The first thing I will do when I get access to this is ask it to generate a realistic chess board. I have never gotten a decent looking chessboard with any image generator that doesn't have deformed pieces, the correct number of squares, squares properly in a checkerboard pattern, pieces placed in the correct position, board oriented properly (white on the right!) and not an otherwise illegal position. It seems to be an "AI complete" problem.
Similarly the Veo example of the northern lights is a really interesting one. That's not what the northern lights look like to the naked eye - they're actually pretty grey. The really bright greens and even the reds really only come out when you take a photo of them with a camera. Of course the model couldn't know that because, well, it only gets trained on photos. Gets really existential - simulacra energy - maybe another good AI Turing test, for now.
Human eyes are basically black and white in low light since rod cells can't detect color. But when the northern lights are bright enough you can definitely see the colors.
The fact that some things are too dark to be seen by humans but can be captured accurately with cameras doesn't mean that the camera, or the AI, is "making things up" or whatever.
Finally, nobody wants to see a video or a photo of a dark, gray, and barely visible aurora.
Living in northern Sweden I see the northern lights multiple times a year. I have never seen them pale or otherwise not colorful. Green and reds always. That is to my naked eye. Photographs do look more saturated, but the difference isn't as large as this comment thread make it out to be.
Even in Upper Michigan near Lake Superior we sometimes had stunn, colorful Northern Lights. Sometimes it seemed like they were flying overhead within your grasp
I'm in Australia where the southern lights are known to be not as intense as northern lights. That's where my remark comes from. Those who have never seen the aurora with their own eyes may like to see an accurate photo. A rare find among the collective celebration of saturation.
Exactly. I went through major gas lighting trying to see the Aurora. I just wasn't sure whether I was actually seeing it, because it always looked so different from the photos. It is absolutely maddening trying to find a realistic photo of what it looks like to the naked eye, so that you can know if what you are seeing is actually the Aurora and not just clouds
Priming the opsins in your retina is a continuous process, and primed opsins are depleted rapidly by light. Fully adapting your eye to darkness takes a great deal of darkness and a great deal of time - on the order of an hour should set you up.
Most human beings in arctic regions live in places and engage in lifestyles where it's impossible to even come close to attaining the full light sensitivity of the human retina in perfect darkness. The sky never gets dark enough in a city or even a small town to get the full experience, and if you saw your smart watch five minutes ago you still haven't fully recovered your night vision. Even a sliver of moon makes remote dark-sky-sites dramatically brighter.
Everybody is going to have different degrees of the experience because they'll have eyes with different degrees of dark adaptation. And their brains are going to shift around the ~10^3x dynamic range of the eye up or down the light intensity scale by a factor ~10^6, without making it obvious to them.
There's a middle ground here. I saw the northern lights with my own eyes just days ago and it was mostly grey. I saw some color. But when I took a photo with a phone camera, the color absolutely popped. So it may be that you've seen more color than any photo, but the average viewer in Seattle this past weekend saw grey-er with their eyes and huge color in their phone photos.
(Edit: it was still super-cool even if grey-ish, and there was absolutely beautiful colors in there if you could find your way out of the direct city lights)
The hubris of suggesting that your single experience of vaguely seeing the northern lights one time in Seattle has now led to a deep understanding of their true "color" and that the other person (perhaps all other people?) must be fooling themselves is... part of what makes HN so delightful to read.
I've also seen the northern lights with my own eyes. Way up in the arctic circle in Sweden. Their color changes along with activity. Grey looking sometimes? Sure. But also colors that are so vivid that it feels like it envelopes your body.
> The hubris of suggesting that your single experience of vaguely seeing the northern lights one time in Seattle has now led to a deep understanding of their true "color" and that the other person (perhaps all other people?) must be fooling themselves is... part of what makes HN so delightful to read.
The person they were responding to was saying that the people reporting grays were wrong, and that they had seen it and it was colorful. If anything, you should be accusing that person of hubris, not GP. All GPS point was, is that it can differ in different situations. They used the example of Seattle to show that the person they were responding to is not correct that it is never gray and dull.
The human retina effectively combines a color sensor with a monochrome sensor. The monochrome channel is more light-sensitive. When the lights are dim, we'll dilate our pupils, but there's only so much we can do to increase exposure. So in dim light we see mostly in grayscale, even if that light is strongly colored in spectral terms.
Phone cameras have a Bayer filter which means they only have RGB color-sensing. The Bayer filter cuts out some incoming light and dims the received image, compared with what a monochrome camera would see. But that's how you get color photos.
To compensate for a lack of light, the phone boosts the gain and exposure time until it gets enough signal to make an image. When it eventually does get an image, it's getting a color image. This comes at the cost of some noise and motion-blur, but it's that or no image at all.
If phone cameras had a mix of RGB and monochrome sensors like the human eye does, low-light aurora photos might end up closer to matching our own perception.
I can see what you mean, and that the video is somewhat not what it would be like in real. I have lived in northern Norway most of my life, and watched Auroras a lot. It certainly look green and link for the most time. Fainter, it would perhaps sorry gray I guess? Red, when viewed from a more southern viewpoint..
I work at Andøya Space where perhaps most of the space research on Aurora had been done by sending scientific rockets into space for the last 60 yrs.
That not true, they look grey when they aren't bright enough, but they can look green or red to the naked eyes if they are bright. I have seen it myself and yes I was disappointed to see only grey ones last week.
> [Aurora] only appear to us in shades of gray because the light is too faint to be sensed by our color-detecting cone cells."
> Thus, the human eye primarily views the Northern Lights in faint colors and shades of gray and white. DSLR camera sensors don't have that limitation. Couple that fact with the long exposure times and high ISO settings of modern cameras and it becomes clear that the camera sensor has a much higher dynamic range of vision in the dark than people do.
The brightest ones I saw in Northern Canada I even saw hints of reds - but no real greens - until I looked at it through my phone, and it looked just like the simulated video.
If I looked up and saw them the way they appear in the simulation, in real life, I'd run for a pair of leaded undies.
That is totally incorrect which anyone who have seen real northern lights can attest to. I'm sorry that you haven't gotten the chance to experience it and now think all northern lights are that lackluster.
Greens are the more common colors, reds and blues occur in higher energy solar storms.
And yes, they can be as green to the naked eye in that AI video. I've seen aurora shows that fill the entire night sky from horizon to horizon, way more impressive than that AI video with my own eyes.
This is such an arrogant pile of bullshit. I’ve seen very obvious colors on many different occasions in the northern part of the lower 48, up in southern Canada, and in Alaska.
To be fair, the prompt isn’t asking for a realistic interpretation it’s asking for a timelapse. What it’s generated is absolutely what most timelapses look like.
> Prompt: Timelapse of the northern lights dancing across the Arctic sky, stars twinkling, snow-covered landscape
That doesn't seem in any way useful, though... To use a very blunt analogy, are color blind people intelligent/sentient/whatever? Obviously, yes: differences in perceptual apparatus aren't useful indicators of intelligence.
To add a bit of color (ha) I was with my color-sighted spouse at a spot well known for panoramic views. 50ish people there. Many conversations happening around me.
“I can’t see anything”
“Maybe that’s something over there?”
“What’s everyone looking at?”
Someone shows their phone.
“Ooh!” “How do you turn on night mode?” “Wow it’s so much clearer on the phone!”
So I can’t know what their eyes see or what they really think, I could hear what came out of their mouths.
I don’t think this is an instance that warrants deep philosophical skepticism about the nature of truth or the impossibility of knowledge.
For decades, game engines have been working on realistic rendering. Bumping quality here and there.
The golden standard for rendering has always been cameras. It’s always photo-realistic rendering. Maybe this won’t be true for VR, but so far most effort is to be as good as video, not as good as the human eye.
Any sort of video generation AI is likely to have the same goal. Be as good as top notch cameras, not as eyes.
What struck me about the northern lights video was that it showed the Milky Way crossing the sky behind the northern lights. That bright part of the Milky Way is visible in the southern sky but the aurora hugging the horizon like that indicates the viewer is looking north. (Swap directions for the southern hemisphere and the aurora borealis).
that's a bad example since the only images of aurora borealis are brightly colored. What I expect of an image generator is to output what is expected from it
Ha, wow, I’d never seen this one before. The failures are pretty great. Even repeatedly trying to correct ChatGPT/Dall-e with the proper number of squares and pieces, it somehow makes it worse.
This is what dall-e came up with after trying to correct many previous iterations: https://imgur.com/Ss4TwNC
As someone who criticizes AI a lot: this actually looks pretty cool! AI is not better at surrealism than a good artist, but at least its work is enjoyable as a surreal art. Justifies the name Dall-e pretty well too.
This strikes me as equally "AI complete" as drawing hands, which is now essentially a solved problem... No one test is sufficient, because you can add enough training data to address it.
Tiring, but so is the relentless over-marketing. Each new demo implies new use cases and flexible performance. But the reality is they're very brittle and blunder most seemingly simple tasks. I would personally love an ongoing breakdown of the key weaknesses. I often wonder "can it X?" The answer is almost always "almost, but not a useful almost".
Most generative AI will struggle when given a task that requires something more less exact. They're probably pretty good at making something "chessish".
Conventionally this term means the opposite -- problems that AI unlocks that conventional computing could not do. Conventional computing can render a very wide range of different stylized chess boards, but when an ML technique like diffusion is applied to this mundane problem, it falls apart.
Mine is generation of any actual IBM PC/XT computer. All of the training sets either didn't include actual IBM PCs in them, or they labeled all PC compatibles "IBM PC". Whatever the reason, no generative AI today, whether commercial or open-source, can generate any picture of an IBM PC 5150. Once that situation improves, I'll start taking notice.
I would like a bit more convincing that the text watermark will not be noticeable. AI text already has issues with using certain words to frequently. Messing with the weights seems like it might make the issue worse
Not to mention, when does he get applied? If I am asking an llm to transform some data from one format to another, I don't expect any changes other than the format.
It seems really clever, especially the encoding of a signature into LLM token probability selections. I wonder if synthid will trigger some standarization in the industry. I don't think there's much incentive to tho. Open-source gen AI will still exist. What does google expext to occur? I guess they're just trying to present themselves as 'ethically pursuing AI'.
From a filmmaking standpoint I still don't think this is impactful.
For that it needs a "director" to say: "turn the horse's head 90˚ the other way, trot 20 feet, and dismount the rider" and "give me additional camera angles" of the same scene.
Otherwise this is mostly b-roll content.
That sounds actively harmful. Often we want story boards to be less specific so as not to have some non artist decision maker ask why it doesn't look like the storyboard.
And when we want it to match exactly in an animatic or whatever, it needs to be far more precise than this, matching real locations etc.
I hadn't thought about that in movie context before, but it totally makes sense.
I've worked with other developers that want to build high fidelity wire frames, sometimes in the actual UI framework, probably because they can (and it's "easy"). I always push back against that, in favor of using whiteboard or Sharpies. The low-fidelity brings better feedback and discussion: focused on layout and flow, not spacing and colors. Psychologically it also feels temporary, giving permission for others to suggest a completely different approach without thinking they're tossing out more than a few minutes of work.
I think in the artistic context it extends further, too: if you show something too detailed it can anchor it in people's minds and stifle their creativity. Most people experience this in an ironically similar way: consider how you picture the characters of a book differently depending on if you watched the movie first or not.
I think of it in terms of the anchoring bias. Imagine that your most important decisions are anchored for you by what a 10 year old kid heard and understood. Your ideas don’t come to life without first being rendered as a terrible approximation that is convincing to others but deeply wrong to you, and now you get to react to that instead of going through your own method.
So if it’s an optional tool, great, but some people would be fine with it, some would not.
I guess this will give birth to a new kind of film making. Start with a rough sketch, generate 100 higher quality versions with an image generator, select one to tweak, use that as input to a video generator which generates 10 versions, coffee one to refine etc
Perhaps the only industry which immediately benefits from this is the short ads and perhaps TikTok. But still it is very dubious, as people seem to actually enjoy being themselves the directors of their thing, not somebody else.
Maybe this works for ads for duner place or shisha bar in some developing country.
I’ve seen generated images used for menus in such places.
But I doubt a serious filmography can be done this way. And if it can - it’d be again thanks to some smart concept on behalf of humans.
Stock videos are indeed crucial, especially now that we can easily search for precisely what we need. Take, for instance, the scene at the end of 'Look Up' featuring a native American dance in Peru. The dancer's movements were captured from a stock video, and the comet falling was seamlessly edited in.
now imagine having near infinite stock videos tailored to the situation.
Stock photographers are already having issues with piracy due to very powerful AI watermark removal tools. And I suspect the companies are using content of these people to train these models too.
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I dont think "turn the horse's head 90˚" is the right path forward. What I think is more likely and more useful is: here is a start keyframe and here is a stop keyframe (generated by text to image using other things like controlnet to control positioning etc.) and then having the AI generate the frames in between. Dont like the way it generated the in between? Choose a keyframe, adjust it, and rerun with the segment before and segment after.
This appeals to me because it feels auditable and controllable... But the pace these things have been progressing the last 3 years, I could imagine the tech leapfrogs all conventional understanding real soon. Likely outputting gaussian splat style outputs where the scene is separate from the camera and ask peices can be independently tweaked via a VR director chair
They claim it can accept an "input video and editing command" to produce a new video output. Also, "In addition, it supports masked editing, enabling changes to specific areas of the video when you add a mask area to your video and text prompt." Not sure if that specific example would work or not.
For most things I view on the internet B-roll is great content, so I'm sure this will enable a new kind of storytelling via YouTube Shorts / Instagram, etc at minimum.
I wouldn't be so sure it's coming. NNs currently dont have the structures for long term memory and development. These are almost certainly necessary for creating longer works with real purpose and meaning. It's possible we're on the cusp with some of the work to tame RNNs, but it's taken us years to really harness the power of transformers.
There's also the whole "oh you have no actual model/rigging/lighting/set to manipulate" for detail work issue.
That said, I personally think the solution will not be coming that soon, but at the same time, we'll be seeing a LOT more content that can be done using current tools, even if that means a dip in quality (severely) due to the cost it might save.
This lead me to the question of why hasn't there been an effort to do this with 3D content (that I know of).
Because camera angles/lighting/collision detection/etc. at that point would be almost trivial.
I guess with the "2D only" approach that is based on actual, acquired video you get way more impressive shots.
But the obvious application is for games. Content generation in the form of modeling and animation is actually one the biggest cost centers for most studios these days.
I think with AI content, we'd need to not treat it like expecting fine grained control. E.g. instead like "dramatic scene of rider coming down path, and dismounting horse, then looking into distance", etc. (Or even less detail eventually once a cohesive story can be generated.)
HN has always been notoriously negative, and wrong a lot of the time. One of my personal favorites is Brian Armstrong's post about an exciting new company he was starting around cryptocurrency and needing a co-founder... Always a good one to go back and read when I've been staying up late working on side projects and need a mental boost.
Yeah, I've made a lot of images, and it sure is amazing if all you're interested in is, like, "Any basically good image," but if you start needing something very particular, rather than "anything that is on a general topic and is aesthetically pleasing," it gets a lot harder.
And there are a lot more degrees of freedom to get something wrong in film than in a single still image.
I can't wait what will the big video camera makers gonna do with tech similar to this. Since Google clearly have zero idea what to do with this, and they lack the creativity, it's up to ARRI, Canon, Panasonic etc. to create their own solutions for this tech. I can't wait to see what Canon has up its sleeves with their new offerings that come in a few months.
The videos in this demo are pretty neat. If this had been announced just four months ago we'd all be very impressed by the capabilities.
The problem is that these video clips are very unimpressive compared to the Sora demonstration which came out three months ago. If this demo was announced by some scrappy startup it would be worth taking note. Coming from Google, the inventor of the Transformer and owner of the largest collection of videos in the world, these sample videos are underwhelming.
Having said that, Sora isn't publicly available yet, and maybe Veo will have more to offer than what we see in those short clips when it gets a full release.
They didn't really do a very good job of selecting marketing examples. The only good one, that shows off creative possibilities, is the knit elephant. Everything else looks like the results of a (granted fairly advanced) search through a catalog of stock footage.
Even search, in and of itself, is incredibly amazing but fairly commoditized at this point. They should've highlighted more unique footage.
The faster the tech cycle, the faster we become accustomed to it. Look at your phone, an absolute, wondrous marvel of technology that would have been utterl and totally scifi just 25 years ago. Yet we take it for granted, as we do with all technology eventually. The time frames just compress is all, for better or for worse.
Yeah man but there has to be some thresholds. We take phones for granted after years of active availability. I personally remember days when "what if your phone dies" was a valid concern for even short periods, and I'm not that old. Sora isn't even available publicly. At some point it crosses over from being jaded to just being a cynic.
On some level, it's healthy to retain a sense of humility at the technological marvels around us. Everything about our daily lives is impressive.
Just a few years ago, I would have been absolutely blown away by these demo videos. Six months ago, I would have been very impressed. Today, Google is rolling a product that seems second best. They're playing catch-up in a game where they should be leading.
I will still be very impressed to see videos of that quality generated on consumer grade hardware. I'll also be extremely impressed if Google manages to roll out public access to this capability without major gaffes or embarrassments.
This is very cool tech, and the developers and engineers that produced it should be proud of what they've achieved. But Google's management needs to be asking itself how they've allowed themselves to be surpassed.
Honestly, if Veo becomes public faster than Sora, they could win the video AI race. But what am I wishfully thinking - it's Google we're talking about!
> But what am I wishfully thinking - it's Google we're talking about!
Google the company known to launch way too many products? What other big company launches more stuff early than them? What people complain about Google is that they launch too much and then shut them down, not that they don't launch things.
Google lost first place in AI precisely because they've been walking around imaginary eggshells regarding AI's effect on the public. That led to the whole Gemini fiasco and the catch up game they've had to play with OpenAI-MSFT.
Except your single experience doesn't mean it's generally true, bud. For instance I have not switched to Opus despite claims that it is better because I don't want to go through the effort of cancelling my ChatGPT subscription and subbing to Claude. Plus I like getting new stuff early that OpenAI occasionally gives out and the same could apply for Google's AI.
Sorry, but lock in effects are real. End users, solo devs and startups might find it trivially easy, but enterprise clients would go through hoops before a decision is to be made. And enterprise clients would rather not go through with that, hence they'll stick to whoever came first, unless there's a massive differentiator between the two.
Same impression here. The scene changes very abruptly from a sky view to following the car. The cars meld with the ground frequently, and I think I saw one car drive through another at one point.
So… much… bloom. I like it, but still holy shit. I hate that I like it because I don’t want this art form to be reduced by overuse. Sadly, it’s too late.
It's also probably that it's easier to spot fake humans than to spot fake cats or camels. We are more attuned to the faces of our own species
That is, AI humans can look "creepy" whereas AI animals may not. The cowboy looks pretty good precisely because it's all shadow.
CGI animators can probably explain this better than I can ... they have to spend way more time on certain areas and certain motions, and all the other times it makes sense to "cheat" ...
It explains why CGI characters look a certain way too -- they have to be economical to animate
Actually there is one in the last demo, it is not an individual one, but one shot in the demo where a team uses this model to create a scene with human in it, where they created an image of black woman but only up her head in it
I would generally agree though, it is not normal they didn’t show more human
Gemini still won't generate images of humans or even other hominids. They're missing here probably for the same reason. Namely that they're trying to figure out how to balance diverse representation with all the various other factors.
Not nearly as impressive as Sora. Sora was impressive because the clips were long and had lots of rapid movement since video models tend to fall apart when the movement isn't easy to predict.
By comparison, the shots here are only a few seconds long and almost all look like slow motion or slow panning shots cherrypicked because they don't have that much movement. Compare that to Sora's videos of people walking in real speed.
The only shot they had that can compare was the cyberpunk video they linked to, and it looks crazy inconsistent. Real shame.
>The videos below were edited by the artists, who creatively integrated Sora into their work, and had the freedom to modify the content Sora generated.
Interesting to see that OpenAI was successful in creating their own reality distortion spells, just like Apple's reality distortion field which has fooled many of these commenters here.
It's quite early to race to the conclusion that one is better than the other when not only they are both unreleased, but especially when the demos can be edited, faked or altered to look great for optics and distortion.
EDIT: It appears there is at least one commenter who replied below that is upset with this fact above.
It is OK to cope, but the truth really doesn't care especially when the competition (Google) came out much stronger than expected with their announcements.
Indeed, and they’re at 2.87T today… Built largely on differentiated high-margin products, which is not how I would describe OpenAI. I should clarify that I’m a fan of both companies, but the reality is that OpenAI’s business model depends on how well it can commoditize itself.
HN guidelines ask commenters to be kind and for the discussion to get more thoughtful and substantive as it progresses.
If you believe a comment is so bad as to warrant shame and embarrassment, please explain why you think so, rather than being dismissive and spewing insults.
On a related note, that is likely why you’re being downvoted. I wouldn’t be surprised if the comment is soon flagged.
I believe it was clear that Air Head was an edited video.
The intention wasn't to show "This is what Sora can generate from start to end" but rather "This is what a video production team can do with Sora instead of shooting their own raw footage."
Maybe not so obvious to others, but for me it was clear from how the other demo videos looked.
> Sora was impressive because the clips were long and had lots of rapid movement
Sora videos ran at 1 beat per second, so everything in the image moved at the same beat and often too slow or too fast to keep the pace.
It is very obvious when you inspect the images and notice that there are keyframes at every whole second mark and everything on the screen suddenly goes in their next animation step.
That really limits the kind of videos you can generate.
It also needs to separate animation steps for different objects so that objects can keep different speeds. It isn't trivial at all to go from having a keyframe for the whole picture to having separate for separate parts, you need to retrain the whole thing from the ground up and the results will be way worse until you figure out a way to train that.
My point is that it isn't obvious at all that Soras way actually is closer to the end goal, it might look better today to have those 1 second beats for every video but where do you go from there?
The best case scenario would probably being able to generate "layers" at a time. That would give more creative control over the outcome, but I have no idea how you would do it.
Comparing two children is a good one. My girlfriend has taken to pointing out when I’m engaging in “punditry”. They're an engineer like I am and we talk about tech all the time, but sometimes I talk about which company is beating which company like it’s a football game, and they call me out for it.
Video models are interesting, and to some extent trying to imagine which company is gonna eat the other’s lunch is kind of interesting, but sometimes that’s all people are interested in and I can see my girlfriend's reasoning for being disinterested in such discussion.
Except that many of the people involved do think of it like a football game, and thus it actually is like one. Of course the researchers and engineers at both OpenAI and Google DeepMind have a sense of rivalry and strive to one up another. They definitely feel like they are in a competition.
> They definitely feel like they are in a competition.
Citation needed?
Although I did not work in AI, I did work at Google X robotics on a robot they often use for AI research.
Maybe some people felt like it was a competition, but I don’t have much reason to believe that feeling is common. AI researchers are literally in collaboration with other people in the field, publishing papers and reading the work of others to learn and build upon it.
> AI researchers are literally in collaboration with other people in the field, publishing papers and reading the work of others to learn and build upon it.
When OpenAI suddenly stopped publishing their stuff I bet that many researchers now started feeling like it started to be a competition.
OpenAI is no longer cooperating, they are just competing. They still haven't said anything about how gpt-4 works.
I’m fairly certain Google just has a big stack of these in storage but never released, or the moment someone pulls ahead it’s all hands on deck to make the same thing.
Sora is also movement limited to a certain range if you look at the clips closely. Probably something like filtering by some function of optical flow in both cases.
> The shots here [..] almost all look like slow motion or slow panning shots.
I think this is arguably better than the alternative. With slow-mo generated videos, you can always speed them up in editing. It's much harder to take a fast-paced video and slow it down without terrible loss in quality.
A commercially available tool that can turn still images into depth-conscious panning shots is still tremendously impactful across all sorts of industries, especially tourism and hospitality. I’m really excited to see what this can do.
Not just that, but anything with a subject in it felt uncanny valleyish... like that cowboy clip, the gate of the horse stood out as odd and then I gave it some attention . It seems like a camel's gate. And whole thing seems to be hovering, gliding rather than walking. Sora indeed seems to have an advantage
I thought a camel's gait is much closer to two legs moving almost at the same time. Granted, I don't see camels often. Out of curiosity can you explain that more?
Could also be the doing of google. if Veo screws up , the weight falls on Alphabet stock. While open AI is not public and doesn't have to worry about anything . Like even if open AI faked some of their AI videos(not saying they did), it wouldn't affect them the way it would affect Veo--> Google-->Alphabet
From a 2014 Wired article [0]:
"The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today"
I can see more real-world impact from this (and/or Sora) than most other AI tools
This is very noticeable. Watching movies from the 1970s is positively serene for me, vs the shot time on modern films often leaves me wonder, "wait, what just happened there?"
And I'm someone who is fine playing fast action video games. Can't imagine what it's like if you're older or have sensory processing issues.
I'm okay with watching the majority of action movies, but I distinctly remember watching this fight scene in a Bourne movie and not having a clue what was going on. The constant camera changes, short shot length, and shaky cam, just confused the hell out of me.
I thought it was brilliant. Notice there’s no music. It’s one of the most brutal action scenes I know. Brutal in the sense of how honest it felt about direct combat.
I'd like to fact check this amazing comment on that video, but it would require watching Taken 3:
> Some of y'all may find how awful this editing gets pretty interesting: I did an Average Shot Length (ASL) for many movies for a recent project, and just to illustrate bad overediting in action movies, I looked at Taken 3 (2014) in its extended cut.
> The longest shot in the movie is the last shot, an aerial shot of a pier at sunset ending the movie as the end credits start rolling over them. It clocks in at a runtime of 41 seconds and is, BY FAR, the longest shot in the movie.
> The next longest is a helicopter establishing shot of the daughter's college after the "action scene" there a little over an hour in, at 5 seconds.
> Otherwise, the ASL for Taken 3 (minus the end credits/opening logos), which has a runtime of 1:49:40, 4,561 shots in all (!!!), is 1.38 SECONDS . For comparison, Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) (minus end credits/opening logos) is 3:50:59, with 3163 shots overall, giving it an ASL of 4.40 seconds, and this movie, at 1 hour 50 minutes, has north of 4,561 for an ASL of 1.38 seconds?!?! Taken 3 has more shots in it than Zack Snyder's Justice League, a movie more than double its length...
> To further illustrate how ridiculous this editing gets, the ASL for Taken 3's non-action scenes is 2.27 seconds. To reiterate, this is the non-action scenes. The "slow scenes." The character stuff. Dialogue scenes. The stuff where any other movie would know to slow down. 2.27 SECONDS For comparison, Mad Max: Fury Road (minus end credits/opening logos) has a runtime of 1:51:58, with 2646 shots overall, for an ASL of 2.54 seconds. TAKEN 3'S "SLOW SCENES" ARE EDITED MORE AGGRESSIVELY THAN MAD MAX: FURY ROAD!
> And Taken 3's action scenes? Their ASL is 0.68 seconds!
> If it weren't for the sound people on the movie, Taken 3 wouldn't be an "action movie". It'd be abstract art.
It's worth noting that Taken 3 has a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is well in to "it's so bad it's good" territory. I don't think the rapid cuts went unnoticed.
"He's 68. I'm guessing they stitched it together like this because "geriatric spends 30 seconds scaling chainlink fence then breaks a hip" doesn't exactly make for riveting action flick fare."
Lingering shots are horrible for obscuring things.
The first time I watched The Rise of Skywalker it was just too much being thrown at my brain. The second and third watch was much easier to process of course. I'm a big fan of older movies and have noticed the shot length difference anecdotally - Lawrence of Arabia and Ben Hur are two of my favorites. So I suppose it all makes sense to me now that there is actually a comparison measurement that has been completed.
Shot length, yes - but the scene stays the same. Getting continuity with just prompts seems not yet figured out.
Maybe it's easy, and you feed continuity stills into the prompt. Maybe it's not, and this will always remain just a more advanced storyboarding technique.
But then again, storyboards are always less about details and more about mood, dialog, and framing.
How many of those 2.5 second "shots" are back-and-forths between two perspectives (ex. of two characters talking to one another) where each perspective is consistent with itself? This would be extremely relevant for how many seconds of consistent footage are actually needed for an AI-generated "shot" at film-level quality.
As someone who doesn't live in the US this year's Google IO feels like I'm outside looking in at all the cool kids who get to play with the latest toys.
>Google and Apple have a somewhat poor software innovation reputation.
I'm assuming you mean reputation as in general opinion among developers? Because Google's probably been the most innovative company of the 21st century so far.
Yes, I miss Stadia so much. It was the most innovative streaming platform I had ever used. I wished I could still use it. Please, Google, bring Stadia back.
Google and Apple also have an "API access" advantage. It is similar to the ecosystem advantage but goes beyond it; Google and Apple restrict third-party app makers from access to crucial APIs like receiving and reading texts or interacting with onscreen content from other apps. I think that may turn out to be the most important advantage of them all. This should be a far bigger concern for antitrust regulators than petty squabbles over in-app purchases. Spotify and Netflix are possible (if slightly inconvenient) to use on iOS, a fully-featured AI assistant coming from somebody who isn't Apple is not.
Google (and to a lesser extend also Microsoft and Meta) also have a data advantage, they've been building search engines for years, and presumably have a lot more in-house expertise on crawling the web and filtering the scraped content. Google can also require websites which wish to appear in Google search to also consent to appearing in their LLM datasets. That decision would even make sense from a technical perspective, it's easier and cheaper to scrape once and maintain one dataset than to have two separate scrapers for different purposes.
Then there's the bias problem, all of the major AI companies (except for Mistral) are based in California and have mostly left-leaning employees, some of them quite radical and many of them very passionate about identity politics. That worldview is inconsistent with a half of all Americans and the large majority of people in other countries. This particularly applies to the identity politics part, which just isn't a concern outside of the English-speaking world. That might also have some impact on which AI companies people choose, although I suspect far less so than the previous two points.
Google has a deep addiction to AdWords revenue which makes for a significant disadvantage. Nomatter how good their technology, they will struggle internally with deploying it at scale because that would risk their cash cow. Innovator’s dilemma.
They are embedding their models not only widely across their platforms suite of internal products and devices, but also computationally via API for 3rd party development.
Those are all free from any perceived golden handcuffs that AdWords would impose.
X is tiny compared to Apple/Meta/Google, both in engineering size and in "fingerprint" in people's life.
Also engineering wise, currently every tweet is followed by a reply "my nudes in profile" and X seems unable to detect it as trivial spam, I doubt they have the chops to compete in this arena, especially after the mass layoffs they experienced.
Vaguely unsettling that the thumbnail for first example prompt "A lone cowboy rides his horse across an open plain at beautiful sunset, soft light, warm colors" looks something like the pixelated vision of The Gunslinger android (Yul Brynner's character) from the 1973 version of Westworld.
Incidentally that was one of the early uses of computer graphics in a movie, supposedly those short scenes took many hours to render and had to be done three times to achieve a colorized image.
> It's critical to bring technologies like Veo to the world responsibly. Videos created by Veo are watermarked using SynthID, our cutting-edge tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated content
And we're supposed to believe that this is resilient against prompt injection?
How do you prevent state actors from creating "proof" that their enemies engaged in acts of war, and they are only engaging in "self-defense"?
Oddly enough, I predict the final destination for this train will be for moving images to fade into the background. Everything will have a dazzling sameness to it. It's not unlike the weird place that action movies and pop music have arrived. What would have been considered unbelievable a short time ago has become bland. It's probably more than just novelty that's driving the comeback of vinyl.
It's a lot more than novelty. It's dedicating the attention span needed to listen to an album track by track without skipping to another song or another artist. If that sounds dumb, give it time and you'll get there also.
It's not just technology though. Globalization has added so many layers between us and the objects we interact with.
I think Etsy was a bit ahead of their time. It's no longer a marketplace for handcrafted goods - it got overrun by mass produced goods masquerading as something artisan. I think the trend is continuing and in 5-10 years we'll be tired of cheap and plentiful goods.
Even this site just did not impress me. I feel like it's all stuff I could easily imagine myself. True creativity is someone with a unique mind creating something you would never had thought of.
AI generated images and video are not competing against actual quality work with money put into it. They are competing against the quick photoshop or Adobe Aftereffects done by hobbyists and people learning how to work in the creative arts.
I never heard HN claiming that Copilot will replace programmers. Why do so many people believe generative AI will replace artists?
Yeah, but if you bring up a generation or two on this trash, they will get used to it and think this will be the norm and gonna enjoy it like pigs at the troughs.
Also it is either very good at generating living people or they need to put more though into saying "Note: All videos on this page were generated by Veo and have not been modified"
That "footage has not been modified" statement is probably to get ahead of any speculation that it was "cleaned up" in post, after it turned out that the Sora demo of the balloon headed man had fairly extensive manual VFX applied afterwards to fix continuity errors and other artifacts.
The studio was pretty up front about it, they released a making-of video one day after debuting the short which made it clear they used VFX to fix Soras errors in post, but OpenAI neglected to mention that in their own copy so it flew under the radar for a while.
> While all the imagery was generated in SORA, the balloon still required a lot of post-work. In addition to isolating the balloon so it could be re-coloured, it would sometimes have a face on Sonny, as if his face was drawn on with a marker, and this would be removed in AfterEffects. similar other artifacts were often removed.
I wish it were AI Donald Glover talking and the "Apple twist" at the end was that the entire 3 minute segment was a prompt for "Donald Glover talking about how Awesome Gemini Models are in a California vineyard"
Uh.. First it tells me that I can't sign up because my country is supported (yay, EU) and I can sign up to be notified when it's actually available. Great, after I complete that form, I get an error that the form can't be submitted and I'm taken to https://aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com/tools/video-fx where I can only press the "Join our waitlist" button. This takes me to a Google Form, that doesn't have my country in the required country dropdown and has a hint that says: "Note: the dropdown only includes countries where ImageFX and MusicFX are publicly available.". Say what?
Why does this have to be so confusing? Is the name "Veo" or "VideoFX"? Why is the waitlist for VideoFX telling me something about public availability of ImageFX and MusicFX? Why is everything US only, again? Sigh..
> Veo's cutting-edge latent diffusion transformers reduce the appearance of these inconsistencies, keeping characters, objects and styles in place, as they would in real life.
How is this achieved? Is there temporal memory between frames?
With so much recent focus by OpenAI/Google on AI's visual capabilities, does anyone know when we might see an OCR product as good as Whisper for voice transcription? (Or has that already happened?) I had to convert some PDFs and MP3s to text recently and was struck by the vast difference in output quality. Whisper's transcription was near-flawless, all the OCR softwares I tried struggled with formatting, missed words, and made many errors.
You might enjoy this breakdown of the lengths one person went through to take advantage of the iOS vision API and creating a local web service for transcribing some very challenging memes:
We use GPT-4o for data extraction from documents, its really good. I published a small library that does a lot of the document conversion and output parsing: https://npmjs.com/package/llm-document-ocr
For straight OCR, it does work really well but at the end of the day its still not 100%
all of this stuff i'll believe when it's ready for public release
1. safety measures lead to huge quality reductions
2. the devil's in the details. you can make me 1 million videos which look 99% realistic, but it's useless. consumers can pick it instantly, and it's a gigantic turn-off for any brand
There'll always be a market for cheap low-quality videos, and vice versa always a market for shockingly high quality videos. K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azham had enormous ticket sales and a huge budget spending on all sorts of stuff, like actual gold jewelry to make the actors feel that they were important despite the film being black and white.
No matter how good AI gets, it will never be the highest budget. Hell, even technically more accurate quartz watches cannot compete price wise with mechanical masterpiece watches of lower accuracy
The company that controls online video is announcing a new tool, and ambitions to develop it further, to create videos without need for content creators. Using their videos to make a machine that will cut them out of the loop.
I think we should all take a pause and just appreciate the amazing work Google, OpenAI, MS and many others including those in academia have done. We do not know if Google or OpenAI or someone else is going to win the race but unlike many other races, this one makes the entire humanity move faster. Keep the negativity aside and appreciate the sweat and nights people have poured into making such things happen. Majority of these people are pretty ordinary folks working for a salary so they can spend their time with their families.
Majority of the people building the ai are artists having their work stolen or workers earning extremely low wages to label gory and csam data to a point where it hurts their mental health.
I hate to be so cynical, but I'm dreading the inevitable flood of AI generated video spam.
We really are about this close to infinite jest. Imagine TikTok's algorithm with on demand video generation to suit your exact tastes. It may erase the social aspect, but for many users I doubt that would matter too much. "Lurking" into oblivion.
YouTube actually has really good recommendations and comments these days.
In fact I would say the comments are too good. They clearly have something ranking them for "niceness" but it makes them impossibly sentimental. Like I watched a bunch of videos about 70s rock recently and every single comment was about how someone's family member just died of cancer and how much they loved listening to it.
If it really suited my exact tastes, that would actually be great. But I don’t see how we’re anywhere close to that. And they won’t target matching your exact taste. They will target the threshold where it’s just barely interesting enough that people don’t turn it off.
It's introduced early on (and not what the book is really about): distribution of a video that is so entertaining that any viewer is compelled to watch it until they die
Reminds me of the competition in tech in the late 80's early 90's between Microsoft and Borland, Microsoft and IBM, AMD and Intel, Word vs Wordperfect, etc.
I think it's funny the demos don't have people in them after the Gemini fiasco. I wonder if they didn't have time to re-train the model to show representative ethnicities.
Now that the first direct competitor to Sora has been announced, I am sure Sora will be suddenly ready for public consumption, all it's ai safety concerns forgotten
I think there's a tremendous compute cost associated with both models still... I can't see how either company could withstand the instant enormous demand, even if they tried to command crazy prices.
Even at $1 per 5-second video, I think some use cases (including fun/non-business ones) would still overwhelm capacity.
Kind of sucks to be google. Even they're making good progress here, and have laid the foundations of a lot if not most things.. their products are, well there aren't any noteworthy compared to rest. And considering google is sitting on top of one of the largest if not THE largest video database, along with maps, traffic, search, internet.zip, usenet, vast computing resources vertically integrated.. they have the whole advantage in the world. So, the hell are they doing? Why isn't their CEO already out? Expectations from them are higher than from anyone else.
I don't know how more people don't talk about the 1M context tokens. While the output is mediocre for cutting edge models, you can context stuff the ever living hell out of it for some pretty amazing capabilities. 2M tokens is even crazier.
Google search has been absolutely ruined in terms of quality. You're right, they've built the base in terms of R&D for many of the AI breakthroughs thats powering competing alternative products.... that happen to be better than Google's own products. Google went from "Don't be evil" to just another big corporate tech company. They have so much potential. Regrettable.
Their CEO is generating massive, growing profits every quarter while releasing generative technology, all the while threading a fine line in what those models generate because it can be pretty devastating for a large corp like Google.
Because they punish experimentation as it eats into their bottom line. AI is a tool for ads in the mind of executives at Google. Ads and monetization of human productivity, not an agent of productivity on its own.
"Laser-focused on the bottom line at the expense of all else" is not how I'd describe Google, now or at any point in the past. They have a lot of dysfunction, but if anything that dysfunction stems from too much experimentation and autonomy at the leaf nodes of the organization. That's how they get into these crazy places where they have to pick between 5 chat apps or whatever.
If Google were as focused on ads as you seem to think we'd at least see some sort of coherent org-wide strategy instead of a complete lack of direction.
The person now in charge of Search is Elizabeth Hamon Reid, a long-time googler who came up through the ranks from engineer (in Google Maps) to VP over 20 years. She's legit.
That was a decision that prioritized the bottom line over other things. But saying that Google is "focused" on the bottom line implies that there's a pattern of them putting the bottom line first, which is simply not true if you look at Google as a whole. Search specifically, maybe, but not Alphabet.
C'mon, Google doesn't "punish" experimentation. Google X, Google Glass, Daydream, Fuschia, moonshots, the lab spinoff (whose name I can't remember)... hell, even all the abandoned products everyone here always complains about.
The experiments often/usually fail, but they do experiment.
It's often said you need to disrupt your own business model.
Google had blinders on. They didn't relentlessly focus on reinventing their domain. They just milked what they had. Gradually losing site of the user experience[1] to focus on monetization above all else.
If you were of a mind to give Google the benefit of the doubt you would have to think they are desperately trying not to overpromise and underdeliver, partly because that has been their track record to date. It's a very curious time to choose to make this switch though given their competition, and if it was motivated by the reception Bard received then it shows they didn't learn the right lessons from that mess at all.
1. Generating an image of "a group of catgirls activating a summoning circle". Anything related to catgirls tends to get tagged as sexual or NSFW so it's censored. Unsurprising.
2. The lamb described in Book of Revelation. Asking for it directly or pasting in the passage where the lamb is described both fail to generate any images. Normally this fails because there's not much art of the lamb from Book of Revelation from which the model can steal. If I gave the worst of artists a description of this, they'd be able to come up with something even if it's not great.
Overall, a very disappointing release. It's surprising that despite having effectively infinite money this is the best that Google is able to ship at the moment.
There's nothing sarcastic about my comment. It highlights key limitations of the system with clear examples. Considering the number of world-class engineers and effectively infinite resources available to Google it's just a disappointing release. Both examples are things that I care about and which other people aren't discussing, so I think adding my voice to the conversation is a net positive.
I was hoping to see more.. I logged in and was greeted by a waiting list for videos. Since I was disappointed already, I figured I might as well spend some time on other, hopefully usable, features. So I moved to pictures.
First, randomly selected 'feeling lucky' prompt got rejected, because it did not meet some criteria and pop-up helpfully listed FAQ to explain to me how I should be more sensitive to the program. I found it amusing.
Then I played with a couple of images, but it was nothing really exciting one way or another.
I guess you can color me disappointed overall. And no, I don't consider videos on repeat sufficient.
The amount of negativity in these comments is astounding. Congrats to the teams at Google on what they have built, and hoping for more competition and progress in this space.
There's genuinely impressive progress being made, but there are also a lot of new models coming out promising way more than they can deliver. Even the Google AI announcements, which used to be carefully tailored to keep expectations low and show off their own limitations, now read more like marketing puff pieces.
I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd likes to pretend we're all perfectly discerning arbiters of the tech future with our thumbs on the pulse of the times or whatever, but realistically nobody is going to sift through a mountain of announcements ranging from "states it's revolutionary, is marginal improvement" to "states it's revolutionary, is merely an impressive step" to "states it's revolutionary, is bullshit" without resorting to vibes-based analysis.
It's made all the worse by just being a giant waitlist. Sora is still no where to be seen three months later, GPT-4o's conversational features aren't widely rolled out yet, and Google's AI releases have been waitlist after waitlist after waitlist.
Companies can either get peopled hyped or have never-ending georestricted waitlists, they can't have their cake and eat it too.
We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI) and platform is going to favor its own and be aware that Sam Altman is the golden boy of YC's founder after all.
So of course you are going to see snarky comments and straight up denial in the competition. We saw that yesterday in the comments with the release of GPT4o in anticipation of Gemini 2.0 (GPT-5 basically) release being announced today at Google I/O
I'm SORA to say Veo looks much more polished without jank.
Big congratulations to Google and their excellent AI team for not editing their AI generated videos like SORA
> We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI)
You have to be pretty deep inside your own little bubble to think that even more than a 0.001% of HN has "stakes in YC" or "secondary shares in OpenAI".
I have 0% stake in any YC, and I'm very vocal in my negativity against any of these "AI" anythings. All of these announcements are only slighty more than a toddler anxious to show the parental units a finger painting looking to hang it on the fridge. Only instead of the fridge, they are a hoping to get funding/investment knowing that their product is not a fully fledged anything. It's comical.
The amount of copium in this response is astounding.
Yes, there is a noticeable negative response from HN towards Google, and there has always been especially when speaking about their weird product management practices and incentives. Google hasn't launched any notable (and still surviving, Stadia being a sad example of this) consumer product or service in the last 10 years.
But to suggest there is a Sam Altman / OpenAI bias is delusional. In most posts about them there is at least some kind of skepticism or criticism towards Altman (his participation in Worldcoin and his accelerationist stance towards AGI) or his companies (OpenAI not being really open).
PS: I would say most people lurking here are just hackers (of many kinds, but still hackers), not investors with shady motives.
My argument wasn't that there was a cabal of shady investors trying to influence perception here. your observation is certainly valid there is general disdain for Google but specifically I'm calling out people that were blatantly telling lies and making outlandish claims and attacking others who were simply pointing out that some of those people have financial motives (either being backed by YC or seek to benefit from the work of others).
None of this is surprising to me and shouldn't shock you. You are literally on a site called Ycombinator. Had this been another platform without ties to investments or drawing from crowd that actively seeks to enrich themselves through participation in a narrative, this wouldn't even be a thing.
Large number of people who read my comment seems to agree and this whole worldcoin thing seems to me just another distraction (We've already been through why that was shady but we are talking about something different here).
Well, you have a point. I've always thought that Hacker News <> YCombinator, but maybe the truth is in the middle. At the very least, this is food for thought.
Yup, there's a significant anti-Google spin in HN, twitter. For example, here's paulg claiming that Cruise handles driving around cyclists better than Waymo [1], obviously not true to anyone who's used both services
I suspect it's also a general fatigue with the over-hype. It is moving fast, but every step improvement has come with its own mini hype cycle. The demos are very curated and make the model look incredibly flexible and resilient. But when we test the product in the wild, it's constantly surprising the simple tasks it blunders on. It's natural to become a bit cynical and human to take that cynicism on the attack. Not saying it's right, just natural, in the same way that it's natural for the marketing teams to be as misleading as they can get away with. Both are annoying, but there's not much to do.
Progress? There are loads of downsides the AI fans won't acknowledge. It diminishes human value/creativity and will be owned and controlled by the wealthiest people. It's not like the horse being replaced by the tractor. This time it's different there is no place to move to but doing nothing on a UBI (best case). That same power also opens the door to dystopian levels of censorship and surveillance. I see more of the Black Mirror scenarios coming true rather than breakthroughs that benefit society. Nobody is denying that it's impressive but the question is more whether it's good overall. Unfortunately the toothpaste seems to be out of the tube.
>Progress? There are loads of downsides the AI fans won't acknowledge.
I don’t know if this is true.
>It diminishes human value/creativity
I don’t see this at all, I see it as enhancing creativity and human value.
>and will be owned and controlled by the wealthiest people.
There are a lot of open source models being created, even if they are being released by Meta…
>It's not like the horse being replaced by the tractor. This time it's different there is no place to move to but doing nothing on a UBI (best case).
So, like, you wouldn’t do anything if you could just chill on UBI all day? If anything I’d get more creative.
> That same power also opens the door to dystopian levels of censorship and surveillance.
I don’t disagree with this at all, but I think we can fight back here and overcome this, but we have to lean into the tech to do that.
> I see more of the Black Mirror scenarios coming true rather than breakthroughs that benefit society.
I think this is basically wrong historically. Things are very seldom permanently dystopian if they’re dystopian at all. Things are demonstrably better than they were 100 years ago, and if you think back even a couple decades things are often a lot better.
The medical applications alone will save a lot of lives.
> Nobody is denying that it's impressive but the question is more whether it's good overall. Unfortunately the toothpaste seems to be out of the tube.
There are going to be annoyances, but I would bet serious cash that things continue to get better.
> So, like, you wouldn’t do anything if you could just chill on UBI all day? If anything I’d get more creative.
There is a lot of empirical research on UBI and all of it shows that it has very little effect on employment either way. That is, nothing will change here.
(This is probably because 1. positional goods exist 2. romantic prospects don't like it when you're unemployed even if you're rich.)
I have noticed this the most in SWE's who went from being code writers to "human intention decipherers". Ask a an SWE in 2019 what they do and it was "Write novel and efficient code", ask one in 2024 and you get "Sit in meetings and talk to project managers in order to translate their poor communication to good code".
Not saying the latter was never true, it's just interesting to see how people have reframed their work in the wake of breakneck AI progress.
Honestly just think that Google has burned their good will at this point. If you notice, most announcements by Apple are positively received here and same with OpenAI. But since Google's "don't be evil" persona has faded and since they went through so much churn WRT products. I think most people just don't want to see them win.
You have to give Google credit as they went against the OpenAI fanatics, Google doomsday crowd and some of the permanent critics (who won't disclose they invested in OpenAI's secondary share sale) that believe that Google can't keep up.
In fact, they already did. What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already.
The top comments around Sora vs Veo suggesting that Google was falling behind, given the fact that both are still unavailable to use wasn't even a point to make in the first place, but just typical HN nonsense.
> What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already
I don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities. Apple didn’t release anything that Xerox or IBM couldn’t do. The difference is they didn’t.
Google’s problem has always been in product follow through. In this case, I fault them for having the sole action item be a buried waitlist request and two new brands (Veo and VideoFX) for one unreleased product.
> I don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities
Serious or not, that criticism existed on HN - and still does. I've seen many comments claiming Google has "fallen behind" on AI, sometimes with the insinuation the Google won't ever catch up due to OpenAI's apparent insurmountable lead
> Google’s problem has always been in product follow through.
Google is large enough to not care about small opportunities. It ends up focusing on bigger opportunities that only it can execute well. Google's ability to shut down products that dont work is an insult to user but a very good corporate strategy and they deserve kudos for that.
Now, coming back to the "follow through". Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Photos, Drive, Cloud etc. all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment to the product and constantly making things better and keeping them relevant for the market. Many companies like Yahoo! had a head start but could not keep up with their mail service.
Sure it has shut down many small products but that is because they were unlikely to turn into bigger opportunities. They often integrated the best aspect of those products into their other well established products such as Google Trips became part of search and Google Shopping became part of search.
> coming back to the "follow through". Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Photos, Drive, Cloud etc. all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment
Do you have any examples of something they launched in the last decade?
Pixel smartphones: Launched in 2016
Google Home smart speaker: Launched in 2016
Google Wifi mesh Wi-Fi system: Launched in 2016
Google Nest smart display: Launched in 2018
Google Nest Wifi mesh Wi-Fi system: Launched in 2019
Stadia Cloud gaming platform*: Launched in 2019
Google Pay (formerly known as Tez): 2028
Early 2015 - technically correct. But I hope you would agree that their ability to release successful products has significantly diminished between the decade 2005-2014 to 2015-2024, apparently in reverse proportion to their headcount.
> Google is large enough to not care about small opportunities. It ends up focusing on bigger opportunities
that result in shittier products overall. For example, just a few months ago they cut 17 features from Google Assistant because they couldn't monetize them, sorry, because these were "small opportunities": https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/google-is-removing-17-unde...
> all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment to the product and constantly making things better and keeping them relevant for the market.
And here's a long list of excellent examples of Google killing products right and left because small opportunities or something: https://killedbygoogle.com/
And don't get me started on the whole Hangouts/Meet/Alo/Duo/whatever fiasco
> Sure it has shut down many small products but that is because they were unlikely to turn into bigger opportunities.
Translation: because they couldn't find ways to monetize the last cent out of them
---
Edit: don't forget: The absolute vast majority of Google's money comes from selling ads. There's nothing else it is capable of doing at any significant scale. The only reason it doesn't "chase small opportunities" is because Google doesn't know how. There are a few smaller cash cows that it can keep chugging along, but they are dwarfed by the single driving force that mars everything at Google: the need to sell more and more ads and monetize the shit out of everything.
Don't forget SORA edited their "ai generated" videos while Google did not here.
Where did SORA get all its training videos from again and why won't the executives answer a simple Yes/No question to "Did you scrape Youtube to train SORA?"
Google does not care to start a war where every company has to form explicit legal agreements with every other company to scrape their data. Maybe if they got really desperate, but right now they have no reason to be.
I have no doubt about Google's capabilities in AI, my doubt lies on the productization part. I don't think they can produce something that will not be a complete mess
It’s tiring. Same thing happened to the GPT-4o announcement yesterday. Apparently because there’s no unquestionable AGI 14 months after GPT-4 then everything sucks.
I always found HN contrarian but as I say it’s really tiring. I’ve no idea what the negative commenters are working on on a daily basis to be so dismissive of everybody else’s work, including work that leaves 90% of the population in a combination of awe and fear. Also people sometimes forget that behind big corp names there are actual people. People who might be reading this thread.
What's also tiring is that no one is allowed to have any critical thoughts because "it's tiring".
From my own perspective the critique is usually a counter balance to extreme hype, so maybe let's just agree it's ok to have both types of comments, you know "checks and balances".
AI is a pretty direct threat to software engineering. It's no surprise people are hostile towards it. Come 2030, how do you justify a paying someone $175k/yr when a $20/mo app is 95% as good, and the other 5% can be done by someone making $40k/yr?
Yeah it's pretty unfortunate. Saying something sucks is such a lack of understanding that things are not static. I guess it's a sure way to be right, because there will always be progress and you can look back and say "See I told you!"
Psh. Things are not static. Progress sucks now. Haven't you heard of enshitification? You can always look back and say, "see? I told you it would suck in the future!"
...why am I feeling to urge to point out that I am only making a joke here and not trying to make an actual counter point, even if one can be made...?
I commented on this elsewhere, but being a negative Nancy is really a winning strategy.
If you’re negative and you get it wrong, nobody cares, get it and right you look like a damn genius. Conversely, if you’re positive and get it wrong, you look like an idiot and if you’re right you’re praised for a good call once. The rational “game theory” choice is to predict calamity.
Right, but I think people sometimes get the “what constitutes long term” factor a little bit wrong.
I am still talking to a lot of people who say, “what can any of this AI stuff even do?” It’s like, robots you could hold a conversation with effectively didn’t exist 3 years ago and you’re already upset that it’s not a money tree?
I think that peoples expectation horizon narrowing down may be the clearest evidence that we’re in the singularity.
I think the thing that most perturbs me about AI is that it takes jobs that involve manipulating colours, light, shade and space directly and turns them into essay writing exercises. As a dyslexic I fucking hate writing essays. 40% of architects are dyslexic. I wouldn't be surprised if that was similar or higher in other creative industries such as filmmaking and illustration. Coincidentally 40% of the prison population is also dyslexic, I wonder if that's where all the spare creatives who are terrible at describing things with words will end up in 20 years time.
You're entitled to your opinion but this will open up a world of possibilities to people who couldn't work in these fields previously due to their own non-dyslexia disability. Handless intelligent people shouldn't lose out because incumbents don't want to share their lane.
The AI we have today has very little to do with writing prompts, you still need to understand, correct, glue and edit the results and that is most of the work so you still need skilled professionals.
Pretty much everythnig I see about using AI is based around the construction of proper prompts to achieve the type of output you require.
Could you explain how prompts are not a big part of interrfacing with AI?
Yes but you are trading off a lot of people with a one kind of disadvantage, dyslexia, for the benefit of very very few people with a motor skills disability that affects their ability to draw or manipulate an input device which is a different disadvantage. What's the acceptable ratio? One handless person enabled for every 100,000 dyslexics sidelined? Is that fair? How do you work out an acceptable tradeoff?
It is not a given that everyone can or should be enabled to do everything possible at any cost; people in wheelchairs can't be firefighters and we don't make all old subway lines fully accessible because it is incredibly expensive.
Disadvantaging a huge number of people for the benefit of very few has a societal cost.
I guess in the near future prompts can be replaced by a live editing conversation with the AI, like talking to a phantom draughtsman or a camera operator / movie team. The AI will adjust while you talk to it and can also ask questions.
ChatGPT already allows this workflow to some extent. You should try it out. I just talked to ChatGPT on my phone to test it. I think I will not go back to text for these purposes. It's much more creative to just say what you don't like about a picture.
If you speech is also affected rough sketches and other interfaces will/are also be available (see https://openart.ai/apps/sketch-to-image). What kind of expression do you prefer?
This would be feasible. Even right now, but I am not sure how much delay is tolerable.
If you use tablets or screens, I would imagine a two screen/tablet setup, where on one screen there is a variant gallery with AI output and on the other screen there is the drawing area. The drawing constantly refreshes the gallery.
One can click on images in the gallery to move the whole image or parts of it into the drawing area. Additionally voice input leads to a conversation in the background that affects the variants as well. The process would be a mix of sketching, overpainting and voice-controlled image manipulation.
Automatic image segmentation that is automatically applied to all variants would make it easy to move objects/parts from the variants easily. The pulled parts would be stitched automatically into the drawing area, as some kind of super charged collage technique.
Maybe the variant gallery would be more like an idea board. You would say things like: "Can you make a variant with clinkers", "Please add garden furniture near the pond." etc. In the gallery these images would pop up and you can pick what you like from it.
I would imagine and hope for interfaces to exist where the natural language prompt is the initial seed and then you'd still be able to manipulate visual elements through other ways.
This is the case today. You won't get a "perfect" image without heavy post-processing, even if that post-processing is AI enhanced. ComfyUI is the new PhotoShop and although its not an easy app to understand, once it "clicks" its the most amazing piece of software to come out of the opensource oven in a long time.
Your claim that 40% of architects piqued my curiosity. I wonder if this would have an impact on the success of tools like ChatGPT in the architecture industry.
Do you have a source for this stat? I can't seem to find anything to support it.
Not sure I could fine a reference for that any more. I think I got it from an article or lecture by Richard Rogers years ago. He was a famously dyslexic architect and if I remember correctly was the patron of the British Dyslexia Association.
Very interesting. Thank you for the perspective, it is extremely illuminating.
What is a user interface which can move from color, light, shade, and space to images or text? Could there be an architecture that takes blueprints and produces text or images?
Presumably this is DeepMind vs Labs fighting over the same project. A consequence of guaranteeing Demis some level of independence when DeepMind was bought, which still shows through in the fact that the DeepMind brand(s) survive.
The Donald Glover segment might be a new low for Google announcement videos. They spent all this time talking up the product but didn't actually show what he had created.
Imagine how bad the model must be if this is the best way Google can think of selling it.
What seems worse is the Google TextFX video with Lupe Fiasco? What the heck am I supposed to get out of watching boring monologues by a couple of people? They could have just as easily shown, with less camera work, Lupe Fiasco actually using the LLM model, but they didn't - or at least not enough to grab my attention in 2 minutes.
Personally, I liked the above link, even as a Google skeptic, but the videos aren't helping their case.
OpenAI hardly released gpt-4o. The demo yesterday was clearly a rushed response to I/O. It’s quite possible that Google will ship multi-modality features faster than OpenAI will.
What do you mean? Everyone has access to the gpt-4o model right now through ChatGPT and the API. Sure we don't have voice-to-voice but we have a lot more than what Google has promised.
How do I get access? I just checked my app and the Premium upgrade says it will unlocked GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, so I assume my version is still the old one.
I just checked, there was an iOS app update available and it enabled it. I'd check again if there's a new update (version 1.2024.129). Or you could use the website.
In the App Store there's a new build of the iOS app as of 3 hours about (call it about 11am US Pacific time). It includes the GPT-4o model (at least it shows it for me.)
I feel silly now. I downloaded the app after the announcement (I'm a desktop user) and it looked identical to the one they show in the sarcasm video. When I asked it, I was told it was not the new feature announced yesterday. Still a lot of fun!
Edit - it does list the new model in my app at least
API yes, ChatGPT no (at least not for all users); I've got my own web interface for the API so I can play with the model (for all of $0.045 of API fees), but most people can't be bothered with that and will only get 4o when it rolls out as far as their specific ChatGPT account.
I have a regular ChatGPT Pro account and I have GPT-4o.
The bigger issue is that 4o without the multi-modal, new speech capabilities or desktop app isn't that different to GPT-4. And those things aren't yet launched.
Without doing anything, I have access to GPT-4o in chatgpt and the api already (on a personal account, not related to work). Maybe I’m just super lucky, but it’s certainly not vaporware.
Which one of these products Google are releasing that you can trust will even be around in a year or two? I'm certainly done trusting Google with new products.
Yeah I think at this point it's "not if, but when" and the gap between parity is just going to keep shrinking (until/unless there's some kind of copyright/legislative barrier implemented that favors one or the other).
They just released the text chat model which still uses the same old audio interface as 4. The new audio/video chat stuff is not out yet (unless you are a very lucky early beta user).
I don't know what's wrong with GPT-4o, but the answers I'm getting are much worse than before yesterday. It's constantly repeating the entire content required to provide a seemingly "full" answer, but if it passes me the same but slightly modified Python code for the fifth time even if it has become irrelevant to the current conversation, it really gets on my nerves.
I had so well tuned custom instructions which worked beautifully and now it's as if it is ignoring most of them.
It's causing me frustration and really wasting my time when I have to wait for the unnecessary long answers to finish.
Sora is the closest comparison to Veo and both aren't out.
It's been there for three months and still isn't even close to being released and available.
Essentially Google has already caught up to OpenAI with their recent responses and it's clear that there are private OpenAI investors pushing such nonsense around Google struggling to compete.
This is Google for the last 5+ IOs. They just release waitlists and demos that are leapfrogged by the time they're available to all. (and shut down a few years later)
GPT-4o is available for me on ChatGPT, with the text+attachment input (as a Plus user from Germany). It's crazy fast. The voice for the audio conversation in the app is still the old one, and doesn't let you interrupt it.
It is. I've got it already, but I'm a bit of a gpt4 power user. I hit my rate limit biweekly or so and run up close to it every day. I'd bet maybe they prioritized people that were costing them money.
It might be just by sign-up order. I signed up for pro basically as soon as I could, but I never hit limits, and only really use it once or twice a day, sometimes not at all.
Google Press: This is the greatest AI Model ever yet.
Users: Lol it wont even tell me how to draw a picture of a human because its inappropriate.
Google flipped like a switch a few years ago. Instead of going for product quality, it seems they went full Apple Marketing and control the narrative of top social media.
I keep trying thinking: "well its Google, they will be the best right?" No, I'm at giving up on Google, they are not as powerful as I once thought... Hmm seems like a good time to get into Lobbying and Marketing...
Even as a very inexperienced musician I think I can say these are not very compelling examples? They sound like unfinished sketches that took a few minutes to make each, but with no overarching theme and weirdly low fidelity. An absolute beginner could make better things just by messing around with a groovebox.
Apparently it's only released to red teams at the moment as they try to manage safety. There's also the issue about releasing too close to an election?
Too little, too late. Google is follower, not leader. They need to stop trying and do more stock buybacks and strip the company to barebones, like Musk did with Twitter & Tesla.
