Comment by echelon
2 days ago
Speaking of Netflix -
I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing.
Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches.
I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real.
For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.
Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary. There's currently more anti-AI hype than AI hype imho. As in there's literally people claiming it's completely useless and not going to change a thing. Which is crazy.
That’s an anecdote about intensity, not volume. The extremes on both sides are indeed very extreme (no value, replacing most white collar jobs next year).
IME the volume is overwhelming on the pro-LLM side.
Yeah the conversation on both extremes feels almost religious at times. The pro LLM hype feels more disconcerting sometimes because there are literally billions if not trillions of dollars riding on this thing, so people like Sam Altman have a strong incentive to hype the shit out of it.
One sides extremes says LLM wont change a thing, the other sides extremes says LLM will end the world.
I don't think the ones saying it wont change a thing are the most extreme here.
Luckily for humanity reality is somewhere in between extremes, right?
You're right, and I also think LLMs have an impact.
The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples.
That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things.
I think that's what not happened yet.
Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?
> Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?
Good question? Is that necessary, or is it sufficient for AI to be integrated in every kind of CAD/design software out there?
Because I think most productivity tools whether CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc will benefit from AI. That's a huge market.
I guess there are two markets to consider.
The market of the AI foundation models itself, will they have customers long term willing to pay a lot of money for access to the models?
I think yes, there will be demand for foundational AI models, and a lot of it.
The second market is the market of CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc. This market will not grow because they integrate AI into their products, or that is the question, will it? Otherwise, you could almost hypothesize these market will shrink as AI is going to be for them an additional cost of business that customers will expect to be included. Or maybe they manage to sell to their customers a premium for the AI features where they take a cut above that of what they pay the foundational models under the hood, that's a possibility.
I see the point at the moment on “low quality advertising”, but we are still far from high quality video generated for AI.
It’s the equivalent of those cheap digital effects. They look bad for a Hollywood movie, but it allows students to shot their action home movies
You're looking at individual generations. These tools aren't for casual users expecting to 1-shot things.
The value is in having a director, editor, VFX compositor pick and choose from amongst the outputs. Each generation is a single take or simulation, and you're going to do hundreds or thousands. You sift through that and explore the latent space, and that's where you find your 5-person Pixar.
Human curated AI is an exoskeleton that enables small teams to replace huge studios.
Is there any example of an AI generated film like this that is actually coherent? I've seen a couple short ones that are basically just vibe based non-linear things.
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It's quite incredible how fast the generative media stuff is moving.
The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted).
As long as you do not make ads with four-fingered hands, like those clowns ... :)
https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique...
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal...
Typical large team $300,000 ad made for < $2,000 in a weekend by one person.
It's going to be a bloodbath.
> Kalshi's Jack Such declined to disclose Accetturo's fee for creating the ad. But, he added, "the actual cost of prompting the AI — what is being used in lieu of studios, directors, actors, etc. — was under $2,000."
So in other words, if you ignore the costs of paying people to create the ad, it barely costs anything. A true accounting miracle!
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This ad was purposefully playing off the fact that it was AI though, it was a large amount of short bizarre things like two old women selling Fresh Manatee out of the back of a truck. You couldn't replace a regular ad with this.
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oh no the poor advertisers
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