4 ms·

>I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp." I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the s

>I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp." I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.

echelon 1y ago
Speaking of Netflix - I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing. Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches. I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real. For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.
- AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary. There's currently more anti-AI hype than AI hype imho. As in there's literally people claiming it's completely useless and not going to change a thing. Which is crazy.
  - lokar 1y ago
    That’s an anecdote about intensity, not volume. The extremes on both sides are indeed very extreme (no value, replacing most white collar jobs next year). IME the volume is overwhelming on the pro-LLM side.
    - whatevertrevor 1y ago
      Yeah the conversation on both extremes feels almost religious at times. The pro LLM hype feels more disconcerting sometimes because there are literally billions if not trillions of dollars riding on this thing, so people like Sam Altman have a strong incentive to hype the shit out of it.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    One sides extremes says LLM wont change a thing, the other sides extremes says LLM will end the world. I don't think the ones saying it wont change a thing are the most extreme here.
    - wyre 1y ago
      Luckily for humanity reality is somewhere in between extremes, right?
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    >Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary iterative. we had a shittier version of this 20 years ago
- mh- 1y ago
  It's quite incredible how fast the generative media stuff is moving. The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted).
- didibus 1y ago
  You're right, and I also think LLMs have an impact. The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples. That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things. I think that's what not happened yet. Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?
  - jopsen 1y ago
    > Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ? Good question? Is that necessary, or is it sufficient for AI to be integrated in every kind of CAD/design software out there? Because I think most productivity tools whether CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc will benefit from AI. That's a huge market.
    - didibus 1y ago
      I guess there are two markets to consider. The market of the AI foundation models itself, will they have customers long term willing to pay a lot of money for access to the models? I think yes, there will be demand for foundational AI models, and a lot of it. The second market is the market of CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc. This market will not grow because they integrate AI into their products, or that is the question, will it? Otherwise, you could almost hypothesize these market will shrink as AI is going to be for them an additional cost of business that customers will expect to be included. Or maybe they manage to sell to their customers a premium for the AI features where they take a cut above that of what they pay the foundational models under the hood, that's a possibility.
- realo 1y ago
  As long as you do not make ads with four-fingered hands, like those clowns ... :) https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique-au-festival-d-ete-de-quebec/l-art-est-humain.php https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique...
  - echelon 1y ago
    https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kalshi-advertising-nba-finals https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal... Typical large team $300,000 ad made for < $2,000 in a weekend by one person. It's going to be a bloodbath.
    - dingnuts 1y ago
      oh no the poor advertisers
      - whatevertrevor 1y ago
        Cheaper poorer quality ads means a bad time for us, people who are being incessantly targeted by this crap. Websites are already finding creative ways around DNS blocklists for ads serving.
    - mjr00 1y ago
      > Kalshi's Jack Such declined to disclose Accetturo's fee for creating the ad. But, he added, "the actual cost of prompting the AI — what is being used in lieu of studios, directors, actors, etc. — was under $2,000." So in other words, if you ignore the costs of paying people to create the ad, it barely costs anything. A true accounting miracle!
      - echelon 1y ago
        Do you pay people to pump your gas? How about harvesting your whale blubber to power your oil lamp at night? The nature of work changes all the time. If an ad can be made with one person, that's it. We're done. There's no going back to hiring teams of 50 people. It's stupid to say we must hire teams of 50 to make an advertisement just because. There's no reason for that. It's busy work. The job is to make the ad, not to give 50 people meaningless busy work. And you know what? The economy is going to grow to accommodate this. Every single business is now going to need animated ads. The market for video is going to grow larger than we've ever before imagined, and in ways we still haven't predicted. Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before. You're going to have silly videos for corporate functions. Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis. Whatever. There'll be a market for everything, and 100,000 times as many creators with actual autonomy. In some number of years, there is going to be so much more content being produced. More content in single months than in all human history up to this point. Content that caters to the very long tail. And you know what that means? Jobs out the wazoo. More jobs than ever before. They're just going to look different and people will be doing more.
- jaimebuelta 1y ago
  I see the point at the moment on “low quality advertising”, but we are still far from high quality video generated for AI. It’s the equivalent of those cheap digital effects. They look bad for a Hollywood movie, but it allows students to shot their action home movies
  - echelon 1y ago
    You're looking at individual generations. These tools aren't for casual users expecting to 1-shot things. The value is in having a director, editor, VFX compositor pick and choose from amongst the outputs. Each generation is a single take or simulation, and you're going to do hundreds or thousands. You sift through that and explore the latent space, and that's where you find your 5-person Pixar. Human curated AI is an exoskeleton that enables small teams to replace huge studios.
    - neaden 1y ago
      Is there any example of an AI generated film like this that is actually coherent? I've seen a couple short ones that are basically just vibe based non-linear things.
      - gazarsgo 1y ago
        https://www.instagram.com/aist.aistories/ https://www.instagram.com/aist.aistories/ has tons of counterpoints, the Sam Altman vs Zuckerberg matrix recreation has been making the rounds...
      - echelon 1y ago
        I recommend following specific artists rather than the medium as a whole. Anything by sketch comedian Carter Jay Allen: https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialArtCraftStudios/videos https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialArtCraftStudios/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY - Marvel parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - DC parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 - here's him compositing real life actors with AI. "Bots in the Hall", a fairly prolific Hollywood film and TV writer who wants to remain unnamed: https://www.youtube.com/@BotsInTheHall/videos https://www.youtube.com/@BotsInTheHall/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - "Paywall Sphinx" is pretty good. "Meta Puppet", who works for one of the big AI studios, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtPcpWvAEt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtPcpWvAEt0 - "Plastic" doesn't look great, but it keeps getting crazier as you watch it https://www.metapuppet.ai/ https://www.metapuppet.ai/ Some of the festival winners purposely stay away from talking since AI voices and lipsync are terrible, eg. "Poof" by the infamous "Pizza Later" (who is responsible for "Pepperoni Hug Spot") : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc "Talk Boys", who only posts on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/talkboys/ https://www.reddit.com/user/talkboys/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ime5m8/birdwatchers_nepo_babies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ime5m8/birdwatche... Marcos Higueras, an animator fully embracing AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZC6XmEmK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZC6XmEmK0 Most of the professional AI usage is still winding up in commercial use cases where you don't even know it's been used at all.
- duncangh 1y ago
  Sorry I’m late to this conversation but am very interested in the specifics of your comment and the micro domain of AI in studio productions and the econs of the bidding landscape as well. Contact in bio :)
dml2135 1y ago
It's a logical fallacy that just because some technology experienced some period of exponential growth, all technology will always experience constant exponential growth. There are plenty of counter-examples to the scaling of computers that occurred from the 1970s-2010s. We thought that humans would be traveling the stars, or at least the solar system, after the space race of the 1960s, but we ended up stuck orbiting the earth. Going back further, little has changed daily life more than technologies like indoor plumbing and electric lighting did in the late 19th century. The ancient Romans came up with technologies like concrete that were then lost for hundreds of years. "Progress" moves in fits and starts. It is the furthest thing from inevitable.
- jopsen 1y ago
  True, but adoption of AI has certainly seen exponential growth. Improvement of models may not continue to be exponential. But models might be good enough, at this point it seems more like they need integration and context. I could be wrong :)
  - tracker1 1y ago
    At what cost though? Most AI operations are losing money, using a lot of power, including massive infrastructure costs, not to mention the hardware costs to get going, and that isn't even covering the level of usage many/most want, and certainly aren't going to pay even $100s/month per person that it currently costs to operate.
    - martinald 1y ago
      This is a really basic way to look at unit economics of inference. I did some napkin math on this. 32x H100s cost 'retail' rental prices about $2/hr. I would hope that the big AI companies get it cheaper than this at their scale. These 32 H100s can probably do something on the order of >40,000 tok/s on a frontier scale model (~700B params) with proper batching. Potentially a lot more (I'd love to know if someone has some thoughts on this). So that's $64/hr or just under $50k/month. 40k tok/s is a lot of usage, at least for non-agentic use cases. There is no way you are losing money on paid chatgpt users at $20/month on these. You'd still break even supporting ~200 Claude Code-esque agentic users who were using it at full tilt 40% of the day at $200/month. Now - this doesn't include training costs or staff costs, but on a pure 'opex' basis I don't think inference is anywhere near as unprofitable as people make out.
dormento 1y ago
> I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games. Can you elaborate? That sounds interesting.
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  too soon to get it to market, though it obviously all sold perfectly well, people were sufficiently wowed by it

echelon 1y ago

Speaking of Netflix - I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing. Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches. I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real. For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago
Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary. There's currently more anti-AI hype than AI hype imho. As in there's literally people claiming it's completely useless and not going to change a thing. Which is crazy.
- lokar 1y ago
  That’s an anecdote about intensity, not volume. The extremes on both sides are indeed very extreme (no value, replacing most white collar jobs next year). IME the volume is overwhelming on the pro-LLM side.
  - whatevertrevor 1y ago
    Yeah the conversation on both extremes feels almost religious at times. The pro LLM hype feels more disconcerting sometimes because there are literally billions if not trillions of dollars riding on this thing, so people like Sam Altman have a strong incentive to hype the shit out of it.
- Jensson 1y ago
  One sides extremes says LLM wont change a thing, the other sides extremes says LLM will end the world. I don't think the ones saying it wont change a thing are the most extreme here.
  - wyre 1y ago
    Luckily for humanity reality is somewhere in between extremes, right?
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  >Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary iterative. we had a shittier version of this 20 years ago
mh- 1y ago
It's quite incredible how fast the generative media stuff is moving. The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted).
didibus 1y ago
You're right, and I also think LLMs have an impact. The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples. That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things. I think that's what not happened yet. Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?
- jopsen 1y ago
  > Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ? Good question? Is that necessary, or is it sufficient for AI to be integrated in every kind of CAD/design software out there? Because I think most productivity tools whether CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc will benefit from AI. That's a huge market.
  - didibus 1y ago
    I guess there are two markets to consider. The market of the AI foundation models itself, will they have customers long term willing to pay a lot of money for access to the models? I think yes, there will be demand for foundational AI models, and a lot of it. The second market is the market of CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc. This market will not grow because they integrate AI into their products, or that is the question, will it? Otherwise, you could almost hypothesize these market will shrink as AI is going to be for them an additional cost of business that customers will expect to be included. Or maybe they manage to sell to their customers a premium for the AI features where they take a cut above that of what they pay the foundational models under the hood, that's a possibility.
realo 1y ago
As long as you do not make ads with four-fingered hands, like those clowns ... :) https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique-au-festival-d-ete-de-quebec/l-art-est-humain.php https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique...
- echelon 1y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kalshi-advertising-nba-finals https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal... Typical large team $300,000 ad made for < $2,000 in a weekend by one person. It's going to be a bloodbath.
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    oh no the poor advertisers
    - whatevertrevor 1y ago
      Cheaper poorer quality ads means a bad time for us, people who are being incessantly targeted by this crap. Websites are already finding creative ways around DNS blocklists for ads serving.
  - mjr00 1y ago
    > Kalshi's Jack Such declined to disclose Accetturo's fee for creating the ad. But, he added, "the actual cost of prompting the AI — what is being used in lieu of studios, directors, actors, etc. — was under $2,000." So in other words, if you ignore the costs of paying people to create the ad, it barely costs anything. A true accounting miracle!
    - echelon 1y ago
      Do you pay people to pump your gas? How about harvesting your whale blubber to power your oil lamp at night? The nature of work changes all the time. If an ad can be made with one person, that's it. We're done. There's no going back to hiring teams of 50 people. It's stupid to say we must hire teams of 50 to make an advertisement just because. There's no reason for that. It's busy work. The job is to make the ad, not to give 50 people meaningless busy work. And you know what? The economy is going to grow to accommodate this. Every single business is now going to need animated ads. The market for video is going to grow larger than we've ever before imagined, and in ways we still haven't predicted. Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before. You're going to have silly videos for corporate functions. Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis. Whatever. There'll be a market for everything, and 100,000 times as many creators with actual autonomy. In some number of years, there is going to be so much more content being produced. More content in single months than in all human history up to this point. Content that caters to the very long tail. And you know what that means? Jobs out the wazoo. More jobs than ever before. They're just going to look different and people will be doing more.
jaimebuelta 1y ago
I see the point at the moment on “low quality advertising”, but we are still far from high quality video generated for AI. It’s the equivalent of those cheap digital effects. They look bad for a Hollywood movie, but it allows students to shot their action home movies
- echelon 1y ago
  You're looking at individual generations. These tools aren't for casual users expecting to 1-shot things. The value is in having a director, editor, VFX compositor pick and choose from amongst the outputs. Each generation is a single take or simulation, and you're going to do hundreds or thousands. You sift through that and explore the latent space, and that's where you find your 5-person Pixar. Human curated AI is an exoskeleton that enables small teams to replace huge studios.
  - neaden 1y ago
    Is there any example of an AI generated film like this that is actually coherent? I've seen a couple short ones that are basically just vibe based non-linear things.
    - gazarsgo 1y ago
      https://www.instagram.com/aist.aistories/ https://www.instagram.com/aist.aistories/ has tons of counterpoints, the Sam Altman vs Zuckerberg matrix recreation has been making the rounds...
    - echelon 1y ago
      I recommend following specific artists rather than the medium as a whole. Anything by sketch comedian Carter Jay Allen: https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialArtCraftStudios/videos https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialArtCraftStudios/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY - Marvel parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - DC parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 - here's him compositing real life actors with AI. "Bots in the Hall", a fairly prolific Hollywood film and TV writer who wants to remain unnamed: https://www.youtube.com/@BotsInTheHall/videos https://www.youtube.com/@BotsInTheHall/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - "Paywall Sphinx" is pretty good. "Meta Puppet", who works for one of the big AI studios, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtPcpWvAEt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtPcpWvAEt0 - "Plastic" doesn't look great, but it keeps getting crazier as you watch it https://www.metapuppet.ai/ https://www.metapuppet.ai/ Some of the festival winners purposely stay away from talking since AI voices and lipsync are terrible, eg. "Poof" by the infamous "Pizza Later" (who is responsible for "Pepperoni Hug Spot") : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc "Talk Boys", who only posts on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/talkboys/ https://www.reddit.com/user/talkboys/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ime5m8/birdwatchers_nepo_babies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ime5m8/birdwatche... Marcos Higueras, an animator fully embracing AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZC6XmEmK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZC6XmEmK0 Most of the professional AI usage is still winding up in commercial use cases where you don't even know it's been used at all.
duncangh 1y ago
Sorry I’m late to this conversation but am very interested in the specifics of your comment and the micro domain of AI in studio productions and the econs of the bidding landscape as well. Contact in bio :)

dml2135 1y ago

It's a logical fallacy that just because some technology experienced some period of exponential growth, all technology will always experience constant exponential growth. There are plenty of counter-examples to the scaling of computers that occurred from the 1970s-2010s. We thought that humans would be traveling the stars, or at least the solar system, after the space race of the 1960s, but we ended up stuck orbiting the earth. Going back further, little has changed daily life more than technologies like indoor plumbing and electric lighting did in the late 19th century. The ancient Romans came up with technologies like concrete that were then lost for hundreds of years. "Progress" moves in fits and starts. It is the furthest thing from inevitable.

jopsen 1y ago
True, but adoption of AI has certainly seen exponential growth. Improvement of models may not continue to be exponential. But models might be good enough, at this point it seems more like they need integration and context. I could be wrong :)
- tracker1 1y ago
  At what cost though? Most AI operations are losing money, using a lot of power, including massive infrastructure costs, not to mention the hardware costs to get going, and that isn't even covering the level of usage many/most want, and certainly aren't going to pay even $100s/month per person that it currently costs to operate.
  - martinald 1y ago
    This is a really basic way to look at unit economics of inference. I did some napkin math on this. 32x H100s cost 'retail' rental prices about $2/hr. I would hope that the big AI companies get it cheaper than this at their scale. These 32 H100s can probably do something on the order of >40,000 tok/s on a frontier scale model (~700B params) with proper batching. Potentially a lot more (I'd love to know if someone has some thoughts on this). So that's $64/hr or just under $50k/month. 40k tok/s is a lot of usage, at least for non-agentic use cases. There is no way you are losing money on paid chatgpt users at $20/month on these. You'd still break even supporting ~200 Claude Code-esque agentic users who were using it at full tilt 40% of the day at $200/month. Now - this doesn't include training costs or staff costs, but on a pure 'opex' basis I don't think inference is anywhere near as unprofitable as people make out.

dormento 1y ago

> I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games. Can you elaborate? That sounds interesting.

skeezyboy 1y ago
too soon to get it to market, though it obviously all sold perfectly well, people were sufficiently wowed by it