81–90 of 252 posts
I let myself get mildly excited with the last Omni release, but it turns out it (and this one) can't do the one practical thing I want - Sync generated video to provided pre-existing audio. Meanwhile, I'm happily using Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX to finally finish the lip syncing to recorded dialog on my abandoned 20 year old Flash animation hobby projects.
I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.
it always sucks at everything else.
It certainly makes for easy demos, but I always struggle with the practical application. As in, what work or enjoyment does someone actually get from this? Ads and media pre production seem plausible, but it fails the 'how can this enrich life' in a way most other AI tools don't. Maybe for them that's not a consideration, if their only interest is the other meaning of enrich that might flow from ads and numbing river…
I have a young boy, and whenever he builds an impressive "scene" from LEGO (like a diorama or whatever), I take a couple of reference pictures with my phone and make it into a "real" movie scene, cartoon, or whatever. He loves it, and this motivates him to build more and bigger things out of LEGO.
If he builds something really special, I might actually fork over the $5 to use Omni to turn his LEGO creation into a 10-second video instead of a still image. It'll blow his mind!
PS: There also are cheap and even free phone apps that make stop-motion animation trivial. We've already made a couple of videos of his toys moving around that way.
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Google is so internally fractured, and the factions individually are so powerful, that it's really only the chrome people who care about chrome. If anything FF gets left out because usage is so low.
> If anything FF gets left out because usage is so low. I've been following this for a long time. They were leaving Firefox out when its usage wasn't low. Probably the typical backdoor executive mandate that led to death by "sprint prioritization": Yes, we will for sure work on the Firefox compatibility bug, Dave-Open-Source-Enthusiast-Google-Dev. But we can only pick up 10 bugfixing tickets this sprint and the ticke…
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Just because Anthropic and OpenAI really want there to be an arms race justifying the outsized investment, doesn't mean the optimal play is to build larger, more expensive, models. The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening. I think it's reasonable to not completely drain o…
If the Chinese labs can compete on a shoestring budget with access to much less powerful hardware, Google should be able to compete as well. They're becoming almost irrelevant for agentic coding right now.
Interesting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation. Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?
Previously when making video ads you'd need to actually create the video. Actors, cameramen, editors - you name it. Now a new video ads is just a prompt away, directly inside the ad-spend web UI too no doubt.
People say Google have lost and that they're having their lunch eaten by anthropic, but I am not so sure...
It certainly makes for easy demos, but I always struggle with the practical application. As in, what work or enjoyment does someone actually get from this? Ads and media pre production seem plausible, but it fails the 'how can this enrich life' in a way most other AI tools don't. Maybe for them that's not a consideration, if their only interest is the other meaning of enrich that might flow from ads and numbing river…
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Just because Anthropic and OpenAI really want there to be an arms race justifying the outsized investment, doesn't mean the optimal play is to build larger, more expensive, models. The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening. I think it's reasonable to not completely drain o…
Yes, I agree with you that the race all the AI companies are running doesn't make sense, but at the same time, there are rumors that Google has produced newer versions of Pro without releasing them to the public. Version 3.1 has plenty of room for improvement, yet they don't seem to be giving the attention it deserves or at least communicating accordingly.
It may be that they wish to slow their cadence of releases, or develop their models to focus more in a different direction, etc. No matter what the actual reasoning, they have chosen to not compete in the same race, and I cannot say I fault them.
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A lot of it will get automated the same way very many industries got automated. A lot of physical labour got automated once a primitive for it was created. Similarly, we have now a primitive for automating knowledge work. In the next few years to a decade, as all the right training data and runtime environments are slowly consolidated for various fields, a lot will be automated. There is no inherent reason a voice ac…
I don't really like comparing the way automation of the past displaced jobs to the way AI is/will displace jobs. The timeline is just faster and, more importantly, there were still plenty of other fields of work for people to go to. But now that we are automating white collar work... where will people go? I'm a 36 year-old veteran who has returned to college and so many of the younger students seem to be filled with…
This slow transition period will also help answer the "where will they go" questions. We can't answer them right now.
Ultimately, everything we do is in service of social political and personal human incentives, and I think the effect of that is discounted when people make these takeoff predictions for AI and "AGI"