Comment by echelon

Comment by echelon 3 days ago

23 replies

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Speaking of Netflix -

I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing.

Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches.

I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real.

For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.

AnotherGoodName 3 days ago

Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary. There's currently more anti-AI hype than AI hype imho. As in there's literally people claiming it's completely useless and not going to change a thing. Which is crazy.

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  • lokar 3 days ago

    That’s an anecdote about intensity, not volume. The extremes on both sides are indeed very extreme (no value, replacing most white collar jobs next year).

    IME the volume is overwhelming on the pro-LLM side.

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    • whatevertrevor 2 days ago

      Yeah the conversation on both extremes feels almost religious at times. The pro LLM hype feels more disconcerting sometimes because there are literally billions if not trillions of dollars riding on this thing, so people like Sam Altman have a strong incentive to hype the shit out of it.

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  • Jensson 2 days ago

    One sides extremes says LLM wont change a thing, the other sides extremes says LLM will end the world.

    I don't think the ones saying it wont change a thing are the most extreme here.

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    • wyre 2 days ago

      Luckily for humanity reality is somewhere in between extremes, right?

      Reply View 0 replies
didibus 3 days ago

You're right, and I also think LLMs have an impact.

The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples.

That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things.

I think that's what not happened yet.

Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?

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  • jopsen 2 days ago

    > Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?

    Good question? Is that necessary, or is it sufficient for AI to be integrated in every kind of CAD/design software out there?

    Because I think most productivity tools whether CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc will benefit from AI. That's a huge market.

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    • didibus 2 days ago

      I guess there are two markets to consider.

      The market of the AI foundation models itself, will they have customers long term willing to pay a lot of money for access to the models?

      I think yes, there will be demand for foundational AI models, and a lot of it.

      The second market is the market of CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc. This market will not grow because they integrate AI into their products, or that is the question, will it? Otherwise, you could almost hypothesize these market will shrink as AI is going to be for them an additional cost of business that customers will expect to be included. Or maybe they manage to sell to their customers a premium for the AI features where they take a cut above that of what they pay the foundational models under the hood, that's a possibility.

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jaimebuelta 3 days ago

I see the point at the moment on “low quality advertising”, but we are still far from high quality video generated for AI.

It’s the equivalent of those cheap digital effects. They look bad for a Hollywood movie, but it allows students to shot their action home movies

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mh- 3 days ago

It's quite incredible how fast the generative media stuff is moving.

The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted).

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realo 3 days ago

As long as you do not make ads with four-fingered hands, like those clowns ... :)

https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique...

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  • echelon 3 days ago

    https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal...

    Typical large team $300,000 ad made for < $2,000 in a weekend by one person.

    It's going to be a bloodbath.

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    • mjr00 3 days ago

      > Kalshi's Jack Such declined to disclose Accetturo's fee for creating the ad. But, he added, "the actual cost of prompting the AI — what is being used in lieu of studios, directors, actors, etc. — was under $2,000."

      So in other words, if you ignore the costs of paying people to create the ad, it barely costs anything. A true accounting miracle!

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      • echelon 2 days ago

        Do you pay people to pump your gas?

        How about harvesting your whale blubber to power your oil lamp at night?

        The nature of work changes all the time.

        If an ad can be made with one person, that's it. We're done. There's no going back to hiring teams of 50 people.

        It's stupid to say we must hire teams of 50 to make an advertisement just because. There's no reason for that. It's busy work. The job is to make the ad, not to give 50 people meaningless busy work.

        And you know what? The economy is going to grow to accommodate this. Every single business is now going to need animated ads. The market for video is going to grow larger than we've ever before imagined, and in ways we still haven't predicted.

        Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before.

        You're going to have silly videos for corporate functions. Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis. Whatever. There'll be a market for everything, and 100,000 times as many creators with actual autonomy.

        In some number of years, there is going to be so much more content being produced. More content in single months than in all human history up to this point. Content that caters to the very long tail.

        And you know what that means?

        Jobs out the wazoo.

        More jobs than ever before.

        They're just going to look different and people will be doing more.

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        • mrtranscendence 2 days ago

          > Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before.

          And why would your local plumber hire someone to produce this funny action trailer (which I'm not convinced would actually help them from an advertising perspective), when they can simply have an AI produce that action funny action trailer without hiring anyone? Assuming models improve sufficiently that will become trivially possible.

          > Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis.

          Well, first of all, if the audience is "the most niche of audiences", then I'm not sure how that's going to lead to a sustainable career. And again -- if I want to see my niche historical fantasy interests come to life in a movie about Grace Hopper fighting vampire Nazis, why will I need a filmmaker to create this for me when I can simply prompt an AI myself? "Give me a fun action movie that incorporates famous computer scientists fighting Nazis. Make it 1.5 hours long, and give it a comedic tone."

          I think you're fundamentally overvaluing what humans will be able to provide in an era where creating content is very cheap and very easy.

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    • neaden 2 days ago

      This ad was purposefully playing off the fact that it was AI though, it was a large amount of short bizarre things like two old women selling Fresh Manatee out of the back of a truck. You couldn't replace a regular ad with this.

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      • echelon 2 days ago

        I've got friends at WPP. Heads are rolling.

        This is very much real and happening as we speak.

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    • dingnuts 3 days ago

      oh no the poor advertisers

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      • whatevertrevor 2 days ago

        Cheaper poorer quality ads means a bad time for us, people who are being incessantly targeted by this crap.

        Websites are already finding creative ways around DNS blocklists for ads serving.

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