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Goodbye to Sora

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Re: Goodbye to Sora

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have 20 years of experience and I don't handwrite any code anymore. Opus does everything, and it only needs a bit of steering occasionally. If you can give it guardrails (ie a pre-existing design system) and ways to verify its output (ie enforce TDD and use Chrome to visually verify) then it gets it right basically every time.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition. As a onetime semi-pro musician, with decades of live performance and sound design experience: I would rather burn my beloved instruments publicly and pee on the fire.

It depends how it is used. If it is an assist which generates sounds/samples that a musician can edit themselves, that seems fine. But spewing out a final form track from a prompt would just be slop. Integrating AI with existing tools to improve productivity is harder and requires effort and investment...

As one whose musicianship involved a great deal of generating sounds and samples myself, via modular synthesis and the occasional use of a programming language for DSP, I assure you I find that idea of using genAI for an assist on that front offensive.

Could you use the bullshit machines to generate sounds that were nuanced, musical, and original, with enough time and effort?

Maybe. I'm not sure original is something they can do, but it's not totally implausible.

I would strongly recommend learning to use other tools for that purpose, instead of feeding the plagiarism monstrosities.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#653
post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where you can make money and have a really profitable business I am not convinced. Nobody is making money, every player is losing money hand over fist.

Not because there is no path to profitability (they make a ton of money on inference), they just spend a lot on R&D.

> they make a ton of money on inference

So it is stated, but is it actually true? I am not convinced.

Besides, it's not as if they can suddenly stop training models, the moment you do that you've spelled a death sentence for profitablity because Google and open source will very quickly undercut a 15 year break even timeline.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real answer is that Sora-style AI slop videos just aren't as addictive as we thought they'd be. I let my kids have access to the app in the hope they would be inoculated against being obsessed with AI video and it actually worked. They got bored in like 2 days. It simply doesn't compare well with handcrafted short form videos that are already plentiful on TikTok (which I absolutely don't let my kids watch…

Yes, fortunately slop is pretty unwatchable after the novelty wears out. Even the lowest common denominator stuff NFLX churns out is in a different league. I was talking to other people re: difference between code & other domains. Code is, for customer, what it does.. not how it does it. That is - we can get mad about style, idioms, frameworks, language, indentation, linting, verbosity, readability, maintainability b…

IMO slop fits best for "art that isn't the point".

A promotional flyer for an event could work perfectly well in plain text. The art is pure social signal - this event is thrown by the type of people who put art in a certain style on their flyers. Your eye is caught and your brain almost immediately discards the art.

Same with power point - you make a power point so that everyone knows this decision was made by the type of people who make power points. A txt file and a png would have gotten the job done.

Same also with memes - you could just _say_ a lot of these jokes, but they're funnier with a hastily-edited image alongside.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#655
Off Topic: I paid 100 $ for Dall-E 2 credits back in the pre chatgpt days.

Then they killed Dall-E 2 and my credits vaporized.

Anybody found themselves in the same situation? What have you done?

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#656
post #7

How much money did they burn on this? And for what? Nothing?

They paid for an opportunity. Sometimes paying for a chance nets you nothing.

If you end up with nothing in aggregate for the chances you pay for, you're a loser. Not in a pejorative sense, just as a fact, you lost.

If you come out with more than nothing, in aggregate, you're a winner, in the same objective sense.

Probably controversial. Eh.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik Anthropic still loses money for their main product in this space: Claude Code and their Max plans.

This became immediately clear to me over the weekend when I used Opus via API key. I had it review the code for my (relatively small) personal blog to create an AGENTS.MD - it cost me $3.26.

same here... The API costs are absolutely insane for any real usage. This is either high prices to make sure no profitable competitor to claude workspace or other agent system emerges, or heavily sponsoring of their own soluions.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#658
at least they‘re not trying to play the „our tech is too dangerous“ card as the sunset reason (again [yet]).

also, for a company carrying „open“ in their name, that pretends to still remember its origins, they could open source at least the projects they sunset…

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#659
post #545

Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried in a thread of 500 plus comments. But I think you finally see a little bit of a flaw in the strategy or just a little bit of insight into what was desperation for relevance and to try to very quickly attain what other companies have attained but essentially what they're seeing is this gradual reduction in ambition and…

> I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.

Considering the large million plus view counts I see AI slop getting on FB and YouTube I'm not seeing this behaviour play out.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#660
post #545

Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried in a thread of 500 plus comments. But I think you finally see a little bit of a flaw in the strategy or just a little bit of insight into what was desperation for relevance and to try to very quickly attain what other companies have attained but essentially what they're seeing is this gradual reduction in ambition and…

> I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.

The addictive toxic content will go the way of tobacco and explore new markets.

Back in 2010 around 11% of the population of Indonesia was connected to the internet. Currently it's closer to 80% - largely via mobile phones. That's approximately 200mln new users.

Nigeria and Pakistan are going through the same change, just started later.

Since 2016 India alone added more users than the mentioned countries combined.

That's a lot of first generation users. More than the entire western population.

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