This reads as shareholder fluff. Every business says, “we’re using AI to…” in their presentations these days. Five or six years ago the phrase was, “we’re using the blockchain to…”, and we even had a brief window where, “in the metaverse,” was popular.
Blockchain goes unmentioned now; the same will be true for AI.
They’ve had years of using all the stolen material they can get their hands on1 and the results are underwhelming. This “exploratory partnership” may apply a veneer of legality, but Runway et al have already sucked the well dry. A legally acquired copy of the Twilight Saga isn’t going to stir things up.
1. which a reasonable person can presume to be all available media on the internet, from youtube to the pirate bay, at least until any of these companies says otherwise.
Nuclear is great, even fission. But I really wish the US would embrace next gen reactors and small modular reactors. All the legacy stuff is just too complex and expensive.
Well, if AI took your job, you could always do this instead and sit on the beach. Only problem maybe, that everyone and their dog will be on the beach with you doing the same thing:
(headline is a bit click-baity, but the article is legit)
Some early experiments with the Strawberry model - the reasoning upgrade of ChatGPT.
Also explains why they’re happy to spend all this money on GPUs. Nobody really cares about your video, all they want to do is print money figuratively.
If you are like me you’ve watched all of these videos with a mixture of awe and dread. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion we could be rattling tin cups on a sidewalk a year or two from now. YES i know you can’t really art direct it yet. YES i know it suffers from some form of uncanny valley. It’s just the rate of progress we are witness to in… has it even been 2 years yet? makes it hard to ignore an inevitable conclusion. Or does it?
Therefore i submit “exhibit A” and ask for everyone to use their imaginations… It’s quite a leap i realize and comparing what we all do here to the fast-food industry is a back-handed compliment at best yet it’s hard to ignore some similarities… Its all automation at the end of the day…
Does this mean we’ll be fixing crappy videos genAI created? Kidding aside, this technology is going to change the way we work but not in any sense we can guess now, imho.
For the same reason some shops are ripping out the self-check out lanes. And no, it’s not malicious shrink. But human error, frustration, and stress. Turning expensive machines into long-term losses.
Hm, very skeptical of the self checkout creates more jobs position being pushed here for several reasons @TimC which would be a very long OT to Ai post:)
edit- sorry Tim, meant to reply to your post directly.
So my 1st and only counter to the jury on “exhibit A” your honor is that Kiosk tech is not the same as Ai technology:) These Kiosks don’t have agency and they’re not telling their robot friends on the grill what the order is, YET…
The bigger picture here is less about self-checkout specifically, but about a fair amount of technology being hyped and even adopted only to find out later that it had short legs.
There is no way of predicting where AI will eventually land on that scale. There is a tremendous amount of hype, and no shortage of sexy demos, and some interesting early stage real world applications. And more money at stake than any tech bet in recent history.
As with the self-checkout, the verdict won’t come out for a few more years, when the dust starts to settle. But it’s good to keep in mind that it will be a toss up.
AI is stuck between a solution in search of a use case on one end, and the standard for imagery we consume changing yet again. In the end it will come down to what the consumer finds acceptable and interesting. Cool demos make executives and money people drool, but consumers only care about entertaining content, regardless how we got there.
If the consumer accepts what AI delivers, nothing else matters, whether it bothers us or not.
