Not nearly as good as Sora.Google missed this train, big time.

The page is now fixed. Even for a &quot;test kitchen,&quot; that&#x27;s a shocking error for a company like Google to make.

Whoa. The URL is correct, the text is not.

&gt; &quot;SIGN IN TO GET A SNEAK PEAK.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoatmeal.com&#x2F;comics&#x2F;sneak_peek" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoatmeal.com&#x2F;comics&#x2F;sneak_peek</a>

You have to log in just to see a demo?  They are desperate to track people.

His job is keeping stock price up which he is doing well so far. Another is layoffs which again he is doing fine :)

or someone has to crack the whip on Sundar :)

It&#x27;s so bad its laughable. Sundar really needs to crack the whip harder on those Googlers.

Exactly!&quot;Hey guys big artist says this is fine so we&#x27;re good&quot;

And those clips mostly look like generic stock footage, not something specific that a director might want to pre-vis.This is what movie pre-vis is actually like, it doesn&#x27;t need to be pretty, it needs to be precise:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KMMeHPGV5VE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KMMeHPGV5VE</a>

Yeah that wasn&#x27;t obvious what they were trying to show. Demis said feature films will be released in a while

I wish it were AI Donald Glover talking and the &quot;Apple twist&quot; at the end was that the entire 3 minute segment was a prompt for &quot;Donald Glover talking about how Awesome Gemini Models are in a California vineyard&quot;

That &quot;footage has not been modified&quot; statement is probably to get ahead of any speculation that it was &quot;cleaned up&quot; in post, after it turned out that the Sora demo of the balloon headed man had fairly extensive manual VFX applied afterwards to fix continuity errors and other artifacts.

Also it is either very good at generating living people or they need to put more though into saying &quot;Note: All videos on this page were generated by Veo and have not been modified&quot;

Was anyone else confused by that Donald Glover segment. It felt like we were going to get a short film, and we got 3-5 clips?

Seems like ImageFX, VideoFX (just a Google form and 3 demos), MusicFX, and TextFX at the links are down and not working.Huge grammar error on front page too.

VPN&#x27;d right into that playground, turns out the toys were pretty blah

don&#x27;t feel left out, we&#x27;re all on the wait lists

As someone who doesn&#x27;t live in the US this year&#x27;s Google IO feels like I&#x27;m outside looking in at all the cool kids who get to play with the latest toys.

I thought I read they’ve deemed Sora too dangerous to release pre- election ? Or have reservations about it ? I might be wrong…

Apparently it&#x27;s only released to red teams at the moment as they try to manage safety. There&#x27;s also the issue about releasing too close to an election?

Oh look another half baked product release that&#x27;s not available in any country. They&#x27;re a joke.

What seems worse is the Google TextFX video with Lupe Fiasco? What the heck am I supposed to get out of watching boring monologues by a couple of people? They could have just as easily shown, with less camera work, Lupe Fiasco actually using the LLM model, but they didn&#x27;t - or at least not enough to grab my attention in 2 minutes.Personally, I liked the above link, even as a Google skeptic, but the videos aren&#x27;t helping their case.

The Donald Glover segment might be a new low for Google announcement videos. They spent all this time talking up the product but didn&#x27;t actually show what he had created.Imagine how bad the model must be if this is the best way Google can think of selling it.

Kodak failed because their CEO refused to go down the digital route. How is that comparable?

&gt; But what am I wishfully thinking - it&#x27;s Google we&#x27;re talking about!Google the company known to launch way too many products? What other big company launches more stuff early than them? What people complain about Google is that they launch too much and then shut them down, not that they don&#x27;t launch things.

The cost to switch to new models is negligible. People will switch to Sora if its better instantlyI’ve switched to Opus from GPT-4 for coding and it was non-trivially easy

Honestly, if Veo becomes public faster than Sora, they could win the video AI race. But what am I wishfully thinking - it&#x27;s Google we&#x27;re talking about!

The faster the tech cycle, the faster we become accustomed to it. Look at your phone, an absolute, wondrous marvel of technology that would have been utterl and totally scifi just 25 years ago. Yet we take it for granted, as we do with all technology eventually. The time frames just compress is all, for better or for worse.

On some level, it&#x27;s healthy to retain a sense of humility at the technological marvels around us. Everything about our daily lives is impressive.Just a few years ago, I would have been absolutely blown away by these demo videos. Six months ago, I would have been very impressed. Today, Google is rolling a product that seems second best. They&#x27;re playing catch-up in a game where they should be leading.I will still be very impressed to see videos of that quality generated on consumer grade hardware. I&#x27;ll also be extremely impressed if Google manages to roll out public access to this capability without major gaffes or embarrassments.This is very cool tech, and the developers and engineers that produced it should be proud of what they&#x27;ve achieved. But Google&#x27;s management needs to be asking itself how they&#x27;ve allowed themselves to be surpassed.

They didn&#x27;t really do a very good job of selecting marketing examples. The only good one, that shows off creative possibilities, is the knit elephant. Everything else looks like the results of a (granted fairly advanced) search through a catalog of stock footage.Even search, in and of itself, is incredibly amazing but fairly commoditized at this point. They should&#x27;ve highlighted more unique footage.

&gt;these sample videos are underwhelmingwow the speed at which we can be blasé is terrifying. 6 months ago this was not possible, and felt this was years away!They&#x27;re not underwhelming to me, they&#x27;re beyond anything I thought would ever be possible.are you genuinely unimpressed? or maybe trying to play it cool?

The videos in this demo are pretty neat. If this had been announced just four months ago we&#x27;d all be very impressed by the capabilities.The problem is that these video clips are very unimpressive compared to the Sora demonstration which came out three months ago. If this demo was announced by some scrappy startup it would be worth taking note. Coming from Google, the inventor of the Transformer and owner of the largest collection of videos in the world, these sample videos are underwhelming.Having said that, Sora isn&#x27;t publicly available yet, and maybe Veo will have more to offer than what we see in those short clips when it gets a full release.

Actually there is one in the last demo, it is not an individual one, but one shot in the demo where a team uses this model to create a scene with human in it, where they created an image of black woman but only up her head in itI would generally agree though, it is not normal they didn’t show more human

I’m sure part of the reason, beyond those given already, is that they want to avoid the debate around nudity.

Please elaborate, because I certainly don&#x27;t.

You know why and it’s not that their technology struggles with it.

It&#x27;s also probably that it&#x27;s easier to spot fake humans than to spot fake cats or camels. We are more attuned to the faces of our own speciesThat is, AI humans can look &quot;creepy&quot; whereas AI animals may not. The cowboy looks pretty good precisely because it&#x27;s all shadow.CGI animators can probably explain this better than I can ... they have to spend way more time on certain areas and certain motions, and all the other times it makes sense to &quot;cheat&quot; ...It explains why CGI characters look a certain way too -- they have to be economical to animate

They&#x27;re probably still wary of their latest PR disaster, the inclusive and diverse WW2 Germans from Gemini.

Gemini still won&#x27;t generate images of humans or even other hominids. They&#x27;re missing here probably for the same reason. Namely that they&#x27;re trying to figure out how to balance diverse representation with all the various other factors.

They didn&#x27;t show any human videos, which could indicate that the technology struggles with generating them.

Then again Veo is in the same category as Sora, which isn&#x27;t released either, 3 months after the reveal.

&quot;This tool isn’t available in your country yet&quot;

To be fair, all the voice stuff OpenAI demoed isn&#x27;t released yet either.

This is Google for the last 5+ IOs. They just release waitlists and demos that are leapfrogged by the time they&#x27;re available to all. (and shut down a few years later)

Yeah I think at this point it&#x27;s &quot;not if, but when&quot; and the gap between parity is just going to keep shrinking (until&#x2F;unless there&#x27;s some kind of copyright&#x2F;legislative barrier implemented that favors one or the other).&quot;We have no moat&quot; swings both ways.

Which one of these products Google are releasing that you can trust will even be around in a year or two? I&#x27;m certainly done trusting Google with new products.

Without doing anything, I have access to GPT-4o in chatgpt and the api already (on a personal account, not related to work). Maybe I’m just super lucky, but it’s certainly not vaporware.

What do you mean? Everyone has access to the gpt-4o model right now through ChatGPT and the API. Sure we don&#x27;t have voice-to-voice but we have a lot more than what Google has promised.

listen all these guys out here attacking Google and making outlandish&#x2F;false claimslook at their linkedin pages, that will tell you why they are desperate(hint: they bought OpenAI bags on the secondary market)

OpenAI hardly released gpt-4o. The demo yesterday was clearly a rushed response to I&#x2F;O. It’s quite possible that Google will ship multi-modality features faster than OpenAI will.

Sora is the closest comparison to Veo and both aren&#x27;t out.It&#x27;s been there for three months and still isn&#x27;t even close to being released and available.Essentially Google has already caught up to OpenAI with their recent responses and it&#x27;s clear that there are private OpenAI investors pushing such nonsense around Google struggling to compete.

Google Press: This is the greatest AI Model ever yet.Users: Lol it wont even tell me how to draw a picture of a human because its inappropriate.Google flipped like a switch a few years ago. Instead of going for product quality, it seems they went full Apple Marketing and control the narrative of top social media.I keep trying thinking: &quot;well its Google, they will be the best right?&quot; No, I&#x27;m at giving up on Google, they are not as powerful as I once thought... Hmm seems like a good time to get into Lobbying and Marketing...

I was using it yesterday in the mobile app. Unless they just slapped the new UI on an older model.

Except gpt-4o with audio and video inputs isn’t actually out

It is. I&#x27;ve got it already, but I&#x27;m a bit of a gpt4 power user. I hit my rate limit biweekly or so and run up close to it every day. I&#x27;d bet maybe they prioritized people that were costing them money.

GPT-4o is available for me on ChatGPT, with the text+attachment input (as a Plus user from Germany). It&#x27;s crazy fast. The voice for the audio conversation in the app is still the old one, and doesn&#x27;t let you interrupt it.

&gt; GPT-4o: outIs it? I can&#x27;t use it yet at least

Google is scared of what every new model can produce, they don&#x27;t want drama but they always end up in some kind of media drama.

I can&#x27;t even join the waitlist from Europe while 4o is fully available here.

I haven’t been able to try out 4o. The voice chat continuously says there’s too much traffic and I don’t even see a button to turn on the camera

&gt; GPT-4o: outI don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s wrong with GPT-4o, but the answers I&#x27;m getting are much worse than before yesterday. It&#x27;s constantly repeating the entire content required to provide a seemingly &quot;full&quot; answer, but if it passes me the same but slightly modified Python code for the fifth time even if it has become irrelevant to the current conversation, it really gets on my nerves.I had so well tuned custom instructions which worked beautifully and now it&#x27;s as if it is ignoring most of them.It&#x27;s causing me frustration and really wasting my time when I have to wait for the unnecessary long answers to finish.

To quote Twitter&#x2F;X, &quot;I wonder what OpenAI will release tomorrow and Google will release a waitlist for.&quot;GPT-4o: outVeo: waitlistAdmittedly this is impressive and the direct comp would be Sora, which isn&#x27;t out, but sometimes the caricature is very close to the truth.

Never mind no benchmarks, half of these announcements in the past were straight made up, &quot;offline enhanced&quot; cherry picked &quot;examples&quot;, CGI fantasies.Not to mention the whole AGI topic is forever doomed from SciFi fans, just remember what happened with that room-temperature superconductivity.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the commentary of these models creates the sort of fervor like politics or sports.In any case - no details on compute needed. Curious if this ever can be cheap. Even Midjourney still requires a lot.I’m also surprised there hasn’t been some attempt at creating benchmarks for this. One example could be color accuracy.

Even if the shots are very short you still need coherency between shots, and they don&#x27;t seem to have tackled that problem yet.

Obligatory: Liam Neeson jumps over a fence in 6 seconds, with 14 cuts[1].1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gCKhktcbfQM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gCKhktcbfQM</a>

My brain processes too slow for modern action movies.I can tell what&#x27;s going on, but I always end up feeling agitated.

The first time I watched The Rise of Skywalker it was just too much being thrown at my brain.  The second and third watch was much easier to process of course.  I&#x27;m a big fan of older movies and have noticed the shot length difference anecdotally - Lawrence of Arabia and Ben Hur are two of my favorites.  So I suppose it all makes sense to me now that there is actually a comparison measurement that has been completed.

This is very noticeable. Watching movies from the 1970s is positively serene for me, vs the shot time on modern films often leaves me wonder, &quot;wait, what just happened there?&quot;And I&#x27;m someone who is fine playing fast action video games. Can&#x27;t imagine what it&#x27;s like if you&#x27;re older or have sensory processing issues.

How many of those 2.5 second &quot;shots&quot; are back-and-forths between two perspectives (ex. of two characters talking to one another) where each perspective is consistent with itself? This would be extremely relevant for how many seconds of consistent footage are actually needed for an AI-generated &quot;shot&quot; at film-level quality.

Shot length, yes - but the scene stays the same. Getting continuity with just prompts seems not yet figured out.Maybe it&#x27;s easy, and you feed continuity stills into the prompt. Maybe it&#x27;s not, and this will always remain just a more advanced storyboarding technique.But then again, storyboards are always less about details and more about mood, dialog, and framing.

In 1930 they often literally had a single camera.Just worth keeping that in mind. You could not just switch between multiple shots like you can today.

From a 2014 Wired article [0]: 
&quot;The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today&quot;I can see more real-world impact from this (and&#x2F;or Sora) than most other AI tools[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;cinema-is-evolving&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;cinema-is-evolving&#x2F;</a>

They are fast on their way becoming IBM 2.0.

If anything google search with the Gemini area on the top has been very good for me.

Google search has been absolutely ruined in terms of quality. You&#x27;re right, they&#x27;ve built the base in terms of R&amp;D for many of the AI breakthroughs thats powering competing alternative products.... that happen to be better than Google&#x27;s own products. Google went from &quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot; to just another big corporate tech company. They have so much potential. Regrettable.

C&#x27;mon, Google doesn&#x27;t &quot;punish&quot; experimentation. Google X, Google Glass, Daydream, Fuschia, moonshots, the lab spinoff (whose name I can&#x27;t remember)... hell, even all the abandoned products everyone here always complains about.The experiments often&#x2F;usually fail, but they do experiment.

&quot;Laser-focused on the bottom line at the expense of all else&quot; is not how I&#x27;d describe Google, now or at any point in the past. They have a lot of dysfunction, but if anything that dysfunction stems from too much experimentation and autonomy at the leaf nodes of the organization. That&#x27;s how they get into these crazy places where they have to pick between 5 chat apps or whatever.If Google were as focused on ads as you seem to think we&#x27;d at least see some sort of coherent org-wide strategy instead of a complete lack of direction.

Because they punish experimentation as it eats into their bottom line. AI is a tool for ads in the mind of executives at Google. Ads and monetization of human productivity, not an agent of productivity on its own.

It is pretty amazing. I&#x27;ve been using it every day. I do wish you could easily upload an entire repo into it though.

Anything approaching the token limit I turn into a file and upload to a vector store. Results are comparable between Chat and Assistants.

That&#x27;s a good point. Gemini gatekeeping me on so many answers made me forget about this extraordinary feature of it.

I don&#x27;t know how more people don&#x27;t talk about the 1M context tokens. While the output is mediocre for cutting edge models, you can context stuff the ever living hell out of it for some pretty amazing capabilities. 2M tokens is even crazier.

It&#x27;s often said you need to disrupt your own business model.Google had blinders on. They didn&#x27;t relentlessly focus on reinventing their domain. They just milked what they had. Gradually losing site of the user experience[1] to focus on monetization above all else.1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;pdrmnvd&#x2F;status&#x2F;1707395736458207430" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;pdrmnvd&#x2F;status&#x2F;1707395736458207430</a>

you think it&#x27;s because of him or despite him?

Their CEO is generating massive, growing profits every quarter while releasing generative technology, all the while threading a fine line in what those models generate because it can be pretty devastating for a large corp like Google.

Kind of sucks to be google. Even they&#x27;re making good progress here, and have laid the foundations of a lot if not most things.. their products are, well there aren&#x27;t any noteworthy compared to rest. And considering google is sitting on top of one of the largest if not THE largest video database, along with maps, traffic, search, internet.zip, usenet, vast computing resources vertically integrated.. they have the whole advantage in the world. So, the hell are they doing? Why isn&#x27;t their CEO already out? Expectations from them are higher than from anyone else.

Yeah I was like so is it Veo or VisionFX.This landing page feels as haphazardly put together as the Coinbase downtime page last night.

Maybe it&#x27;s going to be a new messaging app - but with AI!Kidding... I signed up for the waitlist. I have ideas for videos I&#x27;d like to use to explain things that I have no hope of creating myself.

This is very on-brand with how Google does branding. &quot;are you confused yet? no? try this other vaguely similar name.&quot;

I see the endpoint returns &quot;Not Implemented&quot; when trying to make a video :&lt;Imagen 3 is awesome though, generates nice logos :D

Disclaimer: I work at Google on related stuffVeo is the name of a video model. VideoFX is the name of a new experimental tool at labs.google.com, which uses Veo and lets you make videos.Thanks for the feedback though, I see how it&#x27;s confusing for users.

Presumably this is DeepMind vs Labs fighting over the same project. A consequence of guaranteeing Demis some level of independence when DeepMind was bought, which still shows through in the fact that the DeepMind brand(s) survive.

And: Communication isn&#x27;t what you say, it&#x27;s what people hearAgree this is totally confusing.

&gt; Veo&gt; Sign up to try VisionFXIs it Veo or VisionFX? Is it a sign up, a trial, or a waitlist?How hard can it be to write a clear message? In the words of Don Miller, if you confuse, you lose.

I think there&#x27;s a tremendous compute cost associated with both models still... I can&#x27;t see how either company could withstand the instant enormous demand, even if they tried to command crazy prices.Even at $1 per 5-second video, I think some use cases (including fun&#x2F;non-business ones) would still overwhelm capacity.

Now that the first direct competitor to Sora has been announced, I am sure Sora will be suddenly ready for public consumption, all it&#x27;s ai safety concerns forgotten

Sora is also movement limited to a certain range if you look at the clips closely. Probably something like filtering by some function of optical flow in both cases.

Has Gemini started generated impacted of people again? My trial has ended and I haven’t been following the issue.

Also Sora demos had some really impressive generations featuring _people_. Here we hardly see any people which likely means exactly what you’d guess.

Also the horse just looks weird, just like the buildings and peppers.It&#x27;s impressive as hell though. Even if it would only be used to extrapolate existing video.

I imagine thats just a function of how much training data you throw at it.

So it needs to learn how far each object can travel in 1sec at its natural speed?

&gt; Sora was impressive because the clips were long and had lots of rapid movementSora videos ran at 1 beat per second, so everything in the image moved at the same beat and often too slow or too fast to keep the pace.It is very obvious when you inspect the images and notice that there are keyframes at every whole second mark and everything on the screen suddenly goes in their next animation step.That really limits the kind of videos you can generate.

Comparing two children is a good one. My girlfriend has taken to pointing out when I’m engaging in “punditry”. They&#x27;re an engineer like I am and we talk about tech all the time, but sometimes I talk about which company is beating which company like it’s a football game, and they call me out for it.Video models are interesting, and to some extent trying to imagine which company is gonna eat the other’s lunch is kind of interesting, but sometimes that’s all people are interested in and I can see my girlfriend&#x27;s reasoning for being disinterested in such discussion.

I’m fairly certain Google just has a big stack of these in storage but never released, or the moment someone pulls ahead it’s all hands on deck to make the same thing.

Objectively speaking (if people would be honest with themselves), both are just decent at best.I think comparing them now is probably not that useful outside of this AI hype train. Like comparing two children. A lot can happen.The bigger message I am getting from this is it&#x27;s clear OpenAI won&#x27;t have a super AI monopoly.

&gt; The shots here [..] almost all look like slow motion or slow panning shots.I think this is arguably better than the alternative. With slow-mo generated videos, you can always speed them up in editing. It&#x27;s much harder to take a fast-paced video and slow it down without terrible loss in quality.

You mean like how they faked some Gemini stuff?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-67650807" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-67650807</a>

Could also be the doing of google. if Veo screws up , the weight falls on Alphabet stock. While open AI is not public and doesn&#x27;t have to worry about anything . Like even if open AI faked some of their AI videos(not saying they did), it wouldn&#x27;t affect them the way it would affect Veo--&gt; Google--&gt;Alphabetbeing cautious often puts a dent in innovation

Interesting to see that OpenAI was successful in creating their own reality distortion spells, just like Apple&#x27;s reality distortion field which has fooled many of these commenters here.It&#x27;s quite early to race to the conclusion that one is better than the other when not only they are both unreleased, but especially when the demos can be edited, faked or altered to look great for optics and distortion.EDIT: It appears there is at least one commenter who replied below that is upset with this fact above.It is OK to cope, but the truth really doesn&#x27;t care especially when the competition (Google) came out much stronger than expected with their announcements.

To Shy Kids credit they made it clear the Sora footage was heavily edited, but OpenAIs site still presents Air Head without that context.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KFzXwBZgB88" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KFzXwBZgB88</a> (posted the day after the short debuted)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;sora-first-impressions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;sora-first-impressions</a> (no mention of editing, nor do they link to the above making-of video)

I believe it was clear that Air Head was an edited video.The intention wasn&#x27;t to show &quot;This is what Sora can generate from start to end&quot; but rather &quot;This is what a video production team can do with Sora instead of shooting their own raw footage.&quot;Maybe not so obvious to others, but for me it was clear from how the other demo videos looked.

&gt; Not nearly as impressive as Sora. Sora was impressive because the clips were long and had lots of rapid movementThe most impressive Sora demo was heavily edited.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxguide.com&#x2F;fxfeatured&#x2F;actually-using-sora&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxguide.com&#x2F;fxfeatured&#x2F;actually-using-sora&#x2F;</a>

They’re not showing people because that can get hairy quickly.

A commercially available tool that can turn still images into depth-conscious panning shots is still tremendously impactful across all sorts of industries, especially tourism and hospitality. I’m really excited to see what this can do.

I thought a camel&#x27;s gait is much closer to two legs moving almost at the same time. Granted, I don&#x27;t see camels often. Out of curiosity can you explain that more?

Not just that, but anything with a subject in it felt uncanny valleyish... like that cowboy clip, the gate of the horse stood out as odd and then I gave it some attention . It seems like a camel&#x27;s gate. And whole thing seems to be hovering, gliding rather than walking. Sora indeed seems to have an advantage

Not nearly as impressive as Sora. Sora was impressive because the clips were long and had lots of rapid movement since video models tend to fall apart when the movement isn&#x27;t easy to predict.By comparison, the shots here are only a few seconds long and almost all look like slow motion or slow panning shots cherrypicked because they don&#x27;t have that much movement. Compare that to Sora&#x27;s videos of people walking in real speed.The only shot they had that can compare was the cyberpunk video they linked to, and it looks crazy inconsistent. Real shame.

I saw one of those where a guy just made videos about increasingly elaborate AI generated cakes. You&#x27;re right, I guess we&#x27;re mostly there.But those still require some human input. I&#x27;m imagining a sort of genetic algorithm for video prompts, no human editing, input, or curation required.

It&#x27;s already here. There are communities forming around generating passive income from mass producing AI videos as tiktoks and shorts.

The endgame of that is that people will leave.

Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?

YouTube’s endgame is to not need content creators in the loop any more. The algorithm will just create everything

I had the same thought regarding infinite jest recently

And somehow our exact tastes would also include influencer coded advertisements.

It&#x27;s introduced early on (and not what the book is really about): distribution of a video that is so entertaining that any viewer is compelled to watch it until they die

Can you explain this aspect of infinite jest to me without spoiling the book?

At the bottom of the text blurb on the Veo page: &quot;In the future, we’ll also bring some of Veo’s capabilities to YouTube Shorts and other products.&quot;So...you&#x27;re not cynical, it&#x27;s an explicit product goal.

I think of it as we&#x27;re replacing the SEO spam we have right now with AI spam. At least now we can fight that with more AI.

If it really suited my exact tastes, that would actually be great. But I don’t see how we’re anywhere close to that. And they won’t target matching your exact taste. They will target the threshold where it’s just barely interesting enough that people don’t turn it off.

I hate to be so cynical, but I&#x27;m dreading the inevitable flood of AI generated video spam.We really are about this close to infinite jest. Imagine TikTok&#x27;s algorithm with on demand video generation to suit your exact tastes. It may erase the social aspect, but for many users I doubt that would matter too much. &quot;Lurking&quot; into oblivion.

If you were of a mind to give Google the benefit of the doubt you would have to think they are desperately trying not to overpromise and underdeliver, partly because that has been their track record to date. It&#x27;s a very curious time to choose to make this switch though given their competition, and if it was motivated by the reception Bard received then it shows they didn&#x27;t learn the right lessons from that mess at all.

It&#x27;s mildly interesting how many of the samples shown fail to fully conform to the prompts. Lots of specifics are missing.Kudos to Google for if not foregrounding, being entirely transparent, about this.

There&#x27;ll always be a market for cheap low-quality videos, and vice versa always a market for shockingly high quality videos. K. Asif&#x27;s Mughal-e-Azham had enormous ticket sales and a huge budget spending on all sorts of stuff, like actual gold jewelry to make the actors feel that they were important despite the film being black and white.No matter how good AI gets, it will never be the highest budget. Hell, even technically more accurate quartz watches cannot compete price wise with mechanical masterpiece watches of lower accuracy

all of this stuff i&#x27;ll believe when it&#x27;s ready for public release1. safety measures lead to huge quality reductions2. the devil&#x27;s in the details. you can make me 1 million videos which look 99% realistic, but it&#x27;s useless. consumers can pick it instantly, and it&#x27;s a gigantic turn-off for any brand

Males the very long Acknowledgments section at the bottom extra rich.

The company that controls online video is announcing a new tool, and ambitions to develop it further, to create videos without need for content creators. Using their videos to make a machine that will cut them out of the loop.

...and enter your email into the form again despite being logged into a Google account.

...and then fill out an actual google form at the end, _after_ you&#x27;ve already signed in, to be added to the waitlist :sigh:

I&#x27;ve never had to click &quot;Sign in&quot; so many times in a row.

YouTube people: We need more UGC.DeepMind people: AI can do it.

While it&#x27;s cool that they chose to showcase full-resolution videos, they take so long to load I thought their videos were just a stuttery mess.Turns out if you open the video in a new tab the smoothness is much more impressive.

I love the reference to Llama with the alpacas.

&gt; platform is going to favor its own and be aware that Sam Altman is the golden boy of YC&#x27;s founderI don’t know if there is a sentiment analysis tool for HN, but I’m pretty sure it’s been dead negative for Altman since at least Worldcoin.

&gt; We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI)You have to be pretty deep inside your own little bubble to think that even more than a 0.001% of HN has &quot;stakes in YC&quot; or &quot;secondary shares in OpenAI&quot;.

The amount of copium in this response is astounding.Yes, there is a noticeable negative response from HN towards Google, and there has always been especially when speaking about their weird product management practices and incentives. Google hasn&#x27;t launched any notable (and still surviving, Stadia being a sad example of this) consumer product or service in the last 10 years.But to suggest there is a Sam Altman &#x2F; OpenAI bias is delusional. In most posts about them there is at least some kind of skepticism or criticism towards Altman (his participation in Worldcoin and his accelerationist stance towards AGI) or his companies (OpenAI not being really open).PS: I would say most people lurking here are just hackers (of many kinds, but still hackers), not investors with shady motives.

Yup, there&#x27;s a significant anti-Google spin in HN, twitter. For example, here&#x27;s paulg claiming that Cruise handles driving around cyclists better than Waymo [1], obviously not true to anyone who&#x27;s used both services[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1360341492850708481" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1360341492850708481</a>

We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI) and platform is going to favor its own and be aware that Sam Altman is the golden boy of YC&#x27;s founder after all.So of course you are going to see snarky comments and straight up denial in the competition. We saw that yesterday in the comments with the release of GPT4o in anticipation of Gemini 2.0 (GPT-5 basically) release being announced today at Google I&#x2F;OI&#x27;m SORA to say Veo looks much more polished without jank.Big congratulations to Google and their excellent AI team for not editing their AI generated videos like SORA

&gt; What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do alreadyI don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities. Apple didn’t release anything that Xerox or IBM couldn’t do. The difference is they didn’t.Google’s problem has always been in product follow through. In this case, I fault them for having the sole action item be a buried waitlist request and two new brands (Veo and VideoFX) for one unreleased product.

Don&#x27;t forget SORA edited their &quot;ai generated&quot; videos while Google did not here.Where did SORA get all its training videos from again and why won&#x27;t the executives answer a simple Yes&#x2F;No question to &quot;Did you scrape Youtube to train SORA?&quot;Google attorneys want to know.

I have no doubt about Google&#x27;s capabilities in AI, my doubt lies on the productization part. I don&#x27;t think they can produce something that will not be a complete mess

&gt; In fact, they already did.In terms of software that&#x27;s actually been released Google is still at best in third place when it comes to AI products.I don&#x27;t care what they can demo, I care what they&#x27;ve shipped. So far the only thing they&#x27;ve shipped for Veo is a waitlist.

You have to give Google credit as they went against the OpenAI fanatics, Google doomsday crowd and some of the permanent critics (who won&#x27;t disclose they invested in OpenAI&#x27;s secondary share sale) that believe that Google can&#x27;t keep up.In fact, they already did. What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already.The top comments around Sora vs Veo suggesting that Google was falling behind, given the fact that both are still unavailable to use wasn&#x27;t even a point to make in the first place, but just typical HN nonsense.

Yeah it&#x27;s pretty unfortunate. Saying something sucks is such a lack of understanding that things are not static. I guess it&#x27;s a sure way to be right, because there will always be progress and you can look back and say &quot;See I told you!&quot;

What&#x27;s also tiring is that no one is allowed to have any critical thoughts because &quot;it&#x27;s tiring&quot;.From my own perspective the critique is usually a counter balance to extreme hype, so maybe let&#x27;s just agree it&#x27;s ok to have both types of comments, you know &quot;checks and balances&quot;.

AI is a pretty direct threat to software engineering. It&#x27;s no surprise people are hostile towards it. Come 2030, how do you justify a paying someone $175k&#x2F;yr when a $20&#x2F;mo app is 95% as good, and the other 5% can be done by someone making $40k&#x2F;yr?

It’s tiring. Same thing happened to the GPT-4o announcement yesterday. Apparently because there’s no unquestionable AGI 14 months after GPT-4 then everything sucks.I always found HN contrarian but as I say it’s really tiring. I’ve no idea what the negative commenters are working on on a daily basis to be so dismissive of everybody else’s work, including work that leaves 90% of the population in a combination of awe and fear. Also people sometimes forget that behind big corp names there are actual people. People who might be reading this thread.

I have noticed this the most in SWE&#x27;s who went from being code writers to &quot;human intention decipherers&quot;. Ask a an SWE in 2019 what they do and it was &quot;Write novel and efficient code&quot;, ask one in 2024 and you get &quot;Sit in meetings and talk to project managers in order to translate their poor communication to good code&quot;.Not saying the latter was never true, it&#x27;s just interesting to see how people have reframed their work in the wake of breakneck AI progress.

I suspect it&#x27;s also a general fatigue with the over-hype. It is moving fast, but every step improvement has come with its own mini hype cycle. The demos are very curated and make the model look incredibly flexible and resilient. But when we test the product in the wild, it&#x27;s constantly surprising the simple tasks it blunders on. It&#x27;s natural to become a bit cynical and human to take that cynicism on the attack. Not saying it&#x27;s right, just natural, in the same way that it&#x27;s natural for the marketing teams to be as misleading as they can get away with. Both are annoying, but there&#x27;s not much to do.

Progress? There are loads of downsides the AI fans won&#x27;t acknowledge. It diminishes human value&#x2F;creativity and will be owned and controlled by the wealthiest people. It&#x27;s not like the horse being replaced by the tractor. This time it&#x27;s different there is no place to move to but doing nothing on a UBI (best case). That same power also opens the door to dystopian levels of censorship and surveillance. I see more of the Black Mirror scenarios coming true rather than breakthroughs that benefit society. Nobody is denying that it&#x27;s impressive but the question is more whether it&#x27;s good overall. Unfortunately the toothpaste seems to be out of the tube.

I think it’s fear.  Maybe not openly, but people are spooked at how fast stuff is happening, so shitting on progress is a natural reaction.

Well for me it linked to a Google Form to join a waitlist lol, so I&#x27;m not exactly pumped

It&#x27;s made all the worse by just being a giant waitlist. Sora is still no where to be seen three months later, GPT-4o&#x27;s conversational features aren&#x27;t widely rolled out yet, and Google&#x27;s AI releases have been waitlist after waitlist after waitlist.Companies can either get peopled hyped or have never-ending georestricted waitlists, they can&#x27;t have their cake and eat it too.

I think it&#x27;s just hype fatigue.There&#x27;s genuinely impressive progress being made, but there are also a lot of new models coming out promising way more than they can deliver. Even the Google AI announcements, which used to be carefully tailored to keep expectations low and show off their own limitations, now read more like marketing puff pieces.I&#x27;m sure a lot of the HN crowd likes to pretend we&#x27;re all perfectly discerning arbiters of the tech future with our thumbs on the pulse of the times or whatever, but realistically nobody is going to sift through a mountain of announcements ranging from &quot;states it&#x27;s revolutionary, is marginal improvement&quot; to &quot;states it&#x27;s revolutionary, is merely an impressive step&quot; to &quot;states it&#x27;s revolutionary, is bullshit&quot; without resorting to vibes-based analysis.

Honestly just think that Google has burned their good will at this point. If you notice, most announcements by Apple are positively received here and same with OpenAI. But since Google&#x27;s &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; persona has faded and since they went through so much churn WRT products. I think most people just don&#x27;t want to see them win.

I hope they didn&#x27;t mess this one up with ideologically driven non-sense, like they did with Gemini.

The amount of negativity in these comments is astounding.  Congrats to the teams at Google on what they have built, and hoping for more competition and progress in this space.

&gt; &quot;This tool isn’t available in your country yet&quot;How did I know I would see this message before clicking &quot;Sign up to try&quot;?

Is there any good blogs&#x2F;videos that ELI5 how these video generation models even work?

I assume for consumers to use this, we must agree to have product placements inserted into our productions every 48 seconds.

Can&#x27;t say I see a visual similarity. In any case, &quot;Cowboy silhouette in the sunset&quot; is a pretty classic American visual.But the parallel you made between android Brynner&#x27;s vision and the generated imagery is fun to consider!

Vaguely unsettling that the thumbnail for first example prompt &quot;A lone cowboy rides his horse across an open plain at beautiful sunset, soft light, warm colors&quot; looks something like the pixelated vision of The Gunslinger android (Yul Brynner&#x27;s character) from the 1973 version of Westworld.See 1:11 in this video <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=MAvid5fzWnY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=MAvid5fzWnY</a>Incidentally that was one of the early uses of computer graphics in a movie, supposedly those short scenes took many hours to render and had to be done three times to achieve a colorized image.

its 2024 and AI is taking over and yet, to signup for this, it take way more clicks and Google form entry(1)Sigh. I still have hopes for VEO though

This is so good - thanks for sharing this!

You might enjoy this breakdown of the lengths one person went through to take advantage of the iOS vision API and creating a local web service for transcribing some very challenging memes:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;findthatmeme.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;08&#x2F;image-stacks-and-iphone-racks-building-an-internet-scale-meme-search-engine-Qzrz7V6T.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;findthatmeme.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;08&#x2F;image-stacks-and-ip...</a>discussed on HN:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34315782">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34315782</a>

Thanks! look forward to checking this out as soon as I get home.

We use GPT-4o for data extraction from documents, its really good. I published a small library that does a lot of the document conversion and output parsing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;llm-document-ocr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;llm-document-ocr</a>For straight OCR, it does work really well but at the end of the day its still not 100%

With so much recent focus by OpenAI&#x2F;Google on AI&#x27;s visual capabilities, does anyone know when we might see an OCR product as good as Whisper for voice transcription? (Or has that already happened?) I had to convert some PDFs and MP3s to text recently and was struck by the vast difference in output quality. Whisper&#x27;s transcription was near-flawless, all the OCR softwares I tried struggled with formatting, missed words, and made many errors.

We can blame the EU AI act and other regulations for that.

Its not US only though. Mostly just excluding the EU countries until they can be sure to pass all relevant regulations.

Uh.. First it tells me that I can&#x27;t sign up because my country is supported (yay, EU) and I can sign up to be notified when it&#x27;s actually available. Great, after I complete that form, I get an error that the form can&#x27;t be submitted and I&#x27;m taken to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com&#x2F;tools&#x2F;video-fx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com&#x2F;tools&#x2F;video-fx</a> where I can only press the &quot;Join our waitlist&quot; button. This takes me to a Google Form, that doesn&#x27;t have my country in the required country dropdown and has a hint that says: &quot;Note: the dropdown only includes countries where ImageFX and MusicFX are publicly available.&quot;. Say what?Why does this have to be so confusing? Is the name &quot;Veo&quot; or &quot;VideoFX&quot;? Why is the waitlist for VideoFX telling me something about public availability of ImageFX and MusicFX? Why is everything US only, again? Sigh..

Google puts more effort into the namings than the actual model, ngl.

I think it&#x27;s funny the demos don&#x27;t have people in them after the Gemini fiasco.  I wonder if they didn&#x27;t have time to re-train the model to show representative ethnicities.

Is there any non slow motion example?The cyberpunk video seems better in that aspect, but I wish there were more.

This is far more superior than SORA, there is no comparison.

Same impression here. The scene changes very abruptly from a sky view to following the car. The cars meld with the ground frequently, and I think I saw one car drive through another at one point.

For some reason this video reminds me of dreaming--details just kind of pop in and out and the entire thing seems very surreal and fractal.

So… much… bloom. I like it, but still holy shit. I hate that I like it because I don’t want this art form to be reduced by overuse. Sadly, it’s too late.I’ll just go back to living under a rock.

Funny if true. Perhaps in some generated video it will suddenly interrupt the sequence with pretend unskippable ads for phone cases &amp; VPNs.

Looks like in places this has learned video compression artifacts...

60 second example video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=diqmZs1aD1g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=diqmZs1aD1g</a>

Not to mention, when does he get applied? If I am asking an llm to transform some data from one format to another, I don&#x27;t expect any changes other than the format.

I would like a bit more convincing that the text watermark will not be noticeable. AI text already has issues with using certain words to frequently. Messing with the weights seems like it might make the issue worse

It seems really clever, especially the encoding of a signature into LLM token probability selections. I wonder if synthid will trigger some standarization in the industry. I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s much incentive to tho. Open-source gen AI will still exist. What does google expext to occur? I guess they&#x27;re just trying to present themselves as &#x27;ethically pursuing AI&#x27;.

An interesting thing that Google does is to watermark the AI generated videos using the [SynthID technology](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepmind.google&#x2F;technologies&#x2F;synthid&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepmind.google&#x2F;technologies&#x2F;synthid&#x2F;</a>).It seems that the SynthID is not only for AI generated video but for image, text and audio.

This looks really good for promo videos. All scenes in here are basically that.

&gt; where it hurts their mental health.Why are they working there then ?

Majority of the people building the ai are artists having their work stolen or workers earning extremely low wages to label gory and csam data to a point where it hurts their mental health.

I think we should all take a pause and just appreciate the amazing work Google, OpenAI, MS and many others including those in academia have done. We do not know if Google or OpenAI or someone else is going to win the race but unlike many other races, this one makes the entire humanity move faster. Keep the negativity aside and appreciate the sweat and nights people have poured into making such things happen. Majority of these people are pretty ordinary folks working for a salary so they can spend their time with their families.