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The worst acquisition in history, again

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Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#101
post #90
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t you replace a lot of Hollywood with AI now? What am I missing?

Not "a lot" of Hollywood, not yet. Short clips are doable, but the coherency duration before it goes weird just isn't there yet, unless you're OK with very short segments (like, single-digit seconds) between each AI-equivalent of a cut. That will probably improve, but the tech isn't there yet for "a lot", it's like CGI in the 90s rather than CGI as it is today. That's aside from how AI output isn't copyrightable, whi…

You haven't been seeing what's been coming out of models from China. Hollywood is the Wiley coyote that hasn't looked down yet. They're turbo fucked.

Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#102
post #53

On top of this Ellison is likely to have to sell off the dried husk of Cerner in order to fuel his circular AI transactions with NVidia.

Remember, the Cerner acquisition enabled an essentially permanent beachhead for Oracle in the VA. It will pay off over time in 'we already run Oracle' across many dimensions of government. See the career of Seema Verma from last DT admin.

I thought the VA had come up with their own version of an EMR?

Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#103

There is a kind of business people who do most of their money engineering failed business takeovers and mergers. A good example is John C. Malone. This guys is always involved in some takeover or merger of companies, most of the time leading to no gain for investors, but he himself became billionaire with this strategy. Media companies are some of the best ways to engineer these business "opportunities".

John Malone is on the board at Warner. Yes, he's profiting again from these shenanigans.

Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#104
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "a lot" of Hollywood, not yet. Short clips are doable, but the coherency duration before it goes weird just isn't there yet, unless you're OK with very short segments (like, single-digit seconds) between each AI-equivalent of a cut. That will probably improve, but the tech isn't there yet for "a lot", it's like CGI in the 90s rather than CGI as it is today. That's aside from how AI output isn't copyrightable, whi…

You haven't been seeing what's been coming out of models from China. Hollywood is the Wiley coyote that hasn't looked down yet. They're turbo fucked.

> You haven't been seeing what's been coming out of models from China.

Citations?

I haven't, and would be genuinely curious if it is better than the AI short clip slop that appears on YouTube and really just needs to be taken out back and shot.

I have no doubt that its coming, I just haven't seen it yet.

Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#105
post #46

Netflix use BSD heavily. Oracle is Solaris. It was just BSD vs SysV all over again.

Legitimate question (I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just ignorant): why? Linux is just as free (or free-er), and it's a ton better supported: why would these major companies not use it?

[deleted]

Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't been seeing what's been coming out of models from China. Hollywood is the Wiley coyote that hasn't looked down yet. They're turbo fucked.

> You haven't been seeing what's been coming out of models from China. Citations? I haven't, and would be genuinely curious if it is better than the AI short clip slop that appears on YouTube and really just needs to be taken out back and shot. I have no doubt that its coming, I just haven't seen it yet.

I think there's two things contributing to YouTube slop, the earlier generations of free model being one, the other is more fundamental: most people using these tools for slop only care about advertising money, they neither know nor care about how much of a difference artistic taste makes (hence also why there's so many YouTube shorts which are just a clip from a random TV show with inappropriate music added, sometimes as a mic-drop, sometimes just obscuring the dialogue, but how even are YT shorts monetised?)

FWIW, there are models which are better than the majority of the YouTube slop I've seen*; but even then, when I show short clips from e.g. Google's "Flow" generator to others, those others find the results unimpressive. Also, the voice range is weird, my experience playing with them it had a much harder time of creating a decent working-class British accent than Dick Van Dyke.

However, amongst the various issues Flow has, the most obvious is length, because even though Flow lets me "extend" a clip, it's not got enough coherency between each (8 second?) segment when I do.

The second biggest issue is that, as with Stable Diffusion before it, it quite often produces stuff you just don't want. Junk dealers don't care about that and use the first result, an artist can afford to do 10 attempts and pick the right one, and will care to, too. That's something I can at least expect will be solved, or has been on non-free tools (control nets etc.) even though I don't expect slop dealers to ever bother with them.

If each 8 seconds of video was actually Hollywood quality (they're not, in any sense including resolution) and they were coherent when extended (likewise, they're not), as there's 750 times 8 seconds in a 100 minute film, it would still be an existential threat to Hollywood if those segments cost $1333, because that's a million dollars and in the cost range of "micro-budget indie", rather than the tens of millions that even normal-indie films cost (before marketing etc.) or hundreds of millions that blockbusters cost.

I have no idea how video generators scale up in cost with time or resolution, let alone quality, so I don't want to make guesses on how much extra compute (or indeed training data) would be needed for a coherent 2 minute cut-equivalent at 4k. As I don't like the epistemic collapse we're already witnessing with clips from video games being passed off as coverage of warfare, I very much hope this is one of those things which fails to scale up.

* although even with early models, if you wield them as an artist rather than as a slop merchant you get interesting output; you may remember the Harry Potter Balenciaga videos from a few years back, same channel and you can see how things have changed: https://www.youtube.com/@demonflyingfox/videos

Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#107
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "a lot" of Hollywood, not yet. Short clips are doable, but the coherency duration before it goes weird just isn't there yet, unless you're OK with very short segments (like, single-digit seconds) between each AI-equivalent of a cut. That will probably improve, but the tech isn't there yet for "a lot", it's like CGI in the 90s rather than CGI as it is today. That's aside from how AI output isn't copyrightable, whi…

You haven't been seeing what's been coming out of models from China. Hollywood is the Wiley coyote that hasn't looked down yet. They're turbo fucked.

I keep up to date via Two Minute Papers, but I also take note of teams like Corridor Crew: Hollywood are not yet turbo-anything.

They may become so, I don't know how resolution and temporal coherency scale, but right now Hollywood's biggest problem from China is that China's got 1.5 billion people who are just as capable of learning SFX as anyone in the US.

Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#108
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You haven't been seeing what's been coming out of models from China. Citations? I haven't, and would be genuinely curious if it is better than the AI short clip slop that appears on YouTube and really just needs to be taken out back and shot. I have no doubt that its coming, I just haven't seen it yet.

I think there's two things contributing to YouTube slop, the earlier generations of free model being one, the other is more fundamental: most people using these tools for slop only care about advertising money, they neither know nor care about how much of a difference artistic taste makes (hence also why there's so many YouTube shorts which are just a clip from a random TV show with inappropriate music added, sometim…

https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1pu8smq/lord_of_th... is the tip of the iceberg.

Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#109
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's two things contributing to YouTube slop, the earlier generations of free model being one, the other is more fundamental: most people using these tools for slop only care about advertising money, they neither know nor care about how much of a difference artistic taste makes (hence also why there's so many YouTube shorts which are just a clip from a random TV show with inappropriate music added, sometim…

https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1pu8smq/lord_of_th... is the tip of the iceberg.

Cuts/scene transitions: 5s, 7s, 8s, 11s, 13s, 14s, 17s, 20s, 25s, 27s, 29s, (and then several continuously overlapping transitions), 36s, 38s, 39s, 40s, 42s, 43s, 47s, 49s, 50s, 52s, another at 52s, 54s, two more at 55s, two at 57s, 1:00, …

This is demonstrating the specific limitation I was talking about. And also, some of those scenes, if you pause on them, they've got the slightly-off vibes of GenAI content, a casual viewer is only missing that because the scenes change so quickly. Something something moonwalking gorilla.

An artist can make a work of art despite the limitations of whatever tool they use (and indeed may get a kick out of doing just that), that doesn't mean the tool can do everything.

I myself am working on a GenAI musical comedy sketch video, but it is only possible with current tech because there's a good opportunity to make cuts every few seconds.

Re: The worst acquisition in history, again

#110
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, the Cerner acquisition enabled an essentially permanent beachhead for Oracle in the VA. It will pay off over time in 'we already run Oracle' across many dimensions of government. See the career of Seema Verma from last DT admin.

I thought the VA had come up with their own version of an EMR?

They had a very kludgy, homegrown, but generally well-liked and cost effective EMR calls Vista.

The fact that it was cost effective, but required internal expertise was exactly what led the Trump administration to kill it.

Now they are transitioning to Cerner, the worse of the two major commerical EMRs by a fair margin, for many billions of dollars to the Kansas-based company, now owned by Oracle.

You can fill in the details of why this is happening by looking at where the CMS appointees at the time have landed in their post-government careers.

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