Yesterday I was having the same issues as the top commenter except I was having trouble getting Google to label various mountain peaks I had zoomed in on.
It would be nice if they'd fix the missing labels on roads, even at the highest zoom with no clutter. Likewise, highway speed limits that were changed over a year ago.
The thing is, if you want AI output to be heavily directed, which is probably the case here, I can imagine that thousands of random takes had to be made to make the damn thing follow the director's imagination.
If you don't care too much about the output you can make these very quickly, yeah.
Don't get it either. LGTM. Sure, it's no high budget (pre-AI) Coca Cola Christmas Ad, but it's not disturbing or particularly bad. Feels like people are just jumping on the "AI ads bad" bandwagon.
> If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
This isn’t how it works. Excel didn’t free up bookkeepers to become CFOs. Digital photography didn’t free up photo lab technicians to become cinematographers.
The person who in 1970 would have been an accountant at Ford Motor Company with a pension and a mortgage is now, displaced by Excel, working at two burger joints to make ends meet, with no realistic path to anything better. The VFX artists will follow in the exact same footsteps. The shareholders will keep the difference, as they have time and again.
> If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
There are way more people who want to be movie VFX artists then positions. Artists do commercials, because it pays that is where jobs are. They would gladly do cool movies.
> There are way more people who want to be movie VFX artists then positions.
Not good ones. Good VFX studios are actually a major blocker in movie production, because there aren't enough of them. And their only limit is the number of qualified artists available.
Really not. If the movie studios were willing to pay for that, there would be more studios.
We are talking about very competitive field where employers call all the shots. You know how you recognize lack of workers in an area? By high salaries, low competitiveness and very good working conditions.
There's demand for VFX artists like there's demand for video game developers; so many people want to do it that it drives wages down and there's demand for even cheaper labor. Nobody dreams of making TV commercials, movies are what people want to make.
Yes there are so many people that want to do it. Unfortunately, they're mostly junior-level. There continues to be a real shortage of senior-level VFX talent.
Okay, so the junior VFX guys who could only get jobs making commercials should, now that there is less demand for them to make commercials, go make movies instead? Make it make sense.
Why are you assuming it's the junior VFX guys making commercials? Commercials have big budgets too.
It's the same studios. They do work both for Hollywood and ad agencies.
But if ad agencies decide they're happier with lower-quality AI for 5% of the price (whereas they weren't if junior artists were still 50% of the price), while movie producers are not, then yes. They can make movies instead.
Okay, so the senior VFX artist who has the experience to get a job in the movie industry if he wants it, instead gets a job in the commercial industry because the pay is better or maybe he just prefers it, now has to work in the movie industry contrary to his preferences.
No matter which way you slice it, you're not doing anybody a favor by eliminating their job. People generally already work the best job they can manage to and by eliminating that job you're making them pick another job they otherwise wouldn't have picked, or worse and more often, leaving them without a job because they were already working in the best job they were qualified for.
The whole "now that these jobs have been eliminated, the former workers are free to find a new job!" thing is bullshit cope. Always has been. They were already free to chose another job, and chose the one you think you're 'freeing' them from. You're not giving them choice, you're taking it from them.
There's a reason nearly all of the old guard VFX studios were driven to bankruptcy over the last decade and it doesn't have anything to do with massive demand for talent.
I haven't watched it but I'm sure they also either said or implied McDonalds is worthwhile on some level so we can pump the brakes on taking them at their word.
That’s… not many at all, really. You could do it in a year with ninety deliveries per day per location (well, 92).
Assuming a dozen robots per location, that's less than eight deliveries per day per robot (and even that might be beyond their upper bound, actually, given their speed and range).
But then they didn't do it all in one year. So… it doesn't feel like a stretch.
Given how many will be recurring customers with recurring journey routes, it feels barely enough to encounter all the possible unique problems.
There was a brief period of time in which rifles were available and game was easy to find. 20 million bison were hunted to the brink of extinction within a couple decades.
It's the opinion of Netflix execs, who have expressed envy over how much money HBO is still making off of decades old IP. Not a lot of Netflix content has legs like that, but I suppose that's about to change with the WB acquisition.
> how much money HBO is still making off of decades old IP
I'd say Disney is the uncontested king of making money off old work. If HBO was that good they wouldn't have been scooped up so easily.
Netflix execs may be envious of the enduring cultural cachet of shows like The Sopranos or The Wire. That's completely different from making real money.
I'm not sure Netflix execs spend much time worrying about cultural cachet like that. They care about popularity and virality but I think they'd be 100% contented to make 100 reality shows like the one I affectionately dubbed "Sluts Island" that each make them $10 million than make one Sopranos-type show that makes them $500 million and 57 Emmys.
When there are more obstacles and hazards on the road drivers tend to slow down and pay attention. Pedestrian deaths in my city peaked in 2025, but they didn't happen in the walkable central areas of the city where pedestrians are common, they happened out in the 'burbs where the roads are wide and pedestrians are few.
I take this code red as a red flag. Open AI should continue to concern itself with where it will be 5 years from now, not lose sight over concern about where it will 5 months from now.
open ai is at risk of complete collapse if it cannot fulfill its financial obligations. if people willing to give them money don't have faith in their ability to win the AI race anymore, then they're going out of business.
Exactly. They aren't going to win the AI race chasing rabbits at the expense of long-term goals. We're 3 years into a 10 year build-out. Open AI and it's financiers are too impatient, clearly, and they're fucking themselves. Open AI doesn't need to double it's revenue to meet expectations. They need to 50x their revenue to meet expectations. That's not the kind of problem you solve by working through the weekend.
The financiers are running out of money to lend. At this point, staying negative profit isn’t an option, they need to be able to fund themselves or they’ll go bankrupt.
i cannot imagine how they are going to be able to meet their obligations unless they pull off a massive hail mary at this point via a bail out or finding someone to provide tens of billions of dollars in funding.
Back in the day before Adobe bought Macromedia, there was a constant back and forth between Illustrator and Freehand where each release would better the competitor at least until the competitor's next release.
When I was a teenager I borrowed a unicycle for the weekend from a friend at school. I practiced obsessively the whole weekend long and by Sunday afternoon I was able to go to the end of my street, turn around and come back. That Monday I returned the unicycle to my friend and never rode one again.
Later in life I made a concerted effort to learn how to manual a bicycle, and after a couple seasons of regular practice I gave up, I never really got the knack for it.
The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes.
Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
Without reading the article, the headline, taken at face value, should come with the caveat that human brain is preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world we've evolved to inhabit. Modern industrial civilization is something different. I wonder to what degree common mental disorders would count as disorders outside the highly unnatural environments and systems we've built for ourselves.
I feel like people on the autism spectrum would still be worse off in a pre-civilization pre-agrarian world, but ADHD would make pretty much no difference.
> in a pre-civilization pre-agrarian world, but ADHD would make pretty much no difference.
I have ADHD and I also have hyperfocus, I think hyperfocus is an advantage in a pre-industrialized world.
As a child I was fascinated with blowguns. After a summer of shooting unripe grapes out of plastic pipe, I could shoot anybody in the forehead from 20 meters away, easily. I shot the blowgun thousands of times a day, it was relentless.
The same when I went fishing, a whole day could vanish and it would feel like a blink of an eye.
I taught myself how to ride a bike and I woke up that night to ride the bike, even though it had a flat tire.
I like to go mushroom hunting, but when I do, I usually like to go alone, I walk for extraordinary distances, rough terrain, I don't get bored, I can literally keep at it for the whole day that people think I'm crazy.
It's a bit like a stimulant induced obsession, but my inner voice recedes far back in my skull, it's an incredible flow state-like feeling.
I'm sure this kind of obsession builds skills and it has to have some benefits in pre-industrial societies.
I have ADHD and I bet your tribe would like to have a guy who snaps to attention from every little noise watching over while you eat or sleep. I also prob have ‘tism, I suck at typical modern social settings, but get along well in martial arts or other activities, where you are doing something physical and concrete together with people, without endlessly yapping about each other’s boring life. Today when I’m older people often elect me as some sort of leader in these settings, prob because I learn fast and it comes pretty naturally to me. I think I would be pretty successful in pre-civilisation society. I’m also great with animals, I kinda naturally know how to touch and groom them. Looking at apes, this is far more important in creating social connections rather than lying about your professional achievements on Linkedin.
I’ve seen people who are “good with people” just make friendships in less than a minute pouring their whole life to another person like they had known for years. If you can do that you have a great career in sales, marketing or politics in front of you. To me it seems completely insane behaviour, like I was watching completely different species.
Perhaps we all come with adhd and autism as a default, and some people get modernity updated into their system while in the womb?
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