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Goodbye to Sora

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Re: Goodbye to Sora

#681

Post by lnenad »

jjulius wrote: post #633
lnenad wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really funny how people can say these things online without giving them a second thought. There are literal weapons being produced that are killing people daily. But no, it's the meme generator that's evil.

Because this is a tech forum, not a weapons forum. I'd wager that a sizeable chunk of folk decrying AI/LLMs in this manner also do, in fact, decry the same weapons you refer to. They just do it elsewhere because it's not typically on-topic here.

Context is tech, I agree. Is there no tech in weapons? Palantir? Drones? Are there developers that are proud when they made the kill machine 1% more precise; more optimized?

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#682

Post by WarmWash »

yoz-y wrote: post #505
meken wrote: post #163

I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us. After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall…

The problem is that due to the ease these can be made there is also really no reason to make this social. “Why would I look at somebody else’s creations when I can do mine.”

I'm not an artist or creative person in any sense. My persona is closer to a settings menu than a colorful canvas.

The AI art I have seen creatives produce is far beyond anything I have been able to come up with. We're not at the point yet where you can just prompt "Make me a video that is visually stunning and captivating" and get something cool.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#683

Post by WarmWash »

internet_points wrote: post #522
wholinator2 wrote: post #197

Earlier 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.

> You have to go read it yourself afterwards ^ this is important. Otherwise you may very well be missing anything really surprising or novel. See for example https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/after-software-eats-the... , an experience report of NotebookLM where > It was remarkable to see how many errors could be stuffed into 5 minutes of vacuous conversation. What was even more striking was that the errors systema…

On one hand 2024 in AI time was a decade ago.

On the other, Google might not have done much to upgrade the podcast feature since them.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#684

Post by hbn »

johnfn wrote: post #321

As 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

I think if you had to foot the bill for generating a bajillion gigabytes of slop with no real utility, you wouldn't be too mystified.

They showed off their technology and proved it was impressive. That's all it had to do.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#685

Post by steveBK123 »

WarmWash wrote: post #680
heavyset_go wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these AI companies that promised AGI are going to find out that they're actually IDE plugin subscription companies

Coding is a small minority of total generated tokens. It's easy swimming in tech waters all day to think Claude is the pack leader because it writes excellent code, but the reality is that tokens are overwhelmingly coming from OpenAI and Google doing mostly stuff like "Make this e-mail sound nicer" and "What's a cheap vacation spot with warm turquoise waters"

> "Make this e-mail sound nicer" and "What's a cheap vacation spot with warm turquoise waters"

Right but I think a lot of these use cases aren't replacing any jobs because it wasn't anyones job. It's just a little polish on existing work (did spell correction in Word kill jobs?) or the stuff that voice assistants have been promising for 10 years.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#686

Post by jjulius »

lnenad wrote: post #681
jjulius wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this is a tech forum, not a weapons forum. I'd wager that a sizeable chunk of folk decrying AI/LLMs in this manner also do, in fact, decry the same weapons you refer to. They just do it elsewhere because it's not typically on-topic here.

Context is tech, I agree. Is there no tech in weapons? Palantir? Drones? Are there developers that are proud when they made the kill machine 1% more precise; more optimized?

Plenty of HN threads about Palantir and drones also have people commenting about their evil.

Just because one thing is a lesser/different kind doesn't mean we can't also be vigilant about it as well.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#687

Post by steveBK123 »

neutronicus wrote: post #654
steveBK123 wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Agreed, it's good at placeholder art for which entertainment consumption is not the point. Clip Art for the new generation.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#688

Post by drzaiusx11 »

bpodgursky wrote: post #404
34ahgaf wrote: post #241

Earlier 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.

It's because programmers are willing to pay thousands of dollars a month for a product commensurate with the value to provides, aka AI coding. Generating pointless AI videos for pocket change or ad revenue is a loser in comparison.

From my vantage point AI consumption is being lead by tech leadership moreso than actual in-the-weeds programmers themselves. HN just happens to include more folk at the intersection of leadership and individual code contributor.

The top down push for AI is in line with the age old traditions of replacing highly skilled and highly compensated trade workers with automation. The writing is on the wall if folks care to look; many just don't want to. This has happened 1000 times before and it'll keep happening in the name of "progress" in capitalist systems for as long as there are "inefficiencies" to "resolve." AI is meant as our replacement, not as an extension of our skill as it happens to align with today.

Its increasingly obvious that the next phase in the evolution of the average programmer role will be as technical requirements writers and machine generated output validators, leaving the actual implementation outsourced to the machine. Even in that new role, there is no secret sauce protecting this "programmer" from further automation. Technical product managers eventually fall to automation given enough time and money poured into the automation of translating fuzzy, under specified ideas into concrete bulleted requirements where they can simply review the listed output, make minor tweaks and hit "send" to generate the list of jira-like units of work to farm out to a fleet of agents wearing various hats (architect, programming, validator, etc.)

The above is very much in progress already, and today I'm already spending the majority of my time reviewing the output of said AI "teams", and let me tell you: it gets closer and closer to "good enough" week by week. Last year's models are horse shit in comparison to what I'm using today with agentic teams of the latest frontier models (Opus 4.6 [1m] currently, with some Sonnet.)

Maybe we're at a plateau and the limitations inherent in GenAI tech will be insurmountable before we get to 100% replacement. But it literally won't matter in the end as "good enough" always prevails over the perfect, and human devs are far from perfect already.

I have been producing software (at fang scale) for several decades now, and I've been closely monitoring GenAI systems for coding specifically. Even just a few months ago I'd get a verbose, meandering sprawl of methods and logic scattered with the actual deliverables outlined in the prompt from these systems. Sometimes even with clear disregard of the requirements laid out, or "cheating" on validation via disabling tests or writing ones that don't actually do anything useful. Today I'm getting none of that. I don't know what changed, but I somehow get automated code with good separation of concerns, following best practices and proven architectural patterns. Sure, with a bunch of juniors let loose with AI you get garbage still, but that's simply a function of poor delegation of work units. Giving the individual developer and the AI too much leeway in the scope of changes is the bug there. Division of work into small enough units is the key and always has been for the de-skilling portion of automating away skilled human labor for machines. We're just watching Marxist theory on capitalist systems play out in real time in a field generally thought to be "safe." It certainly won't be the last.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#689

Post by rf15 »

wiseowise wrote: post #528
rf15 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay understanding for speed. How much this trade is acceptable is up to you and the task you have in front of you. I cannot recommend it as a general solution.

That’s just falls. I’ve spent disproportionate amount on “understanding” awful tooling like Gradle and npm. There’s no value in it if you’re not an infra engineer. It would take me a couple of days to manually restructure my hobby app, now I can just say “extract this into another workspace/subproject” and be done with it in minutes. And that’s just one example.

I agree with this sentiment. I just also see AI-driven development in core business logic, where truly understanding what is going on is essential and yet completely disregarded.
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