Yeah, even those looking for the full segment will have trouble finding it if they are not tech savvy and highly motivated.
A relative in their 60s saw headlines about the cancellation and wasn’t able to find it until I sent them the archive.org link. They are relatively well informed and competent with technology but never go around digging for hard to find media.
I think people on HN tend to overestimate how closely people follow news and how hard they are willing to work to seek out alternative sources of information. I’m with some extended family over the holidays. They might have seen this segment had it aired - I believe it was airing after some football game - but now there’s no chance of that happening. I don’t judge them for it at all, but most of their news consumption is passive through TV or social media. I think a lot of people follow news that way. Life’s busy.
It kind of makes me understand a little better how the censorship regime in other countries is so effective despite it being so easy to hop on a VPN. Raising the barrier to entry even a little reduces the audience from 10,000,000 to a fraction of that, even with the censorship itself being public knowledge.
The linked article states that their president has suggested that evacuations may be necessary if rationing isn't effective. I was a little shocked when I read this suggestion from another source, but public figures are talking about it.
There's some wind power in south central Texas as well. I'd thought it was more of a west Texas sight, but you also see them going down I37 and I69E toward Brownsville.
I think there's a bubble around AI, but I don't think I agree with this argument. Google search launched in 1998, and ChatGPT launched in 2022.
In 2001, if Google had gone under like a lot of .com bubble companies, I think the economic impact visible to people of the time would have been marginal. There was no Google News, Gmail, Android, and the alternatives (AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, MSN Search) would have been enough. Google was a forcing function for the others to compete with the new paradigm or die trying. It wasn't itself an economic behemoth the way it is today.
I think if OpenAI folded today, you'd still have several companies in the generative AI space. To me, OpenAI's reminiscent of Google in the late 90s in its impact, although culturally it's very different. It's a general purpose website anyone with an internet connection can visit, deep industry competitors are having to adapt to its model to stay alive, and we're seeing signs of a frothy tech bubble a few years after its founding. People across industry verticals, government, law, and NGOs are using it, and students are learning with it.
One counterpoint to this would be that companies like Google reacted to the rise of social media with stuff like Google+, but to me the level to which "AI" is baked into every product at Google exceeds that play by a great margin. At most I remember a "post to plus" link at the top of GMail and a few hooks within the contact/email management views. In contrast, they are injecting AI results into almost every search I make and across almost every product of theirs I use today.
If you fast forward 20 years, I would be surprised if companies specializing in LLMs were not major players the way today's tech giants are. Some of the companies might have the same names, but they'll have changed.
> At most I remember a "post to plus" link at the top of GMail and a few hooks within the contact/email management views.
Google probably could have been whatsapp but to push Google+ scrapped a successful gmail chat for hangouts, which you had to visit Google+ feed each time to open at first.
Running theory seems to be that someone found his flight reservation using his name and canceled it after he mentioned somewhere that he was leaving. He'd received various death threats for books he wrote and classes he taught and was leaving for personal safety to teach remotely for the year.
The timing is very suspicious given he was able to get his boarding pass and then denied at the gate, so I'm not sure what really happened.
I wonder if they're going to license this to brands for heavily personalized advertisement. Imagine being able to see videos of yourself wearing clothes you're buying online before you actually place the order, instead of viewing them on a model.
If they got the generation "live" enough, imagine walking past a mirror in a department store and seeing yourself in different clothes.
At that point, why even buy the clothes? Influencers will just post the video of the mockup on social media, which is the only reason they were considering it in the first place. Save themselves the foot fungus.
Then take the next step. Why even spend money going out? Generate a video of yourself with fake friends at a party and post that, while eating ice cream alone at home.
I was criticising and making a joke prediction about the practice, not suggesting you actually do it.
I agree with you regarding online validation. I would even go so far as saying that depending on online validation or fame in general for happiness is unhealthy and anyone who does should make it a priority to find alternative sources.
We probably haven't even scratched the surface of what will be done with this tech. When video becomes "easy", "quick", "affordable", and "automatable" (something never before possible on any of those dimensions) - it enables countless new things to be done.
Its still just video though. Its not a new type of media. My guess is it will play out same as self publishing on amazon. Ultra specific generas that monitize the infinite long tail.
I feel like the main problem with buying clothes online is there is no way to tell if they are actually good or fit right. The photos are all fake where it's just an image projected on a stock photo of someone in a shirt. Doesn't tell you what the material is like, doesn't tell you if it actually fits (an AI video model is just making up the fit).
I don't have to imagine it because it's probably the most COMMON fantasy that people who work in advertisement and marketing have every day.
Now... take it a STEP further. Remember the scene in Futurama where Fry tries on the Lightspeed Briefs and looks in the mirror to see a rather aspirational version of himself?
its called Virtual Try On (VTO) and there are plenty of models going there for static gfx, it is very reasonable to expect soon emerge those for video VTO.
Accurate virtual try on however is quite difficult, and users will quickly learn to distrust platforms that just generate something that"looks right".
You can prompt with a normal size 8 dress and "kim jungle un wearing a dress" and it will show you something that doesn't help you understand whether that dress would fit or not. You can ask for a tube dress and it will usually give him a big bust to hold it up. It's not useful for the purpose of visualing fit.
It will definitely be used for such just like image models already are for cheap tenu clothes, and our onions shopping experience will get worse.
Maybe this needs purpose built models like vibe-net or maybe you cab train a general purpose model to do it, but if they were spending the effort necessary to do so they'd be calling it out.
You don't need generative AI for that at all, snapchat filters have existed for a decade and are the same concept. A lot of brands have already adopted that.
I'm surprised I had to ctrl-f this far for the first snapchat mention. Same. All I see here is snapchat except on any platform. Far from a tiktok competitor and far from revolutionary.
Or, on the genAI side, Google marketed this use case heavily for Flash Image 2.5 (even if that's not the same type of generative model because it's geared for editing, it's still in the taxonomy)
Seems like a nice feature but the most important aspect is "fit" and I wouldn't trust these models to do that accurately. They'll most likely make everything fit perfectly. Should be fixable tho.
When the dust settles , that's probably going to be the most common application of these video models. Making automated social content kind of defeats the purpose; people empathize with other people, not with AI . (I guess that's why they didn't also make their interview video via AI)
But Sora /VEO will probably also revolutionize movies and tv content
A relative in their 60s saw headlines about the cancellation and wasn’t able to find it until I sent them the archive.org link. They are relatively well informed and competent with technology but never go around digging for hard to find media.
I think people on HN tend to overestimate how closely people follow news and how hard they are willing to work to seek out alternative sources of information. I’m with some extended family over the holidays. They might have seen this segment had it aired - I believe it was airing after some football game - but now there’s no chance of that happening. I don’t judge them for it at all, but most of their news consumption is passive through TV or social media. I think a lot of people follow news that way. Life’s busy.
It kind of makes me understand a little better how the censorship regime in other countries is so effective despite it being so easy to hop on a VPN. Raising the barrier to entry even a little reduces the audience from 10,000,000 to a fraction of that, even with the censorship itself being public knowledge.
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