Ed Zitron is going to be all over this
Really he already was, back in August 2024:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/
Goodbye to Sora
331–340 of 916 posts
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is the last narrative that some of Wall Street believes and has enough mediocre or senile coders to promote it. That narrative will implode like Sora later this year.
To be fair, LLMs are exceptional at coding and they very well could displace some jobs. But you'll always need people at the helm who know what they're doing too.
> To be fair, LLMs are exceptional at coding
No they aren't. Any decently skilled human blows them out of the water. They can do better than an untrained human, but that's not much of an achievement.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#333One thing I'll give sora is that the remix feature actually required human input and enabled users to interact with each other through a novel means.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like in several years we will look back at how we treated our most creative minds in disgust. This behavior will not be readily forgiven.
I have re-read this comment several times and cannot tell who "most creative minds" means. Artists? AIs? People who AI will help become artists?
The artists. Their work was stolen, their employment threatened, and told they are not needed. We will need them.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#335As someone who generally liked the products that OpenAI puts out, I think Sora was their first product that I really didn't like. I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling. It's primary value proposition to keep me using it wasn't to trick me with addictive content, but to get me high quality answers as…
> Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown. Does anyone have any guess what happened there?
My guess is they over committed server/energy resources, since they were generating ~30 images per frame of 1 second of video for results that may be discarded and then tried again.
Now that energy costs are increasingly less predictable because of the war, they're prioritizing what is sustainable. Willing to blow up the $1 billion Disney deal for Sora, because that's a popular IP that would have increased discarded server time.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is consistent with a lot of AI apps. I fell in love with Gamma and haven’t used it in forever. Same with NotebookLM.
I somewhat consistently use notebookLM for podcasts of academic papers I'm reading in my PhD. You have to go read it yourself afterwards but it makes better use of time in the gym or doing dishes/groceries.
The bantering of the podcast I found distracting and the breathless enthusiasm. I guess there was a way to make it more no nonsense? I found I lost content if tuned for brevity.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, that's not the "proper" way to think about it, that's just your opinion. As it stands today, AI video generation tools like Sora suck up useful energy and produce things that are useless at best (throwaway short form videos), and harmful at worst (propaganda, deepfakes). Rich people were always going to do what they wanted anyway, "democratizing" that doesn't make the situation better.
>Rich people were always going to do what they wanted anyway, "democratizing" that doesn't make the situation better. total disagree. if you put vid gen in the hands of regular people then regular people get super-powered in that they begin to recognize the frame pacing, frame counts, and typical lengths and features of an AI video. Do you know how many people have cited AI videos in this war? We'd all be better off…
I think you're overestimating the average person. We can give people direct, scientifically-backed evidence of something, and there will still be significant groups of people fervently denying it.
The resources (money, energy, opportunity cost of engineering time) put into AI video generation are better spent elsewhere. Not pouring resources into it would hopefully stunt its progress, making AI generated propaganda lower quality and easier to spot.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#338Generative video is insanely expensive and OpenAI is burning through money. They need to use the compute on things that they actually might make money on - like enterprise Codex usage.
OpenAI is bleeding money faster than they can afford to and they are literally running out of people that they can go to for more. They need to stop the bleeding.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I somewhat consistently use notebookLM for podcasts of academic papers I'm reading in my PhD. You have to go read it yourself afterwards but it makes better use of time in the gym or doing dishes/groceries.
The bantering of the podcast I found distracting and the breathless enthusiasm. I guess there was a way to make it more no nonsense? I found I lost content if tuned for brevity.
I just use elevenreader for this. I copy in essays or whatever text I want to listen to and it works decently well. It's far from perfect, but certainly good enough.
Sometimes I'll take deep research output and listen to it too that way.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just listen to actual audio books... literally doing double the work for no benefit... why?
There aren't a lot of highly technical audiobooks or ones that give the same specificity that would be the same as an academic paper
Not yet but it seems like they're getting to the point of AI narration finally being good enough to make any text an 'audiobook'.
Having said that I absolutely hate the audio format, I only used it when I had to drive or when I swam lanes. But these days I do neither.