If any engineers think that's what they're doing they should be fired. More likely it's product managers who barely know what's going on in their departments except that there's a word "AI" pinging around that's good for their KPIs and keeps them from getting fired.
Videos are expensive to store, but generative AI is expensive to run. That will cost them more than storage allegedly saved.
To solve this problem of adding compute heavy processing to serving videos, they will need to cache the output of the AI, which uses up the storage you say they are saving.
What type of compression would change the relative scale of elements within an image? None that I'm aware of, and these platforms can't really make up new video codecs on the spot since hardware accelerated decoding is so essential for performance.
Excessive smoothing can be explained by compression, sure, but that's not the issue being raised there.
Neural compression wouldn't be like HVEC, operating on frames and pixels. Rather, these techniques can encode entire features and optical flow, which can explain the larger discrepancies. Larger fingers, slightly misplaced items, etc.
Neural compression techniques reshape the image itself.
If you've ever input an image into `gpt-image-1` and asked it to output it again, you'll notice that it's 95% similar, but entire features might move around or average out with the concept of what those items are.
Maybe such a thing could exist in the future, but I don't think the idea that YouTube is already serving a secret neural video codec to clients is very plausible. There would be much clearer signs - dramatically higher CPU usage, and tools like yt-dlp running into bizarre undocumented streams that nothing is able to play.
A new client-facing encoding scheme would break utilization of hardware encoders, which in turn slows down everyone's experience, chews through battery life, etc. They won't serve it that way - there's no support in the field for it.
It looks like they're compressing the data before it gets further processed with the traditional suite of video codecs. They're relying on the traditional codecs to serve, but running some internal first pass to further compress the data they have to store.
If they were using this compression for storage on the cache layer, it could allow more videos closer to where they serve them, but they decide the. Back to webm or whatever before sending them to the client.
I don't think that's actually what's up, but I don't think it's completely ruled out either.
That doesn't sound worth it, storage is cheap, encoding videos is expensive, caching videos in a more compact form but having to rapidly re-encode them into a different codec every single time they're requested would be ungodly expensive.
The law of entropy appears true of TikToks and Shorts. It would make sense to take advantage of this. That is to say, the content becomes so generic that it merges into one.
The resources required for putting AI <something> inline in the input (upload) or output (download) chain would likely dwarf the resources needed for the non-AI approaches.
Probably compression followed by regeneration during decompression. There's a brilliant technique called "Seam Carving" [1] invented two decades ago that enables content aware resizing of photos and can be sequentially applied to frames in a video stream. It's used everywhere nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me that arbitrary enlargements are artifacts produced by such techniques.
I largely agree, I think that probably is all that it is. And it looks like shit.
Though there is a LOT of room to subtly train many kinds of lossy compression systems, which COULD still imply they're doing this intentionally. And it looks like shit.
As soon as people start paying Google for the 30,000 hours of video uploaded every hour (2022 figure), then they can dictate what forms of compression and lossiness Google uses to save money.
That doesn't include all of the transcoding and alternate formats stored, either.
People signing up to YouTube agree to Google's ToS.
Google doesn't even say they'll keep your videos. They reserve the right to delete them, transcode them, degrade them, use them in AI training, etc.
That's the difference between the US and European countries. When you have SO MUCH POWER like Google, you can't just go around and say ItSaFReeSeRViCe in Europe. With great power comes great responsibility, to say it in American words.
