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There has been a lot of hype news in robotics + AI lately, as the AI updates just continue to come at a blinding pace. From Tesla/XAI we have the Optimus robot, which I can't tell if this is a major breakthrough or just another marketing splash driven by Elon.
On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.
You also have Google's I/O, which I haven't had the energy to look into.
With the speed of AI updates and the wars of hype, it's always hard to tell who is actually advancing the frontier. But it does seem that in particular robotics are advancing quite rapidly compared to even a couple of years ago. Personally I think that while automating white collar work is useful and such, AI entering into robotics will be the real game changer. If we can begin to massively automate building things like housing, roads, and mass manufactured goods, all of the sudden we get into an explosive growth curve.
Of course, this is where AGI doomer fears do become more salient, so that's something to watch out for.
Either way, another day, another AI discourse. What do you think of this current crop of news?
I did take a gander at a couple of Google's Veo 3 demos for a look into one future of filmmaking.
The sailor and "Irish coast" clips were better than rally car. I did take the time to read the prompts, posted below in the description, and noted the first two were short and simple, while the rally car prompt (which had bad audio via headphones) one was insanely dense. Behold, the future of screenwriting:
Probably written by an LLM? To be fair, the other two video prompts are only a few sentences long:
Seems good enough to change a chunk of TV commercial filmmaking and advertising at the least.
I actually found the rally car one the most impressive, because holy cow that's a lot of details to keep consistent, including The water splash on the camera lens, and the vehicle itself doesn't do any weird shape changing even as the water obscures it, and the audio was good enough that I would not have called that it was an AI producing it rather than a professional Foley artist.
Camera motions seem slightly unnatural but THE CAMERA IS MOVING and the scene retains coherence. Actually mind-blowing.
I heard steady washed out "wobbles" in audio which I found distracting. It could have been my cheapo wireless earbuds. I agree it's visually stunning. and a great expo for the fluid bits. Pass the soma, Mom, we're getting super HD vision in the singularity.
Found an even better example, which has a number of tells, but if you told me this was a clip from a TV show I might believe you at first:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kC8dxvMKsEc
Yup. Seems at least B movies with live actors are finished soon. Unless it's cheaper to film which I doubt except in the most minimalist arthouse cinema. The hope for the Screen Actor's Guild is many people miraculously form strong, lasting opinions to only pay to watch live action media. It hadn't occurred to me that this will cause the death of many entertainment celebrities. I didn't categorize them much of artists I suppose.
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