Comment by incognito124
Comment by incognito124 3 days ago
Watched it a while ago. Made me seriously think about AI and what we should use it for. I feel like all the entertainment use cases (image and video gen) are a complete waste.
Comment by incognito124 3 days ago
Watched it a while ago. Made me seriously think about AI and what we should use it for. I feel like all the entertainment use cases (image and video gen) are a complete waste.
None of that has reached the market yet. If it was up to the sciences alone, AI couldn't bear the weight of its own costs.
It also needs to be vertically integrated to make money, otherwise it's a handout to the materials science company. I can't see any of the AI companies stretching themselves that thin. So they give it away for goodwill or good PR.
Science in general tends to be subsidised and given away because as basic understanding of the world is hard to monopolise. I'm not sure how Einstein would have done a general relativity startup.
That said Deepmind are doing a spin-off making drugs https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/
That's not really true. Commercial weather prediction has reached the market, and a drug (sorry, can't find the new s link) that was found by AI-accelerated drug discovery is now in clinical testing
The reason why vertical integration is important for AI investment is that if AI is commoditized, then that AI-acceleration will costs pennies for drugs that are worth billions.
I don't see how OpenAI or Google can profit from drug discovery. It's nearly pure consumer surplus (where the drug companies and patients are the consumers).
Right. More accurate predictions for meta-data based killings which as championed by US in their war on terror
I relocated to Australia last year. This country is obsessed with the BoM and I don't know why. The few times I've used it, it was either outright wrong, or I couldn't even find the weather info I wanted (like, is it going to rain tomorrow), and they only added TLS in 2025!
LLMs in general are ML based, need a lot of data and compute. The same infrastructure as any other ML based system.
The AI/AGI hype in my opinion could be better renamed to ml with data and compute 'hype' (i don't like the word hype as it doesn't fit very well)
unfortunately all this work on sora has very real military use case. I personally think all this investment in sora by open AI is largely to create a digital fog of war. Now when a rocket splatters a 6 year old palestinian girl's head across the pavement like a jackson polock painting, They will be able to claim its AI generated by state sponsored actors in order to prevent disruption to the manufactured consent aperatus.
Why are images and video a complete waste? This makes no sense to me.
Right now the generators aren’t effective but they are definitely stepping stones to something better in the future.
If that future thing produces video, movies and pictures better than anything humanity can produce at a rate faster than we can produce things… how is that a waste?
It can arguably be bad for society but definitely not a waste.
Let me phrase it a bit differently, then: AI generated cats in Ghibli style are a waste, we should definitely do less of that. I did not hold that opinion before the documentary
Education-style infographics and videos are OK.
I’m not even talking about this. Those cat videos are just stepping stones for academy award winning masterpieces of cinema like dune. All generated by AI on a click in one second.
It might be shocking to you but some people believe there is more to life than producing and consuming "content" faster and faster.
Most of it is used to fool people for engagement, scam, politics or propaganda, it definitely is a huge waste of resource, time, brain and compute power. You have to be completely brainwashed by consumerism and techsolutionism to not see it
I see it. But you’re lacking imagination to what I’m referring to. It’s also fucking obvious. Like I’m obviously not referring to TikTok videos and ads and that kind of bullshit every one on earth knows about and obviously hates. You’re going on as if it’s “shocking” to me when what you’re talking about is obvious as night and day. What’s shocking to me is that you’re not getting my point and I’m obviously talking about something less well known.
Take your favorite works of art, music and cinema. Imagine if content on that level can be generated by AI in seconds. I wouldn’t classify that as a “waste” at all. You’re obviously referring to bullshit content, I’m referring to content that is meaningful to you and most people. That is where the trendline is pointing. And my point, again is this:
We don’t know the consequence of such a future. But I wouldn’t call such content created by AI a waste if it is objectively superior to content created by humans.
I actually had a counter thought a few years ago.
We consume A LOT of entertainment every day. Our brains like that a lot.
Doesn't has to be just video but even normal people not watching tv at all entertain themselves through books or events etc.
Live would be quite boring.
Parent said "entertainment use cases" are a complete waste, not all uses of images and video. I don't agree, but do particularly find educational use cases of AI video are becoming compelling.
I help people turn wire rolling shelf racks into the base of their home studio, and AI can now create a "how to attach something to a wire shelf rack" without me having to do all the space and rack and equipment and lighting and video setup, and just use a prompt. It's not close to perfect yet, but it's becoming useful.
> particularly find educational use cases of AI video are becoming compelling.
compelling graphics take a long time to create. for education content creators, this can be too expensive as well. my high school physics teacher would hand draw figures on transparencies on an overhead projector. if he could have produced his drawings as animations cheap and fast using AI, it would have really brought his teaching style (he really tried to make it humorous) to another level. I think it would be effective for his audience.
imagine the stylized animations for things like the rebooted Cosmos, NOVA, or even 3Blue1Brown on YT. there is potential for small teams to punch above their weight class with genAI graphics
If AI can produce movies, video and art better aka “more entertaining” then humans than how is it a waste?
But it’s not. I think most can agree that there really has not been any real entertainment from genAI beyond novelty crap like seeing Lincoln pulling a nice track at a skate park. No one wants to watch genAI slop video, no one wants to listen to genAI video essays, most people do not want to read genAI blog posts. Music is a maybe, based on leaderboards, but it is not like we ever had a lack of music to listen to.
DeepMind's new [edit: apparently now old] weather forecast model is similar in architecture to the toys that generate videos of horses addressing Congress or cats wearing sombreros. The technology moves forward and while some of the new applications are not important, other applications of the same technology may be important.
Is it really similar? I was under the impression it's a GNN of a (really dense) polyhedron, not a diffusion model
GenCast is a diffusion model, but it is not the "new" one like I said. Apparently there is another one. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10772
The chatbots and image editors are just a side-show. The real value is coming in e.g. chemistry (Alpha fold etc all), fusion research, weather prediction etc.