4 ms·

Most probably they employ overseas, underpaid workers with non-standard English accents and so they include text-to-speach in the production process to smoothen

Most probably they employ overseas, underpaid workers with non-standard English accents and so they include text-to-speach in the production process to smoothen the end result. I won't argue wether text to speech qualifies as an AI but I agree they must be making bank.

asveikau 2y ago
I think it's unusual to assume they are based in the US and employ/underpay foreigners. A lot of people making the content are just from somewhere else.
derefr 2y ago
> Most probably they employ overseas, underpaid workers with non-standard English accents and so they include text-to-speach in the production process to smoothen the end result. Might also be an AI voice-changer (i.e. speech2speech) model. These models are most well-known for being used to create "if [famous singer] performed [famous song not by them]" covers — you sing the song yourself, then run your recording through the model to convert the recording into an equivalent performance in the singer's voice; and then you composite that onto a vocal-less version of the track. But you can just as well use such a model to have overseas workers read a script, and then convert that recording into an "equivalent performance" in a fluent English speaker's voice. Such models just slip up when they hit input phonemes they can't quite understand the meaning of. (If you were setting this up for your own personal use, you could fine-tune the speech2speech model like a translation model, so it understands how your specific accent should map to the target. [I.e., take a bunch of known sample outputs, and create paired inputs by recording your own performances of them.] This wouldn't be tenable for a big low-cost operation, of course, as the recordings would come from temp workers all over the world with high churn.)
- spywaregorilla 2y ago
  Can you identify any of these models?
bee_rider 2y ago
I wonder if they are making bank. Seems like a race to the bottom, there’s no barrier to entry, right?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- atomic128 2y ago
  Right, content creators are in a race to the bottom. But the people who position themselves to profit from the energy consumption of the hardware will profit from all of it: the LLMs, the image generators, the video generators, etc. See discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41733311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41733311 Imagine the number of worthless images being generated as people try to find one they like. Slop content creators iterate on a prompt, or maybe create hundreds of video clips hoping to find one that gets views. This is a compute-intensive process that consumes an enormous amount of energy. The market for chips will fragment, margins will shrink. It's just matrix multiplication and the user interface is PyTorch or similar. Nvidia will keep some of its business, Google's TPUs will capture some, other players like Tenstorrent (https://tenstorrent.com/hardware/grayskull https://tenstorrent.com/hardware/grayskull) and Groq and Cerebras will capture some, etc. But at the root of it all is the electricity demand. That's where the money will be made. Data centers need baseload power, preferably clean baseload power. Unless hydro is available, the only clean baseload power source is nuclear fission. As we emerge from the Fukushima bear market where many uranium mining companies went out of business, the bottleneck is the fuel: uranium.
  - valval 2y ago
    You spent a lot of words to conclude that energy is the difference maker between modern western standards of living and whatever else there is and has been.
    - atomic128 2y ago
      Ok, too many words. Here's a summary: Trial and error content-creation using generative AI, whether or not it creates any real-world value, consumes a lot of electricity. This electricity demand is likely to translate into demand for nuclear power. When this demand for nuclear power meets the undersupply of uranium post-Fukushima, higher uranium prices will result.

asveikau 2y ago

I think it's unusual to assume they are based in the US and employ/underpay foreigners. A lot of people making the content are just from somewhere else.

derefr 2y ago

> Most probably they employ overseas, underpaid workers with non-standard English accents and so they include text-to-speach in the production process to smoothen the end result. Might also be an AI voice-changer (i.e. speech2speech) model. These models are most well-known for being used to create "if [famous singer] performed [famous song not by them]" covers — you sing the song yourself, then run your recording through the model to convert the recording into an equivalent performance in the singer's voice; and then you composite that onto a vocal-less version of the track. But you can just as well use such a model to have overseas workers read a script, and then convert that recording into an "equivalent performance" in a fluent English speaker's voice. Such models just slip up when they hit input phonemes they can't quite understand the meaning of. (If you were setting this up for your own personal use, you could fine-tune the speech2speech model like a translation model, so it understands how your specific accent should map to the target. [I.e., take a bunch of known sample outputs, and create paired inputs by recording your own performances of them.] This wouldn't be tenable for a big low-cost operation, of course, as the recordings would come from temp workers all over the world with high churn.)

spywaregorilla 2y ago
Can you identify any of these models?

bee_rider 2y ago

I wonder if they are making bank. Seems like a race to the bottom, there’s no barrier to entry, right?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
atomic128 2y ago
Right, content creators are in a race to the bottom. But the people who position themselves to profit from the energy consumption of the hardware will profit from all of it: the LLMs, the image generators, the video generators, etc. See discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41733311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41733311 Imagine the number of worthless images being generated as people try to find one they like. Slop content creators iterate on a prompt, or maybe create hundreds of video clips hoping to find one that gets views. This is a compute-intensive process that consumes an enormous amount of energy. The market for chips will fragment, margins will shrink. It's just matrix multiplication and the user interface is PyTorch or similar. Nvidia will keep some of its business, Google's TPUs will capture some, other players like Tenstorrent (https://tenstorrent.com/hardware/grayskull https://tenstorrent.com/hardware/grayskull) and Groq and Cerebras will capture some, etc. But at the root of it all is the electricity demand. That's where the money will be made. Data centers need baseload power, preferably clean baseload power. Unless hydro is available, the only clean baseload power source is nuclear fission. As we emerge from the Fukushima bear market where many uranium mining companies went out of business, the bottleneck is the fuel: uranium.
- valval 2y ago
  You spent a lot of words to conclude that energy is the difference maker between modern western standards of living and whatever else there is and has been.
  - atomic128 2y ago
    Ok, too many words. Here's a summary: Trial and error content-creation using generative AI, whether or not it creates any real-world value, consumes a lot of electricity. This electricity demand is likely to translate into demand for nuclear power. When this demand for nuclear power meets the undersupply of uranium post-Fukushima, higher uranium prices will result.