alt Hacker NewsReading the comments almost everyone seems not impressed at all and points at obvious errors in the samples. Meanwhile it's been just roughly over 3 years since we've seen an AI generated abomination of Will Smith "eating" (or whatever you want to call that act) spaghetti. Yes, AI gets things wrong. You could say the same about LLMs still making obvious errors here and there. To me, personally, this seems super impressive and it's clearly another leap forward. Not perfect, yes. But an improvement.
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My problem with it is the shift in focus. The original Genie was pitched as a simulator of the world that an agent can interact with to learn so that it could be deployed into the real world. This new version looks like a good, controllable video generator. The fact that you're comparing it to the will smith video, rather than a simulator, is indicative of the fact they've strayed from that original goal. I think that's a shame
People are emotionally driven. When emotions drive us to do something we will (unconsciously) find plausible justifications for it without realizing we're doing it.
Anti-AI crowd is anti AI. Maybe they were (mostly) happy with status quo and don't like change. Maybe scared for the future. Or any other reason. Went from "AI can't even tell what 2+2 is", to "AI can't even tell whether these simply connected smooth 4-manifolds are merely homeomorphic or actually diffeomorphic after stabilization" without batting an eye. The goalposts will keep being moved and the dismissal will continue.
It's a huge leap from 3 years ago, but not a huge leap from other current AI models. People who are deep in the AI rabbit hole have seen impressive generative video that has fewer problems (or possibly just better chosen examples).
I agree. This is nothing short of magic -- or perhaps 95% of magic. Imagine yourself 5 years ago, and someone from today going back in time and telling you "hey, check this out, in just 5 years you'll be able to write this short text and a computer will generate this movie from it"...
Impressive... at populating our visual world with more slop? Sure.
Would this be impressive in terms of convincing you to buy something or teach you something or entertain you?
Genuinely asking.
I'm by no means anti-anything but I think what the comments are getting at is that these "world models" do not have a world model. It's a fundamental qualitative gap that no amount of compute has been able to close, just mask by everything else getting better.
This doesn't show up as much where the verifiable reward is "code compiles and tests pass" but you can still absolutely see it in things like movies, prose, or slide decks. Even frontier models are pretty bad at keeping track of narrative threads even as the technical quality drastically improves.
This begs the question of whether the gap can be closed just with more compute (presumably yes, or at least errors can be minimized beyond human capacity to see them) and is that going to be worth it with current tech (possibly no).