7 ms·

Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

297 points by saretup 1mo ago

tiahura 1mo ago
wish some of these frontier models supported 3d.
petcat 1mo ago
I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.
- newyankee 1mo ago
  Everyone will probably go through the 5 stages of grief w.r.t AI adoption in their field and the gatekeepers will (rightfully) hold onto hallucination and errors as reasons to delay incorporation or to incorporate it with more human handholding.
- lambda 1mo ago
  Many screen and voice actors are unionized, and the unions have been striking and bargaining specifcially over these points. For example: https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unauthorized-ai-performances-the-sag-aftra-video-game-strike-and-performer-protections-under-the-new-collective-bargaining-agreement/ https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unau... Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
  - r_lee 1mo ago
    it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced I think too many just expect that they can get by like before because they're a 10x engineer or whatever
    - quaintdev 1mo ago
      It won't happen to me is what I used to think
      - georgemcbay 1mo ago
        > It won't happen to me is what I used to think In my experience this is what almost everyone thinks, right up to the point where it starts happening to them. And it isn't just an individual blind spot, organizations suffer from the same thing in the sense that many companies will be happy to automate away all their labor to avoid paying the "human tax" without giving much thought to the fact that the need for the company itself will also be automated away soon after. If you can replace nearly all of your workers with some cheap tokens and prompts, everyone else who previously would have been a customer can replace your whole company with the same thing.
        Melatonic 1mo ago
        Exactly. Or a competitor comes in and does what you do for half the cost and double the efficiency.
    - embedding-shape 1mo ago
      > it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced To be fair, most of us spent our entire career trying our best to automate ourselves away one way or another, and always seen that as our job description.
      - 12ags-18276 1mo ago
        No, that is just nerd heroism lore that indeed has always shown up in comments, that part is definitely true. Some people dislike automation altogether and like the computational aspect. Most people seem to enjoy constructing virtual worlds and Rube Goldberg machines.
        1mo ago
  - catigula 1mo ago
    Half of them are from India or China. Racial diversity is known to be detrimental to unionization. In fact, Amazon used this exact strategy to bust nascent Somali unions. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-Foods-uses-heat-mapping-to-track-unionisation-efforts https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
    - 12ahsgf 1mo ago
      Here is the obligatory scientific paper for those who cannot observe simple facts without a statistical analysis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0176268022001215 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762...
  - Lagoon3384_SWE 1mo ago
    That is an american take. Sweden just has an "office worker" union. https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen Now, they cannot prevent offshoring or AI use or replacements. Very very rarely if ever. But they can negotiate a large layoff and give better pay/conditions during work etc. This view that unions can prevent anything... when so many jobs have gone to east EU (all amazing and good at what they do but lets face it, it is due to pay) so yea there wont be any union preventing AI...
  - arjie 1mo ago
    Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested. It’s how other people oppose buildings near them because it blocks their view. I really don’t want to stop other people from writing software. If they want to use AI to do it so be it. That’ll be somewhat detrimental to me perhaps (which isn’t certain), but that’s okay. I’d rather attempt to adapt to a changing world.
    - koe123 1mo ago
      Thats great, although understand that unionizing protects the more vulnerable of also the software engineered. You not advocating for your rights also means weakening others. Is it still self interested to unionized from that perspective?
    - smallerize 1mo ago
      You may be surprised to know that residential areas in San Francisco are height limited, sometimes as short as 4 stories. They're not exactly anti-progress.
      - BeetleB 1mo ago
        Height limiting is anti-progress, which was his point.
        smallerize 1mo ago
        Ok SF needs somewhat higher-density housing. But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress. If the benefits accrue to only a few people, it's not progress.
        BeetleB 1mo ago
        > But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress. It is if it makes it worse for everyone else.
        deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
  - boredatoms 1mo ago
    No one has offered a union to join at any workplace Ive been at
    - lambda 1mo ago
      Yeah, the problem is, someone has to start the union. It takes work. You have to get the whole workforce to vote on it. A lot of software engineers believe (or believed) that they were too smart and professional to need a union. And of course, if management gets wind of it while you are working on setting up the vote, they may do all kinds of trickery, legal or illegal, to block it. It is possible. But it's quite uncommon in this industry in the US. And given the current administration, it is hard to trust you'd get fair enforcement of labor laws if the company did illegal things to block unionization.
  - vlyan 1mo ago
    >The union demanded clear protections to ensure that recordings of actors’ performances could not be copied without consent and compensation. >California’s legislation passed AB 2602 and AB 1836 in September 2024, prohibiting media companies from using AI to replicate actors’ performances without their consent. it's a very reasonable law, but it is not the win you seem to believe it to be. the actors who refuse to consent will simply be passed over in favor of those who don't. no law will ever be passed to force companies to employ humans over machines, and if it were, the industry would move elsewhere. this is not without precedent :) speech models have got so good so quickly that you can already replace a VA -- even an AAA prima donna -- with a teenager from Fiverr, who will simply bruteforce the right inflection.
    - Melatonic 1mo ago
      If they still have to pay an actual person though to license their likeness then they are much more likely to actually employ that person directly to get a better result. And in the cases where quality is not needed the person still gets paid for their AI likeness. Seems like a reasonable take
  - isoprophlex 1mo ago
    And thus the developers remain, until this very moment, ionized.
    - worthless-trash 1mo ago
      I appreciate.
  - dzonga 1mo ago
    I don't think software developers need to unionize - but to form French style co-ops. e.g a lot of video game studios even the AAA ones could be co-ops. same as a lot of SAAS software companies. Linear - just announced a tender offer. I don't see a reason - why linear couldn't work as a co-op.
    - ameliaquining 1mo ago
      Are the employees supposed to front the capital themselves?
  - epolanski 1mo ago
    Because software developers enjoyed scarcity for most of the fields existence and could barter themselves better conditions instead of falling back to unionized fixed incomes. In any case, the overwhelming majority of jobs is non-unionized and I don't think that software developers can stop technological changes by unionizing.
  - ameliaquining 1mo ago
    My objection has always been that advocates either can't or don't care to explain how such a thing would actually work from the perspective of a unionized engineer.
  - Melatonic 1mo ago
    Software engineers and VFX workers also tried to unionise back in the day and there was a giant wage fixing and anti competitive hiring scandal that was majorly illegal. Perpetuated by some of the biggest names in tech. They settled for a large undisclosed sum out of court. But largely won unfortunately as unionisation efforts failed
  - miki123211 1mo ago
    In the 21st century, the only professions that can successfully unionize are those you can't replace with workers from a non-unionized country. If your students are in Oklahoma, your teachers also have to be in Oklahoma. If the Oklahoma teachers unionize, you have no option but to hire those unionized teachers if you want your students taught. If your bank is in Oklahoma, you can hire programmers in London or buy a SaaS from a company based in Geneva. Programmers also have much less of a reason to unionize, as "quit and go work somewhere else" is often a realistic option. This is usually not the case for teachers, where the only employer seeking their skills in the area is the government, whose idea of what teacher salaries should be is not based on market forces.
- earthnail 1mo ago
  Work that doesn’t have a personal brand involved is basically dead. Arbitrary voice acting? Dead. It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.
  - Melatonic 1mo ago
    People pretty consistently vote with their wallet and are not excited to pay and consume media made by AI.
    - richrichardsson 1mo ago
      Unfortunately sometimes you can't even vote with your wallet. I was bored yesterday and started watching a stupid documentary series about UFOs/UAP on Netflix. It was immediately obvious that the voice over was AI slop bullshit. All I could do is stop watching and thumb down it, but they still have my money. :(
    - sumedh 1mo ago
      Do you have any stats for that?
- moscoe 1mo ago
  Sounds like a perfect application of AI. Some jobs should be automated.
  - tiagod 1mo ago
    I would rather hear human voices than synthesized ones. I don't care how realistic they sound. I'm not alone, and the sentiment will certainly grow.
    - chung8123 1mo ago
      As long as there are enough people than there will be a market. I think there are a lot of people that prefer human but don't want the human cost.
  - oblio 1mo ago
    Ok, let's go the other way round. Which jobs do you think should not be automated?
    - Melatonic 1mo ago
      Probably the ones we collectively value as human and are willing to pay for (in either our time or money or both). And jobs where quality is paramount and or there is greater chance of risk / bodily harm
      - oblio 1mo ago
        > Probably the ones we collectively value as human and are willing to pay for (in either our time or money or both). Society seems to be very bad at that, and we end up with high frequency traders making millions while teachers are paid peanuts.
    - ajjahs 1mo ago
      [dead]
- porridgeraisin 1mo ago
  A lot of it will get automated the same way very many industries got automated. A lot of physical labour got automated once a primitive for it was created. Similarly, we have now a primitive for automating knowledge work. In the next few years to a decade, as all the right training data and runtime environments are slowly consolidated for various fields, a lot will be automated. There is no inherent reason a voice actor must be an eternal job, the same way there was no inherent reason for a draftsman or stage musician to be an eternal job. It has nothing to do with skill. Both were very skilled jobs. Draftsman as well despite many people going to it straight from school. But computers and CAD mean that it is now necessary for someone to do a STEM degree to be a draftsman. Recorded audio made many stage musicians redundant. It is cheaper to do it this way and gets superior results, that is all, there is no further agenda. Now too, the next generation of voice actors and many other knowledge workers will have to go up the value chain one step and operate or potentially build these tools (in whatever form they mature to in a decades time). The current generation of voice actors will face the same situation as many before in the performance industry - stage musicians/performers for example that were made redundant by recorded audio. The reality is that most of them just left and dispersed into the economy doing completely unrelated jobs. For software and generally computer engineers, this new primitive happens to itself be software, so it's less of a transition and an easier upskilling path to learn to build it. And building it is one step higher in the value chain than simply using it. That is a structural advantage.
  - bubblemoth 1mo ago
    I don't really like comparing the way automation of the past displaced jobs to the way AI is/will displace jobs. The timeline is just faster and, more importantly, there were still plenty of other fields of work for people to go to. But now that we are automating white collar work... where will people go? I'm a 36 year-old veteran who has returned to college and so many of the younger students seem to be filled with despair. I have hope for the future, but I think there will be an uncomfortable period of time.
    - porridgeraisin 1mo ago
      I think people are overestimating the speed at which the transition will happen. I think it will happen much slower than is often portrayed online. This slow transition period will also help answer the "where will they go" questions. We can't answer them right now. Ultimately, everything we do is in service of social political and personal human incentives, and I think the effect of that is discounted when people make these takeoff predictions for AI and "AGI"
- space_fountain 1mo ago
  I'm really sad about how little creative control these tools have. They seem great for creating slop, but pretty useless for creating content that someone would love. I love the potential but text isn't really a great medium for describing artistic vision. All these demos are focused on how easy it makes everything. Easy is great, but if everyone is able to make instant cute cat videos or whatever it just devalues it. I want to see turning a photo into a rigged 3d model, letting the artist animate and then generate the video. This technology could be used to increase creative expression, but instead it's being used to squeeze out creative expression
  - bonoboTP 1mo ago
    Text is not the only input. You can provide 3d block outs with rudimentary animation, annotated images with arrows etc, voice recordings of one person acting out some emotion then mapping that to a different character's voice, other uses of video to video, etc. There could easily be at least some time period of low skilled ugly people acting in approximate but shitty ways in cheap sets just to give an input reference to a model and then describing the differences in text, yielding gorgeous people speaking with prestigious accents doing stuff in fancy locations in the output.
  - api 1mo ago
    That'll change. They'll get as many knobs as e.g. photoshop for image editing. You'll also be able, if not already, to use your own voice to communicate the emotion and tone you want but then have it re-render it in the voice of your choice. The "slop" phase is early AI, like chunky ugly very early 3D graphics where you can see the triangles. I'm already seeing images generated by first-generation diffusion models like Stable Diffusion 1.5 (which is small enough to run on a phone) used ironically as meme generators due to the now-retro silliness of what they generate.
- NooneAtAll3 1mo ago
  recently I encountered several youtubers in the uncanny valley of "is it Ai or really repetitive intonation pattern" one youtuber used irl footage, with hands and stuff - so I know there's human behind the camera the other was a letsplay that reacted to events just fine emotionally and yet the uncanny valley of the sound is in full force. Maybe youtube has done something with the codecs? I feel sad
  - bulder 1mo ago
    I know that there are at least a few content farms out there that specifically pump out "faceless video" to be resold, ie. those "hands in frame only" videos. The idea being that you can then put on some AI generated voiceover over them.
- thangalin 1mo ago
  It'll come quickly for audio books. I've been working on a locally hosted, fully containerized web application to narrate my sci-fi novel using a full cast of characters and a few distinct narrators: * https://i.ibb.co/ccqKZ71L/keenlore.png https://i.ibb.co/ccqKZ71L/keenlore.png * https://i.ibb.co/1t3W0JqZ/keenlore-02.png https://i.ibb.co/1t3W0JqZ/keenlore-02.png * https://i.ibb.co/LdBqHwKB/keenlore-03.png https://i.ibb.co/LdBqHwKB/keenlore-03.png
  - dormento 1mo ago
    This is very interesting! Imagine Silly Tavern, with dialog tagging and coloring of some sort, auto-generated talking heads. Almost a game engine.
  - ianmarcinkowski 1mo ago
    I would pay a few actors (mostly Star Trek TNG cast) money for a license to their voice. I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about and how we don't descend into a pit of neverending photocopies of things people once loved in the 1990s/2000s.
    - thangalin 1mo ago
      From reddit: * $250 per finished hour for the narrator (lowest professional rate). * 200k to 270k words. * 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours. * Books 1 to 3 cost $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250, respectively. My novel has 8 major characters, including the 3 narrators, and 25+ minor characters. That price tag is daunting, presumably in USD. This would mean investing $7,750 CAD in crafting an audiobook, which may not even sell, much less recoup the investment. In contrast, a locally hosted solution has a wallet cost of pennies for electricity plus my time to develop the system.
    - ChickeNES 1mo ago
      > I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about To me it's been obvious for a while now: there won't be one
      - 1mo ago
- dominotw 1mo ago
  it effects software develpoers because ai has compliers , tests , ci and bought tons of data in mercor. it always sucks at everything else.
- andsoitis 1mo ago
  > I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors. Articles and discussions pop up from time here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=Ai%20actors&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- anonzzzies 1mo ago
  Related; here in my city, every event, restaurant, cinema, delivery service etc have all images / posters generated, very obviously, by OpenAI. ‘Authentic Italian’ and then an AI generated menu. This must hurt companies that used to make these before; a friend was a good photographer and he says he does wedding since end last year as the work was plummeting. Not sure about stats but it’s just ‘normal’ here at least.
- qingcharles 1mo ago
  My ex is a professional voice actor. Someone recently gave her a negative review saying she was AI, so now even the humans are getting unfairly penalized. I also heard a promotional video recently that used her voice, that she hadn't done, so someone has already trained their voice model on her.
- DeusExMachina 1mo ago
  Relatedly, a friend told me that graphical design gigs dried up because everyone can make event fliers and posters with AI with results that are often better than those of designers.
037 1mo ago
Prompt engineering tip for Google employees: just add "P.S. Make sure the page works in Firefox too."
- fg137 1mo ago
  It is in their business interest to ignore Firefox.
  - fl4regun 1mo ago
    Then they aren't doing a very good job of it. >Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added. https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-revenue-share-doj-antitrust-remedies https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...
    - jorl17 1mo ago
      What people usually say is that Google merely wants Firefox to survive for anti-competitive reasons. Presumably that does not necessitate it actually being used (or be usable).
  - sva_ 1mo ago
    Hot take: Google keeps Mozilla/Firefox alive through the default search engine placement (which makes Mozilla millions each year) so they don't get designated as a monopoly with their browser.
    - BbzzbB 1mo ago
      That's lukewarm at most, doubt you'll find many people disagreeing here!
    - Vinnl 1mo ago
      And of course they're doing the same for Apple/Safari, which wouldn't survive without the $20 million default search engine placement deal.
Gecko4072 1mo ago
So Seedance is good primarily because of TikTok and this because of YouTube. I wonder what portion of all recorded video is privately held in hard drives at people’s homes or Apple photos. Of course there is data labeling and cleaning but is the next evolution just a question of access? Same goes for LLMs. Would people be willing to sell their data? Kind of a messed up way to make yourself obsolete. Or there is a limit to scaling?
guilhermeasper 1mo ago
Google does anything except launch a new version of Gemini Pro.
- AISnakeOil 1mo ago
  Why do they need to? For search, instant models are more important and fit the use case better. Pro models are mainly for coding agent work; it doesn't necessarily make them any money.
  - sva_ 1mo ago
    I think they also have the problem of having given away their pro subscription to 10s or 100s of millions of students worldwide. They're tightening down on that now, and I have a feeling that this goes into them not releasing a larger model.
    - jimmoores 1mo ago
      They blew up my interest when the stole my money by cutting me off from Gemini CLI with no explanation or recourse. I did not violate the terms of service and my only crime seemed to be not wanting to use Antigravity. They still took my money for the rest of that month and gave me nothing for it.
- SimianSci 1mo ago
  Just because Anthropic and OpenAI really want there to be an arms race justifying the outsized investment, doesn't mean the optimal play is to build larger, more expensive, models. The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening. I think it's reasonable to not completely drain one's cash reserves trying to stay ahead in a race where participants may very clearly be about to run straight off of a cliff.
  - jimmoores 1mo ago
    If the Chinese labs can compete on a shoestring budget with access to much less powerful hardware, Google should be able to compete as well. They're becoming almost irrelevant for agentic coding right now.
simonw 1mo ago
Interesting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation. Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?
- kfarr 1mo ago
  Also Google already has a huge built in training corpus with YouTube, gphotos, and geospatial data
- OtherShrezzing 1mo ago
  10% of their revenue comes from YouTube, so they need to make sure that they own any technology that might disrupt that platform.
- bahmboo 1mo ago
  This is paid API access only. They are here to make money not to position themselves for an IPO. Not a value judgement only an observation.
- msabalau 1mo ago
  Google has always been committed to multimodal. And, Veo and omni simply were better than Sora And, Youtube is huge both as a place where video contents goes and where can be trained from. Microdramas are starting to become a real category--14 Billion USD, 90% of it made with AI. Chinese video models can be more immediately impressive, but none of them come close to beat the value of Google's Flow. Especially when you are throwing away a lot of generations as part of the creative process. Which is what you have to do to make longer content with any video model. OpenAI needed to be able to focus. Google can walk and chew gum, and they're not going to run out of money to buy chewing gum.
  - pwython 1mo ago
    Sora 2 was way better than Veo in terms of quality. It just didn't have much of a use case for businesses outside of one-shot zany UGC-looking clips. https://youtu.be/QaiecWzeHFM?si=UV6eF-m514nCOFe0&t=156 https://youtu.be/QaiecWzeHFM?si=UV6eF-m514nCOFe0&t=156
CmonGoogle 1mo ago
The AI brand fragmentation at Google is not yet a problem because everyone is pretending: x There are so-called “SOTA” or “frontier” models that are more effective than the other ones (independent of harnessing and routing) x OpenAI and Anthropic have all the SOTA models and lead all the innovation x Google’s moat is its search bread/butter (it’s the only reason they’re relevant) All 3 operating assumptions are - I think - false. What Google has done that the “cuter products” (Claude, ChatGPT) haven’t is connected relatively standard LLMs to an externally valuable live service. As more companies realize that is where all the value is (the service) and not in the AI capability, then products (and humans) become important again. Google should just be Google again, and Gemini should be Gemini, off to the side. Omni confuses everyone (and angers some iykyk), they should resolve “AI mode”, rename Gemma? and consolidate the brand overall so it’s clear what Google is. Google is search. It helps people on all sides of the market find what they’re looking for. I don’t really see how repeatedly reinventing and rebranding the same AI chat UX is accomplishing anything toward that goal.
- bahmboo 1mo ago
  > Google is search. Implicit to that is "find". Their AI integration into search has really hit its stride for me. They have that search box (or speech prompt) hard wired into people and they are finally iterating and crafting AI into that experience. They really failed hard initially. I know others have worse experiences than me but Google knows a lot about me so maybe that affects my results. YMMV
  - CmonGoogle 1mo ago
    > YMMV It does. Very commonly it will get acronyms wrong or assume I mean something else, even when it should be in my “ad profile” or whatever it bases it off. Often I think the search engine is working perfectly then the LLM is ruining it in delivery. There are other UIs besides chat
    - bahmboo 1mo ago
      You (we) type in some words. 2-8 roughly. You hit enter. Are you saying that in the website results that are presented they are skewed by the LLM taking off to somewhere you aren't intending? Steering you off - like to a place they want you to go? You say "ruining the delivery". I believe I understand. It is not traditional www text search. I do have a problem with most chat ai's that always ask a question at the end of their answer. This is where configurability is more important to me than absolute performance. e.g. "don't end an answer with a question unless it is directly relevant to the current conversation. Yes there are many other UIs besides chat. The default chat UI really bothered me at first. Seemed cheesy. However the majority of human interaction is "chat". Something that is really really cool in this tech is the vision and audio and text models that naturally cluster similar things in massive multi-dimensional arrays. I have a hard time mapping nut~squirrel~food~imageofnut~dogsaspredators~whateves. How does that condense? We have come so far on the audio transcription dimension. In this discussion context yes it is still chat but we've moved to a different place in the brain. Not radically different (humans without visual sight come to mind in how the process goes from photons to perception (also see hank green's vid on how the eyes are part of the brain)). Anyway hope this isn't a throwaway account. That username doesn't inspire confidence in that regard. What the hell am I doing? [edit: made things more clear about my un-clear thoughts! I did not shift things in the intent space]
polytely 1mo ago
I'm still getting major uncanny valley from any of the videos featuring humans, something about them disgusts me. I guess I should be glad I'm still able to distinguish them.
- aloknnikhil 1mo ago
  Something in their eyes. Looks very robotic / lifeless for me. And the sound-mixing is very off. Clearly feels like the voice was layered on top of whatever sound is in the background and not blended.
- kzrdude 1mo ago
  I don't think I can see the difference. I just have my skin crawl because I'm expecting to see something off and generally have a bad feeling about it.
- bahmboo 1mo ago
  You knew upfront that it was generated. I did too so the first thing I did was look at the lips of the actors convincing myself that there were flaws. When it comes to fish swimming around I don't think I would be able to reliably tell what was real vs generated even with deep inspection.
sashank_1509 1mo ago
[dead]
overflowy 1mo ago
If you're using any of these generated videos in any professional setting, I don't think I will be able to ever use your business.
- visarga 1mo ago
  Only AI code is holy, video is sinful.
  - overflowy 1mo ago
    Nobody says that AI code is holy, I'm pretty sure vibe coded crap by people that know nothing about writing code has the same effect.
rcr-anti 1mo ago
It certainly makes for easy demos, but I always struggle with the practical application. As in, what work or enjoyment does someone actually get from this? Ads and media pre production seem plausible, but it fails the 'how can this enrich life' in a way most other AI tools don't. Maybe for them that's not a consideration, if their only interest is the other meaning of enrich that might flow from ads and numbing rivers of slop. Why do we look at art, watch videos/movies? Is that replicable as a function of text, other existing media, and 3-30 cents of compute per second? I'm pretty functionalist about these things, and at some point it probably won't be possible to tell the difference. But until then, at which point we might just say 'death of the author', it seems like a category error. I do work with artists that use video and image generation models to create stuff, but from what I can tell they're interested in faster iteration and controlling a lot of intermediate steps (their graphs can get pretty labyrinthine).
- msabalau 1mo ago
  Yes, most people using AI for creative projects spend a lot of time and attention mastering their tools, and figure out how to adapt them into their creative processes. AI can dramatically lower the cost of indie productions, while also a allowing a broader range of stories to be told. Even the most successful film makers need to bow and scrape to get their projects funded, democratizing visual media can be a good thing, even if you, personally, are no more likely to do this than you are to pick up Photoshop or record a podcast. I enjoy making short films with AI. When my latest short screens at a festival in Ocotber, alongside traditional and AI films, hopefully the audience will like it too. The quick "one shot" video generation might be slop to you, or I. But if someone wants to send it as birthday greeting to their aunt, and they both enjoy it, what business is it of ours?
  - visarga 1mo ago
    The cheaper it is to produce, the more daring it can be. Which is a good thing.
- jiggawatts 1mo ago
  Kids love image and video generation! The former is cheap enough to do just because it is fun. I have a young boy, and whenever he builds an impressive "scene" from LEGO (like a diorama or whatever), I take a couple of reference pictures with my phone and make it into a "real" movie scene, cartoon, or whatever. He loves it, and this motivates him to build more and bigger things out of LEGO. If he builds something really special, I might actually fork over the $5 to use Omni to turn his LEGO creation into a 10-second video instead of a still image. It'll blow his mind! PS: There also are cheap and even free phone apps that make stop-motion animation trivial. We've already made a couple of videos of his toys moving around that way.
Nihilartikel 1mo ago
I let myself get mildly excited with the last Omni release, but it turns out it (and this one) can't do the one practical thing I want - Sync generated video to provided pre-existing audio. Meanwhile, I'm happily using Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX to finally finish the lip syncing to recorded dialog on my abandoned 20 year old Flash animation hobby projects.
- msabalau 1mo ago
  Yeah, that'd be a great feature.
- jarjoura 1mo ago
  Pretty sure I heard one of the PMs in a podcast a few weeks ago say they are intentionally not building support for it out of concerns of enabling deep-fakes. I agree though. My issue is the cost for using AI video models is way too high for anyone not building anything serious with them, at the same time they are too restricted for actually using professionally. Prompting them with text to get something generated is cute, but then you just end up creating slop that everyone hates, ultimately devaluing the power of these things.
  - doctorpangloss 1mo ago
    Deepfakes are kind of the point though.
- KolmogorovComp 1mo ago
  > Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX Minimax H3 is about 240Gb alone, how do you do? How much quantised is it, and how good are the results?
  - vunderba 1mo ago
    Not op, but where are you getting that number from? Even the full 16-bit precision model is only about 66GB. Most people are running the stock release of Minimax H3 using the INT8 quant and it's about ~20GB. https://huggingface.co/Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3/tree/main/diffusion_models https://huggingface.co/Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3/tree/main/diffus... https://docs.comfy.org/tutorials/video/minimax/minimax-h3 https://docs.comfy.org/tutorials/video/minimax/minimax-h3
SpyCoder77 1mo ago
So we are just making up numbers now, huh
shreya1999 1mo ago
Raw generation quality is becoming table stakes; controllability might be the more important battleground.
chermi 1mo ago
Google we ain't falling for it. #neverforget3.5prowithinamonth
cube00 1mo ago
Draft videos more efficiently in 360p While it sounds great you're quickly disappointed after you run the same prompt at standard resolution only to get a different result because it's non deterministic.
- kridsdale1 1mo ago
  Can you hold the seed constant?
  - cube00 1mo ago
    No option I could see in their Web UI. Their changelog suggests using their new upscaler but I've had nothing but disappointment from upscalers. Upscale when ready: Users on paid tiers can seamlessly upgrade their favorite clips using our new 360p to 720p upscaler.
peter_d_sherman 1mo ago
>"Draft videos more efficiently in 360p Generate lightweight previews in 360p resolution up to 60% faster and at a third of the cost compared to Omni 1.1’s standard 720p resolution. This is helpful for rapid prototyping, storyboard iteration, and quick rendering in developer platforms." This is a great idea, to have a low-resolution mode for additional speed to create previews, do test runs, create rapid prototypes, etc. My curiousity is, what's the absolute useable minimum that this could be? That is, would/could 240p resolution work? If so, what about 144p? How about lower? Then, could those images be upscaled quickly (and is the result still usable?) with a faster image upscaling-only neural network? The reason why knowing such lower numbers / lower bounds -- is because they could be important for additional cost/time savings and/or running derived LLM's on local resource-constrained hardware... Anyway, great post, great idea, and we welcome Gemnini Omni 1.1 Flash to the ever-expanding list of LLM/AI's!
- Melatonic 1mo ago
  Surprised they don't have something in between a video generation and image generation model (literally like storyboarding) which still took into account physics and world knowledge. You could probably (relatively cheaply) generate decently high resolution storyboards and then have something to directly feed a video model at the end.
  - peter_d_sherman 1mo ago
    Great idea!
deadlast2 1mo ago
For me it's kind of weird right it's like no one can see the bigger picture. All technology's going to be eaten by AI so companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta ... are middle men in an industry that's disappearing. No one's really going to use a search engine when a chat bot can do a better job. No one is going to pay for software when the AI can do the whole process better at a proper command. All technology and the companies in it are essentially horses and the related roles in a time of cars. That whole slice of the economy is at best going to reduce year on year eventually to disappear. No replacement AI is it.
- anentropic 1mo ago
  The chat bot will still use the search engine
hi_hi 1mo ago
Would this model be available in ComfyUI, or does Google limit these to their own tools?
petegleeson 1mo ago
> What stands out about Gemini Omni Flash is its accuracy: the details hold up under scrutiny. Quote under the video of a short Argentinian footballer wearing no 10 with "RESSC" on his back. Can't make it up.
apwheele 1mo ago
Is there a good example someone can show of naturally generating real videos using extending and interpolation from the last frames? (For any of the video generators). I mean I have not tinkered that much, but trying to even get a video to 30 seconds (I just want a cartoon AI avatar to narrate tutorials) has been incredibly difficult. They drift so easily. Many AI videos you can tell just stitch short clips together. I just want a continuous scene for like 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
bluerooibos 1mo ago
Anyone else becoming numb to these updates? I feel like I should be excited about being able to generate almost perfect videos but, I just don't care anymore.
DataDive 1mo ago
Before AI, cool and interesting shots carried the promise that it was reality - even if it was perhaps exaggerated. The amazing videos and photos carried the promise that I could experience that for real. They were aspirational. Today I suspect every cool shot is made of pixels arranged on a 2D screen by an algorithm. It doesn't do it for me. That makes me sad...
StizzurpXDD 1mo ago
https://nasengetu.com/article/google-releases-gemini-omni-1.1-flash https://nasengetu.com/article/google-releases-gemini-omni-1....
StizzurpXDD 1mo ago
I have written how is impact the AI Industry in Nasengetu Tech News website.
animanoir 1mo ago
[dead]
malshe 1mo ago
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ruffrey 1mo ago
Does the last video demo give a totalitarian AI apocalypse feeling to anyone else? "Omni" -> everwhere/all "The final chapter will end with a choice. The choice between holding on to the past, or letting go. What will you choose?"
ChannelFence 1mo ago
I'm getting model fatigue at this point. Impressive pace, but fucking exhausting to follow.
- bitexploder 1mo ago
  Models are like programming, language languages. You don’t need to follow them. If you don’t do video stuff don’t worry about it. You could probably digest mode every month or two and be just fine.

297 points by saretup 1mo ago

wish some of these frontier models supported 3d.

I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.

newyankee 1mo ago
Everyone will probably go through the 5 stages of grief w.r.t AI adoption in their field and the gatekeepers will (rightfully) hold onto hallucination and errors as reasons to delay incorporation or to incorporate it with more human handholding.
lambda 1mo ago
Many screen and voice actors are unionized, and the unions have been striking and bargaining specifcially over these points. For example: https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unauthorized-ai-performances-the-sag-aftra-video-game-strike-and-performer-protections-under-the-new-collective-bargaining-agreement/ https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unau... Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
- r_lee 1mo ago
  it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced I think too many just expect that they can get by like before because they're a 10x engineer or whatever
  - quaintdev 1mo ago
    It won't happen to me is what I used to think
    - georgemcbay 1mo ago
      > It won't happen to me is what I used to think In my experience this is what almost everyone thinks, right up to the point where it starts happening to them. And it isn't just an individual blind spot, organizations suffer from the same thing in the sense that many companies will be happy to automate away all their labor to avoid paying the "human tax" without giving much thought to the fact that the need for the company itself will also be automated away soon after. If you can replace nearly all of your workers with some cheap tokens and prompts, everyone else who previously would have been a customer can replace your whole company with the same thing.
      - Melatonic 1mo ago
        Exactly. Or a competitor comes in and does what you do for half the cost and double the efficiency.
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    > it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced To be fair, most of us spent our entire career trying our best to automate ourselves away one way or another, and always seen that as our job description.
    - 12ags-18276 1mo ago
      No, that is just nerd heroism lore that indeed has always shown up in comments, that part is definitely true. Some people dislike automation altogether and like the computational aspect. Most people seem to enjoy constructing virtual worlds and Rube Goldberg machines.
      - 1mo ago
- catigula 1mo ago
  Half of them are from India or China. Racial diversity is known to be detrimental to unionization. In fact, Amazon used this exact strategy to bust nascent Somali unions. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-Foods-uses-heat-mapping-to-track-unionisation-efforts https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
  - 12ahsgf 1mo ago
    Here is the obligatory scientific paper for those who cannot observe simple facts without a statistical analysis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0176268022001215 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762...
- Lagoon3384_SWE 1mo ago
  That is an american take. Sweden just has an "office worker" union. https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen Now, they cannot prevent offshoring or AI use or replacements. Very very rarely if ever. But they can negotiate a large layoff and give better pay/conditions during work etc. This view that unions can prevent anything... when so many jobs have gone to east EU (all amazing and good at what they do but lets face it, it is due to pay) so yea there wont be any union preventing AI...
- arjie 1mo ago
  Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested. It’s how other people oppose buildings near them because it blocks their view. I really don’t want to stop other people from writing software. If they want to use AI to do it so be it. That’ll be somewhat detrimental to me perhaps (which isn’t certain), but that’s okay. I’d rather attempt to adapt to a changing world.
  - koe123 1mo ago
    Thats great, although understand that unionizing protects the more vulnerable of also the software engineered. You not advocating for your rights also means weakening others. Is it still self interested to unionized from that perspective?
  - smallerize 1mo ago
    You may be surprised to know that residential areas in San Francisco are height limited, sometimes as short as 4 stories. They're not exactly anti-progress.
    - BeetleB 1mo ago
      Height limiting is anti-progress, which was his point.
      - smallerize 1mo ago
        Ok SF needs somewhat higher-density housing. But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress. If the benefits accrue to only a few people, it's not progress.
        BeetleB 1mo ago
        > But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress. It is if it makes it worse for everyone else.
        deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
- boredatoms 1mo ago
  No one has offered a union to join at any workplace Ive been at
  - lambda 1mo ago
    Yeah, the problem is, someone has to start the union. It takes work. You have to get the whole workforce to vote on it. A lot of software engineers believe (or believed) that they were too smart and professional to need a union. And of course, if management gets wind of it while you are working on setting up the vote, they may do all kinds of trickery, legal or illegal, to block it. It is possible. But it's quite uncommon in this industry in the US. And given the current administration, it is hard to trust you'd get fair enforcement of labor laws if the company did illegal things to block unionization.
- vlyan 1mo ago
  >The union demanded clear protections to ensure that recordings of actors’ performances could not be copied without consent and compensation. >California’s legislation passed AB 2602 and AB 1836 in September 2024, prohibiting media companies from using AI to replicate actors’ performances without their consent. it's a very reasonable law, but it is not the win you seem to believe it to be. the actors who refuse to consent will simply be passed over in favor of those who don't. no law will ever be passed to force companies to employ humans over machines, and if it were, the industry would move elsewhere. this is not without precedent :) speech models have got so good so quickly that you can already replace a VA -- even an AAA prima donna -- with a teenager from Fiverr, who will simply bruteforce the right inflection.
  - Melatonic 1mo ago
    If they still have to pay an actual person though to license their likeness then they are much more likely to actually employ that person directly to get a better result. And in the cases where quality is not needed the person still gets paid for their AI likeness. Seems like a reasonable take
- isoprophlex 1mo ago
  And thus the developers remain, until this very moment, ionized.
  - worthless-trash 1mo ago
    I appreciate.
- dzonga 1mo ago
  I don't think software developers need to unionize - but to form French style co-ops. e.g a lot of video game studios even the AAA ones could be co-ops. same as a lot of SAAS software companies. Linear - just announced a tender offer. I don't see a reason - why linear couldn't work as a co-op.
  - ameliaquining 1mo ago
    Are the employees supposed to front the capital themselves?
- epolanski 1mo ago
  Because software developers enjoyed scarcity for most of the fields existence and could barter themselves better conditions instead of falling back to unionized fixed incomes. In any case, the overwhelming majority of jobs is non-unionized and I don't think that software developers can stop technological changes by unionizing.
- ameliaquining 1mo ago
  My objection has always been that advocates either can't or don't care to explain how such a thing would actually work from the perspective of a unionized engineer.
- Melatonic 1mo ago
  Software engineers and VFX workers also tried to unionise back in the day and there was a giant wage fixing and anti competitive hiring scandal that was majorly illegal. Perpetuated by some of the biggest names in tech. They settled for a large undisclosed sum out of court. But largely won unfortunately as unionisation efforts failed
- miki123211 1mo ago
  In the 21st century, the only professions that can successfully unionize are those you can't replace with workers from a non-unionized country. If your students are in Oklahoma, your teachers also have to be in Oklahoma. If the Oklahoma teachers unionize, you have no option but to hire those unionized teachers if you want your students taught. If your bank is in Oklahoma, you can hire programmers in London or buy a SaaS from a company based in Geneva. Programmers also have much less of a reason to unionize, as "quit and go work somewhere else" is often a realistic option. This is usually not the case for teachers, where the only employer seeking their skills in the area is the government, whose idea of what teacher salaries should be is not based on market forces.
earthnail 1mo ago
Work that doesn’t have a personal brand involved is basically dead. Arbitrary voice acting? Dead. It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.
- Melatonic 1mo ago
  People pretty consistently vote with their wallet and are not excited to pay and consume media made by AI.
  - richrichardsson 1mo ago
    Unfortunately sometimes you can't even vote with your wallet. I was bored yesterday and started watching a stupid documentary series about UFOs/UAP on Netflix. It was immediately obvious that the voice over was AI slop bullshit. All I could do is stop watching and thumb down it, but they still have my money. :(
  - sumedh 1mo ago
    Do you have any stats for that?
moscoe 1mo ago
Sounds like a perfect application of AI. Some jobs should be automated.
- tiagod 1mo ago
  I would rather hear human voices than synthesized ones. I don't care how realistic they sound. I'm not alone, and the sentiment will certainly grow.
  - chung8123 1mo ago
    As long as there are enough people than there will be a market. I think there are a lot of people that prefer human but don't want the human cost.
- oblio 1mo ago
  Ok, let's go the other way round. Which jobs do you think should not be automated?
  - Melatonic 1mo ago
    Probably the ones we collectively value as human and are willing to pay for (in either our time or money or both). And jobs where quality is paramount and or there is greater chance of risk / bodily harm
    - oblio 1mo ago
      > Probably the ones we collectively value as human and are willing to pay for (in either our time or money or both). Society seems to be very bad at that, and we end up with high frequency traders making millions while teachers are paid peanuts.
  - ajjahs 1mo ago
    [dead]
porridgeraisin 1mo ago
A lot of it will get automated the same way very many industries got automated. A lot of physical labour got automated once a primitive for it was created. Similarly, we have now a primitive for automating knowledge work. In the next few years to a decade, as all the right training data and runtime environments are slowly consolidated for various fields, a lot will be automated. There is no inherent reason a voice actor must be an eternal job, the same way there was no inherent reason for a draftsman or stage musician to be an eternal job. It has nothing to do with skill. Both were very skilled jobs. Draftsman as well despite many people going to it straight from school. But computers and CAD mean that it is now necessary for someone to do a STEM degree to be a draftsman. Recorded audio made many stage musicians redundant. It is cheaper to do it this way and gets superior results, that is all, there is no further agenda. Now too, the next generation of voice actors and many other knowledge workers will have to go up the value chain one step and operate or potentially build these tools (in whatever form they mature to in a decades time). The current generation of voice actors will face the same situation as many before in the performance industry - stage musicians/performers for example that were made redundant by recorded audio. The reality is that most of them just left and dispersed into the economy doing completely unrelated jobs. For software and generally computer engineers, this new primitive happens to itself be software, so it's less of a transition and an easier upskilling path to learn to build it. And building it is one step higher in the value chain than simply using it. That is a structural advantage.
- bubblemoth 1mo ago
  I don't really like comparing the way automation of the past displaced jobs to the way AI is/will displace jobs. The timeline is just faster and, more importantly, there were still plenty of other fields of work for people to go to. But now that we are automating white collar work... where will people go? I'm a 36 year-old veteran who has returned to college and so many of the younger students seem to be filled with despair. I have hope for the future, but I think there will be an uncomfortable period of time.
  - porridgeraisin 1mo ago
    I think people are overestimating the speed at which the transition will happen. I think it will happen much slower than is often portrayed online. This slow transition period will also help answer the "where will they go" questions. We can't answer them right now. Ultimately, everything we do is in service of social political and personal human incentives, and I think the effect of that is discounted when people make these takeoff predictions for AI and "AGI"
space_fountain 1mo ago
I'm really sad about how little creative control these tools have. They seem great for creating slop, but pretty useless for creating content that someone would love. I love the potential but text isn't really a great medium for describing artistic vision. All these demos are focused on how easy it makes everything. Easy is great, but if everyone is able to make instant cute cat videos or whatever it just devalues it. I want to see turning a photo into a rigged 3d model, letting the artist animate and then generate the video. This technology could be used to increase creative expression, but instead it's being used to squeeze out creative expression
- bonoboTP 1mo ago
  Text is not the only input. You can provide 3d block outs with rudimentary animation, annotated images with arrows etc, voice recordings of one person acting out some emotion then mapping that to a different character's voice, other uses of video to video, etc. There could easily be at least some time period of low skilled ugly people acting in approximate but shitty ways in cheap sets just to give an input reference to a model and then describing the differences in text, yielding gorgeous people speaking with prestigious accents doing stuff in fancy locations in the output.
- api 1mo ago
  That'll change. They'll get as many knobs as e.g. photoshop for image editing. You'll also be able, if not already, to use your own voice to communicate the emotion and tone you want but then have it re-render it in the voice of your choice. The "slop" phase is early AI, like chunky ugly very early 3D graphics where you can see the triangles. I'm already seeing images generated by first-generation diffusion models like Stable Diffusion 1.5 (which is small enough to run on a phone) used ironically as meme generators due to the now-retro silliness of what they generate.
NooneAtAll3 1mo ago
recently I encountered several youtubers in the uncanny valley of "is it Ai or really repetitive intonation pattern" one youtuber used irl footage, with hands and stuff - so I know there's human behind the camera the other was a letsplay that reacted to events just fine emotionally and yet the uncanny valley of the sound is in full force. Maybe youtube has done something with the codecs? I feel sad
- bulder 1mo ago
  I know that there are at least a few content farms out there that specifically pump out "faceless video" to be resold, ie. those "hands in frame only" videos. The idea being that you can then put on some AI generated voiceover over them.
thangalin 1mo ago
It'll come quickly for audio books. I've been working on a locally hosted, fully containerized web application to narrate my sci-fi novel using a full cast of characters and a few distinct narrators: * https://i.ibb.co/ccqKZ71L/keenlore.png https://i.ibb.co/ccqKZ71L/keenlore.png * https://i.ibb.co/1t3W0JqZ/keenlore-02.png https://i.ibb.co/1t3W0JqZ/keenlore-02.png * https://i.ibb.co/LdBqHwKB/keenlore-03.png https://i.ibb.co/LdBqHwKB/keenlore-03.png
- dormento 1mo ago
  This is very interesting! Imagine Silly Tavern, with dialog tagging and coloring of some sort, auto-generated talking heads. Almost a game engine.
- ianmarcinkowski 1mo ago
  I would pay a few actors (mostly Star Trek TNG cast) money for a license to their voice. I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about and how we don't descend into a pit of neverending photocopies of things people once loved in the 1990s/2000s.
  - thangalin 1mo ago
    From reddit: * $250 per finished hour for the narrator (lowest professional rate). * 200k to 270k words. * 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours. * Books 1 to 3 cost $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250, respectively. My novel has 8 major characters, including the 3 narrators, and 25+ minor characters. That price tag is daunting, presumably in USD. This would mean investing $7,750 CAD in crafting an audiobook, which may not even sell, much less recoup the investment. In contrast, a locally hosted solution has a wallet cost of pennies for electricity plus my time to develop the system.
  - ChickeNES 1mo ago
    > I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about To me it's been obvious for a while now: there won't be one
    - 1mo ago
dominotw 1mo ago
it effects software develpoers because ai has compliers , tests , ci and bought tons of data in mercor. it always sucks at everything else.
andsoitis 1mo ago
> I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors. Articles and discussions pop up from time here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=Ai%20actors&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
anonzzzies 1mo ago
Related; here in my city, every event, restaurant, cinema, delivery service etc have all images / posters generated, very obviously, by OpenAI. ‘Authentic Italian’ and then an AI generated menu. This must hurt companies that used to make these before; a friend was a good photographer and he says he does wedding since end last year as the work was plummeting. Not sure about stats but it’s just ‘normal’ here at least.
qingcharles 1mo ago
My ex is a professional voice actor. Someone recently gave her a negative review saying she was AI, so now even the humans are getting unfairly penalized. I also heard a promotional video recently that used her voice, that she hadn't done, so someone has already trained their voice model on her.
DeusExMachina 1mo ago
Relatedly, a friend told me that graphical design gigs dried up because everyone can make event fliers and posters with AI with results that are often better than those of designers.

037 1mo ago

Prompt engineering tip for Google employees: just add "P.S. Make sure the page works in Firefox too."

fg137 1mo ago
It is in their business interest to ignore Firefox.
- fl4regun 1mo ago
  Then they aren't doing a very good job of it. >Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added. https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-revenue-share-doj-antitrust-remedies https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...
  - jorl17 1mo ago
    What people usually say is that Google merely wants Firefox to survive for anti-competitive reasons. Presumably that does not necessitate it actually being used (or be usable).
- sva_ 1mo ago
  Hot take: Google keeps Mozilla/Firefox alive through the default search engine placement (which makes Mozilla millions each year) so they don't get designated as a monopoly with their browser.
  - BbzzbB 1mo ago
    That's lukewarm at most, doubt you'll find many people disagreeing here!
  - Vinnl 1mo ago
    And of course they're doing the same for Apple/Safari, which wouldn't survive without the $20 million default search engine placement deal.

Gecko4072 1mo ago

So Seedance is good primarily because of TikTok and this because of YouTube. I wonder what portion of all recorded video is privately held in hard drives at people’s homes or Apple photos. Of course there is data labeling and cleaning but is the next evolution just a question of access? Same goes for LLMs. Would people be willing to sell their data? Kind of a messed up way to make yourself obsolete. Or there is a limit to scaling?

guilhermeasper 1mo ago

Google does anything except launch a new version of Gemini Pro.

AISnakeOil 1mo ago
Why do they need to? For search, instant models are more important and fit the use case better. Pro models are mainly for coding agent work; it doesn't necessarily make them any money.
- sva_ 1mo ago
  I think they also have the problem of having given away their pro subscription to 10s or 100s of millions of students worldwide. They're tightening down on that now, and I have a feeling that this goes into them not releasing a larger model.
  - jimmoores 1mo ago
    They blew up my interest when the stole my money by cutting me off from Gemini CLI with no explanation or recourse. I did not violate the terms of service and my only crime seemed to be not wanting to use Antigravity. They still took my money for the rest of that month and gave me nothing for it.
SimianSci 1mo ago
Just because Anthropic and OpenAI really want there to be an arms race justifying the outsized investment, doesn't mean the optimal play is to build larger, more expensive, models. The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening. I think it's reasonable to not completely drain one's cash reserves trying to stay ahead in a race where participants may very clearly be about to run straight off of a cliff.
- jimmoores 1mo ago
  If the Chinese labs can compete on a shoestring budget with access to much less powerful hardware, Google should be able to compete as well. They're becoming almost irrelevant for agentic coding right now.

simonw 1mo ago

Interesting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation. Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?

kfarr 1mo ago
Also Google already has a huge built in training corpus with YouTube, gphotos, and geospatial data
OtherShrezzing 1mo ago
10% of their revenue comes from YouTube, so they need to make sure that they own any technology that might disrupt that platform.
bahmboo 1mo ago
This is paid API access only. They are here to make money not to position themselves for an IPO. Not a value judgement only an observation.
msabalau 1mo ago
Google has always been committed to multimodal. And, Veo and omni simply were better than Sora And, Youtube is huge both as a place where video contents goes and where can be trained from. Microdramas are starting to become a real category--14 Billion USD, 90% of it made with AI. Chinese video models can be more immediately impressive, but none of them come close to beat the value of Google's Flow. Especially when you are throwing away a lot of generations as part of the creative process. Which is what you have to do to make longer content with any video model. OpenAI needed to be able to focus. Google can walk and chew gum, and they're not going to run out of money to buy chewing gum.
- pwython 1mo ago
  Sora 2 was way better than Veo in terms of quality. It just didn't have much of a use case for businesses outside of one-shot zany UGC-looking clips. https://youtu.be/QaiecWzeHFM?si=UV6eF-m514nCOFe0&t=156 https://youtu.be/QaiecWzeHFM?si=UV6eF-m514nCOFe0&t=156

CmonGoogle 1mo ago

The AI brand fragmentation at Google is not yet a problem because everyone is pretending: x There are so-called “SOTA” or “frontier” models that are more effective than the other ones (independent of harnessing and routing) x OpenAI and Anthropic have all the SOTA models and lead all the innovation x Google’s moat is its search bread/butter (it’s the only reason they’re relevant) All 3 operating assumptions are - I think - false. What Google has done that the “cuter products” (Claude, ChatGPT) haven’t is connected relatively standard LLMs to an externally valuable live service. As more companies realize that is where all the value is (the service) and not in the AI capability, then products (and humans) become important again. Google should just be Google again, and Gemini should be Gemini, off to the side. Omni confuses everyone (and angers some iykyk), they should resolve “AI mode”, rename Gemma? and consolidate the brand overall so it’s clear what Google is. Google is search. It helps people on all sides of the market find what they’re looking for. I don’t really see how repeatedly reinventing and rebranding the same AI chat UX is accomplishing anything toward that goal.

bahmboo 1mo ago
> Google is search. Implicit to that is "find". Their AI integration into search has really hit its stride for me. They have that search box (or speech prompt) hard wired into people and they are finally iterating and crafting AI into that experience. They really failed hard initially. I know others have worse experiences than me but Google knows a lot about me so maybe that affects my results. YMMV
- CmonGoogle 1mo ago
  > YMMV It does. Very commonly it will get acronyms wrong or assume I mean something else, even when it should be in my “ad profile” or whatever it bases it off. Often I think the search engine is working perfectly then the LLM is ruining it in delivery. There are other UIs besides chat
  - bahmboo 1mo ago
    You (we) type in some words. 2-8 roughly. You hit enter. Are you saying that in the website results that are presented they are skewed by the LLM taking off to somewhere you aren't intending? Steering you off - like to a place they want you to go? You say "ruining the delivery". I believe I understand. It is not traditional www text search. I do have a problem with most chat ai's that always ask a question at the end of their answer. This is where configurability is more important to me than absolute performance. e.g. "don't end an answer with a question unless it is directly relevant to the current conversation. Yes there are many other UIs besides chat. The default chat UI really bothered me at first. Seemed cheesy. However the majority of human interaction is "chat". Something that is really really cool in this tech is the vision and audio and text models that naturally cluster similar things in massive multi-dimensional arrays. I have a hard time mapping nut~squirrel~food~imageofnut~dogsaspredators~whateves. How does that condense? We have come so far on the audio transcription dimension. In this discussion context yes it is still chat but we've moved to a different place in the brain. Not radically different (humans without visual sight come to mind in how the process goes from photons to perception (also see hank green's vid on how the eyes are part of the brain)). Anyway hope this isn't a throwaway account. That username doesn't inspire confidence in that regard. What the hell am I doing? [edit: made things more clear about my un-clear thoughts! I did not shift things in the intent space]

polytely 1mo ago

I'm still getting major uncanny valley from any of the videos featuring humans, something about them disgusts me. I guess I should be glad I'm still able to distinguish them.

aloknnikhil 1mo ago
Something in their eyes. Looks very robotic / lifeless for me. And the sound-mixing is very off. Clearly feels like the voice was layered on top of whatever sound is in the background and not blended.
kzrdude 1mo ago
I don't think I can see the difference. I just have my skin crawl because I'm expecting to see something off and generally have a bad feeling about it.
bahmboo 1mo ago
You knew upfront that it was generated. I did too so the first thing I did was look at the lips of the actors convincing myself that there were flaws. When it comes to fish swimming around I don't think I would be able to reliably tell what was real vs generated even with deep inspection.

sashank_1509 1mo ago

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overflowy 1mo ago

If you're using any of these generated videos in any professional setting, I don't think I will be able to ever use your business.

visarga 1mo ago
Only AI code is holy, video is sinful.
- overflowy 1mo ago
  Nobody says that AI code is holy, I'm pretty sure vibe coded crap by people that know nothing about writing code has the same effect.

rcr-anti 1mo ago

It certainly makes for easy demos, but I always struggle with the practical application. As in, what work or enjoyment does someone actually get from this? Ads and media pre production seem plausible, but it fails the 'how can this enrich life' in a way most other AI tools don't. Maybe for them that's not a consideration, if their only interest is the other meaning of enrich that might flow from ads and numbing rivers of slop. Why do we look at art, watch videos/movies? Is that replicable as a function of text, other existing media, and 3-30 cents of compute per second? I'm pretty functionalist about these things, and at some point it probably won't be possible to tell the difference. But until then, at which point we might just say 'death of the author', it seems like a category error. I do work with artists that use video and image generation models to create stuff, but from what I can tell they're interested in faster iteration and controlling a lot of intermediate steps (their graphs can get pretty labyrinthine).

msabalau 1mo ago
Yes, most people using AI for creative projects spend a lot of time and attention mastering their tools, and figure out how to adapt them into their creative processes. AI can dramatically lower the cost of indie productions, while also a allowing a broader range of stories to be told. Even the most successful film makers need to bow and scrape to get their projects funded, democratizing visual media can be a good thing, even if you, personally, are no more likely to do this than you are to pick up Photoshop or record a podcast. I enjoy making short films with AI. When my latest short screens at a festival in Ocotber, alongside traditional and AI films, hopefully the audience will like it too. The quick "one shot" video generation might be slop to you, or I. But if someone wants to send it as birthday greeting to their aunt, and they both enjoy it, what business is it of ours?
- visarga 1mo ago
  The cheaper it is to produce, the more daring it can be. Which is a good thing.
jiggawatts 1mo ago
Kids love image and video generation! The former is cheap enough to do just because it is fun. I have a young boy, and whenever he builds an impressive "scene" from LEGO (like a diorama or whatever), I take a couple of reference pictures with my phone and make it into a "real" movie scene, cartoon, or whatever. He loves it, and this motivates him to build more and bigger things out of LEGO. If he builds something really special, I might actually fork over the $5 to use Omni to turn his LEGO creation into a 10-second video instead of a still image. It'll blow his mind! PS: There also are cheap and even free phone apps that make stop-motion animation trivial. We've already made a couple of videos of his toys moving around that way.

Nihilartikel 1mo ago

I let myself get mildly excited with the last Omni release, but it turns out it (and this one) can't do the one practical thing I want - Sync generated video to provided pre-existing audio. Meanwhile, I'm happily using Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX to finally finish the lip syncing to recorded dialog on my abandoned 20 year old Flash animation hobby projects.

msabalau 1mo ago
Yeah, that'd be a great feature.
jarjoura 1mo ago
Pretty sure I heard one of the PMs in a podcast a few weeks ago say they are intentionally not building support for it out of concerns of enabling deep-fakes. I agree though. My issue is the cost for using AI video models is way too high for anyone not building anything serious with them, at the same time they are too restricted for actually using professionally. Prompting them with text to get something generated is cute, but then you just end up creating slop that everyone hates, ultimately devaluing the power of these things.
- doctorpangloss 1mo ago
  Deepfakes are kind of the point though.
KolmogorovComp 1mo ago
> Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX Minimax H3 is about 240Gb alone, how do you do? How much quantised is it, and how good are the results?
- vunderba 1mo ago
  Not op, but where are you getting that number from? Even the full 16-bit precision model is only about 66GB. Most people are running the stock release of Minimax H3 using the INT8 quant and it's about ~20GB. https://huggingface.co/Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3/tree/main/diffusion_models https://huggingface.co/Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3/tree/main/diffus... https://docs.comfy.org/tutorials/video/minimax/minimax-h3 https://docs.comfy.org/tutorials/video/minimax/minimax-h3

SpyCoder77 1mo ago

So we are just making up numbers now, huh

shreya1999 1mo ago

Raw generation quality is becoming table stakes; controllability might be the more important battleground.

chermi 1mo ago

Google we ain't falling for it. #neverforget3.5prowithinamonth

cube00 1mo ago

Draft videos more efficiently in 360p While it sounds great you're quickly disappointed after you run the same prompt at standard resolution only to get a different result because it's non deterministic.

kridsdale1 1mo ago
Can you hold the seed constant?
- cube00 1mo ago
  No option I could see in their Web UI. Their changelog suggests using their new upscaler but I've had nothing but disappointment from upscalers. Upscale when ready: Users on paid tiers can seamlessly upgrade their favorite clips using our new 360p to 720p upscaler.

peter_d_sherman 1mo ago

>"Draft videos more efficiently in 360p Generate lightweight previews in 360p resolution up to 60% faster and at a third of the cost compared to Omni 1.1’s standard 720p resolution. This is helpful for rapid prototyping, storyboard iteration, and quick rendering in developer platforms." This is a great idea, to have a low-resolution mode for additional speed to create previews, do test runs, create rapid prototypes, etc. My curiousity is, what's the absolute useable minimum that this could be? That is, would/could 240p resolution work? If so, what about 144p? How about lower? Then, could those images be upscaled quickly (and is the result still usable?) with a faster image upscaling-only neural network? The reason why knowing such lower numbers / lower bounds -- is because they could be important for additional cost/time savings and/or running derived LLM's on local resource-constrained hardware... Anyway, great post, great idea, and we welcome Gemnini Omni 1.1 Flash to the ever-expanding list of LLM/AI's!

Melatonic 1mo ago
Surprised they don't have something in between a video generation and image generation model (literally like storyboarding) which still took into account physics and world knowledge. You could probably (relatively cheaply) generate decently high resolution storyboards and then have something to directly feed a video model at the end.
- peter_d_sherman 1mo ago
  Great idea!

deadlast2 1mo ago

For me it's kind of weird right it's like no one can see the bigger picture. All technology's going to be eaten by AI so companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta ... are middle men in an industry that's disappearing. No one's really going to use a search engine when a chat bot can do a better job. No one is going to pay for software when the AI can do the whole process better at a proper command. All technology and the companies in it are essentially horses and the related roles in a time of cars. That whole slice of the economy is at best going to reduce year on year eventually to disappear. No replacement AI is it.

anentropic 1mo ago
The chat bot will still use the search engine

hi_hi 1mo ago

Would this model be available in ComfyUI, or does Google limit these to their own tools?

petegleeson 1mo ago

> What stands out about Gemini Omni Flash is its accuracy: the details hold up under scrutiny. Quote under the video of a short Argentinian footballer wearing no 10 with "RESSC" on his back. Can't make it up.

apwheele 1mo ago

Is there a good example someone can show of naturally generating real videos using extending and interpolation from the last frames? (For any of the video generators). I mean I have not tinkered that much, but trying to even get a video to 30 seconds (I just want a cartoon AI avatar to narrate tutorials) has been incredibly difficult. They drift so easily. Many AI videos you can tell just stitch short clips together. I just want a continuous scene for like 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

bluerooibos 1mo ago

Anyone else becoming numb to these updates? I feel like I should be excited about being able to generate almost perfect videos but, I just don't care anymore.

DataDive 1mo ago

Before AI, cool and interesting shots carried the promise that it was reality - even if it was perhaps exaggerated. The amazing videos and photos carried the promise that I could experience that for real. They were aspirational. Today I suspect every cool shot is made of pixels arranged on a 2D screen by an algorithm. It doesn't do it for me. That makes me sad...

StizzurpXDD 1mo ago

https://nasengetu.com/article/google-releases-gemini-omni-1.1-flash https://nasengetu.com/article/google-releases-gemini-omni-1....

StizzurpXDD 1mo ago

I have written how is impact the AI Industry in Nasengetu Tech News website.

animanoir 1mo ago

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malshe 1mo ago

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ruffrey 1mo ago

Does the last video demo give a totalitarian AI apocalypse feeling to anyone else? "Omni" -> everwhere/all "The final chapter will end with a choice. The choice between holding on to the past, or letting go. What will you choose?"

ChannelFence 1mo ago

I'm getting model fatigue at this point. Impressive pace, but fucking exhausting to follow.

bitexploder 1mo ago
Models are like programming, language languages. You don’t need to follow them. If you don’t do video stuff don’t worry about it. You could probably digest mode every month or two and be just fine.