So you're talking about the rendering part, which has obviously seen tremendous improvement from AI-based techniques e.g. neural material rendering, ReSTIR etc.

So you're talking about the rendering part, which has obviously seen tremendous improvement from AI-based techniques e.g. neural material rendering, ReSTIR etc. Since Catmull is known for contributions computer animation research, where the application of ML hasn't exactly thrived, at least not yet, to the same extent as rendering has, I assumed you were talking about geometry processing.