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petegleeson 16 minutes ago [-]
> What stands out about Gemini Omni Flash is its accuracy: the details hold up under scrutiny.
Quote under the video of a short Argentinian footballer wearing no 10 with "RESSC" on his back. Can't make it up.
petcat 18 hours ago [-]
I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.
lambda 17 hours ago [-]
Many screen and voice actors are unionized, and the unions have been striking and bargaining specifcially over these points.
Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
arjie 17 hours ago [-]
Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested. It’s how other people oppose buildings near them because it blocks their view. I really don’t want to stop other people from writing software. If they want to use AI to do it so be it.
That’ll be somewhat detrimental to me perhaps (which isn’t certain), but that’s okay. I’d rather attempt to adapt to a changing world.
lambda 16 hours ago [-]
I don't know that unions would necessarily negotiate for no use of AI. The SAG-AFRA deals don't preclude all use of AI; they just requre consent and negotiation in certain cases.
A union doesn't give you unilateral power; it just gives you a better seat at the bargaining table. Capital pools its resources to negotiate better as a single bloc; why shouldn't labor as well?
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
The giant strikes were hugely based on AI issues
bayindirh 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, and these prevented actors being copied in 3D, in all their likeness and cast for any and every movie they fit practically for free.
nurettin 7 hours ago [-]
I don't have a voice or likeness in my code. Sure, I have a very specific style in all the code I wrote for the past couple of decades, but you can achieve the same outputs with completely orthogonal styles as well. (like AoS vs SoA) so what would I even negotiate for when everything I ever thought of got distilled into neural network weights to be high-pressure sprayed to the masses?
bayindirh 4 hours ago [-]
> so what would I even negotiate for when everything I ever thought of got distilled into neural network weights to be high-pressure sprayed to the masses?
For your unique approach to the problems at hand. Yes, 90% of the code written is CRUD, but when it's not, how it's solved matters.
This is why we have grown with id Software games. They solved the problems, created new paths and methods for limited hardware for their time.
This is why we praised DivX and XviD back in the day. They solved problems again which are caused by the limits of the computers.
The way one solves problems matter, makes one valuable. This is why we do research and create new ways to do things.
In short, your creativity is being sold/sprayed to masses.
croon 5 hours ago [-]
I'm unsure how you reach the conclusion of "self-interest". Unions are about collective bargaining power, reaching (ideally) what's best for most of the people it represents, even if it's detrimental to you specifically.
LeBit 2 hours ago [-]
Try to think about other people a bit.
You are part of a whole. You are not alone.
Saying you don’t mind to adapt is insulting.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
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brendoelfrendo 14 hours ago [-]
This is the first time I've heard someone argue that unionizing is a self-interested pursuit. It's called "collective bargaining" for a reason; workers who cooperate in negotiations with their employers have more leverage than those who negotiate individually. The entire point is to work together for the betterment of the group!
sib 14 hours ago [-]
See current situation where the Carpenters' Union in California is pushing hard against an initiative that would make it much easier to build more housing in the state because it would also reduce requirements for union labor.
Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon (and in many cases, the benefits are specifically to the more senior union members vis a vis the less senior ones.)
Dayshine 4 hours ago [-]
> Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon (and in many cases, the benefits are specifically to the more senior union members vis a vis the less senior
In the US. In the UK all the major unions I know don't require membership and fight for all employees in the industries they represent. E.g. as a software developer on a research project at a University I got all the negotiated benefits of the academic Union.
w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 3 hours ago [-]
In Italy too. We have national contracts that are negotiated by unions for the whole indistry and are valid for all workers of the same industry, not only members.
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
They've also been proven to increase wages for people in the same industry who are not even in the union due to raising the floor in general for what good labor should cost
magicalist 12 hours ago [-]
> See current situation where the Carpenters' Union in California is pushing hard against an initiative that would make it much easier to build more housing in the state because it would also reduce requirements for union labor
If you're talking about AB 1751 (Missing Middle Townhome Ownership Act) I think you have this exactly backwards.
> Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon
As opposed to what? You and the GGP phrase this as a dichotomy, but I'm really curious what the other side of this is, because "not being in a union" doesn't erase your self interest or all the many many groups of people doing the same that don't feel like they're apparently being overly self interested by forming corporations, governments, non-profits, advocacy groups, etc, etc, etc
fuck_google 5 hours ago [-]
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csallen 11 hours ago [-]
I can't speak for the OP, but I don't think their point was that they're against the self-interested nature of unionizing.
I read it more like they're against trying to stop, hinder, or prevent the use of new technology, simply because it's personally threatening.
And I feel the same way. If I was part of a union, I would believe in the collective bargaining power, but I wouldn't necessarily believe we should use that to pursue every single possible agenda that might benefit us. And I've personally pooled my capital with others in the past in order to achieve certain outcomes. And in those situations I also didn't attempt to reach so far as to limit the totally valid freedoms of others just because I knew it might be better for me.
Acting in the interest of a collective doesn't mean one must also abandon the ethics they usually employ when acting in their solo self interest.
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
People also forget the role they play in protecting and helping corporations. Without unions as a legal and negotiating intermediary you get things like factory workers burning down the factories when they are overly exploited.
baron816 14 hours ago [-]
Have you ever not been able to send your kids to school for weeks (or years in the case of COVID) because the teachers refused to work? Have you ever been unable to get timely medical treatment because nurses refused to work? Have you ever been unable to work yourself because the transit workers refused to work?
mattkevan 13 hours ago [-]
Maybe if employers offered better working conditions and salaries people wouldn’t feel the need to go on strike?
baron816 11 hours ago [-]
People have this right to take better jobs at other companies. This is how we get better working conditions: competition between employers. Tech has figured this out. I’ve never felt the need to go on strike.
Unions can be a deterrent to this. If you have sectoral bargaining, you can’t get a better deal anywhere because everyone pays the same. Or even if it’s within a single company, you’re just stuck with whatever scheme the union bosses agreed to.
But also, unions are a deterrent to new employers since fewer people want to start companies in industries where unions have taken over. They’re a nightmare to deal with. Fewer employers means less competition means worse services.
We have a dynamic economy with lots of competition. It’s easy to switch jobs and find a better place to work. We should not want to give this up.
tyre 6 hours ago [-]
"Competition is universally good" is what has decimated American manufacturing since Reagan. It's hollowed out the US middle class, which affects what the country can build, purchasing power, and innovation. Free trade policies have destroyed cities, eliminated millions of well-paying jobs, cut social services, and ripped the social fabric from communities. There were no alternatives to just "take a job at a better company"; most manufacturing jobs that left had no alternatives.
It was cynically selfish and short-sighted. The US from 1980–2020 is a perfect example of how much more complex systems, economies, worker dynamics, and second/third/nth order effects are.
ezst 3 hours ago [-]
Just to add to that "Competition" is no longer even a thing when the unchecked capitalistic game is played to the extent we are at, with extreme consolidation and duo/triopoly cartels running most services and playing all the dirty tricks in the bag (regulatory capture, rent extraction, lobbying for deregulation and weakening of labour and environmental norms, ...)
Competition is generally good for the consumer, but Americans need to wake up to the fact that it's not built into the system, it's to be regulated into it, and competing is only good so far as it doesn't turn into a race to the bottom (which again, is a matter of a regulator setting the bar).
mchusma 9 hours ago [-]
You realize his examples are public sector unions. Which mean the “employer” you are referring to is the citizens? Not some evil corporation, government mandated monopolies which then get taken over to serve their union members.
I don’t have any objection to voluntary unions. Meaning people can join them for support or collective bargaining, but that citizens can just opt to not employ anyone in the union. Unions could be support structures for workers, instead they are mafia bosses.
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
Nurses have very strict legal requirements on when they can strike and for how long. Not unlike railroad workers.
When have you not been able to get timely medical treatment at the fault of nurses ?
lambdas 13 hours ago [-]
Well… yeah. But I didn’t blame the employees, I blamed the employer who must have seen the writing on the wall for a long time and yet let it come to this.
baron816 11 hours ago [-]
Why do you assume unions are always reasonable? Unions in the US have a long history of over reaching and crippling industries and governments.
itishappy 12 hours ago [-]
Those self-interested unions better stay away from my interests!
jplusequalt 13 hours ago [-]
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baron816 11 hours ago [-]
Where do I say that nurses shouldn’t have good working conditions or good pay? Most of us have figured this out already: you can take a job at another company that’s better to work for. Most nurses do have pretty good working conditions and get paid well. Competition among employers is the solution here. Walking out and putting customers (or patients in this case) in a precarious position is not.
ipaddr 11 hours ago [-]
So she doesn't enjoy her job and only works there because you can't make up the $15 hour difference between her working in a book store for minimum wage vs her working for $30 an hour? Why don't you take a part time job on the weekend to lighten her load? There are many people who become a nurse because its a calling.
jackdoe 14 hours ago [-]
their point is while the 'group' wins, the rest of the world loses.
localized gains, distributed loss.
computerliker 14 hours ago [-]
as an art enjoyer, i do not feel that having less media written, drawn, or voiced by a computer is a loss.
a computer can never be sad or horny or have taste. it can only make product. i also think artists should be paid living wages with good working conditions.
thank you SAG-AFTRA, WGA, IATSE, AEMI and Teamsters.
miki123211 4 hours ago [-]
> a computer can never be sad or horny or have taste
Neither can a record player. Nevertheless, we consume recorded music.
Timon3 2 hours ago [-]
Surely you must be aware that record players don't compose the music they are playing?
drdaeman 6 hours ago [-]
> a computer can never be sad or horny or have taste
So far ;-)
binary132 10 hours ago [-]
There is no moral imperative to help the world reach an optimum. Rather, the world is full of competing interests.
popalchemist 9 hours ago [-]
Has it occurred to you that it isn't only self-interest but concern for others that drives collective bargaining? It's essentialy a way for the little guys to stand up to the 1% to fight against the unending series of abuses and diminishment of the average person's ability to earn a livable wage and work under fair conditions.
timr 8 hours ago [-]
Yes. But there's a clear difference between, say, stealing someone's voice, identity or intellectual property, and preventing someone from using automation to do labor.
The former is obviously unfair to the person whose identity is stolen. The latter is sour grapes from people who want to control the future.
I also can't bring myself to get incensed over someone using a robot to write code. It's literally the modern equivalent of smashing knitting looms.
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
A software union probably wouldn't tell you what tools to use when writing code. It would help protect you from being completed replaced by code
popalchemist 7 hours ago [-]
You keep framing it as getting incensed over other people using ai to write code; but that isn't what it's about. A dev union would not attempt that; it would attempt to ensure quality of life for your class of people (and their families) as much as possible. It isn't about policing entire industries or other entities; it is about DEFENDING those who they would, do, and always have exploited when binding contracts or legislation don't prevent them from doing so.
Union = a group of people defending their rights and that includes the right to a life that isn't at the utter mercy of perpetual enshittification due to the infinite mechanical plodding of heartless (by definition) megacorporations that would never hesitate to eradicate peoples' livelihoods and treat humans as material for the orphan grinder if they could get away with it.
And by the way, they do, if you haven't noticed.
timr 3 hours ago [-]
> it would attempt to ensure quality of life for your class of people (and their families) as much as possible.
What is “your class of people”, and why is it threatened by what other people do with coding robots?
You can try to dress it up as an intellectual argument, but at root it’s the same thing that the luddites were trying to do: defending your preferred lifestyle from technological advances.
We, the ditch diggers of the world, support your unqualified resistance to the use of steam shovels! Fewer holes, slower!
jplusequalt 13 hours ago [-]
>Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested
Caring about your ability to pay your bills, and support your family is "self-interested" in the same way that choosing to not drive into oncoming traffic is "self-interested".
fugigigjfn 12 hours ago [-]
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iAMkenough 16 hours ago [-]
> Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested.
Yes, exactly. Do not advocate for yourself and your colleagues by joining them in a united front. Your voice does not matter. You will continue to adapt to widening wage disparities.
You will accept a pay cut and increased productivity goals and be happy to continue adapting as your cost of living keeps on climbing.
smallerize 16 hours ago [-]
You may be surprised to know that residential areas in San Francisco are height limited, sometimes as short as 4 stories. They're not exactly anti-progress.
BeetleB 16 hours ago [-]
Height limiting is anti-progress, which was his point.
smallerize 16 hours ago [-]
Ok SF needs somewhat higher-density housing. But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress. If the benefits accrue to only a few people, it's not progress.
BeetleB 16 hours ago [-]
> But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress.
It is if it makes it worse for everyone else.
16 hours ago [-]
koe123 17 hours ago [-]
Thats great, although understand that unionizing protects the more vulnerable of also the software engineered. You not advocating for your rights also means weakening others. Is it still self interested to unionized from that perspective?
vlyan 16 hours ago [-]
>The union demanded clear protections to ensure that recordings of actors’ performances could not be copied without consent and compensation.
>California’s legislation passed AB 2602 and AB 1836 in September 2024, prohibiting media companies from using AI to replicate actors’ performances without their consent.
it's a very reasonable law, but it is not the win you seem to believe it to be. the actors who refuse to consent will simply be passed over in favor of those who don't. no law will ever be passed to force companies to employ humans over machines, and if it were, the industry would move elsewhere. this is not without precedent :)
speech models have got so good so quickly that you can already replace a VA -- even an AAA prima donna -- with a teenager from Fiverr, who will simply bruteforce the right inflection.
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
If they still have to pay an actual person though to license their likeness then they are much more likely to actually employ that person directly to get a better result. And in the cases where quality is not needed the person still gets paid for their AI likeness.
Seems like a reasonable take
miki123211 4 hours ago [-]
In the 21st century, the only professions that can successfully unionize are those you can't replace with workers from a non-unionized country.
If your students are in Oklahoma, your teachers also have to be in Oklahoma. If the Oklahoma teachers unionize, you have no option but to hire those unionized teachers if you want your students taught. If your bank is in Oklahoma, you can hire programmers in London or buy a SaaS from a company based in Geneva.
Programmers also have much less of a reason to unionize, as "quit and go work somewhere else" is often a realistic option. This is usually not the case for teachers, where the only employer seeking their skills in the area is the government, whose idea of what teacher salaries should be is not based on market forces.
dzonga 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think software developers need to unionize - but to form French style co-ops.
e.g a lot of video game studios even the AAA ones could be co-ops. same as a lot of SAAS software companies. Linear - just announced a tender offer. I don't see a reason - why linear couldn't work as a co-op.
ameliaquining 10 hours ago [-]
Are the employees supposed to front the capital themselves?
r_lee 17 hours ago [-]
it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced
I think too many just expect that they can get by like before because they're a 10x engineer or whatever
zamadatix 17 hours ago [-]
I think I sit somewhere between these two descriptions. I've always supported unions and other "for the common good" type machinery. At the same time, I desperately also don't want to end up doing something the equivalent of barring the use of calculators just so I can toil away at a 9-5 crunching numbers more slowly instead. If AI really does replace all of the meaningful jobs we can do... great - I'd rather we make sure the spoils of that production are distributed than try to cling to preventing the technology from being used.
Inexplicably for the current moment, AI has so far actually meant I have even more to do instead of less. I expect that to change eventually... but man, is it a bit of whiplash to go from wondering if my job will be around in 10 years to starting the work day and being more backed up than ever. Doubly so since the rate of change does not seem to be very evenly distributed by tech role.
oblio 16 hours ago [-]
> I'd rather we make sure the spoils of that production are distributed than try to cling to preventing the technology from being used.
Spoiler alert: unions can help with that.
zamadatix 14 hours ago [-]
Agreed, but I must've severely messed up my message if that was supposed to be a spoiler. To be clearer: I think the unions, economic policy, and such should help with that part rather than us wield the very same to hide from replacing the work we do with something much easier. I.e., don't be ashamed to work towards that, just come together to ensure we all share the spoils.
embedding-shape 17 hours ago [-]
> it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced
To be fair, most of us spent our entire career trying our best to automate ourselves away one way or another, and always seen that as our job description.
12ags-18276 17 hours ago [-]
No, that is just nerd heroism lore that indeed has always shown up in comments, that part is definitely true.
Some people dislike automation altogether and like the computational aspect. Most people seem to enjoy constructing virtual worlds and Rube Goldberg machines.
embedding-shape 3 hours ago [-]
> Some people dislike automation altogether and like the computational aspect
Computation IS automation
genericone 16 hours ago [-]
I thought HN was mostly people who hated doing 'the thing' and would procrastinate until they build a system that does 'the thing' and then they would work tirelessly to never do 'the thing' themselves ever again.
BeetleB 16 hours ago [-]
Much of computing history has been about replacing humans. If they were proud of their work pre-LLMs, then at least they're being consistent!
It's kind of hypocritical to change just because it's now a different industry being impacted.
GeorgeWBasic 13 hours ago [-]
I agree with your point, but I don't think it's funny at all. The whole field is changing because of this. The career, except for those ones lucky enough to have jobs where they're valued and they can decide how to use AI tools, is turning into shit because of this and software engineers have become a lot less valuable as management is trying to turn them into reverse centaurs.
qwytw 16 hours ago [-]
What options do you have? If you're the 10x engineer you'll be a 100x one and do just fine. Otherwise what can you do besides holding on as long as you can or start searching for a new career.
quaintdev 17 hours ago [-]
It won't happen to me is what I used to think
georgemcbay 16 hours ago [-]
> It won't happen to me is what I used to think
In my experience this is what almost everyone thinks, right up to the point where it starts happening to them.
And it isn't just an individual blind spot, organizations suffer from the same thing in the sense that many companies will be happy to automate away all their labor to avoid paying the "human tax" without giving much thought to the fact that the need for the company itself will also be automated away soon after.
If you can replace nearly all of your workers with some cheap tokens and prompts, everyone else who previously would have been a customer can replace your whole company with the same thing.
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Or a competitor comes in and does what you do for half the cost and double the efficiency.
12ags-18276 17 hours ago [-]
Many people who promoted DEI when their corporations demanded it were fired later.
Useful idiots always go first after the goal is accomplished.
17 hours ago [-]
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
Software engineers and VFX workers also tried to unionise back in the day and there was a giant wage fixing and anti competitive hiring scandal that was majorly illegal. Perpetuated by some of the biggest names in tech.
They settled for a large undisclosed sum out of court. But largely won unfortunately as unionisation efforts failed
ameliaquining 10 hours ago [-]
My objection has always been that advocates either can't or don't care to explain how such a thing would actually work from the perspective of a unionized engineer.
isoprophlex 15 hours ago [-]
And thus the developers remain, until this very moment, ionized.
worthless-trash 7 hours ago [-]
I appreciate.
boredatoms 16 hours ago [-]
No one has offered a union to join at any workplace Ive been at
lambda 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the problem is, someone has to start the union. It takes work. You have to get the whole workforce to vote on it. A lot of software engineers believe (or believed) that they were too smart and professional to need a union. And of course, if management gets wind of it while you are working on setting up the vote, they may do all kinds of trickery, legal or illegal, to block it.
It is possible. But it's quite uncommon in this industry in the US.
And given the current administration, it is hard to trust you'd get fair enforcement of labor laws if the company did illegal things to block unionization.
epolanski 14 hours ago [-]
Because software developers enjoyed scarcity for most of the fields existence and could barter themselves better conditions instead of falling back to unionized fixed incomes.
In any case, the overwhelming majority of jobs is non-unionized and I don't think that software developers can stop technological changes by unionizing.
Now, they cannot prevent offshoring or AI use or replacements. Very very rarely if ever.
But they can negotiate a large layoff and give better pay/conditions during work etc. This view that unions can prevent anything... when so many jobs have gone to east EU (all amazing and good at what they do but lets face it, it is due to pay) so yea there wont be any union preventing AI...
catigula 17 hours ago [-]
Half of them are from India or China. Racial diversity is known to be detrimental to unionization. In fact, Amazon used this exact strategy to bust nascent Somali unions.
Related; here in my city, every event, restaurant, cinema, delivery service etc have all images / posters generated, very obviously, by OpenAI. ‘Authentic Italian’ and then an AI generated menu. This must hurt companies that used to make these before; a friend was a good photographer and he says he does wedding since end last year as the work was plummeting. Not sure about stats but it’s just ‘normal’ here at least.
thangalin 16 hours ago [-]
It'll come quickly for audio books. I've been working on a locally hosted, fully containerized web application to narrate my sci-fi novel using a full cast of characters and a few distinct narrators:
I would pay a few actors (mostly Star Trek TNG cast) money for a license to their voice.
I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about and how we don't descend into a pit of neverending photocopies of things people once loved in the 1990s/2000s.
thangalin 14 hours ago [-]
From reddit:
* $250 per finished hour for the narrator (lowest professional rate).
* 200k to 270k words.
* 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours.
* Books 1 to 3 cost $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250, respectively.
My novel has 8 major characters, including the 3 narrators, and 25+ minor characters. That price tag is daunting, presumably in USD. This would mean investing $7,750 CAD in crafting an audiobook, which may not even sell, much less recoup the investment.
In contrast, a locally hosted solution has a wallet cost of pennies for electricity plus my time to develop the system.
ChickeNES 12 hours ago [-]
> I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about
To me it's been obvious for a while now: there won't be one
unified101 10 hours ago [-]
"Celebrity" is an old world concept, and does not need to exist. it's find if we don't have them
dormento 15 hours ago [-]
This is very interesting! Imagine Silly Tavern, with dialog tagging and coloring of some sort, auto-generated talking heads. Almost a game engine.
earthnail 17 hours ago [-]
Work that doesn’t have a personal brand involved is basically dead. Arbitrary voice acting? Dead.
It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
People pretty consistently vote with their wallet and are not excited to pay and consume media made by AI.
sumedh 1 hours ago [-]
Do you have any stats for that?
richrichardsson 3 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately sometimes you can't even vote with your wallet.
I was bored yesterday and started watching a stupid documentary series about UFOs/UAP on Netflix. It was immediately obvious that the voice over was AI slop bullshit. All I could do is stop watching and thumb down it, but they still have my money. :(
newyankee 17 hours ago [-]
Everyone will probably go through the 5 stages of grief w.r.t AI adoption in their field and the gatekeepers will (rightfully) hold onto hallucination and errors as reasons to delay incorporation or to incorporate it with more human handholding.
andsoitis 5 hours ago [-]
> I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.
I'm really sad about how little creative control these tools have. They seem great for creating slop, but pretty useless for creating content that someone would love. I love the potential but text isn't really a great medium for describing artistic vision.
All these demos are focused on how easy it makes everything. Easy is great, but if everyone is able to make instant cute cat videos or whatever it just devalues it. I want to see turning a photo into a rigged 3d model, letting the artist animate and then generate the video. This technology could be used to increase creative expression, but instead it's being used to squeeze out creative expression
api 2 minutes ago [-]
That'll change. They'll get as many knobs as e.g. photoshop for image editing. You'll also be able, if not already, to use your own voice to communicate the emotion and tone you want but then have it re-render it in the voice of your choice.
The "slop" phase is early AI, like chunky ugly very early 3D graphics where you can see the triangles.
I'm already seeing images generated by first-generation diffusion models like Stable Diffusion 1.5 (which is small enough to run on a phone) used ironically as meme generators due to the now-retro silliness of what they generate.
bonoboTP 14 hours ago [-]
Text is not the only input. You can provide 3d block outs with rudimentary animation, annotated images with arrows etc, voice recordings of one person acting out some emotion then mapping that to a different character's voice, other uses of video to video, etc.
There could easily be at least some time period of low skilled ugly people acting in approximate but shitty ways in cheap sets just to give an input reference to a model and then describing the differences in text, yielding gorgeous people speaking with prestigious accents doing stuff in fancy locations in the output.
porridgeraisin 16 hours ago [-]
A lot of it will get automated the same way very many industries got automated. A lot of physical labour got automated once a primitive for it was created. Similarly, we have now a primitive for automating knowledge work. In the next few years to a decade, as all the right training data and runtime environments are slowly consolidated for various fields, a lot will be automated. There is no inherent reason a voice actor must be an eternal job, the same way there was no inherent reason for a draftsman or stage musician to be an eternal job.
It has nothing to do with skill. Both were very skilled jobs. Draftsman as well despite many people going to it straight from school. But computers and CAD mean that it is now necessary for someone to do a STEM degree to be a draftsman. Recorded audio made many stage musicians redundant. It is cheaper to do it this way and gets superior results, that is all, there is no further agenda.
Now too, the next generation of voice actors and many other knowledge workers will have to go up the value chain one step and operate or potentially build these tools (in whatever form they mature to in a decades time).
The current generation of voice actors will face the same situation as many before in the performance industry - stage musicians/performers for example that were made redundant by recorded audio. The reality is that most of them just left and dispersed into the economy doing completely unrelated jobs.
For software and generally computer engineers, this new primitive happens to itself be software, so it's less of a transition and an easier upskilling path to learn to build it. And building it is one step higher in the value chain than simply using it. That is a structural advantage.
bubblemoth 16 hours ago [-]
I don't really like comparing the way automation of the past displaced jobs to the way AI is/will displace jobs. The timeline is just faster and, more importantly, there were still plenty of other fields of work for people to go to.
But now that we are automating white collar work... where will people go? I'm a 36 year-old veteran who has returned to college and so many of the younger students seem to be filled with despair.
I have hope for the future, but I think there will be an uncomfortable period of time.
porridgeraisin 15 hours ago [-]
I think people are overestimating the speed at which the transition will happen. I think it will happen much slower than is often portrayed online.
This slow transition period will also help answer the "where will they go" questions. We can't answer them right now.
Ultimately, everything we do is in service of social political and personal human incentives, and I think the effect of that is discounted when people make these takeoff predictions for AI and "AGI"
moscoe 17 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a perfect application of AI. Some jobs should be automated.
tiagod 16 hours ago [-]
I would rather hear human voices than synthesized ones. I don't care how realistic they sound. I'm not alone, and the sentiment will certainly grow.
chung8123 11 hours ago [-]
As long as there are enough people than there will be a market. I think there are a lot of people that prefer human but don't want the human cost.
oblio 15 hours ago [-]
Ok, let's go the other way round. Which jobs do you think should not be automated?
Melatonic 3 hours ago [-]
Probably the ones we collectively value as human and are willing to pay for (in either our time or money or both).
And jobs where quality is paramount and or there is greater chance of risk / bodily harm
oblio 3 hours ago [-]
> Probably the ones we collectively value as human and are willing to pay for (in either our time or money or both).
Society seems to be very bad at that, and we end up with high frequency traders making millions while teachers are paid peanuts.
ajjahs 3 hours ago [-]
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NooneAtAll3 16 hours ago [-]
recently I encountered several youtubers in the uncanny valley of "is it Ai or really repetitive intonation pattern"
one youtuber used irl footage, with hands and stuff - so I know there's human behind the camera
the other was a letsplay that reacted to events just fine emotionally
and yet the uncanny valley of the sound is in full force. Maybe youtube has done something with the codecs?
I feel sad
dominotw 15 hours ago [-]
it effects software develpoers because ai has compliers , tests , ci and bought tons of data in mercor.
it always sucks at everything else.
037 17 hours ago [-]
Prompt engineering tip for Google employees: just add "P.S. Make sure the page works in Firefox too."
vardump 49 minutes ago [-]
Yes, that, and P.P.S. Make sure the page works in Chrome.
The page instant scrolled suddenly back to previous video examples after I scrolled down. It was disorienting.
ygouzerh 9 hours ago [-]
No worries, even on chromium, their webpage is just horrible. They seems to have focus only on mobile reading, on desktop its a mess.
fg137 17 hours ago [-]
It is in their business interest to ignore Firefox.
WarmWash 16 hours ago [-]
Google is so internally fractured, and the factions individually are so powerful, that it's really only the chrome people who care about chrome.
If anything FF gets left out because usage is so low.
oblio 15 hours ago [-]
> If anything FF gets left out because usage is so low.
I've been following this for a long time. They were leaving Firefox out when its usage wasn't low.
Probably the typical backdoor executive mandate that led to death by "sprint prioritization":
Yes, we will for sure work on the Firefox compatibility bug, Dave-Open-Source-Enthusiast-Google-Dev.
But we can only pick up 10 bugfixing tickets this sprint and the ticket you highlighted, as the entire team agrees, is priority #12.
<repeat every sprint, where during the sprint 9-10 new higher priority items magically appear just in time for the next sprint>
Death by slow asphyxiation.
mattlondon 15 hours ago [-]
I heard that Firefox is banned internally at Google (something-something-security) so Devs can't even test against firefox
tvst 15 hours ago [-]
Not true -- at least up to 2018 when I worked there.
12 hours ago [-]
mattlondon 15 hours ago [-]
What I heard was more recent than 8 years ago, more like 6-12 months ago
fl4regun 16 hours ago [-]
Then they aren't doing a very good job of it.
>Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added.
What people usually say is that Google merely wants Firefox to survive for anti-competitive reasons. Presumably that does not necessitate it actually being used (or be usable).
sva_ 16 hours ago [-]
Hot take: Google keeps Mozilla/Firefox alive through the default search engine placement (which makes Mozilla millions each year) so they don't get designated as a monopoly with their browser.
Vinnl 16 hours ago [-]
And of course they're doing the same for Apple/Safari, which wouldn't survive without the $20 million default search engine placement deal.
sva_ 14 hours ago [-]
Apple forcing users to use their own browser/browsing engine doesn't disprove my argument IMO, virtually nobody outside the apple ecosystem uses Safari, and outside the apple ecosystem is something between 80-90% of internet users.
oblio 15 hours ago [-]
> And of course they're doing the same for Apple/Safari, which wouldn't survive without the $20 million default search engine placement deal.
Billion with a B, as in 10 zeroes, not 7.
BbzzbB 16 hours ago [-]
That's lukewarm at most, doubt you'll find many people disagreeing here!
static_motion 15 hours ago [-]
That's not a hot take, that's just factual.
GaggiX 17 hours ago [-]
Firefox really struggle with demo pages of text-to-video models because of the large numbers of videos in the page in my experience, this page seems to work quite fine for me tho.
simonw 17 hours ago [-]
Interesting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation.
Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?
msabalau 16 hours ago [-]
Google has always been committed to multimodal.
And, Veo and omni simply were better than Sora
And, Youtube is huge both as a place where video contents goes and where can be trained from. Microdramas are starting to become a real category--14 Billion USD, 90% of it made with AI.
Chinese video models can be more immediately impressive, but none of them come close to beat the value of Google's Flow. Especially when you are throwing away a lot of generations as part of the creative process. Which is what you have to do to make longer content with any video model.
OpenAI needed to be able to focus. Google can walk and chew gum, and they're not going to run out of money to buy chewing gum.
TomGarden 3 hours ago [-]
Any source on the 90% number? Last I saw (recently) one of the big players just announced they were planning to do 50% AI going forward
pwython 13 hours ago [-]
Sora 2 was way better than Veo in terms of quality. It just didn't have much of a use case for businesses outside of one-shot zany UGC-looking clips.
Sora was a social network type thing. Google sells their models on a PAYG basis - and makes money off them. Nano Banana alone has changed advertising 2D mockups and Photoshop like tasks forever. Notice how GPT image 2 is now available also on a PAYG basis.
I work in advertising and some days I spent a lot of money using these models. The amount and rapidity of prototyping using them has changed everything about advertising pre production.
mattlondon 15 hours ago [-]
YouTube. And video ads.
Previously when making video ads you'd need to actually create the video. Actors, cameramen, editors - you name it. Now a new video ads is just a prompt away, directly inside the ad-spend web UI too no doubt.
People say Google have lost and that they're having their lunch eaten by anthropic, but I am not so sure...
brazukadev 3 minutes ago [-]
> People say Google have lost and that they're having their lunch eaten by anthropic
That's old news. People are saying the chinese models/labs are eating anthropic lunch.
WarmWash 15 hours ago [-]
Google owns 15% of Anthropic, Claude trains and runs on TPUs, and Google cloud is backlogged with demand from both OAI and Anthropic.
Google is selling shovels, leasing mines, buy stakes in "competitors" and doing it's own exploration/mining. When you look at the full picture, it kinda doesn't even look like Gemini matters that much to them overall.
Melatonic 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think it does. They could probably throw a shitload of compute at Gemini and have something more competitive. Instead they seem focused on the actual innovative research which I think will pay off long term.
Gemma 4 I am way more impressed by than whatever the top ranking model is
simonw 13 hours ago [-]
That's a very convincing answer. I hadn't considered how many advertisers need video ads now and don't have the skill or resources to create them.
OtherShrezzing 17 hours ago [-]
10% of their revenue comes from YouTube, so they need to make sure that they own any technology that might disrupt that platform.
3 hours ago [-]
chermi 15 hours ago [-]
They're main edge has been multimodal. I think they're still the best overall on multimodal? If I were them I would try to be the best at at least something.
I never personally got the least bit excited about Sora or nanobanana or whatever video/audio generation thing. But I guess I'm just not their customer. I do love the read-side of it though.
bahmboo 16 hours ago [-]
This is paid API access only. They are here to make money not to position themselves for an IPO. Not a value judgement only an observation.
testaccount121 3 hours ago [-]
its probably not even a choice given what bytedance is doing with their video models imo
3 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
kfarr 17 hours ago [-]
Also Google already has a huge built in training corpus with YouTube, gphotos, and geospatial data
guilhermeasper 17 hours ago [-]
Google does anything except launch a new version of Gemini Pro.
SimianSci 16 hours ago [-]
Just because Anthropic and OpenAI really want there to be an arms race justifying the outsized investment, doesn't mean the optimal play is to build larger, more expensive, models.
The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening.
I think it's reasonable to not completely drain one's cash reserves trying to stay ahead in a race where participants may very clearly be about to run straight off of a cliff.
msabalau 16 hours ago [-]
And it doesn't have to be either/or. They could make larger, more expensive models, just at a slower cadence.
Sure downside would be not learning from people using your model for coding, if we're on the cusp of huge leaps in self-improvement. But there is a reasonable case for avoiding desperate scramble, especially if other parts of the business can also create value with the compute.
jimmoores 16 hours ago [-]
If the Chinese labs can compete on a shoestring budget with access to much less powerful hardware, Google should be able to compete as well. They're becoming almost irrelevant for agentic coding right now.
bitexploder 16 hours ago [-]
AI / LLM is about more than agentic coding. It is one of the least interesting use cases to me, thinking more broadly. HN may be over-indexed on it.
Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago [-]
I would agree with you on AI/LLM being more than agentic coding but at the same time, I think there's more nuance.
For example, PDF's and powerpoints can be generated using agentic coding by things like https://bento.page or other ways of generating them in an agentic coding fashion.
A lot of browser automation could/is also done by agentic coding.
It can also help them set up and configure self hosted software with the help of LLM's and debugging if its working or not.
You can create videos using Manim and remotion.dev and also excalidraw-animate and generate excalidraw files agentically if what you need is more vector style graphics (which surprisingly can fit into many ideas) rather than say a real life human waving video/more photo-realistic video (but I must say that this has certainly its own pros/use-cases as well).
It might sound self-explainatory but turns out that coding can represent a wide range of problems!
SimianSci 15 hours ago [-]
It's not much of a shoestring budget to be receiving regular injections of investment from state lenders along with cheap credit.
I don't think the comparison holds.
gbriel 14 hours ago [-]
Google doesn't have a good coding model. This is a HUGE problem. They don't need "larger more expensive models", they need a good coding model because it's a competitive advantage.
jnwatson 12 hours ago [-]
3.7 flash ain't bad. It isn't Opus or Sol, but it fits pretty well in the second tier.
f6v 43 minutes ago [-]
Second tier models are like self-driving cars to the point where you question if they save any time. Sol can do a deep analysis and plan a large feature. Luna can mostly execute. There's a clear qualitative difference.
dbbk 14 hours ago [-]
Competitive advantage why? Will it really make them more money? They already have Google Cloud.
guilhermeasper 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, I agree with you that the race all the AI companies are running doesn't make sense, but at the same time, there are rumors that Google has produced newer versions of Pro without releasing them to the public.
Version 3.1 has plenty of room for improvement, yet they don't seem to be giving the attention it deserves or at least communicating accordingly.
SimianSci 15 hours ago [-]
There is more to the cost of a model than its training.
While training is a significant Capex expenditure, it has very low Operational cost after training unless it is deployed for public inference.
It may be that they wish to slow their cadence of releases, or develop their models to focus more in a different direction, etc. No matter what the actual reasoning, they have chosen to not compete in the same race, and I cannot say I fault them.
onlyrealcuzzo 16 hours ago [-]
Google paid for 3.5 Pro training. They just didn't release it.
They never gave an official answer as to why, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
They did not decide it wasn't worth spending the money to train.
They absolutely spent the money.
bitexploder 16 hours ago [-]
I work there. I have zero internal knowledge about the model. Opinion my own, etc. I don't think it is worth fighting to win on a month to month time horizon. When you step back and look an inch above this market, Gemini Pro 3.1 as a product was released in February. 6 months. It feels like forever and that Google is behind, but on a 2-3 year horizon? The models are going to stay similar.
Also, look at Flash 3.5 to 3.7. Flash 3.7 is a genuinely decent Sonnet 5 class model. Flash 3.7 is quite efficient too. Also, whatever was spent training 3.5 pro is probably not wasted. However, as a strategy, when I see models like Kimi K3, Fable, Sol. If you discard "because the model sucked" what other alternatives or potential options might exist?
I thought of a quite a few and they are far more compelling and interesting to me.
(Also Gemini models tend to be pretty decent at more than just programming. Enterprise AI use is more than just software eng / programming)
mh- 15 hours ago [-]
I'm the CTO of a GCP shop with an 8 figure annual commit.
If you'd told me at the end of Cloud Next 2025 that by now Google still wouldn't have a competitive offering to agentic coding offerings from Anthropic (Claude Code + Fable) or OpenAI (Codex + Sol), I wouldn't have believed you.
In our non-coding use cases where we're embedding models in our product, we're also not reaching for GCP stuff. Because Anthropic has the mindshare of our engineers and product folks, since it's what they use every day.
dev_dan_2 6 hours ago [-]
Given your position and the responsibility that comes with it; I sure hope you updated your mental model in another way than simply "they are acting irrational"... It's not clear from your comment that you did, but it sounded a bit like it.
fatata123 6 hours ago [-]
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WarmWash 15 hours ago [-]
3.5 was almost certainly a 3.1 post-train, so likely a small investment on Google's part.
They mentioned that they have already started pretraining Gemini 4, which will be the full ground up rip-your-face-off-expensive training that is often discussed.
dbbk 14 hours ago [-]
All Google has to do is build a model that works good enough for the Gemini app and for Spark. And they have it.
mianos 14 hours ago [-]
I have a pro subscription, I think they have just given up. Likely because when they test their new models against the other frontier models they are so bad, they just pull it back. This leads them to try and innovate in other areas where there is currently less competition so they can compete. Not a bad play.
epolanski 14 hours ago [-]
You can tell you live in the HN/tech bubble.
In the real world out there, Google and Microsoft are absolutely dominating enterprise customers.
Every single non-tech office worker I know is writing Gemini "gems" (sort of claude prompts/skills) or prompting Copilot to help drafting board meeting notes, insurance contracts updates that reflect changes in regulations, make quick loan feasibility assessments before passing them to the relevant office, presentations, etc, etc.
I'm talking insurance, banking, consultancy, manufacturing, etc, etc.
Why? Because Google and Microsoft already were in these companies, all they had to do is "oh, you also have AI now with your plans". Procurement and data compliance are the first thing businesses have to sort out. They were already sorted out.
Google doesn't need to have the best coding model or triumph in meaningless benchmarks, it only needs their models to get better and cheaper while serving them to their existing customer base.
They are playing a different game.
And Microsoft, doesn't even need to care about models at all, they can provide whatever open or closed AI with their services and have to focus on the harness in Excel or Github/Azure Copilot or whatever.
E.g. while developers in most of my clients use whatever they prefer or the company pays for, the remaining 90% uses either Google or Microsoft products.
Not a single one has incentives into venturing into OpenAI or Anthropic or Z.Ai lands because they might be better at some benchmark that is completely irrelevant to their tasks of updating powerpoints or summarizing incoming emails.
iamniels 3 hours ago [-]
This.
Google is an advertising company with an enterprise SaaS branch. I bet they have chosen to focus on running the most efficient "everybody" model instead of running a heavy model for coders.
When using Gemini for other tasks than coding, it is actually pretty good. It grounds well with Google search and gives mostly correct, well written answers to many niche questions.
AISnakeOil 17 hours ago [-]
Why do they need to? For search, instant models are more important and fit the use case better.
Pro models are mainly for coding agent work; it doesn't necessarily make them any money.
sva_ 17 hours ago [-]
I think they also have the problem of having given away their pro subscription to 10s or 100s of millions of students worldwide. They're tightening down on that now, and I have a feeling that this goes into them not releasing a larger model.
jimmoores 16 hours ago [-]
They blew up my interest when the stole my money by cutting me off from Gemini CLI with no explanation or recourse. I did not violate the terms of service and my only crime seemed to be not wanting to use Antigravity. They still took my money for the rest of that month and gave me nothing for it.
vismit2000 7 hours ago [-]
New version of Gemini Pro has now become like GTA-6
Nihilartikel 15 hours ago [-]
I let myself get mildly excited with the last Omni release, but it turns out it (and this one) can't do the one practical thing I want - Sync generated video to provided pre-existing audio.
Meanwhile, I'm happily using Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX to finally finish the lip syncing to recorded dialog on my abandoned 20 year old Flash animation hobby projects.
KolmogorovComp 3 hours ago [-]
> Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX
Minimax H3 is about 240Gb alone, how do you do? How much quantised is it, and how good are the results?
msabalau 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that'd be a great feature.
jarjoura 11 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure I heard one of the PMs in a podcast a few weeks ago say they are intentionally not building support for it out of concerns of enabling deep-fakes.
I agree though. My issue is the cost for using AI video models is way too high for anyone not building anything serious with them, at the same time they are too restricted for actually using professionally. Prompting them with text to get something generated is cute, but then you just end up creating slop that everyone hates, ultimately devaluing the power of these things.
doctorpangloss 10 hours ago [-]
Deepfakes are kind of the point though.
hi_hi 2 hours ago [-]
Would this model be available in ComfyUI, or does Google limit these to their own tools?
deadlast2 3 hours ago [-]
For me it's kind of weird right it's like no one can see the bigger picture. All technology's going to be eaten by AI so companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta ... are middle men in an industry that's disappearing. No one's really going to use a search engine when a chat bot can do a better job. No one is going to pay for software when the AI can do the whole process better at a proper command. All technology and the companies in it are essentially horses and the related roles in a time of cars. That whole slice of the economy is at best going to reduce year on year eventually to disappear. No replacement AI is it.
anentropic 1 hours ago [-]
The chat bot will still use the search engine
rcr-anti 16 hours ago [-]
It certainly makes for easy demos, but I always struggle with the practical application. As in, what work or enjoyment does someone actually get from this? Ads and media pre production seem plausible, but it fails the 'how can this enrich life' in a way most other AI tools don't. Maybe for them that's not a consideration, if their only interest is the other meaning of enrich that might flow from ads and numbing rivers of slop.
Why do we look at art, watch videos/movies? Is that replicable as a function of text, other existing media, and 3-30 cents of compute per second? I'm pretty functionalist about these things, and at some point it probably won't be possible to tell the difference. But until then, at which point we might just say 'death of the author', it seems like a category error.
I do work with artists that use video and image generation models to create stuff, but from what I can tell they're interested in faster iteration and controlling a lot of intermediate steps (their graphs can get pretty labyrinthine).
newswasboring 1 hours ago [-]
> As in, what work or enjoyment does someone actually get from this?
I have been pondering this and have come out with a single statement. It allows you to create the missing piece in the art you want to create. Assets for games, music for the lyrics you wrote, or just a whole song to justify a crazy dance you want to do. Whenever AI art is discussed, people tend to be so purist about art. One person cannot do everything in a project they take on to express themselves. Usually people come back with then get someone else to do it for you. I think that is an economic argument as people are trying to protect artist pay. I get that. But is it fair to just not let something they want to create because they don't posses every talent needed to do this?
visarga 14 hours ago [-]
> As in, what work or enjoyment does someone actually get from this? Why do we look at art, watch videos/movies?
I like to generate songs from obscure poems
msabalau 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, most people using AI for creative projects spend a lot of time and attention mastering their tools, and figure out how to adapt them into their creative processes. AI can dramatically lower the cost of indie productions, while also a allowing a broader range of stories to be told. Even the most successful film makers need to bow and scrape to get their projects funded, democratizing visual media can be a good thing, even if you, personally, are no more likely to do this than you are to pick up Photoshop or record a podcast.
I enjoy making short films with AI. When my latest short screens at a festival in Ocotber, alongside traditional and AI films, hopefully the audience will like it too.
The quick "one shot" video generation might be slop to you, or I. But if someone wants to send it as birthday greeting to their aunt, and they both enjoy it, what business is it of ours?
visarga 14 hours ago [-]
The cheaper it is to produce, the more daring it can be. Which is a good thing.
thisisauserid 15 hours ago [-]
Google's main source of revenue is advertising not enriching people's lives. It's not a charity.
jiggawatts 15 hours ago [-]
Kids love image and video generation! The former is cheap enough to do just because it is fun.
I have a young boy, and whenever he builds an impressive "scene" from LEGO (like a diorama or whatever), I take a couple of reference pictures with my phone and make it into a "real" movie scene, cartoon, or whatever. He loves it, and this motivates him to build more and bigger things out of LEGO.
If he builds something really special, I might actually fork over the $5 to use Omni to turn his LEGO creation into a 10-second video instead of a still image. It'll blow his mind!
PS: There also are cheap and even free phone apps that make stop-motion animation trivial. We've already made a couple of videos of his toys moving around that way.
cube00 14 hours ago [-]
Draft videos more efficiently in 360p
While it sounds great you're quickly disappointed after you run the same prompt at standard resolution only to get a different result because it's non deterministic.
kridsdale1 12 hours ago [-]
Can you hold the seed constant?
cube00 12 hours ago [-]
No option I could see in their Web UI.
Their changelog suggests using their new upscaler but I've had nothing but disappointment from upscalers.
Upscale when ready: Users on paid tiers can seamlessly upgrade their favorite clips using our new 360p to 720p upscaler.
Gecko4072 17 hours ago [-]
So Seedance is good primarily because of TikTok and this because of YouTube. I wonder what portion of all recorded video is privately held in hard drives at people’s homes or Apple photos. Of course there is data labeling and cleaning but is the next evolution just a question of access? Same goes for LLMs. Would people be willing to sell their data? Kind of a messed up way to make yourself obsolete. Or there is a limit to scaling?
polytely 16 hours ago [-]
I'm still getting major uncanny valley from any of the videos featuring humans, something about them disgusts me. I guess I should be glad I'm still able to distinguish them.
bahmboo 16 hours ago [-]
You knew upfront that it was generated. I did too so the first thing I did was look at the lips of the actors convincing myself that there were flaws.
When it comes to fish swimming around I don't think I would be able to reliably tell what was real vs generated even with deep inspection.
aloknnikhil 16 hours ago [-]
Something in their eyes. Looks very robotic / lifeless for me. And the sound-mixing is very off. Clearly feels like the voice was layered on top of whatever sound is in the background and not blended.
kzrdude 16 hours ago [-]
I don't think I can see the difference. I just have my skin crawl because I'm expecting to see something off and generally have a bad feeling about it.
chermi 15 hours ago [-]
Google we ain't falling for it. #neverforget3.5prowithinamonth
peter_d_sherman 9 hours ago [-]
>"Draft videos more efficiently in 360p
Generate lightweight previews in 360p resolution up to 60% faster
and at a third of the cost compared to Omni 1.1’s standard 720p resolution. This is helpful for rapid prototyping, storyboard iteration, and quick rendering in developer platforms."
This is a great idea, to have a low-resolution mode for additional speed to create previews, do test runs, create rapid prototypes, etc.
My curiousity is, what's the absolute useable minimum that this could be?
That is, would/could 240p resolution work? If so, what about 144p? How about lower? Then, could those images be upscaled quickly (and is the result still usable?) with a faster image upscaling-only neural network?
The reason why knowing such lower numbers / lower bounds -- is because they could be important for additional cost/time savings and/or running derived LLM's on local resource-constrained hardware...
Anyway, great post, great idea, and we welcome Gemnini Omni 1.1 Flash to the ever-expanding list of LLM/AI's!
Melatonic 3 hours ago [-]
Surprised they don't have something in between a video generation and image generation model (literally like storyboarding) which still took into account physics and world knowledge. You could probably (relatively cheaply) generate decently high resolution storyboards and then have something to directly feed a video model at the end.
SpyCoder77 15 hours ago [-]
So we are just making up numbers now, huh
tiahura 17 hours ago [-]
wish some of these frontier models supported 3d.
sashank_1509 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shreya1999 15 hours ago [-]
Raw generation quality is becoming table stakes; controllability might be the more important battleground.
overflowy 16 hours ago [-]
If you're using any of these generated videos in any professional setting, I don't think I will be able to ever use your business.
visarga 14 hours ago [-]
Only AI code is holy, video is sinful.
CmonGoogle 16 hours ago [-]
The AI brand fragmentation at Google is not yet a problem because everyone is pretending:
x There are so-called “SOTA” or “frontier” models that are more effective than the other ones (independent of harnessing and routing)
x OpenAI and Anthropic have all the SOTA models and lead all the innovation
x Google’s moat is its search bread/butter (it’s the only reason they’re relevant)
All 3 operating assumptions are - I think - false.
What Google has done that the “cuter products” (Claude, ChatGPT) haven’t is connected relatively standard LLMs to an externally valuable live service.
As more companies realize that is where all the value is (the service) and not in the AI capability, then products (and humans) become important again.
Google should just be Google again, and Gemini should be Gemini, off to the side. Omni confuses everyone (and angers some iykyk), they should resolve “AI mode”, rename Gemma? and consolidate the brand overall so it’s clear what Google is.
Google is search.
It helps people on all sides of the market find what they’re looking for.
I don’t really see how repeatedly reinventing and rebranding the same AI chat UX is accomplishing anything toward that goal.
bahmboo 16 hours ago [-]
> Google is search.
Implicit to that is "find". Their AI integration into search has really hit its stride for me. They have that search box (or speech prompt) hard wired into people and they are finally iterating and crafting AI into that experience. They really failed hard initially.
I know others have worse experiences than me but Google knows a lot about me so maybe that affects my results. YMMV
CmonGoogle 12 hours ago [-]
> YMMV
It does. Very commonly it will get acronyms wrong or assume I mean something else, even when it should be in my “ad profile” or whatever it bases it off.
Often I think the search engine is working perfectly then the LLM is ruining it in delivery.
There are other UIs besides chat
bahmboo 6 hours ago [-]
You (we) type in some words. 2-8 roughly. You hit enter. Are you saying that in the website results that are presented they are skewed by the LLM taking off to somewhere you aren't intending? Steering you off - like to a place they want you to go?
You say "ruining the delivery". I believe I understand. It is not traditional www text search.
I do have a problem with most chat ai's that always ask a question at the end of their answer. This is where configurability is more important to me than absolute performance. e.g. "don't end an answer with a question unless it is directly relevant to the current conversation.
Yes there are many other UIs besides chat. The default chat UI really bothered me at first. Seemed cheesy. However the majority of human interaction is "chat".
Something that is really really cool in this tech is the vision and audio and text models that naturally cluster similar things in massive multi-dimensional arrays. I have a hard time mapping nut~squirrel~food~imageofnut~dogsaspredators~whateves. How does that condense?
We have come so far on the audio transcription dimension. In this discussion context yes it is still chat but we've moved to a different place in the brain. Not radically different (humans without visual sight come to mind in how the process goes from photons to perception (also see hank green's vid on how the eyes are part of the brain)).
Anyway hope this isn't a throwaway account. That username doesn't inspire confidence in that regard.
What the hell am I doing?
[edit: made things more clear about my un-clear thoughts! I did not shift things in the intent space]
Quote under the video of a short Argentinian footballer wearing no 10 with "RESSC" on his back. Can't make it up.
For example: https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unau...
Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
That’ll be somewhat detrimental to me perhaps (which isn’t certain), but that’s okay. I’d rather attempt to adapt to a changing world.
A union doesn't give you unilateral power; it just gives you a better seat at the bargaining table. Capital pools its resources to negotiate better as a single bloc; why shouldn't labor as well?
For your unique approach to the problems at hand. Yes, 90% of the code written is CRUD, but when it's not, how it's solved matters.
This is why we have grown with id Software games. They solved the problems, created new paths and methods for limited hardware for their time.
This is why we praised DivX and XviD back in the day. They solved problems again which are caused by the limits of the computers.
The way one solves problems matter, makes one valuable. This is why we do research and create new ways to do things.
In short, your creativity is being sold/sprayed to masses.
You are part of a whole. You are not alone.
Saying you don’t mind to adapt is insulting.
Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon (and in many cases, the benefits are specifically to the more senior union members vis a vis the less senior ones.)
In the US. In the UK all the major unions I know don't require membership and fight for all employees in the industries they represent. E.g. as a software developer on a research project at a University I got all the negotiated benefits of the academic Union.
If you're talking about AB 1751 (Missing Middle Townhome Ownership Act) I think you have this exactly backwards.
> Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon
As opposed to what? You and the GGP phrase this as a dichotomy, but I'm really curious what the other side of this is, because "not being in a union" doesn't erase your self interest or all the many many groups of people doing the same that don't feel like they're apparently being overly self interested by forming corporations, governments, non-profits, advocacy groups, etc, etc, etc
I read it more like they're against trying to stop, hinder, or prevent the use of new technology, simply because it's personally threatening.
And I feel the same way. If I was part of a union, I would believe in the collective bargaining power, but I wouldn't necessarily believe we should use that to pursue every single possible agenda that might benefit us. And I've personally pooled my capital with others in the past in order to achieve certain outcomes. And in those situations I also didn't attempt to reach so far as to limit the totally valid freedoms of others just because I knew it might be better for me.
Acting in the interest of a collective doesn't mean one must also abandon the ethics they usually employ when acting in their solo self interest.
Unions can be a deterrent to this. If you have sectoral bargaining, you can’t get a better deal anywhere because everyone pays the same. Or even if it’s within a single company, you’re just stuck with whatever scheme the union bosses agreed to.
But also, unions are a deterrent to new employers since fewer people want to start companies in industries where unions have taken over. They’re a nightmare to deal with. Fewer employers means less competition means worse services.
We have a dynamic economy with lots of competition. It’s easy to switch jobs and find a better place to work. We should not want to give this up.
It was cynically selfish and short-sighted. The US from 1980–2020 is a perfect example of how much more complex systems, economies, worker dynamics, and second/third/nth order effects are.
Competition is generally good for the consumer, but Americans need to wake up to the fact that it's not built into the system, it's to be regulated into it, and competing is only good so far as it doesn't turn into a race to the bottom (which again, is a matter of a regulator setting the bar).
I don’t have any objection to voluntary unions. Meaning people can join them for support or collective bargaining, but that citizens can just opt to not employ anyone in the union. Unions could be support structures for workers, instead they are mafia bosses.
When have you not been able to get timely medical treatment at the fault of nurses ?
localized gains, distributed loss.
a computer can never be sad or horny or have taste. it can only make product. i also think artists should be paid living wages with good working conditions.
thank you SAG-AFTRA, WGA, IATSE, AEMI and Teamsters.
Neither can a record player. Nevertheless, we consume recorded music.
So far ;-)
The former is obviously unfair to the person whose identity is stolen. The latter is sour grapes from people who want to control the future.
I also can't bring myself to get incensed over someone using a robot to write code. It's literally the modern equivalent of smashing knitting looms.
Union = a group of people defending their rights and that includes the right to a life that isn't at the utter mercy of perpetual enshittification due to the infinite mechanical plodding of heartless (by definition) megacorporations that would never hesitate to eradicate peoples' livelihoods and treat humans as material for the orphan grinder if they could get away with it.
And by the way, they do, if you haven't noticed.
What is “your class of people”, and why is it threatened by what other people do with coding robots?
You can try to dress it up as an intellectual argument, but at root it’s the same thing that the luddites were trying to do: defending your preferred lifestyle from technological advances.
We, the ditch diggers of the world, support your unqualified resistance to the use of steam shovels! Fewer holes, slower!
Caring about your ability to pay your bills, and support your family is "self-interested" in the same way that choosing to not drive into oncoming traffic is "self-interested".
Yes, exactly. Do not advocate for yourself and your colleagues by joining them in a united front. Your voice does not matter. You will continue to adapt to widening wage disparities.
You will accept a pay cut and increased productivity goals and be happy to continue adapting as your cost of living keeps on climbing.
It is if it makes it worse for everyone else.
>California’s legislation passed AB 2602 and AB 1836 in September 2024, prohibiting media companies from using AI to replicate actors’ performances without their consent.
it's a very reasonable law, but it is not the win you seem to believe it to be. the actors who refuse to consent will simply be passed over in favor of those who don't. no law will ever be passed to force companies to employ humans over machines, and if it were, the industry would move elsewhere. this is not without precedent :)
speech models have got so good so quickly that you can already replace a VA -- even an AAA prima donna -- with a teenager from Fiverr, who will simply bruteforce the right inflection.
Seems like a reasonable take
If your students are in Oklahoma, your teachers also have to be in Oklahoma. If the Oklahoma teachers unionize, you have no option but to hire those unionized teachers if you want your students taught. If your bank is in Oklahoma, you can hire programmers in London or buy a SaaS from a company based in Geneva.
Programmers also have much less of a reason to unionize, as "quit and go work somewhere else" is often a realistic option. This is usually not the case for teachers, where the only employer seeking their skills in the area is the government, whose idea of what teacher salaries should be is not based on market forces.
e.g a lot of video game studios even the AAA ones could be co-ops. same as a lot of SAAS software companies. Linear - just announced a tender offer. I don't see a reason - why linear couldn't work as a co-op.
I think too many just expect that they can get by like before because they're a 10x engineer or whatever
Inexplicably for the current moment, AI has so far actually meant I have even more to do instead of less. I expect that to change eventually... but man, is it a bit of whiplash to go from wondering if my job will be around in 10 years to starting the work day and being more backed up than ever. Doubly so since the rate of change does not seem to be very evenly distributed by tech role.
Spoiler alert: unions can help with that.
To be fair, most of us spent our entire career trying our best to automate ourselves away one way or another, and always seen that as our job description.
Some people dislike automation altogether and like the computational aspect. Most people seem to enjoy constructing virtual worlds and Rube Goldberg machines.
Computation IS automation
It's kind of hypocritical to change just because it's now a different industry being impacted.
In my experience this is what almost everyone thinks, right up to the point where it starts happening to them.
And it isn't just an individual blind spot, organizations suffer from the same thing in the sense that many companies will be happy to automate away all their labor to avoid paying the "human tax" without giving much thought to the fact that the need for the company itself will also be automated away soon after.
If you can replace nearly all of your workers with some cheap tokens and prompts, everyone else who previously would have been a customer can replace your whole company with the same thing.
Useful idiots always go first after the goal is accomplished.
They settled for a large undisclosed sum out of court. But largely won unfortunately as unionisation efforts failed
It is possible. But it's quite uncommon in this industry in the US.
And given the current administration, it is hard to trust you'd get fair enforcement of labor laws if the company did illegal things to block unionization.
In any case, the overwhelming majority of jobs is non-unionized and I don't think that software developers can stop technological changes by unionizing.
Sweden just has an "office worker" union.
https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen
Now, they cannot prevent offshoring or AI use or replacements. Very very rarely if ever.
But they can negotiate a large layoff and give better pay/conditions during work etc. This view that unions can prevent anything... when so many jobs have gone to east EU (all amazing and good at what they do but lets face it, it is due to pay) so yea there wont be any union preventing AI...
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762...
* https://i.ibb.co/ccqKZ71L/keenlore.png
* https://i.ibb.co/1t3W0JqZ/keenlore-02.png
* https://i.ibb.co/LdBqHwKB/keenlore-03.png
I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about and how we don't descend into a pit of neverending photocopies of things people once loved in the 1990s/2000s.
* $250 per finished hour for the narrator (lowest professional rate).
* 200k to 270k words.
* 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours.
* Books 1 to 3 cost $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250, respectively.
My novel has 8 major characters, including the 3 narrators, and 25+ minor characters. That price tag is daunting, presumably in USD. This would mean investing $7,750 CAD in crafting an audiobook, which may not even sell, much less recoup the investment.
In contrast, a locally hosted solution has a wallet cost of pennies for electricity plus my time to develop the system.
To me it's been obvious for a while now: there won't be one
It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.
I was bored yesterday and started watching a stupid documentary series about UFOs/UAP on Netflix. It was immediately obvious that the voice over was AI slop bullshit. All I could do is stop watching and thumb down it, but they still have my money. :(
Articles and discussions pop up from time here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
All these demos are focused on how easy it makes everything. Easy is great, but if everyone is able to make instant cute cat videos or whatever it just devalues it. I want to see turning a photo into a rigged 3d model, letting the artist animate and then generate the video. This technology could be used to increase creative expression, but instead it's being used to squeeze out creative expression
The "slop" phase is early AI, like chunky ugly very early 3D graphics where you can see the triangles.
I'm already seeing images generated by first-generation diffusion models like Stable Diffusion 1.5 (which is small enough to run on a phone) used ironically as meme generators due to the now-retro silliness of what they generate.
There could easily be at least some time period of low skilled ugly people acting in approximate but shitty ways in cheap sets just to give an input reference to a model and then describing the differences in text, yielding gorgeous people speaking with prestigious accents doing stuff in fancy locations in the output.
It has nothing to do with skill. Both were very skilled jobs. Draftsman as well despite many people going to it straight from school. But computers and CAD mean that it is now necessary for someone to do a STEM degree to be a draftsman. Recorded audio made many stage musicians redundant. It is cheaper to do it this way and gets superior results, that is all, there is no further agenda.
Now too, the next generation of voice actors and many other knowledge workers will have to go up the value chain one step and operate or potentially build these tools (in whatever form they mature to in a decades time).
The current generation of voice actors will face the same situation as many before in the performance industry - stage musicians/performers for example that were made redundant by recorded audio. The reality is that most of them just left and dispersed into the economy doing completely unrelated jobs.
For software and generally computer engineers, this new primitive happens to itself be software, so it's less of a transition and an easier upskilling path to learn to build it. And building it is one step higher in the value chain than simply using it. That is a structural advantage.
But now that we are automating white collar work... where will people go? I'm a 36 year-old veteran who has returned to college and so many of the younger students seem to be filled with despair.
I have hope for the future, but I think there will be an uncomfortable period of time.
This slow transition period will also help answer the "where will they go" questions. We can't answer them right now.
Ultimately, everything we do is in service of social political and personal human incentives, and I think the effect of that is discounted when people make these takeoff predictions for AI and "AGI"
And jobs where quality is paramount and or there is greater chance of risk / bodily harm
Society seems to be very bad at that, and we end up with high frequency traders making millions while teachers are paid peanuts.
one youtuber used irl footage, with hands and stuff - so I know there's human behind the camera
the other was a letsplay that reacted to events just fine emotionally
and yet the uncanny valley of the sound is in full force. Maybe youtube has done something with the codecs?
I feel sad
it always sucks at everything else.
The page instant scrolled suddenly back to previous video examples after I scrolled down. It was disorienting.
If anything FF gets left out because usage is so low.
I've been following this for a long time. They were leaving Firefox out when its usage wasn't low.
Probably the typical backdoor executive mandate that led to death by "sprint prioritization":
Yes, we will for sure work on the Firefox compatibility bug, Dave-Open-Source-Enthusiast-Google-Dev.
But we can only pick up 10 bugfixing tickets this sprint and the ticket you highlighted, as the entire team agrees, is priority #12.
<repeat every sprint, where during the sprint 9-10 new higher priority items magically appear just in time for the next sprint>
Death by slow asphyxiation.
>Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added.
https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...
Billion with a B, as in 10 zeroes, not 7.
Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?
And, Veo and omni simply were better than Sora
And, Youtube is huge both as a place where video contents goes and where can be trained from. Microdramas are starting to become a real category--14 Billion USD, 90% of it made with AI.
Chinese video models can be more immediately impressive, but none of them come close to beat the value of Google's Flow. Especially when you are throwing away a lot of generations as part of the creative process. Which is what you have to do to make longer content with any video model.
OpenAI needed to be able to focus. Google can walk and chew gum, and they're not going to run out of money to buy chewing gum.
https://youtu.be/QaiecWzeHFM?si=UV6eF-m514nCOFe0&t=156
I work in advertising and some days I spent a lot of money using these models. The amount and rapidity of prototyping using them has changed everything about advertising pre production.
Previously when making video ads you'd need to actually create the video. Actors, cameramen, editors - you name it. Now a new video ads is just a prompt away, directly inside the ad-spend web UI too no doubt.
People say Google have lost and that they're having their lunch eaten by anthropic, but I am not so sure...
That's old news. People are saying the chinese models/labs are eating anthropic lunch.
Google is selling shovels, leasing mines, buy stakes in "competitors" and doing it's own exploration/mining. When you look at the full picture, it kinda doesn't even look like Gemini matters that much to them overall.
Gemma 4 I am way more impressed by than whatever the top ranking model is
I never personally got the least bit excited about Sora or nanobanana or whatever video/audio generation thing. But I guess I'm just not their customer. I do love the read-side of it though.
The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening.
I think it's reasonable to not completely drain one's cash reserves trying to stay ahead in a race where participants may very clearly be about to run straight off of a cliff.
Sure downside would be not learning from people using your model for coding, if we're on the cusp of huge leaps in self-improvement. But there is a reasonable case for avoiding desperate scramble, especially if other parts of the business can also create value with the compute.
For example, PDF's and powerpoints can be generated using agentic coding by things like https://bento.page or other ways of generating them in an agentic coding fashion.
A lot of browser automation could/is also done by agentic coding.
It can also help them set up and configure self hosted software with the help of LLM's and debugging if its working or not.
You can create videos using Manim and remotion.dev and also excalidraw-animate and generate excalidraw files agentically if what you need is more vector style graphics (which surprisingly can fit into many ideas) rather than say a real life human waving video/more photo-realistic video (but I must say that this has certainly its own pros/use-cases as well).
It might sound self-explainatory but turns out that coding can represent a wide range of problems!
Version 3.1 has plenty of room for improvement, yet they don't seem to be giving the attention it deserves or at least communicating accordingly.
It may be that they wish to slow their cadence of releases, or develop their models to focus more in a different direction, etc. No matter what the actual reasoning, they have chosen to not compete in the same race, and I cannot say I fault them.
They never gave an official answer as to why, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
They did not decide it wasn't worth spending the money to train.
They absolutely spent the money.
Also, look at Flash 3.5 to 3.7. Flash 3.7 is a genuinely decent Sonnet 5 class model. Flash 3.7 is quite efficient too. Also, whatever was spent training 3.5 pro is probably not wasted. However, as a strategy, when I see models like Kimi K3, Fable, Sol. If you discard "because the model sucked" what other alternatives or potential options might exist?
I thought of a quite a few and they are far more compelling and interesting to me.
(Also Gemini models tend to be pretty decent at more than just programming. Enterprise AI use is more than just software eng / programming)
If you'd told me at the end of Cloud Next 2025 that by now Google still wouldn't have a competitive offering to agentic coding offerings from Anthropic (Claude Code + Fable) or OpenAI (Codex + Sol), I wouldn't have believed you.
In our non-coding use cases where we're embedding models in our product, we're also not reaching for GCP stuff. Because Anthropic has the mindshare of our engineers and product folks, since it's what they use every day.
They mentioned that they have already started pretraining Gemini 4, which will be the full ground up rip-your-face-off-expensive training that is often discussed.
In the real world out there, Google and Microsoft are absolutely dominating enterprise customers.
Every single non-tech office worker I know is writing Gemini "gems" (sort of claude prompts/skills) or prompting Copilot to help drafting board meeting notes, insurance contracts updates that reflect changes in regulations, make quick loan feasibility assessments before passing them to the relevant office, presentations, etc, etc.
I'm talking insurance, banking, consultancy, manufacturing, etc, etc.
Why? Because Google and Microsoft already were in these companies, all they had to do is "oh, you also have AI now with your plans". Procurement and data compliance are the first thing businesses have to sort out. They were already sorted out.
Google doesn't need to have the best coding model or triumph in meaningless benchmarks, it only needs their models to get better and cheaper while serving them to their existing customer base.
They are playing a different game.
And Microsoft, doesn't even need to care about models at all, they can provide whatever open or closed AI with their services and have to focus on the harness in Excel or Github/Azure Copilot or whatever.
E.g. while developers in most of my clients use whatever they prefer or the company pays for, the remaining 90% uses either Google or Microsoft products.
Not a single one has incentives into venturing into OpenAI or Anthropic or Z.Ai lands because they might be better at some benchmark that is completely irrelevant to their tasks of updating powerpoints or summarizing incoming emails.
Google is an advertising company with an enterprise SaaS branch. I bet they have chosen to focus on running the most efficient "everybody" model instead of running a heavy model for coders.
When using Gemini for other tasks than coding, it is actually pretty good. It grounds well with Google search and gives mostly correct, well written answers to many niche questions.
Pro models are mainly for coding agent work; it doesn't necessarily make them any money.
Meanwhile, I'm happily using Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX to finally finish the lip syncing to recorded dialog on my abandoned 20 year old Flash animation hobby projects.
Minimax H3 is about 240Gb alone, how do you do? How much quantised is it, and how good are the results?
I agree though. My issue is the cost for using AI video models is way too high for anyone not building anything serious with them, at the same time they are too restricted for actually using professionally. Prompting them with text to get something generated is cute, but then you just end up creating slop that everyone hates, ultimately devaluing the power of these things.
Why do we look at art, watch videos/movies? Is that replicable as a function of text, other existing media, and 3-30 cents of compute per second? I'm pretty functionalist about these things, and at some point it probably won't be possible to tell the difference. But until then, at which point we might just say 'death of the author', it seems like a category error.
I do work with artists that use video and image generation models to create stuff, but from what I can tell they're interested in faster iteration and controlling a lot of intermediate steps (their graphs can get pretty labyrinthine).
I have been pondering this and have come out with a single statement. It allows you to create the missing piece in the art you want to create. Assets for games, music for the lyrics you wrote, or just a whole song to justify a crazy dance you want to do. Whenever AI art is discussed, people tend to be so purist about art. One person cannot do everything in a project they take on to express themselves. Usually people come back with then get someone else to do it for you. I think that is an economic argument as people are trying to protect artist pay. I get that. But is it fair to just not let something they want to create because they don't posses every talent needed to do this?
I like to generate songs from obscure poems
I enjoy making short films with AI. When my latest short screens at a festival in Ocotber, alongside traditional and AI films, hopefully the audience will like it too.
The quick "one shot" video generation might be slop to you, or I. But if someone wants to send it as birthday greeting to their aunt, and they both enjoy it, what business is it of ours?
I have a young boy, and whenever he builds an impressive "scene" from LEGO (like a diorama or whatever), I take a couple of reference pictures with my phone and make it into a "real" movie scene, cartoon, or whatever. He loves it, and this motivates him to build more and bigger things out of LEGO.
If he builds something really special, I might actually fork over the $5 to use Omni to turn his LEGO creation into a 10-second video instead of a still image. It'll blow his mind!
PS: There also are cheap and even free phone apps that make stop-motion animation trivial. We've already made a couple of videos of his toys moving around that way.
While it sounds great you're quickly disappointed after you run the same prompt at standard resolution only to get a different result because it's non deterministic.
Their changelog suggests using their new upscaler but I've had nothing but disappointment from upscalers.
Upscale when ready: Users on paid tiers can seamlessly upgrade their favorite clips using our new 360p to 720p upscaler.
When it comes to fish swimming around I don't think I would be able to reliably tell what was real vs generated even with deep inspection.
Generate lightweight previews in 360p resolution up to 60% faster
and at a third of the cost compared to Omni 1.1’s standard 720p resolution. This is helpful for rapid prototyping, storyboard iteration, and quick rendering in developer platforms."
This is a great idea, to have a low-resolution mode for additional speed to create previews, do test runs, create rapid prototypes, etc.
My curiousity is, what's the absolute useable minimum that this could be?
That is, would/could 240p resolution work? If so, what about 144p? How about lower? Then, could those images be upscaled quickly (and is the result still usable?) with a faster image upscaling-only neural network?
The reason why knowing such lower numbers / lower bounds -- is because they could be important for additional cost/time savings and/or running derived LLM's on local resource-constrained hardware...
Anyway, great post, great idea, and we welcome Gemnini Omni 1.1 Flash to the ever-expanding list of LLM/AI's!
x There are so-called “SOTA” or “frontier” models that are more effective than the other ones (independent of harnessing and routing)
x OpenAI and Anthropic have all the SOTA models and lead all the innovation
x Google’s moat is its search bread/butter (it’s the only reason they’re relevant)
All 3 operating assumptions are - I think - false.
What Google has done that the “cuter products” (Claude, ChatGPT) haven’t is connected relatively standard LLMs to an externally valuable live service.
As more companies realize that is where all the value is (the service) and not in the AI capability, then products (and humans) become important again.
Google should just be Google again, and Gemini should be Gemini, off to the side. Omni confuses everyone (and angers some iykyk), they should resolve “AI mode”, rename Gemma? and consolidate the brand overall so it’s clear what Google is.
Google is search.
It helps people on all sides of the market find what they’re looking for.
I don’t really see how repeatedly reinventing and rebranding the same AI chat UX is accomplishing anything toward that goal.
Implicit to that is "find". Their AI integration into search has really hit its stride for me. They have that search box (or speech prompt) hard wired into people and they are finally iterating and crafting AI into that experience. They really failed hard initially.
I know others have worse experiences than me but Google knows a lot about me so maybe that affects my results. YMMV
It does. Very commonly it will get acronyms wrong or assume I mean something else, even when it should be in my “ad profile” or whatever it bases it off.
Often I think the search engine is working perfectly then the LLM is ruining it in delivery.
There are other UIs besides chat
You say "ruining the delivery". I believe I understand. It is not traditional www text search.
I do have a problem with most chat ai's that always ask a question at the end of their answer. This is where configurability is more important to me than absolute performance. e.g. "don't end an answer with a question unless it is directly relevant to the current conversation.
Yes there are many other UIs besides chat. The default chat UI really bothered me at first. Seemed cheesy. However the majority of human interaction is "chat".
Something that is really really cool in this tech is the vision and audio and text models that naturally cluster similar things in massive multi-dimensional arrays. I have a hard time mapping nut~squirrel~food~imageofnut~dogsaspredators~whateves. How does that condense?
We have come so far on the audio transcription dimension. In this discussion context yes it is still chat but we've moved to a different place in the brain. Not radically different (humans without visual sight come to mind in how the process goes from photons to perception (also see hank green's vid on how the eyes are part of the brain)).
Anyway hope this isn't a throwaway account. That username doesn't inspire confidence in that regard.
What the hell am I doing?
[edit: made things more clear about my un-clear thoughts! I did not shift things in the intent space]