | Will we figure out an easy way make these models match humans in
       | those areas? Let's hope it takes some time.
        
       | ionwake wrote:
       | How long until there is an open source model for.... text to
       | video?
       | 
       | Genuine question I have no idea
        
       | jenny91 wrote:
       | Absolutely insane. It's very odd where the glitches happen. Did
       | anyone else notice in the "stylish woman ... Tokyo" clip how her
       | legs skip-hop and then cross at 0:30 in a physically impossible
       | way. Everything else about the clip seems so realistic, yet this
       | is where it _trips up_?
        
         | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
         | And the cat that wakes up the woman in bed, has three front
         | paws! And that woman seems to be wearing the blanket as though
         | they were pyjamas. Still, it's usually very hard to notice the
         | inconsistencies -- just like the subtle inconsistencies we
         | might see in our dreams.
        
           | jenny91 wrote:
           | Yes, there's some really weird hand-blanket morphing going on
           | in that cat shot. Similarly in the guy reading a book on a
           | cloud, the pages flip in a physically impossible way at one
           | point.
           | 
           | I just think it's perplexing how they got things so right,
           | yet so wrong. How did they implement this?!
        
         | psb217 wrote:
         | She's also wearing a different jacket at the end of the video.
         | Continuity is not maintained when the video zooms back out to a
         | wider shot after the close-up on her face. See, e.g., no zipper
         | on end jacket and obvious zipper on jacket earlier in the
         | video, or placement of the silver "buttons" and general
         | structure of the lapels.
         | 
         | The background details are particularly "slippery" in these
         | videos. E.g., in the initial video of walking along a snowy
         | street in Japan, characters on the left just sort of merge
         | into/out of existence. It's impressive locally, but the global
         | structure and ability to paint in finer-grained details in a
         | physically plausible way fails similarly to current image gen
         | models, but more noticeably with the added temporal dimension.
        
         | qiller wrote:
         | The construction scene has people appearing out of thin air,
         | changing jacket colors, and in general weird things happening
        
       | synapsomorphy wrote:
       | Holy cow, I've literally only looked at the first two videos so
       | far, and it's clear that this absolutely blows every other
       | generative video model out of the water, barely even worth
       | comparing. We immediately jumped from interesting toy models
       | where it was pretty easy to tell that the output was AI generated
       | to.. this.
        
       | nopinsight wrote:
       | Many might miss the key paragraph at the end:
       | "Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand and
       | simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an
       | important milestone for achieving AGI."
       | 
       | This also helps explain why the model is so good since it is
       | trained to simulate the real world, as opposed to imitate the
       | pixels.
       | 
       | More importantly, its capabilities suggest AGI and general
       | robotics could be closer than many think (even though some key
       | weaknesses remain and further improvements are necessary before
       | the goal is reached.)
       | 
       | EDIT: I just saw this relevant comment by an expert at Nvidia:
       | "If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think
       | again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation
       | of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns
       | intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning,
       | and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths.
       | I won't be surprised if Sora is trained on lots of synthetic data
       | using Unreal Engine 5. It has to be!             Let's breakdown
       | the following video. Prompt: "Photorealistic closeup video of two
       | pirate ships battling each other as they sail inside a cup of
       | coffee." ...."
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/DrJimFan/status/1758210245799920123
        
         | lucisferre wrote:
         | > since it is trained to simulate the real world
         | 
         | Is it though? Or is this just marketing?
        
           | rdedev wrote:
           | If it is its not there yet. The snow in the mammoth video
           | kind of looks like smoke, the way it rises into the air
        
           | wilg wrote:
           | I think it's just inherent to the problem space. Obviously it
           | understands something about the world to be able to generate
           | convincing depictions of it.
        
             | lucisferre wrote:
             | It seems very dangerous to assume claims without evidence
             | are obvious.
        
               | wilg wrote:
               | I didn't do that.
        
           | nopinsight wrote:
           | What other likely reasons might explain the leap ahead of
           | other significant efforts?
           | 
           | See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39387333
        
             | lucisferre wrote:
             | Just having a better or bigger model? Better training data,
             | better feedback process, etc.
             | 
             | Seems more likely then "it can simulate reality".
             | 
             | Also I take anecdotal reviews like that with a grain of
             | salt. I follow numerous AI groups on Reddit and elsewhere
             | and many users seem to have strong opinions that their tool
             | of choice is the best. These reviews are highly biased.
             | 
             | Not to say I'm not impressed, but it's just been released.
        
               | nopinsight wrote:
               | Object persistence and consistency are not likely to
               | arise simply from a bigger model. A different approach or
               | architecture is needed.
               | 
               | Also, I just added a link to an expert's tweet above.
               | What do you think?
        
               | lucisferre wrote:
               | Others have provided explanations for things like object
               | persistence, for example keeping a memory of the
               | rendering outside of the frame.
               | 
               | The comment from the expert is definitely interesting and
               | compelling, but clearly still speculation based on the
               | following comment.
               | 
               | > I won't be surprised if Sora is trained on lots of
               | synthetic data using Unreal Engine 5. It has to be!
               | 
               | I like the speculation though, the comments provide some
               | convincing explanations for how this might work. For
               | example, the idea that it is trained using synthetic
               | 3-dimensional data from something like UE5 seems like a
               | brilliant idea. I love it.
               | 
               | Also in his example video the physics look very wrong to
               | me. The movement of the coffee waves are realistic-ish at
               | best. The boat motion also looks wrong and doesn't match
               | up with the liquid much of the time.
        
           | janalsncm wrote:
           | I was impressed with their video of a drone race on Mars
           | during a sunset. In part of the video, the sun is in view,
           | but then the camera turns so it's out of view. When the
           | camera turns back, the sun is where it's supposed to be.
        
             | djsavvy wrote:
             | there's mention of memory in the post -- the model can
             | remember where it put objects for a short while, so if it
             | pans away and pans back it should keep that object
             | "permanence".
        
           | hbn wrote:
           | Well the video in the weaknesses section with the
           | archeologists makes me think it's not just predicting pixels.
           | The fact that a second chair spawns out of nothing looks like
           | a typical AI uncanny valley mistake you'd expect, but then it
           | starts hovering which looks more like a video game physics
           | glitch than an incorrect interpretation of pixels on screen.
        
         | kevmo314 wrote:
         | What is latent space if not a representation of the real world?
        
           | nopinsight wrote:
           | Pretty sure many latent spaces are not trained to represent
           | 3D motions and some detailed physics of the real world. Those
           | in pure text LLMs, for example.
        
         | fasteddie31003 wrote:
         | Movie making is going to become fine-tuning these foundational
         | video models. For example, if you want Brad Pitt in your movie
         | you'll need to use his data to fine-tune his character.
        
         | mentalpiracy wrote:
         | > "understand... the real world"
         | 
         | doing a lot of heavy lifting in this statement
        
         | xtracto wrote:
         | What I want is an AI trained to simulate the human body,
         | allowing scientists to perform artificial human trials on all
         | kind of medicines. Cutting trial times from years to months.
        
       | torginus wrote:
       | I wonder why the input is always text - can't it be text, as well
       | as a low quality blender scene with a camera rig flying through
       | space, a moodboard, sketches of the characters etc.?
        
         | thepasswordis wrote:
         | My guess is because the models were all trained on text. You
         | could do as you say, but I think it would go: blender video
         | {gets described by an AI into text}-> text prompt -> video.
        
       | cboswel1 wrote:
       | Who owns a person's likeness? Now that we're approaching text to
       | video of a quality that could fool an average person, won't this
       | just open a whole new can of worms if the training models are
       | replicating celebrities? The ambiguity around copyright when
       | something on paper is in the style of seems to fall into an
       | entirely separate category than making AI generated videos of
       | actual people without their consent. Will people of note have to
       | get a copyright of their likeness to fight its use in these
       | models?
        
         | Workaccount2 wrote:
         | $100 on the table that studios create new celebrities that they
         | own the rights too.
        
           | hyperion2010 wrote:
           | No need to take the bet, reality is already there. Miku is
           | the endgame for idols. Forever young. Will never have a
           | boyfriend. Always follows the script, or not when the team
           | managing her decides they need a little drama. etc. etc. etc.
        
       | danjoredd wrote:
       | Porn is about to get so much weirder
        
       | ed_balls wrote:
       | How to invest in OpenAI?
        
       | bilsbie wrote:
       | Could this same technology be used to make games? It seems like
       | it has a built in physics engine.
        
       | lairv wrote:
       | The 3D consistency of those videos is insane compared to what has
       | previously been done, they must have used some form of 3D
       | regularization with depth or flow I think
        
       | xyproto wrote:
       | The big question is if it will be able to create a video of
       | whisky without ice or a car without windows.
        
       | lacoolj wrote:
       | Total coincidence this comes out the day Google announces Gemini
       | 1.5 I'm sure
        
       | throwitaway222 wrote:
       | https://openai.com/sora?video=cat-on-bed
       | 
       | Even though many things are super impressive, there is a lot of
       | uncanny valley happening here.
        
         | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
         | Yes, the cat has three hands...
        
         | gwern wrote:
         | Cats are like hands: they are hilariously hard for generative
         | models and then after thinking about it, you realize that
         | cats/hands _really are_ hard. I mean, look at photos of a black
         | cat curled up where it might have its paws sticking out at any
         | angle from anywhere from a solid black void. How the heck do
         | you learn _that_?
        
       | vilius wrote:
       | The Lagos video (https://openai.com/sora?video=lagos) is very
       | much how my dreams unfold. One moment, I'm with my friends in a
       | bustling marketplace, then suddenly we are no longer at the
       | marketplace, but rather overlooking a sunset and a highway. I
       | wonder if there are some conceptual similarities how dreams and
       | AI video models work.
        
         | ladberg wrote:
         | Yeah that one has more surreal elements every time you watch
         | it: the people at the table are giants compared to everyone
         | else, someone is headless, the kid's hand warps around like
         | crazy.
        
       | ericzawo wrote:
       | Why can't AI take the non-fun jobs?
        
       | dsign wrote:
       | This is impressive and amazing. I can already see a press release
       | not too far down the road: "Our new model HoSapiens can do
       | everything humans can do, but better. It has been specifically
       | designed to deprecate humanity. We are working with red teamers
       | -- domain experts in areas like union busting, corporate law and
       | counterinsurgency, plus our habitual bias, misinformation, and
       | hateful content against AI orange team-- who will be
       | adversarially testing the model.
        
       | hooande wrote:
       | This really seems like "DALL-E", but for videos. I can make
       | cool/funny videos for my friends, but after a while the novelty
       | wears off.
       | 
       | All of the AI generated media has this quality where I can
       | immediately tell that it's ai, and that becomes my dominant
       | thought. I see these things on social media and think "oh,
       | another ai pic" and keep scrolling. I've yet to be confused about
       | whether something is ai generated or real for more than several
       | seconds.
       | 
       | Consistency and continuity still seem to be a major issues. It
       | would be very difficult to tell a story using Sora because
       | details and the overall style would change from scene to scene.
       | This is also true of the newest image models.
       | 
       | Many people think that Sora is the second coming, and I hope it
       | turns out to have a major impact on all of our lives. But right
       | now it's looking to have about the same impact that DALL-E has
       | had so far.
        
         | mbm wrote:
         | Yeah, you really have to fast-forward 5 to 10 years. The first
         | cars or airplanes didn't run particularly well either. Soon
         | enough, we won't be able to tell.
        
         | thorncorona wrote:
         | These limitations are fine for short form content ala reels /
         | tiktok. I think the younger generations will get used to how it
         | looks.
        
         | MrNeon wrote:
         | > I've yet to be confused about whether something is ai
         | generated or real for more than several seconds.
         | 
         | How did you rule out survivorship bias?
        
       | bilsbie wrote:
       | I wish this was connected to chatgpt4 such that it could directly
       | generate videos as part of its response.
       | 
       | The bottleneck of creating a separate prompt is very limiting.
       | 
       | Imagine asking for a recipe or car repair and it makes a video of
       | the exact steps. Or if you could upload a video and ask it to
       | make a new ending.
       | 
       | That's what I imagine multi modal models would be.
        
       | max_ wrote:
       | This is amazing!
       | 
       | 1. Why would Adrej Karpathy leave when he knows such an
       | impressive breakthrough is in the pipeline?
       | 
       | 2. Why hasn't Ilya Stuskever spoken about this?
        
         | taejavu wrote:
         | No idea for your first question, but wouldn't the answer to the
         | second be "NDA's and or other legal concerns"?
        
       | dwighttk wrote:
       | What do y'all think caused the weird smoke/cloud in the mammoth
       | video?
        
       | throwitaway222 wrote:
       | How many of you think YT is looking through their logs trying to
       | find a high burn rate of videos that might possibly be from Open
       | AI?
        
       | d--b wrote:
       | Jesus Christ.
       | 
       | AGI can't be far off, that stuff clearly understand a bunch of
       | high level concepts.
        
       | rareitem wrote:
       | I used to think a few years ago that virtual reality/ai projects
       | such as the mataverse wouldn't amount to anything big. I even
       | thought of them ridiculous. Even recently, I thought that GPT's
       | and ai generated images would be the pinnacle of what this new ai
       | wave would amount to. I just keep getting baffled.
        
       | Jeve11326gr6ed wrote:
       | How can I get started
        
       | helix278 wrote:
       | They're attaching metadata to the videos which can be easily
       | removed. Aren't there techniques to hash metadata into the
       | content itself? I.e. such that removing the data would alter the
       | image.
        
       | ericra wrote:
       | It's been said a thousand times, but the "open" in openai becomes
       | more comical every day. I can't imagine how much money they will
       | generate from such a tool, and I'm sure they will do everything
       | possible to keep a tight lid on all the implementation details.
       | 
       | This product looks incredible...
        
       | chrishare wrote:
       | I am very uncomfortable with this being released commercially
       | without the requisite defence against misuse being also
       | accessible. If we didn't have a problem with deepfakes, spam,
       | misleading media before, we surely are now. All leading AI
       | organisations are lacking here, benefiting from the tech but not
       | sufficiently attacking the external costs that society will pay.
        
         | wilg wrote:
         | What's "the requisite defence"?
        
           | __loam wrote:
           | Something like a watermark (doesn't necessarily have to be
           | visible to people) and a tool to detect that watermark might
           | be nice for example. Or alternatively we could stop
           | developing this hell technology and try to automate something
           | that isn't cultural expression.
        
             | wilg wrote:
             | Both of those are included and mentioned in the linked
             | article.
        
         | Palmik wrote:
         | I'm very uncomfortable with this technology being accessible
         | only to a small and arbitrary subset of the population.
        
       | guybedo wrote:
       | Looks like OpenAI managed to burry Gemini 1.5 news.
       | 
       | I guess it was anticipated.
        
       | taejavu wrote:
       | Do we know anything yet about the maximum resolution of the
       | output, or how long it takes to generate these kind of examples?
        
       | karpour wrote:
       | Not a single line saying anything about training data.
        
       | hubraumhugo wrote:
       | The amount of VC money in the text-to-video space that just got
       | wiped out is impressive. Have we ever seen such fast market
       | moves?
       | 
       | Pika - $55M
       | 
       | Synthesia - $156M
       | 
       | Stability AI - $173M
        
         | guwop wrote:
         | Obviously they did not get "wiped" out. Where can i use Sora
         | right now ?
        
       | alex201 wrote:
       | It's a revolutionary thing, but I'll reserve my judgment until I
       | see if it can handle the real challenge: creating a video where
       | my code works perfectly on the first try.
        
       | cush wrote:
       | Does OpenAI hang out with these kinds of features in their back
       | pocket just waiting for a Gemeni announcement so they can wait an
       | hour and absolutely dunk on Google?
        
         | gigglesupstairs wrote:
         | Looking at the scale of this announcement, it's likelier that
         | Google just preempted their announcement with their own.
        
       | cfr2023 wrote:
       | I want to storyboard/pre-vis/mess around with this ASAP
        
       | sebastiennight wrote:
       | I think the implications go much further than just the
       | image/video considerations.
       | 
       | This model shows a very good (albeit not perfect) understanding
       | of the physics of objects and relationships between them. The
       | announcement mentions this several times.
       | 
       | The OpenAI blog post lists "Archeologists discover a generic
       | plastic chair in the desert, excavating and dusting it with great
       | care." as one of the "failed" cases. But this (and "Reflections
       | in the window of a train traveling through the Tokyo suburbs.")
       | seem to me to be 2 of the most important examples.
       | 
       | - In the Tokyo one, the model is smart enough to figure out that
       | on a train, the reflection would be of a passenger, and the
       | passenger has Asian traits since this is Tokyo. - In the chair
       | one, OpenAI says the model failed to model the physics of the
       | object (which hints that it did try to, which is not how the
       | early diffusion models worked ; they just tried to generate
       | "plausible" images). And we can see one of the archeologists
       | basically chasing the chair down to grab it, which does correctly
       | model the interaction with a floating object.
       | 
       | I think we can't underestimate how crucial that is to the
       | building of a general model that has a strong model of the world.
       | Not just a "theory of mind", but a litteral understanding of
       | "what will happen next", independently of "what would a human say
       | would happen next" (which is what the usual text-based models
       | seem to do).
       | 
       | This is going to be much more important, IMO, than the video
       | aspect.
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | Facebook released something in that direction today
         | https://ai.meta.com/blog/v-jepa-yann-lecun-ai-model-video-jo...
        
           | sebastiennight wrote:
           | Wow this is a huge announcement too, I can't believe this
           | hasn't made the front page yet.
        
         | gspetr wrote:
         | This seems to be completely in line with the previous "AI is
         | good when it's not news" type of work:
         | 
         | Non-news: Dog bites a man.
         | 
         | News: Man bites a dog.
         | 
         | Non-news: "People riding Tokyo train" - completely ordinary,
         | tons of similar content.
         | 
         | News: "Archaeologists dust off a plastic chair" - bizarre,
         | (virtually) no similar content exists.
        
         | RhysU wrote:
         | > very good... understanding of the physics of objects and
         | relationships between them
         | 
         | I am always torn here. A real physics engine has a better
         | "understanding" but I suspect that word applies to neither Sora
         | nor a physics engine:
         | https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
         | 
         | An understanding of physics would entail asking this generative
         | network to invert gravity, change the density or energy output
         | of something, or atypically reduce a coefficient of friction
         | partway through a video. Perhaps Sora can handle these, but I
         | suspect it is mimicking the usual world rather than
         | understanding physics in any strong sense.
         | 
         | None of which is to say their accomplishment isn't impressive.
         | Only that "understand" merits particularly careful use these
         | days.
        
       | superconduct123 wrote:
       | So do we think this is the "breakthrough" that was mentioned back
       | when the Sam Altman stuff was going on?
        
       | internetter wrote:
       | The watermark is interesting. Looks like it's unique for every
       | video so they can trace it to the creator?
        
       | countmora wrote:
       | > We're also building tools to help detect misleading content
       | such as a detection classifier that can tell when a video was
       | generated by Sora.
       | 
       | I am curious of how optimised their approach is and what hardware
       | you would need to analyse videos at reasonable speed.
        
       | neutralx wrote:
       | Has anyone else noticed the leg swap in Tokyo video at 0:14. I
       | guess we are past uncanny, but I do wonder if these small
       | artifacts will always be present in generated content.
       | 
       | Also begs the question, if more and more children are introduced
       | to media from young age and they are fed more and more with
       | generated content, will they be able to feel "uncanniness" or
       | become completely blunt to it.
       | 
       | There's definitely interesting period ahead of us, not yet sure
       | how to feel about it...
        
         | Kydlaw wrote:
         | Yep, I noticed it immediately too. Yet it is subtle in reality.
         | I'm not that good to spot imperfections on picture but on the
         | video I immediately felt something was not quite right.
        
         | SirMaster wrote:
         | They swap multiple times lol. Not to mention it almost always
         | looks like the feet are slightly sliding on the ground with
         | every step.
         | 
         | I mean there are some impressive things there, but it looks
         | like there's a long ways to go yet.
         | 
         | They shouldn't have played it into the close up of the face.
         | The face is so dead and static looking.
        
           | micromacrofoot wrote:
           | certainly not perfect... but "some impressive things" is an
           | understatement, think of how long it took to get halfway
           | decent CGI... this AI thing is already better than clips I've
           | seen people spend _days_ building by hand
        
         | hank808 wrote:
         | Yep! Glad I wasn't the only one that saw that. I have a feeling
         | THEY didn't see it or they wouldn't have showcased it.
        
           | ryanisnan wrote:
           | I don't think that's the case. I think they're aware of the
           | limitations and problems. Several of the videos have obvious
           | problems, if you're looking - e.g. people vanishing entirely,
           | objects looking malformed in many frames, objects changing in
           | size incongruent with perspective, etc.
           | 
           | I think they just accept it as a limitation, because it's
           | still very technically impressive. And they hope they can
           | smooth out those limitations.
        
         | jrockway wrote:
         | I noticed at the beginning that cars are driving on the right
         | side of the road, but in Japan they drive on the left. The AI
         | misses little details like that.
         | 
         | (I'm also not sure they've ever had a couple inches of snow on
         | the ground while the cherry blossoms are in bloom in Tokyo, but
         | I guess it's possible.)
        
       | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
       | This is all very impressive. I can't help to wonder though. How
       | is text-to-video going to benefit humanity? That's what OpenAI is
       | supposedly about, right?
       | 
       | We'll get some groundbreaking film content out of this in the
       | hands of a few talented creatives, and a vast ocean of mediocre
       | content from the hands of talentless people who know how to type.
       | What's the benefit to humanity, concretely?
        
         | andai wrote:
         | That's exactly what we have now with YouTube.
        
         | dinobones wrote:
         | If a model can generate it, it can understand it.
         | 
         | They can probably reverse engineer this to build a multi-modal
         | GPT that is fed video and understands what is going on. That's
         | how you get "smart" robots. Active scene understanding via the
         | video modality + conversational capabilities via the text/audio
         | modality.
        
           | internetter wrote:
           | But we can already do this?
        
         | chidiw wrote:
         | > Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand
         | and simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an
         | important milestone for achieving AGI.
        
         | nycdatasci wrote:
         | For models to interact with real-world objects, they first need
         | to understand those objects. These videos demonstrate just how
         | advanced that awareness is. The goal is not to generate videos.
         | Of course, they could and likely will build products on this
         | capability, but the long-term goal is bigger.
        
           | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
           | Sure, if that's not just marketing. I haven't seen enough
           | evidence to conclude this will go towards that kind of thing
           | yet, but I'm open to the possibility.
        
         | sayagain wrote:
         | This vast amount of human talent and computational power could
         | be channeled into fighting disease and death.
        
           | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
           | I'm not quite sure what you mean, so I'll ask for
           | clarification. Are you saying this technology can be
           | channeled into fighting disease and death, or that the man
           | hours and computational freed up by this technology can be
           | channeled?
        
             | ij09j901023123 wrote:
             | Biologists, chemists, and researchers can be all automated
             | and trained on a very big LLM that OpenAI eventually
             | creates. Then, more cures to diseases and technological
             | advances can be invented. This technology can soon run
             | entire countries and emulate humanity / society.
        
             | sayagain wrote:
             | I think that all this goodness was spent on entertainment
             | at a time when every second a catastrophe occurs - a human
             | dies.
        
               | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
               | Oh I see what you mean, thanks.
               | 
               | Yeah, this is a very real issue with a lot of Silicon
               | Valley tech, unfortunately. They're perfecting the art of
               | pretending everything is fine, I feel like.
        
       | Sxubas wrote:
       | I wonder what this tech would do using a descriptive fragment
       | from a book. I don't read many books at all but I would spend
       | some time feeding in fantasy fragments and see how much they
       | differ from what I imagined.
        
       | dartos wrote:
       | God the legs of the woman walking are horrifying.
        
       | tsunamifury wrote:
       | The film "The Congress" will end up being the most on point
       | prediction of our future in ever. I can't believe it. Im in
       | shock.
        
       | bscphil wrote:
       | Not that this isn't a leaps and bounds improvement over the state
       | of the art, but it's interesting to look at the mistakes it makes
       | - where do we still need improvements?
       | 
       | This video is pretty instructive:
       | https://cdn.openai.com/sora/videos/amalfi-coast.mp4
       | 
       | It "eats" several people with the wall part of the way through
       | the video, and the camera movements are odd. Strange camera
       | movements, in response to most of the prompts, seems like the
       | biggest problem. The model arbitrarily decides to change
       | direction on a dime - even a drone wouldn't behave quite like
       | that.
        
       | cyrialize wrote:
       | Does anyone know how to handle the depression/doom one feels with
       | these updates?
       | 
       | Yes, it's a great technical achievement, but I just worry for the
       | future. We don't have good social safety nets, and we aren't
       | close to UBI. It's difficult for me to see that happen unless
       | something drastic changes.
       | 
       | I'm also afraid of one company just having so much power. How
       | does anyone compete?
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | some light alcohol, relaxing and remembering life is beautiful
        
           | rpmisms wrote:
           | Be a human, basically? Very important to be human often. We
           | often forget in this sphere.
        
           | cyrialize wrote:
           | That is a good reminder.
           | 
           | My fear is the alternative reality that these tools could
           | provide. Given the power and output of the tooling, I could
           | see a future where the "normal" of a society is strategically
           | changed.
           | 
           | For example, many younger generations aren't getting a
           | license at 16. This is for a variety of reasons: you connect
           | with friends online, malls cost money, less walkable spaces,
           | less third places.
           | 
           | If I'm a company that makes money based off of subscription
           | services to my tools, wouldn't it be in my best interest to
           | influence each coming generation?
           | 
           | Making friends and interacting with people is hard, but with
           | our tooling you can find or create the exact friend you want
           | and need.
           | 
           | We can remember now that life is beautiful - but what's to
           | stop from making people think that the life made by AI is
           | most beautiful?
           | 
           | And yeah, I've heard this argument before with video games,
           | escapism, etc. I'm talking more about how easy it is to
           | escape now, and how easy it'd be to spread the idea that
           | escapism is better than what is around you.
        
             | benjiweber wrote:
             | Few people getting driving licences sounds ideal.
             | 
             | In Europe there's no need. Got a licence over two decades
             | ago have never needed to drive. Shops in walking distance,
             | public transport anywhere in the country, convenient
             | deliveries, walkable and cyclable cities.
             | 
             | Meanwhile other places have no freedom from cars, locked
             | into expensive car financing, unable to access basic
             | amenities without a car, and motorists have normalised
             | killing millions of people a year.
        
             | drusepth wrote:
             | One thing to remember is that change never stops and we're
             | certainly not in any perfect society right now where we'd
             | want change to stop at. We've seen huge magnitudes of
             | societal change over and over throughout history.
             | 
             | For the most part, the _idea_ of change is rarely
             | inherently bad (even though, IMO, it 's natural to
             | inherently resist it) -- and humans adapt quickly to the
             | parts that have negative impacts.
             | 
             | Humans are one of, if not the most, resilient race on the
             | planet. Younger generations not getting licenses, sticking
             | to themselves more, escaping in different ways, etc are all
             | "different" than what we're used to, but to that younger
             | generation it's just a new normal for them.
             | 
             | One day they'll be posting on HN2, wondering whether the
             | crazy technological or societal changes about to come out
             | will mean the downfall of _their_ children (or children 's
             | children), and the answer will still be the same: no, but
             | what's "normal" for humankind will continue to change.
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | > _Humans are one of, if not the most, resilient race on
               | the planet. Younger generations not getting licenses,
               | sticking to themselves more, escaping in different ways,
               | etc are all "different" than what we're used to..._
               | 
               | As long as they keep having unprotected sex with each
               | other.
               | 
               | Otherwise, you know, humanity is kind of screwed.
        
         | UberFly wrote:
         | I agree. I see how misinformation is effecting my family
         | members now. I can't imagine how this is all going to effect
         | what's coming.
        
         | rllearneratwork wrote:
         | this is so exciting! why do you feel depressed.
         | 
         | Btw, a year or two from now you'll be able to run a more
         | powerful _open_ model locally. So, not they aren 't having some
         | outsized amount of power
        
           | BadHumans wrote:
           | Exciting if you don't think about how tons of people are
           | going to be out of work with no safety nets or how easily
           | millions of people are going to be scammed or how easily it
           | is going to be to be impersonate someone and frame them or
           | etc etc etc
        
             | shric wrote:
             | Let's say, for the sake of argument, AI could generate
             | absolutely perfect invented videos of arbitrary people
             | doing literally anything. The consequence will be that
             | video will no longer be taken seriously as evidence for
             | crimes. People will also quickly not trust video calls
             | without an extreme level of verification (e.g. asking about
             | recent irl interactions, etc.)
             | 
             | Yes some people will be scammed as they always have been,
             | such as the recent Hong Kong financial deepfake. But no,
             | millions of people will not keep falling for this. Just
             | like the classic 419 advanced free fraud, it will hit a
             | very small percentage of people.
        
               | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
               | OK, but I did like living in a universe where I could
               | watch video news of something happening in another
               | country and treat it as reasonably strong evidence of
               | what is happening in the world. Now I basically have to
               | rely on only my own eyes, which are limited to my
               | immediate surroundings, and eyewitness accounts from
               | people I trust who live in those places. In that sense, I
               | feel like my ability to be informed about the world has
               | regressed to pre-20th-century levels.
        
               | wwilim wrote:
               | Pray it doesn't regress any further
        
               | oceanplexian wrote:
               | Video alone has never been considered evidence of a crime
               | in a court of law (At least in the United States). A
               | person needs to authenticate the evidence.
        
             | cyrialize wrote:
             | Yeah. This is how I feel. Seeing new AI updates sometimes
             | makes me regret ever working in technology, no matter how
             | much I love it.
        
             | tavavex wrote:
             | The last two claims always felt wrong to me, because
             | they're assuming a society where these kinds of tools are
             | easy to use and accessible to _everyone_ , yet the society
             | at large is completely oblivious to these tools and their
             | capabilities. Arguably, you couldn't ever fully trust
             | images before, people claimed something was photoshopped
             | for decades now. Instead of something "looking realistic",
             | trusting people and organizations will take its place -
             | when, for example, the BBC posts a photograph, I'm inclined
             | to trust it not because it looks real, but because it's the
             | BBC.
        
             | oceanplexian wrote:
             | Think what it was like before the invention of the camera,
             | and then after, this is a similar level of innovation. I'm
             | sure a lot of people who wrote books were terrified by the
             | prospect of moving pictures, but everything worked out and
             | books still exist.
             | 
             | IMHO humanity will be fine, decades from now kids will be
             | asking what it was like to live before "AI" like how we
             | might ask an old person what it was like to live before
             | television or electricity.
        
               | Fricken wrote:
               | Consensus reality is already cracking up due to the
               | internet, smartphones and social media. The Media
               | theorist Marshall McLuhan had a lot to say about this
               | well in advance, but nobody listened.
        
             | rllearneratwork wrote:
             | I'm excited that tons of people don't need to tend to
             | horses or sew and plow everyday. Automation is a great
             | thing.
        
           | sterlind wrote:
           | Assuming OpenAI's lobbyists don't convince Congress to ban
           | open models because of {deepfakes, CP, disinfo, copyright
           | infringement} or make it impossible to gather open datasets
           | without spending billions on licensing.
           | 
           | I'm not optimistic.
        
         | simpaticoder wrote:
         | I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of
         | animators suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly
         | silenced.
        
           | ethbr1 wrote:
           | The writing has been on the wall for that for awhile
           | though...
           | 
           | Every large animation studio has continually been looking for
           | ways to decrease the number of artists required to produce a
           | film, since the beginning of the field.
        
           | bendergarcia wrote:
           | The only reason this is possible is because of the content
           | those people created. This literally doesn't exist without
           | them. Not sure what you're trying to say....
        
             | tsunamifury wrote:
             | Yea... thats the point he was making.
        
         | mmaunder wrote:
         | Stop pathologizing normal human feelings? If you're worried,
         | learn how to use the tools to give yourself a competitive
         | advantage. See steam trains, electricity, microchips, computers
         | and the Web for historical examples of worried people adapting
         | to game changing tech.
        
           | cyrialize wrote:
           | I am. I know we're in a situation now as programmers where
           | there is more AI tooling and more programming jobs - but it's
           | difficult for me to see that last.
           | 
           | You could be the best at using the tools, but I think there
           | could be a point where there is no need to hire because the
           | tools are just that good.
        
             | bamboozled wrote:
             | Then wouldn't you just stop coding and use the tools to
             | build products ?
        
               | jprete wrote:
               | Have you considered what an enormous jump in career that
               | is? Or that all the people who already started building
               | AI products are being obsoleted by OpenAI a year after
               | they started?
        
               | bamboozled wrote:
               | What concerns me is that Google and OpenAI are racing us
               | to a point where almost no product is valuable. If I can
               | just have AI generate me a booking.com clone, then what's
               | booking.com worth ?
               | 
               | There is zero chance this tech is going to be locked up
               | by a few companies, in a year or two open models will
               | have similar capabilities, I have no idea what this world
               | looks like but I think it's less of a concern for
               | individuals and more of a concern for the global economy
               | in the short term.
               | 
               | Outside of all of this, yeah we're either going I have to
               | adapt or die.
        
               | eastbound wrote:
               | Well, alone I was able to launch a software company in
               | 2010. From accounting to nginx, everything was automated.
               | 
               | Alone, maybe I will be able to launch a unicorn in 2030.
               | It's just tools with more leverage. The limit is just the
               | computing resources we have, so we'll have to use
               | computing resources to calculate how much earth resources
               | each of us can use per year, but that seems a usual
               | growth problem.
        
         | trebligdivad wrote:
         | Just imagine how the cats are worried! If the internet doesn't
         | need cats any more for cute cat videos....
        
         | gigglesupstairs wrote:
         | All those videos made me so scared of what's about to come in
         | next few years. India is already a major market for
         | perpetrators of misinformation and with major social media
         | giants only paying lip service to our concerns, with western
         | countries being their major focus, things portend to get even
         | more darker for the poor, the disenfranchised in our side of
         | the world.
        
         | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
         | I felt depressed after seeing this, so I had a long hug with my
         | partner, and remembered the serenity prayer: "God grant me the
         | serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to
         | change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference."
         | 
         | If AI dystopia is coming, at least it's not here quite yet, so
         | I'll try to enjoy my life today.
        
         | elwell wrote:
         | This will just accelerate the realization in people that this
         | earth can't give you true meaning. That comes from 'above'.
        
           | rafaelero wrote:
           | Mars?
        
           | slothtrop wrote:
           | As though we'd all collectively stop doing anything in a
           | full-automation utopian scenario. Be serious.
        
           | monsieurgaufre wrote:
           | Yes, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
        
             | Xenoamorphous wrote:
             | You know the whote collar worker future is bleak when you
             | find _multiple_ comments in this thread about finding
             | solace in some god.
        
         | xanderlewis wrote:
         | I seem to be immune to it now. I've just accepted that I'm
         | going to feel less and less useful as time goes by, and I
         | should just enjoy whatever I can. Life will probably never be
         | as good as it was for people 30 years older than me, but it's
         | not something that looks likely to change.
         | 
         | Nothing about the future looks particularly good, other than
         | that medicine is improving. But what's the point of being alive
         | in such a sanitised, 'perfect', instant-dopamine-hits-on-demand
         | kind of world anyway?
         | 
         | Just say to hell with it and bury yourself in an interesting
         | textbook. Learn something that inspires you. It doesn't matter
         | if 'AI' can (or soon will be able to) do it a billion times
         | better than you.
         | 
         | And be kind to those around you.
        
           | cyrialize wrote:
           | I feel this, thank you.
           | 
           | I've started reading again, because reddit/instagram/etc. has
           | become kind of boring for me? Like, I still go on them to get
           | an instant dopamine hit from time to time, but like you said
           | burying yourself in a textbook just feels so much more
           | rewarding.
        
             | xanderlewis wrote:
             | Maybe someone needs to start a small group of people who
             | specifically want to do this -- seek refuge from the
             | chaotic and increasingly worrying world (in particular the
             | threat of replacement by extremely general automated
             | systems) by immersing themselves in learning, and sharing
             | the results with others.
             | 
             | I'm sure such groups already exist, but maybe not
             | specifically with this goal in mind.
             | 
             | Learning for its own sake really is the answer to lasting
             | happiness... for some of us, anyway.
        
               | chpmrc wrote:
               | I don't think it's too far fetched to hypothesize that
               | the next major global conflict will be between
               | accelerators (e/acc) and decelerators. I see a parallel
               | with political/economic ideologies like capitalism and
               | communism. One of them will eventually prevail (for most
               | of the world) but it won't be clear which until it
               | happens. Scary but also exciting times ahead!
        
               | yyyk wrote:
               | I can't imagine any coherent 'deceleratorionist'
               | political program. It will be all different flavors of
               | acc.
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | > _seek refuge from the chaotic and increasingly worrying
               | world (in particular the threat of replacement by
               | extremely general automated systems) by immersing
               | themselves in learning, and sharing the results with
               | others._
               | 
               | Since 529 CE!
               | 
               | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedictines
        
               | xanderlewis wrote:
               | I skimmed the article and couldn't see which part was
               | particularly relevant. Can you point out the similarity?
               | 
               | If you're just talking about the idea of becoming a monk:
               | yes, I very much like the idea of becoming a modern,
               | digitally-enabled monk.
        
               | Solvency wrote:
               | Is this a joke? Go outside. Go hiking. Make a garden.
               | Visit Yosemite. Take up bouldering. Learn to surf. Cycle.
               | Go camping. There's a world of living and massive
               | communities but around real life. Explore what your body
               | and mind can do together. Find kinship because it's out
               | there in spades for people not obsessed with the
               | automation of machined content.
        
               | xanderlewis wrote:
               | What about it makes you think I'm joking?
        
               | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
               | I've got about a million things I'd like to delve into if
               | such a group existed(let's call it a realist monastery?)
               | 
               | The key though is to avoid becoming a cult.
        
               | xanderlewis wrote:
               | Cults presumably need leaders, and there wouldn't be one.
               | It would be kind of like a church though. But we worship
               | pure knowledge and learning.
        
             | jprete wrote:
             | I've abandoned all online content sources except HN,
             | Substack, and YouTube. The latter two are aggressively
             | filtered and still feel like they're getting less
             | interesting over time. HN isn't the best habit, either, but
             | it's good to have at least one source of news.
        
           | mrb wrote:
           | " _I've just accepted that I'm going to feel less and less
           | useful as time goes by_ "
           | 
           | It's probably the same feeling farmers had in the beginning
           | of the 20th century when they started seeing industrialized
           | farming technologies (tractors, etc). Sure, farming tech
           | eliminated tons of farming jobs, but they have been replaced
           | by other types of jobs in the cities.
           | 
           | It's the same thing with AI. Some will lose their jobs, but
           | only to find different types of jobs that AI can't do.
        
             | ThisIsMyAltAcct wrote:
             | I see this "just adapt" response a lot and it misses the
             | point. The goal of research like this is to create a
             | machine that can do _any_ job better than humans.
        
               | someplaceguy wrote:
               | And when that happens, humans will no longer need jobs.
               | 
               | The problem is the transition into that new world.
        
               | yyyk wrote:
               | The other problem is that the powers that be won't need
               | the masses for anything.
        
               | rvnx wrote:
               | World War 3 is planned to take care of that.
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | That's been the prediction with many technological
               | updates, but here we are. The small group of
               | fantastically wealthy and powerful people that dictate
               | society's requirements for the rest of us like this setup
               | just fine.
        
             | xanderlewis wrote:
             | Sorry, but comparing this to previous technology seems
             | totally short-sighted to me (and it's not as though you're
             | the first to do so). If ( _if_ ) we end up with truly
             | general AI (and at the moment we seem to be close in some
             | ways and still very far off in others), then that will be
             | fundamentally different from any technology that has come
             | before.
             | 
             | > jobs that AI can't do.
             | 
             | Sure, by definition, you've described the set of jobs that
             | won't be replaced by AI. But naming a few would be a lot
             | more useful of a comment. It's not impossible to imagine
             | that that set might shrink to being pretty much empty
             | within the next ten years.
        
             | yyyk wrote:
             | >It's probably the same feeling farmers had in the
             | beginning of the 20th century
             | 
             | Not remotely comparable. Farming is a backbreaking job,
             | many were happy to see it going away. This is taking over
             | the creative functions. Turns out what Humanity is best at,
             | is menial labor?
        
               | swells34 wrote:
               | Well, replacing novel creative functions with derivative
               | creative functions. That's the big change I see here;
               | similar to the difference between digitally editing an
               | image vs. applying a stock sepia filter to it. Yes, we
               | can use a model to regurgitate a mish mash of the data it
               | was trained on, and that regurgitation might be novel in
               | that nothing like that has been regurgitated before, but
               | it will still be a regurgitation of pre-existing art. To
               | some degree humans do this too, but the constraints are
               | infinitely different.
        
             | WilTimSon wrote:
             | > but they have been replaced by other types of jobs in the
             | cities.
             | 
             | But when one is 30+ years old, or even 40+ years old, it's
             | hard to completely switch careers, especially when you're
             | also dealing with the fact that it's not because you were
             | bad at your job. Rather, a machine was made to replace you
             | and you simply can't compete with a machine.
             | 
             | It's evolution, of course, but it is a stressful process.
        
               | akudha wrote:
               | Even if one is able to switch careers in their 40s and
               | 50s, it is sad that they're forced to do so, just to eat
               | and have a roof over their head.
               | 
               | Nearly all humans work for money (aka, just basic stuff)
               | and not because they're passionate about their work. It
               | is just a sad situation all around
        
           | dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
           | >medicine is improving.
           | 
           | I doubt whether this is true. Lots of hype, but no tangible
           | improvement to show for chronic conditions for common people.
        
             | Brusco_RF wrote:
             | GLP-1 isn't a tangible improvement for a chronic condition
             | for common people?
        
             | xanderlewis wrote:
             | Medical understanding is not getting worse, unless I'm
             | severely mistaken.
             | 
             | The systems that _deliver_ the medical care might be,
             | however (and indeed observably locally are, in many cases).
        
             | TaupeRanger wrote:
             | You're exactly right, but most people just believe the
             | headlines about cancer cures and "individualized medicine"
             | that pop up every week and don't realize that literally
             | none of them produce anything that helps real life
             | patients. Medicine is not getting better - it's getting
             | more expensive and less efficient.
        
               | xanderlewis wrote:
               | > literally none of them produce anything that helps real
               | life patients
               | 
               | If you make claims that bold no one should even bother to
               | read on.
        
               | Aeolun wrote:
               | I dunno, I can casually get an MRI to check the status of
               | slime in my nose these days. It may not be strictly
               | 'better' but the availability certainly goes up.
        
               | swells34 wrote:
               | A majority of what you wrote is objectively false FUD.
               | The only thing that I found accurate is: > it's getting
               | more expensive and less efficient There have been a
               | ridiculous number of medical advances in the last few
               | years, advances that are actively improving and saving
               | lives as I write this. Remember that time we had a
               | pandemic, and quickly designed and produced a massive
               | number of vaccines? Saved millions of lives, kept
               | hundreds of millions from being bed ridden for weeks? The
               | medical technology to design those vaccines, and to
               | produce them at that speed and scale didn't exist 20
               | years ago. Cancer treatments, which you specifically
               | mentioned, are entirely better than they were 10 years
               | ago.
               | 
               | The actual issue, which is the only worthwhile thing you
               | wrote about, is cost and availability.
        
             | mlsu wrote:
             | I'll just say: I have Type 1 diabetes, and in my lifetime,
             | we have invented
             | 
             | - fast acting analog insulins that are metabolized in 2-3
             | hours instead of 6-7
             | 
             | - insulin pumps that automatically dose exactly the right
             | proportion of insulin
             | 
             | - continuous glucose monitoring system that lets you see
             | your BG update in real time (before, it was finger sticks
             | 4-5 times a day; before that, urine test strips where you
             | pee on a stick to get a 6 hours delayed reading (!))
             | 
             | - automated dosing algorithms that can automatically
             | correct BG to bring it into range
             | 
             | In aggregate, these amount to what is closer than not to a
             | functional cure for type 1 diabetes. 100 years ago, this
             | was a fatal condition.
        
           | brandonagr2 wrote:
           | This is an exciting future:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg
        
           | davedx wrote:
           | Get outside, go hiking, climb a mountain! That's my big
           | offline plan for this year and I'm excited to do it.
           | 
           | The world is way bigger than technology and the Internet. It
           | hasn't really gone anywhere
        
             | xanderlewis wrote:
             | Good idea. But for people like me, reading a book on a
             | technical subject feels like climbing a mountain -- but
             | even more thrilling and enriching!
             | 
             | Fresh air and sunlight are important though.
        
               | Aeolun wrote:
               | You can read any book outside.
        
             | xster wrote:
             | That isn't the OP's point I believe. I think the point was
             | if the more productive means of production is ultra-
             | centralized to a few owners of AI, the question wouldn't be
             | whether to go outside, but whether you can afford to not be
             | permanently outside, if the superstructure of society
             | assigns housing to capital and not humans.
        
               | konschubert wrote:
               | Since this is just knowledge, I don't think it can be
               | guarded all that well.
        
               | patientzero wrote:
               | Anyone can make a cotton gin.. Industrialization of an
               | industry basically centralizes its profits on a
               | relatively small number of winners who have some
               | advantage of lead time on some important factors as it
               | becomes not worthwhile for the vast majority of
               | participants from when it required more of the
               | population.
        
               | ohthatsnotright wrote:
               | > Chips are made from sand.
               | 
               | And that sand takes a very, very long time with lots of
               | big brains to figure out how to manipulate at the
               | nanometer level in order to give you a "beep boop"
               | 
               | It's not like Intel could decide tomorrow to spin up a
               | fab and immediately make NVIDIA and TSMC irrelevant.
               | They're the next closest thing given they make chips,
               | have GPU technology, and also foundry experience and it's
               | still multiple years of effort if they chose that
               | direction.
               | 
               | Your statement is a lot like saying "poker has
               | predictable odds" and yet there is still a vast ocean of
               | poker players.
        
               | konschubert wrote:
               | Yea, I deleted that second sentence that you quoted,
               | since it is opening up another discussion that was kind
               | of orthogonal to my main point.
        
             | lIIllIIllIIllII wrote:
             | caveat - it kind of is going somewhere, the amount of
             | wilderness has gone from like 65% to 35% in the last 50
             | years
             | 
             | on the flip side, we'll just generate VR wilderness in the
             | near future and nobody will care what's real or not
        
             | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
             | You can read books outside.
        
               | xanderlewis wrote:
               | Best place to. Especially with a cup of tea.
        
             | suyash wrote:
             | One can't really enjoy life much if you don't have
             | financial means to survive. This technology promises to
             | wipe of hundred's of thousands of jobs in media production
             | - from videographers, actors, animators, designers, camera
             | person working in TV, Movie production all are one click
             | away from losing job.
        
           | karmasimida wrote:
           | Same, I feel nothing.
           | 
           | Just another tool.
           | 
           | Until full automated agent that is able to carry out a task
           | from start to finish without human intervention, there is
           | something for us to do I guess.
        
           | zingelshuher wrote:
           | > I've just accepted that I'm going to feel less and less
           | useful as time goes by
           | 
           | You are not alone : https://youtu.be/h3-va0umXTY?t=383
           | 
           | PS: youtube.com at 6:23, "Leonardo DiCaprio,,Julia Butters in
           | Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood --break"
        
           | ericmcer wrote:
           | I'm the complete opposite, I wish I was being born 20 years
           | in future. I am kinda terrified of being 80 when they come
           | out with some technique for heavily slowing down aging and
           | our generation just has to sigh and accept we just missed the
           | cutoff.
        
           | imiric wrote:
           | > Life will probably never be as good as it was for people 30
           | years older than me
           | 
           | > Nothing about the future looks particularly good, other
           | than that medicine is improving.
           | 
           | How do you reconcile your thoughts with what the CEOs of
           | these AI companies keep telling us? I.e. "the present is the
           | most amazing time to be alive", and "the future will be
           | unimaginably better". I'm paraphrasing, but it's the gist of
           | what Sam Altman recently said at the World Government
           | Summit[1].
           | 
           | Are these people visionaries of some idealistic future that
           | these technologies will bring us, or are they blinded by
           | their own greed and power and driving humanity towards a
           | future they can control? Something else?
           | 
           | FWIW I share your thoughts and feelings, but at the same time
           | have a pinch of cautious optimism that things might indeed be
           | better overall. Sure, bad actors that use technology for
           | malicious purposes will continue to exist, but there is
           | potential for this technology to open new advancements in all
           | areas of science, which could improve all our lives in ways
           | we can't imagine yet.
           | 
           | I guess I'm more excited about the possibilities and seeing
           | how all this unfolds than pessimistic, although that is still
           | a strong feeling.
           | 
           | [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15UZCAr3shU
        
         | lukan wrote:
         | We are close to 1.5 degree global warming. And the world is
         | rather busy with war, than actually make a unified effort to
         | change things. That is depressing to me, not that AI can make
         | somewhat convincing background scenery movies (as standalone
         | videos I do not found them convincing, all in all impressive,
         | sure, but too many errors).
        
           | m2024 wrote:
           | I also find that HN has a stunning lack of perspective in
           | general. Life all across the planet is dying and we are
           | poisoning ourselves.
           | 
           | That said, outside of expending a lot of energy, I think that
           | AI is awesome and can help solve some of our problems if it
           | is open and free.
        
         | schleck8 wrote:
         | > We don't have good social safety nets, and we aren't close to
         | UBI.
         | 
         | In the US, let's keep that in mind.
        
           | reducesuffering wrote:
           | If you think EU funds are going to be there funding those
           | social safety nets in the Brave New World where AGI decimates
           | industry... They're not even sustainable as is.
        
             | Moldoteck wrote:
             | Eu will find ways to keep ppl employed:)
        
         | mv4 wrote:
         | OpenAI is one major privacy/compliance scandal away from losing
         | that power. I believe it's inevitable, and MS 'will' throw them
         | under the bus when that happens.
        
           | mhh__ wrote:
           | Only for Microsoft to get the IP
        
         | throwup238 wrote:
         | Depression and gloom? Not here!
         | 
         | I can see all of my plans for world domination coming together
         | right in front of my eyes. A few years ago I was absolutely
         | certain I'd die without achieving my dream of becoming God
         | Emperor of a united Planet Earth.
        
           | DalasNoin wrote:
           | New alt, Sama?
        
         | debarshri wrote:
         | I think you can create an alternate reality with these tools in
         | a way that we havent even thought can alter ones own self.
         | 
         | We have seen this in small scale of social media that ones self
         | esteem.
         | 
         | We will see a new set of problems that would be much deeper.
         | Videos and image that make you believe false reality, reliance
         | of GPT will generate false knowledge.
         | 
         | False reality problems have started popping up everywhere. It
         | is going to be much deeper. I think we are in for a really
         | crazy trip
        
           | Aeolun wrote:
           | Go back to insularized communities that only interactt
           | offline. Guaranteed reality, as far as you can trust
           | interactions with your neighbors anyway.
        
         | Quothling wrote:
         | The climate is burning. The Amazon is likely collapsing sooner
         | than we expect. There are plenty of wars around the globe and a
         | major multi country conflict brewing in Africa. Western
         | politics are laughable, and still the best if you want to be
         | free to say what you want and have rights. Inequality is
         | incredibly high and rising. And so on.
         | 
         | So there are a lot of things to be depressed about before you
         | get depressed about a little increase in misinformation and
         | idiocy on the interwebs. I mean... things like polio and the
         | measles are literally back to fuck with us because people are
         | so fucking stupid they think vaccines are a bad thing.
         | 
         | It'll be fine.
        
           | BadHumans wrote:
           | A lot of the things you mention are happening because of
           | rampant misinformation. Something these tools will help
           | create more of as an unstoppable rate.
        
         | jameslk wrote:
         | UBI was tested during 2020 on a nearly global scale. In the US,
         | the CARES Act which provided stimulus checks for every tax-
         | paying US citizen as well as extensions to unemployment was
         | essentially a giant UBI experiment. Not for AI, but for a giant
         | shift in economic activity where many individuals became
         | unemployed nonetheless.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARES_Act
         | 
         | EDIT: For the downvoters, yes components of CARES was in fact
         | inspired by UBI:
         | 
         | https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/andrew-yang-aoc-free-ubi-cas...
         | 
         | https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-aoc-demands-univ...
        
           | advael wrote:
           | This is a nonsensical argument
           | 
           | UBI has three basic properties that the CARES act fulfills
           | none of
           | 
           | 1. Covers cost of living for some basic standard (debatable,
           | but should include food, water, and shelter at minimum)
           | 
           | 2. Is available to everyone without onerous requirements or
           | means-testing (IE is "universal")
           | 
           | 3. Carries a reasonable expectation of continuity such that
           | people can plan around continuing to have it
           | 
           | The CARES act was an emergency measure that absolutely zero
           | people expected or intended to be permanent, it was laden
           | with all the means-testing and bureaucratic hurdles that
           | unemployment generally carries, and it very clearly did not
           | provide adequate support for quite a lot of people
           | 
           | It's meaningless to call something a "test" when it carries
           | none of the properties that proponents of a policy claim
           | would make it desirable. The only perspective from which the
           | comparison even makes sense is from that of someone who's not
           | considered it seriously and come up with a strawman to argue
           | against it (IE something like "UBI is the government gives
           | people some money")
           | 
           | It also seems worth mentioning that I really don't buy the
           | highly political claim that some people seem to view as self-
           | evident: that people remained unemployed longer because they
           | got extended unemployment benefits, rather than as a result
           | of the massive economic shock that prompted that decision in
           | the first place
        
           | itishappy wrote:
           | It may be modeled on UBI, but it's not. Universal basic
           | income is perpetual and unconditional, while the CARES Act
           | was a one-time payment in response to COVID. I'm sure there's
           | still a lot we can learn from it, but I also expect many of
           | the psychological effects will be someone muted.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
        
         | rglover wrote:
         | Read the Bible. Specifically Revelation, 1/2 Thessalonians, and
         | Daniel. If you haven't before, you'd be surprised how much of
         | what's taking place now is prophesied.
         | 
         | Many people, rightfully, (over-)react to the American
         | caricature of Christianity (mega churches, Kenneth Copeland,
         | etc.) as the definition of what it is (that's arguably the
         | deception hinted at in the Bible), but reading/trusting the raw
         | word--what's referred to as "sola scriptura"--is remarkably
         | helpful in navigating what's taking place.
        
           | egorfine wrote:
           | Despite you being downvoted which is completely expected on
           | HN, I still have to second this.
           | 
           | > to the American caricature of Christianity
           | 
           | This cannot be overestimated.
        
           | joquarky wrote:
           | Astrology helps people with navigating life in the same way
           | as the Bible
           | 
           | As does the I Ching
           | 
           | These are all just Rorschach tests, why choose one of the
           | most corruptible and corrupted approaches?
        
         | slothtrop wrote:
         | It takes a crisis to spur drastic policy changes such as UBI,
         | or the sort of UBI that would maintain Western lifestyle.
         | 
         | Just wait.
        
         | bowsamic wrote:
         | Listen to Bach and have a beer
        
         | bluerooibos wrote:
         | Well, Google just released Gemini 1.5 which looks insane so
         | there's at least 2 companies in this race.
         | 
         | These huge updates are interestingly timed though - same day?
        
         | ETH_start wrote:
         | AGI would give you access to millions of times more resources
         | than you currently enjoy. So I would suggest that you have
         | absolutely nothing to worry about on the income/employment
         | front.
         | 
         | One company having that much power is a different matter, and I
         | address it by looking at how we can distribute GPT training
         | through decentralized and open platforms.
        
           | cryoshon wrote:
           | Who will own the company that operates the AGI?
           | 
           | It won't be me or you. Whoever it is, they will not share any
           | of the economic upsides of AI with the public unless they are
           | legally forced -- zero, zip, zilch, nada. Even then, they
           | will keep the lion's share for themselves, and they will use
           | their surplus to shape society to their advantage.
           | 
           | So yes, many millions of us have a big problem to worry
           | about, especially considering how much struggling there
           | already is now.
        
           | thuuuomas wrote:
           | > AGI would give you access to millions of times more
           | resources than you currently enjoy. So I would suggest that
           | you have absolutely nothing to worry about on the
           | income/employment front.
           | 
           | Pure theology
        
           | sureglymop wrote:
           | What will you do with millions of times more resources than
           | you currently enjoy?
           | 
           | I for one, would be overwhelmed. In the meantime I will be
           | passionate and joyful about the things I like regardless of
           | whether AI can do them a million times better. I have fun
           | doing it.. while the AI is.. just AI.
        
         | __salt wrote:
         | I know it's cliche, but you truly, unironically need to go
         | touch grass.
        
         | lagrange77 wrote:
         | > we aren't close to UBI
         | 
         | Right! I keep saying, that at least we have to kickoff the
         | process. Not even the legislative process, but convincing the
         | public that we'll need it eventually (alternatively a whole
         | different system worldwide, but that will be even harder). Will
         | take a long time anyway.
        
           | bsenftner wrote:
           | Beware of UBI, simply from the perspective there is no way
           | our puritanical members of society will allow it, and if it
           | does get enacted will have negative ramifications rendering
           | it more of an economic one way trap than a safety net. We're
           | simply to easy to other others, and when those budgeting the
           | entire economy look at the UBI population, their funding will
           | be cut just like they cut education and social services
           | today. I'm afraid of UBI, because I don't trust it's
           | enactment to be fair, honest or worth accepting.
        
             | lagrange77 wrote:
             | Never thought about it this way. Your fears sound
             | realistic.
        
             | eastbound wrote:
             | France has UBI ("RSA").
        
         | Moldoteck wrote:
         | Do you feel the doom related to yourself or related to the
         | future of humanity? If it's the first - I can't think of
         | something else than having a money safety net for 6-12 months
         | and having a flexible mind. You can try to learn just in case
         | some phisical skills like electrician if the doon feeling is
         | that bad. If you feel doon for humanity's future, I don't want
         | to be mean, but you shouldn't worry about things you can't
         | control, try to spend more time with nature and with ppl that
         | spend time close to nature Related to competition - the same
         | thoughts people had when thinking about roman/any empire, how
         | could it break, how could others compete. In the end everything
         | ends, giants like IBM are just shadows of their past success,
         | some are saying google is the next ibm and probably openai will
         | be the next ibm-ed google...
        
         | huhtenberg wrote:
         | The feeling comes from not being able to understand how exactly
         | this is done. Makes one feel like a prehistoric man looking at
         | a smartphone.
        
         | lawrencechen wrote:
         | > Historically, letting technology eliminate their jobs has
         | been a sacrifice people have made for their kids' sakes. Not
         | intentionally, for the most part, but their kids ended up with
         | the new jobs created as a result. No one weaves now, and that's
         | fine.
         | 
         | - paulg
         | 
         | https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1757794178548048117
        
           | tr3ntg wrote:
           | Ah yes, Paul G, the historian
        
           | chis wrote:
           | Ah perfect, all we have to do is consider a vague analogy to
           | a totally different event in the past and it's clear that
           | there's no worries if AI takes the vast majority of human
           | jobs in the next 50 years.
           | 
           | As a side note I shudder to think how many nightmare fuel
           | cursed videos the researchers must have had to work through
           | to get this result. Gotta applaud them for that I guess.
        
           | jprete wrote:
           | I can't imagine Paul Graham actually thought through the
           | scenario he's describing. The kids of the parents who lost
           | their jobs, throwing their lives into disarray and
           | desperation, are not going to be the primary recipients of
           | the new shiny technologically advanced careers.
        
           | akprasad wrote:
           | Sentence 1 seems historically illiterate, and I think pg
           | knows how ridiculous it sounds because he walks it back
           | almost immediately. "Historically people made a sacrifice,
           | but not intentionally, for the most part" is incoherent.
           | 
           | > No one weaves now, and that's fine.
           | 
           | Did horses find new jobs when we moved to steam power? Leave
           | aside the odd horse show and fairground ride. By the numbers,
           | what do you think happened?
        
             | Aeolun wrote:
             | > By the numbers, what do you think happened?
             | 
             | They found alternate employment as pack horses in WW1. The
             | problem was solved after that.
        
         | unethical_ban wrote:
         | Saving money, honing personal skills that ai can't replicate.
         | Staying offline and enjoying the world each day without looking
         | at my phone.
         | 
         | This stuff is going to change media and reality so much. Best
         | to get involved in local groups.
        
           | digging wrote:
           | > honing personal skills that ai can't replicate
           | 
           | Name one, and see if that holds up in 5 years...
        
         | adastra22 wrote:
         | Why do you feel depression, not joy when humanity moves the
         | line of progress further?
        
           | ChatGTP wrote:
           | Progress to what ? Where are we progressing to?
           | 
           | More climate change, war, microplastics in our body and now
           | extreme joblessness ?
           | 
           | If I woke up and I saw a headline that said OpenAI has
           | developed and AI which told us how to sequester huge amounts
           | of cO2 then I'd be excited and agree.
        
         | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
         | We've been on an unsustainable trajectory for quite a while
         | now. I take hope from things like this. Maybe this time it'll
         | finally be the shock we need to rethink everything.
        
         | harryquach wrote:
         | There will be a business created specializing in authenticating
         | digital information. I have no doubt this problem will be
         | solved with technology.
        
         | polytely wrote:
         | Not worried, I trust in my taste. I still haven't seen anything
         | made by AI that moved me. I'm buying physical books written
         | before AI was a thing, backing up music and film. Visiting
         | concerts and museums. The information and experience in my head
         | will become more rare and valuable compared to the AI slop that
         | will soon permiate everything. Oh your model is trained on the
         | billion most read online texts in the english language? cute.
         | I'm pulling inspiration from places that aren't captured by any
         | model.
         | 
         | Most of my programming job is tightly coupled with the business
         | processes and logistics of the company I work for, AI will not
         | replace me there.
         | 
         | Also I'm not convinced this is sustainable, I'm thinking this
         | will be like GCI where the first iron man film looked
         | phenomenal but where huge demand + the drive to make it
         | profitable will drive down the quality to just above barely
         | acceptable levels like the CGI in current marvel blockbusters.
        
         | elorant wrote:
         | Why should we always take the pessimistic viewpoint? Think of
         | all the beautiful things that can be built with something like
         | that. All the tutorials that could be created for any given
         | subject. All the memories that could be relived. Upload a photo
         | with your grandparents, give it context, and see them laughing
         | and playing with you as a toddler. Feed it your favorite book
         | and let it make a movie out of it. I mean, fuck me, the
         | possibilities are endless. I don't feel depressed. I feel
         | blessed to be able to live in an era when all these marvelous
         | things materialize. This is the stuff we read in science
         | fiction decades ago.
        
           | lemming wrote:
           | Yes, I remember the Matrix discussing something very like the
           | situation you describe.
        
         | jjice wrote:
         | For what it's worth, there have been a lot of situations like
         | this in the past. Maybe not as fast as this, but tech has
         | displaced jobs so many times like with the cotton gin and
         | computers, but more jobs have come about from those (like
         | probably your job). Now, you can say that this is different but
         | do we really have any data to back that up aside from speed of
         | development?
         | 
         | As for social safety nets: if this affects people as heavily as
         | you think (on an unprecedented, never before seen level), the
         | US will almost certainly put _something_ into place and add
         | some heavy taxes on something like this. If tens of millions of
         | Americans are removed from the work force and can't find other
         | work because of this, they'll form a really strong voting
         | block.
         | 
         | Also consider that things are never perfect. We've had wars
         | around the world for a notable amount of time. Even the US has
         | been in places we shouldn't be for a serious chunk of the last
         | century, but things have worked out. We have a ton of news and
         | access now so we're just more aware of these things.
         | 
         | Hopefully that perspective helps a bit. HN and social media can
         | have "doomer" tones quote a bit. Hopefully some perspective can
         | help show that this may not be as large a change as we think.
         | 
         | Or maybe I'm an idiot, as some child comments may point out
         | shortly.
        
         | OscarTheGrinch wrote:
         | The more I play with AI the more I realise that The "I" part of
         | AI is just clever marketing. People who are freaking out about
         | AI should just play around with it, you will soon realise how
         | fundamental dumb it is, and maybe relax about it.
         | 
         | AI has no spark, no drive, no ambition, no initiative, no
         | theory of mind, and it's not clear to me that it will ever have
         | these things. Right now, it's just a hammer that can build 100
         | houses a second, but who needs 100 slightly wonky houses?
        
           | srinivgp wrote:
           | Um. A hammer that can build 100 houses a second would be
           | incredibly valuable, both solving and causing some very
           | important problems. So good analogy from my perspective I
           | suppose, but I don't think it supports your conclusion?
        
         | TaupeRanger wrote:
         | It's literally nothing. Generative images haven't really gotten
         | better at the things people care about, like getting specific
         | details right and matching exact descriptions, and avoiding
         | uncanny animals and humans. There's no reason to think video
         | will be any different. No reason to panic - just take it for
         | what it is: something funny to amuse yourself with for a few
         | hours.
        
         | itissid wrote:
         | And we have been told that with innovation and disruption, a
         | new breed of jobs and skill sets are created. But we don't know
         | (or are very bad at predicting) what those would be, especially
         | now that the world has 100's millions of people linked to these
         | economies (film, writing, gaming).
         | 
         | Many people (including myself) have bought into the narrative
         | that history will repeat here and things will be better
         | eventually, but not how much has to break first, and it's used
         | as a hammer by OpenAI and probably every innovator who
         | disrupted.
         | 
         | They advertised "Safety" but no "Economic Impact" analysis
         | because the latter is less scary and requires difficult
         | predictive work, the former is just narrow legalese defined by
         | 80-year-old congressman they have to abide by to "release"
         | v1.0. There is at-least a Congressional Budget office(CBO)
         | where the 80-year-olds work, flawed as it maybe...
        
         | aggie wrote:
         | It's worth considering that throughout history there have been
         | people who have felt this way. That suggests this perception is
         | a natural tendency of humans and it does not have a good track
         | record of turning out be be correct.
        
         | konschubert wrote:
         | 1. I would much rather live in a world of abundance and figure
         | out UBI than in a world of scarcity.
         | 
         | 2. I don't think what they have can be protected all that well.
         | Others will catch up.
        
         | r3trohack3r wrote:
         | I hear this from a lot of people.
         | 
         | What happens when there is no work left, the machines do it
         | all, we don't have income to purchase the things we need, no
         | UBI to support us, and all that's left is human suffering?
         | 
         | But the intersection of the main currents of thoughts over the
         | last few decades gives me a lot of hope:
         | 
         | * Improvements in last mile manufacturing capabilities (DIY)
         | 
         | * AI assistants and knowledge availability
         | 
         | * P2P networking
         | 
         | I don't see the market distortion of crony capitalists lasting
         | much longer, and I expect a full collapse of crony capitalism
         | within the next decade as true capitalist markets, equipped
         | with AI/P2P/DIY, out-compete and out-meme the cronies.
         | 
         | I see us returning to the momentum of the 60s where society
         | seemed to be following a path towards communal-anarcho-
         | capitalism. Where the question of how we will provide for
         | ourselves is answered within our communities first, with global
         | supply chains filling in the gaps.
         | 
         | I want to see a future for my kiddos where most of what they
         | need to survive in a modern civilization can walk out of the
         | printers in their local FabLab. Where solutions to their
         | community's problems are rapidly designed and brought to print
         | with help from their AI assistants. Where schematics for point
         | solutions that prove super useful can be shared globally and
         | customized to meet needs locally.
         | 
         | I don't look at AI as something that's going to bring about
         | untold human suffering. I see it as a load bearing part of a
         | system that brings a level of prosperity and abundance that
         | society is ill equipped to handle.
        
         | suyash wrote:
         | There is no UBI coming, govt can barely fund current budgetary
         | needs without bowing tons of money. We are on our own as I see
         | it.
        
         | satvikpendem wrote:
         | I don't worry. These are all ultimately just tools for humans,
         | they don't do anything without us prompting them to do so.
        
         | throw310822 wrote:
         | The thing that fills me with dread watching these videos is not
         | (much) the thought of how many jobs it might make useless. It's
         | the thought that _every_ single pixel, _every_ movement is
         | fake. There is literally not a speck of truth in these videos,
         | there is nothing one can learn about the real world. Yes they
         | 're often "right" but any detail can be wrong at any moment.
         | Just like ChatGPT hallucinating but in a much deeper way- we
         | know that language can be used to lie or just make up things,
         | but a realistic video hits in a different way. For example the
         | video of the crested pigeon- a bird I haven't seen before- is
         | beautiful and yet it can be wrong in an infinity of details-
         | damn, I don't even know if such a bird exists.
        
         | up2isomorphism wrote:
         | I just don't find much value of the things that they are
         | generating so I don't feel that's a problem. If there is
         | anything this things is positive, is that it reminds us how
         | boring and predictable the daily life of normal people are.
        
         | quadcore wrote:
         | [delayed]
        
       | itissid wrote:
       | I've to go lie down...
        
       | kashnote wrote:
       | Absolutely unreal. Kinda funny how some people are complaining
       | about minor glitches or motion sickness when this is the most
       | impressive piece of technology I've seen. Way to go, OpenAI.
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | This inside VR goggles would make it amazing. probably it wouldnt
       | even need to render 360, it would generate it on demand. I better
       | go get some feeding tube
        
         | bsimpson wrote:
         | That's the difference between Donkey Kong Country and the N64
         | (or perhaps between Pixar and Quake).
         | 
         | The amount of power needed to generate this can't be feasible
         | for real time VR today. There's a reason even the company that
         | invented (massive and free) Gmail is charging for its top tier
         | generative AI.
        
       | timetraveller26 wrote:
       | Is this real life? Or is just a generated fantasy?
        
       | s-xyz wrote:
       | This is seriously insane, in particular as someone mentioned the
       | quality of it. I can't wait to play around with this. SICK!
        
       | lagrange77 wrote:
       | Finally new TNG episodes!
        
       | lagrange77 wrote:
       | They should generate a video of Steve Jobs introducing this in a
       | keynote.
        
       | stephenw310 wrote:
       | The results are mindblowing, to say the least. But will they
       | allow developers to fine-tune this eventually? OpenAI is still
       | yet to give that ability to txt2img DALLE models, so I doubt that
       | will be the case.
        
       | mlsu wrote:
       | They must be using techniques from NeRF in here, maybe in
       | tokenization? The artifacts are unmistakeable.
        
       | 0xcb0 wrote:
       | Wow, feels unreal. Can't believe we have come so far, yet we
       | cannot solve the worlds most basic problems and people still
       | starve each day.
        
       | ij09j901023123 wrote:
       | We thought programmers, fast food workers, and drivers would be
       | automated first. Turns out, it's movie / video, actors, editors
       | and artists....
        
         | Pmop wrote:
         | We all are going to get automated out of the workforce together
         | :)
        
       | rglover wrote:
       | I was super on board until I saw... _the paw_ :
       | https://player.vimeo.com/video/913131059?h=afe5567f31&badge=...
       | 
       | Exciting for the potential this creates, but scary for the social
       | implications (e.g., this will make trial law nearly impossible).
        
         | zuminator wrote:
         | Wow. If I saw this clip a year ago I wouldn't think, "The image
         | generator fucked up," I'd just think that a CG effects artist
         | deliberately tweaked an existing real-world video.
        
           | rglover wrote:
           | Yeah, if that gets cleaned up (one would expect it to in
           | time), this is going to change _a lot_.
        
         | comicjk wrote:
         | If I understand trial law correctly, the rules of evidence
         | already prohibit introducing a video at trial without proving
         | where it came from (for example, testimony from a security
         | guard that a given video came from a given security camera).
         | 
         | But social media has no rules of evidence. Already I see AI-
         | generated images as illustrations on many conspiracy theory
         | posts. People's resistance to believing images and videos from
         | sketchy sources is going to have to increase very fast
         | (especially for images and videos that they agree with).
        
       | cooper_ganglia wrote:
       | It's always kinda crazy to me to see an emerging technology like
       | this have it's next iteration in the development pipeline, and
       | even after seeing the First Gen AI video models, even many of the
       | HN people here _still_ say,  "Meh, not that impressive."
       | 
       | Brother, have you seen Runway Gen 2, or SVD 1.1? I'm not excited
       | about Sora because I think it looks like Hollywood animations,
       | I'm excited because an open-source 3rd-Gen Sora is going to be so
       | much better, and this much progression in one step is really
       | exciting!
        
       | darkhorse13 wrote:
       | Does anyone else feel a sense of doom from these advancements?
       | I'm definitely not a Luddite, I've been working professionally as
       | a programmer for quite some time now, but I just can't shake this
       | feeling. And this is not in the "I might lose my job to this"
       | kind of feeling, that's obviously there, but it's something
       | deeper, more sinister. I don't think I can explain it properly.
       | 
       | Anyway, videos look incredible. I genuinely can't believe my
       | eyes.
        
         | slothtrop wrote:
         | It allows the technical possibility for a post-truth reality,
         | where it's impossible to tell what's true and what isn't. Every
         | piece of information fed through your machine and smartphone.
         | That's the scariest part to me. We need to get ahead of that,
         | because certain interests _will_ be fabricating things with it.
         | 
         | As jobs go, well, we're a long ways from full automation but
         | this represents some serious growing pains that will decimate
         | certain jobs and replace them with few. Not sure what the
         | reaction will be on the consumption side, revulsion or
         | enthusiasm. The "handcrafted" market will still be there but
         | then you wouldn't really know if any AI was used. In a long
         | enough timeline we can hand-wave this away with UBI/negative
         | tax.
         | 
         | But ah, the most at-risk workers are the professional services,
         | white-collar upper-middle class types, even engineers but to a
         | lesser extent. So I wonder what kind of upheaval that would
         | cause.
        
         | hansoolo wrote:
         | I think my thoughts went in a similarly sinister direction,
         | when I saw it. I couldn't quiet grasp it.
         | 
         | My mood wasn't euphoric, to say the least.
        
       | kaimac wrote:
       | meanwhile people are dying
        
       | aubanel wrote:
       | I love how they show the failure cases: compare that with Gemini
       | 1.5 pro's technical paper that carefully avoids any test where it
       | does not seem like a 100% perf! I think confronting your failures
       | a condition for success, and Google seems much too self-indulgent
       | here.
        
       | ij09j901023123 wrote:
       | People are not seeing the bigger picture. Right now, videos are
       | the primary focus because it's easy to show off how good this
       | technology is to investors through entertainment. Eventually, LLM
       | models will expand to biological research, medicine development,
       | cellular advancements, and more, effectively advancing humanity
       | as a whole. Sam Altman will eventually become the richest man in
       | history. OpenAI will dictate whether or not you live or die.
        
       | ij09j901023123 wrote:
       | Apple vision pro + OpenAI entertainment on the fly + living in a
       | tight pod next to millions of other people, hooked onto life
       | support. A wonderful matrix fantasy
        
       | ein0p wrote:
       | That actually looks borderline useful in practice. 3 years from
       | now someone will make a decent full length movie with this.
        
       | notpachet wrote:
       | OpenAI: Prompt: The camera follows behind a white vintage SUV
       | with a black roof rack as it speeds up a steep dirt road
       | surrounded by pine trees on a steep mountain slope...
       | 
       | Sora: _plays GTA V_
        
       | itissid wrote:
       | How does one cope with this?
       | 
       | - Disruptions like this happen to every industry every now and
       | then. Just not on the level of "Communicating with people with
       | words, and pictures". Anduril and SpaceX disrupted defense
       | contractors and United Launch Alliance; Someone working for a
       | defense contractor/ULA here affected by that might attest to the
       | feeling?
       | 
       | - There will be plenty of opportunity to innovate. Industries are
       | being created right now. People probably also felt the same way
       | when they saw HTTP on their screens the first time. So don't
       | think your career or life's worth of work is miniscule, its just
       | a moving target, adapt & learn.
       | 
       | - Devil is in the details. When a bunch of large SaaS behemoths
       | created Enterprise software an army of contractors and
       | consultants grew to support the _glue_ that was ETL. A lot of
       | work remains to be done. It will just be a more imaginative glue.
        
       | d4rkp4ttern wrote:
       | Mind blown of course.
       | 
       | Two things are interesting:
       | 
       | - No audio -- that must have been hard to add, or else it would
       | have been there.
       | 
       | - Spelling is still probably hard to do (the familiar DallE
       | problem)... e.g. a video showing a car driving past a billboard
       | with specified text.
        
         | slothtrop wrote:
         | My intuition is that training on audio will be trivial if they
         | can accomplish this for video. Maybe I'm wrong.
        
       | pradn wrote:
       | It's impressive, but I think it's still in the same category as
       | even the best LLMs: the demos look good and they can be quite
       | useful, but you can never quite trust them. You really can't just
       | have an LLM write a whole report for you - who knows what facts
       | it'll make up, what it'll miss? You really can't use this to
       | generate video for work, who knows where the little artifacts are
       | (it's easier to tell with video).
       | 
       | The future of these high-fidelity (but not perfect) generative AI
       | systems is in realizing we're going to need "humans in the loop".
       | This means designing to output human-manipulable data - perhaps
       | models/skeletons/textures instead of whole output. Pixels are
       | hard to manipulate directly!
       | 
       | As for entertainment, already we see people sick of CGI - will
       | people really want to pay for AI-generated video?
        
         | speedgoose wrote:
         | I subscribe to Disney+ and some of the content is a lot less
         | perfect than the Sora videos presented there.
        
         | bufferoverflow wrote:
         | > _The future of these high-fidelity (but not perfect)
         | generative AI systems is in realizing we 're going to need
         | "humans in the loop"_
         | 
         | Last weekend my 7 year old decided he wanted to make and sell a
         | shirt with an image of a space cat shooting a laser gun. It
         | took him like 1 minute to use free Dalle3 to make and choose an
         | image. Then I showed him a website to remove the background.
         | Then I showed him a tool to AI-upscale the image. Then we
         | uploaded it to Amazon Merch, it got approved after a few hours,
         | and now it's for sale on Amazon. It took us maybe 10 minutes of
         | effort end-to-end. Involved no artists.
         | 
         | Funny enough, Amazon is full of AI-designed merch, there were
         | like 7 pages of shirts with space cats with lasers.
        
       | redm wrote:
       | Why are all the example videos in slow motion?
        
       | itissid wrote:
       | So what happens to the film industry now?
       | 
       | - Local/Bespoke high quality video content creation by ordinary
       | Joes: Check. - Ordinary joes making fake porn videos for money:
       | Check. - Reduce cost for real movies dramatically by editing in
       | AI scenes: Check.
       | 
       | A whole industry will get upturned.
        
       | slothtrop wrote:
       | RE worrying about the future: what concerns me most is post-truth
       | reality. Being thrown into a world where it's impossible to tell
       | fact from fiction is insane and dangerous. Just thinking about it
       | evokes paranoia.
       | 
       | We're nowhere near full-automation, these are growing pains, but
       | maybe the canary in the goldmine for the job market. Expect more
       | enthusiasm for UBI or negative tax and the like and policies to
       | follow. Cheap energy is also coming eventually, just slower.
        
       | foobar_______ wrote:
       | Feels like another pivotal moment in AI. Feel like I'm watching
       | history live. I think I need to go lay down.
        
       | telesilla wrote:
       | Watching these made me think, I'm going to want to go to the
       | theatre a lot more in the future and see fellow humans in plays,
       | lectures and concerts.
       | 
       | Such achievements in technology must lead to cultural change.
       | Look at how popular vinyl has become, why not theatre again.
        
       | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
       | Shall I get into the unemployment line now and beat the rush?
        
       | impulser_ wrote:
       | This is good, but far from being useful or production ready.
       | 
       | It's still too easy to notice these are all AI rendered.
        
       | gebt wrote:
       | Thanks but we saw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39380165
       | 
       | https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97733259&docI...
        
       | qwertox wrote:
       | The one with the grandma is outright scary. All the lies...
        
       | lorenzofalco wrote:
       | Ahora si que si se jodio todo. Apaga todo o desco ecta
        
       | elorant wrote:
       | This could kill the porn industry.
        
       | lxe wrote:
       | Blown every expectation way away....
        
       | lagrange77 wrote:
       | Has anyone noticed the label on the surfing otter's lifejacket?
       | :D
        
       | accra4rx wrote:
       | More layoffs
        
       | lqcfcjx wrote:
       | This is very impressive. I know in general people are iffy about
       | research benchmark. How does it work to evaluate text-to-video
       | types of use cases? I want to have some intuition on how much
       | this is better than other systems like pika quantatively.
        
       | hansoolo wrote:
       | Is it really just coincidence that Andrej Karpathy just left
       | yesterday?
        
       | jgalt212 wrote:
       | These looks like well done PS5 games. Which, of course, is a
       | great achievement.
        
       | jmfldn wrote:
       | Technically breathtaking, but why do these examples of AI-
       | generated content always have a cheap clipart vibe about them? So
       | naff and uninspired given the, no doubt, endless potential this
       | technology has.
       | 
       | I also feel a sense of dread too. Imagine the tidal wave of
       | rubbish coming our way. First text, then images and now video can
       | be spewed out in industrial quantities. Will it lead to a better
       | culture? In theory it could, in practice I just feel like we'll
       | be deluged with exponentially more mediocre "content" .
        
       | MobinaMaghami wrote:
       | hi, my name is mobina and I am from Iran. I want to make a video
       | from text and so yeah. thank you for watching.
        
       | MobinaMaghami wrote:
       | are you gays all hackers? I am not
        
       | quadcore wrote:
       | HN server runs smoothly and is having a walk in the park it seems
       | - impressive compared to previous OpenAI annoucements. Has there
       | been significant rollouts?
        
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