I wish it were AI Donald Glover talking and the "Apple twist" at the end was that the entire 3 minute segment was a prompt for "Donald Glover talking about how Awesome Gemini Models are in a California vineyard"
Also it is either very good at generating living people or they need to put more though into saying "Note: All videos on this page were generated by Veo and have not been modified"
That "footage has not been modified" statement is probably to get ahead of any speculation that it was "cleaned up" 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.
The studio was pretty up front about it, they released a making-of video one day after debuting the short which made it clear they used VFX to fix Soras errors in post, but OpenAI neglected to mention that in their own copy so it flew under the radar for a while.
> While all the imagery was generated in SORA, the balloon still required a lot of post-work. In addition to isolating the balloon so it could be re-coloured, it would sometimes have a face on Sonny, as if his face was drawn on with a marker, and this would be removed in AfterEffects. similar other artifacts were often removed.
As someone who doesn't live in the US this year's Google IO feels like I'm outside looking in at all the cool kids who get to play with the latest toys.
Apparently it's only released to red teams at the moment as they try to manage safety. There's also the issue about releasing too close to an election?
The Donald Glover segment might be a new low for Google announcement videos. They spent all this time talking up the product but didn'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.
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'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't helping their case.
The videos in this demo are pretty neat. If this had been announced just four months ago we'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'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.
Honestly, if Veo becomes public faster than Sora, they could win the video AI race. But what am I wishfully thinking - it's Google we're talking about!
> But what am I wishfully thinking - it's Google we'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't launch things.
Google lost first place in AI precisely because they've been walking around imaginary eggshells regarding AI's effect on the public. That led to the whole Gemini fiasco and the catch up game they've had to play with OpenAI-MSFT.
Except your single experience doesn't mean it's generally true, bud. For instance I have not switched to Opus despite claims that it is better because I don't want to go through the effort of cancelling my ChatGPT subscription and subbing to Claude. Plus I like getting new stuff early that OpenAI occasionally gives out and the same could apply for Google's AI.
Sorry, but lock in effects are real. End users, solo devs and startups might find it trivially easy, but enterprise clients would go through hoops before a decision is to be made. And enterprise clients would rather not go through with that, hence they'll stick to whoever came first, unless there's a massive differentiator between the two.
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.
Yeah man but there has to be some thresholds. We take phones for granted after years of active availability. I personally remember days when "what if your phone dies" was a valid concern for even short periods, and I'm not that old. Sora isn't even available publicly. At some point it crosses over from being jaded to just being a cynic.
On some level, it'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'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'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've achieved. But Google's management needs to be asking itself how they've allowed themselves to be surpassed.
They didn'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've highlighted more unique footage.
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 it
I would generally agree though, it is not normal they didn’t show more human
It's also probably that it's easier to spot fake humans than to spot fake cats or camels. We are more attuned to the faces of our own species
That is, AI humans can look "creepy" whereas AI animals may not. The cowboy looks pretty good precisely because it'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 "cheat" ...
It explains why CGI characters look a certain way too -- they have to be economical to animate
Gemini still won't generate images of humans or even other hominids. They're missing here probably for the same reason. Namely that they're trying to figure out how to balance diverse representation with all the various other factors.
This is Google for the last 5+ IOs. They just release waitlists and demos that are leapfrogged by the time they're available to all. (and shut down a few years later)
OpenAI hardly released gpt-4o. The demo yesterday was clearly a rushed response to I/O. It’s quite possible that Google will ship multi-modality features faster than OpenAI will.
Yeah I think at this point it's "not if, but when" and the gap between parity is just going to keep shrinking (until/unless there's some kind of copyright/legislative barrier implemented that favors one or the other).
Which one of these products Google are releasing that you can trust will even be around in a year or two? I'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't have voice-to-voice but we have a lot more than what Google has promised.
How do I get access? I just checked my app and the Premium upgrade says it will unlocked GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, so I assume my version is still the old one.
I just checked, there was an iOS app update available and it enabled it. I'd check again if there's a new update (version 1.2024.129). Or you could use the website.
I feel silly now. I downloaded the app after the announcement (I'm a desktop user) and it looked identical to the one they show in the sarcasm video. When I asked it, I was told it was not the new feature announced yesterday. Still a lot of fun!
Edit - it does list the new model in my app at least
In the App Store there's a new build of the iOS app as of 3 hours about (call it about 11am US Pacific time). It includes the GPT-4o model (at least it shows it for me.)
API yes, ChatGPT no (at least not for all users); I've got my own web interface for the API so I can play with the model (for all of $0.045 of API fees), but most people can't be bothered with that and will only get 4o when it rolls out as far as their specific ChatGPT account.
I have a regular ChatGPT Pro account and I have GPT-4o.
The bigger issue is that 4o without the multi-modal, new speech capabilities or desktop app isn't that different to GPT-4. And those things aren't yet launched.
Sora is the closest comparison to Veo and both aren't out.
It's been there for three months and still isn't even close to being released and available.
Essentially Google has already caught up to OpenAI with their recent responses and it'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: "well its Google, they will be the best right?" No, I'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...
They just released the text chat model which still uses the same old audio interface as 4. The new audio/video chat stuff is not out yet (unless you are a very lucky early beta user).
It is. I've got it already, but I'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'd bet maybe they prioritized people that were costing them money.
It might be just by sign-up order. I signed up for pro basically as soon as I could, but I never hit limits, and only really use it once or twice a day, sometimes not at all.
GPT-4o is available for me on ChatGPT, with the text+attachment input (as a Plus user from Germany). It's crazy fast. The voice for the audio conversation in the app is still the old one, and doesn't let you interrupt it.
I don't know what's wrong with GPT-4o, but the answers I'm getting are much worse than before yesterday. It's constantly repeating the entire content required to provide a seemingly "full" 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's as if it is ignoring most of them.
It's causing me frustration and really wasting my time when I have to wait for the unnecessary long answers to finish.
From a 2014 Wired article [0]:
"The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today"
I can see more real-world impact from this (and/or Sora) than most other AI tools
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, "wait, what just happened there?"
And I'm someone who is fine playing fast action video games. Can't imagine what it's like if you're older or have sensory processing issues.
I'd like to fact check this amazing comment on that video, but it would require watching Taken 3:
> Some of y'all may find how awful this editing gets pretty interesting: I did an Average Shot Length (ASL) for many movies for a recent project, and just to illustrate bad overediting in action movies, I looked at Taken 3 (2014) in its extended cut.
> The longest shot in the movie is the last shot, an aerial shot of a pier at sunset ending the movie as the end credits start rolling over them. It clocks in at a runtime of 41 seconds and is, BY FAR, the longest shot in the movie.
> The next longest is a helicopter establishing shot of the daughter's college after the "action scene" there a little over an hour in, at 5 seconds.
> Otherwise, the ASL for Taken 3 (minus the end credits/opening logos), which has a runtime of 1:49:40, 4,561 shots in all (!!!), is 1.38 SECONDS . For comparison, Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) (minus end credits/opening logos) is 3:50:59, with 3163 shots overall, giving it an ASL of 4.40 seconds, and this movie, at 1 hour 50 minutes, has north of 4,561 for an ASL of 1.38 seconds?!?! Taken 3 has more shots in it than Zack Snyder's Justice League, a movie more than double its length...
> To further illustrate how ridiculous this editing gets, the ASL for Taken 3's non-action scenes is 2.27 seconds. To reiterate, this is the non-action scenes. The "slow scenes." The character stuff. Dialogue scenes. The stuff where any other movie would know to slow down. 2.27 SECONDS For comparison, Mad Max: Fury Road (minus end credits/opening logos) has a runtime of 1:51:58, with 2646 shots overall, for an ASL of 2.54 seconds. TAKEN 3'S "SLOW SCENES" ARE EDITED MORE AGGRESSIVELY THAN MAD MAX: FURY ROAD!
> And Taken 3's action scenes? Their ASL is 0.68 seconds!
> If it weren't for the sound people on the movie, Taken 3 wouldn't be an "action movie". It'd be abstract art.
It's worth noting that Taken 3 has a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is well in to "it's so bad it's good" territory. I don't think the rapid cuts went unnoticed.
"He's 68. I'm guessing they stitched it together like this because "geriatric spends 30 seconds scaling chainlink fence then breaks a hip" doesn't exactly make for riveting action flick fare."
Lingering shots are horrible for obscuring things.
I'm okay with watching the majority of action movies, but I distinctly remember watching this fight scene in a Bourne movie and not having a clue what was going on. The constant camera changes, short shot length, and shaky cam, just confused the hell out of me.
I thought it was brilliant. Notice there’s no music. It’s one of the most brutal action scenes I know. Brutal in the sense of how honest it felt about direct combat.
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'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.
How many of those 2.5 second "shots" 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 "shot" 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's easy, and you feed continuity stills into the prompt. Maybe it'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.
Kind of sucks to be google. Even they're making good progress here, and have laid the foundations of a lot if not most things.. their products are, well there aren'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't their CEO already out? Expectations from them are higher than from anyone else.
Google search has been absolutely ruined in terms of quality. You're right, they've built the base in terms of R&D for many of the AI breakthroughs thats powering competing alternative products.... that happen to be better than Google's own products. Google went from "Don't be evil" to just another big corporate tech company. They have so much potential. Regrettable.
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.
C'mon, Google doesn't "punish" experimentation. Google X, Google Glass, Daydream, Fuschia, moonshots, the lab spinoff (whose name I can't remember)... hell, even all the abandoned products everyone here always complains about.
The experiments often/usually fail, but they do experiment.
"Laser-focused on the bottom line at the expense of all else" is not how I'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'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'd at least see some sort of coherent org-wide strategy instead of a complete lack of direction.
The person now in charge of Search is Elizabeth Hamon Reid, a long-time googler who came up through the ranks from engineer (in Google Maps) to VP over 20 years. She's legit.
That was a decision that prioritized the bottom line over other things. But saying that Google is "focused" on the bottom line implies that there's a pattern of them putting the bottom line first, which is simply not true if you look at Google as a whole. Search specifically, maybe, but not Alphabet.
I don't know how more people don'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's often said you need to disrupt your own business model.
Google had blinders on. They didn'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.
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.
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.
Now that the first direct competitor to Sora has been announced, I am sure Sora will be suddenly ready for public consumption, all it's ai safety concerns forgotten
I think there's a tremendous compute cost associated with both models still... I can'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/non-business ones) would still overwhelm capacity.
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'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't have that much movement. Compare that to Sora'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.
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.
> Sora was impressive because the clips were long and had lots of rapid movement
Sora 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.
It also needs to separate animation steps for different objects so that objects can keep different speeds. It isn't trivial at all to go from having a keyframe for the whole picture to having separate for separate parts, you need to retrain the whole thing from the ground up and the results will be way worse until you figure out a way to train that.
My point is that it isn't obvious at all that Soras way actually is closer to the end goal, it might look better today to have those 1 second beats for every video but where do you go from there?
The best case scenario would probably being able to generate "layers" at a time. That would give more creative control over the outcome, but I have no idea how you would do it.
Comparing two children is a good one. My girlfriend has taken to pointing out when I’m engaging in “punditry”. They'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's reasoning for being disinterested in such discussion.
Except that many of the people involved do think of it like a football game, and thus it actually is like one. Of course the researchers and engineers at both OpenAI and Google DeepMind have a sense of rivalry and strive to one up another. They definitely feel like they are in a competition.
> They definitely feel like they are in a competition.
Citation needed?
Although I did not work in AI, I did work at Google X robotics on a robot they often use for AI research.
Maybe some people felt like it was a competition, but I don’t have much reason to believe that feeling is common. AI researchers are literally in collaboration with other people in the field, publishing papers and reading the work of others to learn and build upon it.
> AI researchers are literally in collaboration with other people in the field, publishing papers and reading the work of others to learn and build upon it.
When OpenAI suddenly stopped publishing their stuff I bet that many researchers now started feeling like it started to be a competition.
OpenAI is no longer cooperating, they are just competing. They still haven't said anything about how gpt-4 works.
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.
> 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's much harder to take a fast-paced video and slow it down without terrible loss in quality.
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't have to worry about anything . Like even if open AI faked some of their AI videos(not saying they did), it wouldn't affect them the way it would affect Veo--> Google-->Alphabet
Interesting to see that OpenAI was successful in creating their own reality distortion spells, just like Apple's reality distortion field which has fooled many of these commenters here.
It'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't care especially when the competition (Google) came out much stronger than expected with their announcements.
HN guidelines ask commenters to be kind and for the discussion to get more thoughtful and substantive as it progresses.
If you believe a comment is so bad as to warrant shame and embarrassment, please explain why you think so, rather than being dismissive and spewing insults.
On a related note, that is likely why you’re being downvoted. I wouldn’t be surprised if the comment is soon flagged.
Indeed, and they’re at 2.87T today… Built largely on differentiated high-margin products, which is not how I would describe OpenAI. I should clarify that I’m a fan of both companies, but the reality is that OpenAI’s business model depends on how well it can commoditize itself.
>The videos below were edited by the artists, who creatively integrated Sora into their work, and had the freedom to modify the content Sora generated.
I believe it was clear that Air Head was an edited video.
The intention wasn't to show "This is what Sora can generate from start to end" but rather "This is what a video production team can do with Sora instead of shooting their own raw footage."
Maybe not so obvious to others, but for me it was clear from how the other demo videos looked.
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.
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's gate. And whole thing seems to be hovering, gliding rather than walking. Sora indeed seems to have an advantage
I thought a camel's gait is much closer to two legs moving almost at the same time. Granted, I don't see camels often. Out of curiosity can you explain that more?
I hate to be so cynical, but I'm dreading the inevitable flood of AI generated video spam.
We really are about this close to infinite jest. Imagine TikTok'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. "Lurking" into oblivion.
YouTube actually has really good recommendations and comments these days.
In fact I would say the comments are too good. They clearly have something ranking them for "niceness" but it makes them impossibly sentimental. Like I watched a bunch of videos about 70s rock recently and every single comment was about how someone's family member just died of cancer and how much they loved listening to it.
It'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
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.
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'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't learn the right lessons from that mess at all.
all of this stuff i'll believe when it's ready for public release
1. safety measures lead to huge quality reductions
2. the devil's in the details. you can make me 1 million videos which look 99% realistic, but it's useless. consumers can pick it instantly, and it's a gigantic turn-off for any brand
There'll always be a market for cheap low-quality videos, and vice versa always a market for shockingly high quality videos. K. Asif'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
538 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadGoogle missed this train, big time.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/sneak_peek
"Hey guys big artist says this is fine so we're good"
This is what movie pre-vis is actually like, it doesn't need to be pretty, it needs to be precise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMMeHPGV5VE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFzXwBZgB88
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/actually-using-sora/
> While all the imagery was generated in SORA, the balloon still required a lot of post-work. In addition to isolating the balloon so it could be re-coloured, it would sometimes have a face on Sonny, as if his face was drawn on with a marker, and this would be removed in AfterEffects. similar other artifacts were often removed.
Huge grammar error on front page too.
Imagine how bad the model must be if this is the best way Google can think of selling it.
Personally, I liked the above link, even as a Google skeptic, but the videos aren't helping their case.
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'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.
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't launch things.
I’ve switched to Opus from GPT-4 for coding and it was non-trivially easy
wow the speed at which we can be blasé is terrifying. 6 months ago this was not possible, and felt this was years away!
They're not underwhelming to me, they're beyond anything I thought would ever be possible.
are you genuinely unimpressed? or maybe trying to play it cool?
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'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'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've achieved. But Google's management needs to be asking itself how they've allowed themselves to be surpassed.
Even search, in and of itself, is incredibly amazing but fairly commoditized at this point. They should've highlighted more unique footage.
I would generally agree though, it is not normal they didn’t show more human
That is, AI humans can look "creepy" whereas AI animals may not. The cowboy looks pretty good precisely because it'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 "cheat" ...
It explains why CGI characters look a certain way too -- they have to be economical to animate
GPT-4o: out
Veo: waitlist
Admittedly this is impressive and the direct comp would be Sora, which isn't out, but sometimes the caricature is very close to the truth.
"We have no moat" swings both ways.
All my apps are updated in the App Store too.
Website also only has toggle for 3.5 and 4 with the Plus upgrade. Not sure if it's cause I'm in Canada?
Edit - it does list the new model in my app at least
The bigger issue is that 4o without the multi-modal, new speech capabilities or desktop app isn't that different to GPT-4. And those things aren't yet launched.
look at their linkedin pages, that will tell you why they are desperate
(hint: they bought OpenAI bags on the secondary market)
It's been there for three months and still isn't even close to being released and available.
Essentially Google has already caught up to OpenAI with their recent responses and it's clear that there are private OpenAI investors pushing such nonsense around Google struggling to compete.
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: "well its Google, they will be the best right?" No, I'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...
Is it? I can't use it yet at least
I don't know what's wrong with GPT-4o, but the answers I'm getting are much worse than before yesterday. It's constantly repeating the entire content required to provide a seemingly "full" 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's as if it is ignoring most of them.
It's causing me frustration and really wasting my time when I have to wait for the unnecessary long answers to finish.
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.
Not to mention the whole AGI topic is forever doomed from SciFi fans, just remember what happened with that room-temperature superconductivity.
I can see more real-world impact from this (and/or Sora) than most other AI tools
[0] https://www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-is-evolving/
And I'm someone who is fine playing fast action video games. Can't imagine what it's like if you're older or have sensory processing issues.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCKhktcbfQM
> Some of y'all may find how awful this editing gets pretty interesting: I did an Average Shot Length (ASL) for many movies for a recent project, and just to illustrate bad overediting in action movies, I looked at Taken 3 (2014) in its extended cut.
> The longest shot in the movie is the last shot, an aerial shot of a pier at sunset ending the movie as the end credits start rolling over them. It clocks in at a runtime of 41 seconds and is, BY FAR, the longest shot in the movie.
> The next longest is a helicopter establishing shot of the daughter's college after the "action scene" there a little over an hour in, at 5 seconds.
> Otherwise, the ASL for Taken 3 (minus the end credits/opening logos), which has a runtime of 1:49:40, 4,561 shots in all (!!!), is 1.38 SECONDS . For comparison, Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) (minus end credits/opening logos) is 3:50:59, with 3163 shots overall, giving it an ASL of 4.40 seconds, and this movie, at 1 hour 50 minutes, has north of 4,561 for an ASL of 1.38 seconds?!?! Taken 3 has more shots in it than Zack Snyder's Justice League, a movie more than double its length...
> To further illustrate how ridiculous this editing gets, the ASL for Taken 3's non-action scenes is 2.27 seconds. To reiterate, this is the non-action scenes. The "slow scenes." The character stuff. Dialogue scenes. The stuff where any other movie would know to slow down. 2.27 SECONDS For comparison, Mad Max: Fury Road (minus end credits/opening logos) has a runtime of 1:51:58, with 2646 shots overall, for an ASL of 2.54 seconds. TAKEN 3'S "SLOW SCENES" ARE EDITED MORE AGGRESSIVELY THAN MAD MAX: FURY ROAD!
> And Taken 3's action scenes? Their ASL is 0.68 seconds!
> If it weren't for the sound people on the movie, Taken 3 wouldn't be an "action movie". It'd be abstract art.
"He's 68. I'm guessing they stitched it together like this because "geriatric spends 30 seconds scaling chainlink fence then breaks a hip" doesn't exactly make for riveting action flick fare."
Lingering shots are horrible for obscuring things.
And Neeson was only 60 when filming Taken 3.
There ways to shoot an action scene with an aging star that doesn't involve 14 cuts in 4 seconds. You just have to care about your craft.
I can tell what's going on, but I always end up feeling agitated.
https://youtu.be/uLt7lXDCHQ0?si=JnVMjmu0WgN5Jr5e&t=70
Maybe it's easy, and you feed continuity stills into the prompt. Maybe it'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.
Just worth keeping that in mind. You could not just switch between multiple shots like you can today.
The experiments often/usually fail, but they do experiment.
If Google were as focused on ads as you seem to think we'd at least see some sort of coherent org-wide strategy instead of a complete lack of direction.
I'm referring to this article that was posted here recently:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan
Nonetheless, she was a good engineer and a good manager, back when we crossed path many moons ago.
https://searchengineland.com/liz-reid-google-new-head-of-sea...
Google had blinders on. They didn'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 - https://twitter.com/pdrmnvd/status/1707395736458207430
> Sign up to try VisionFX
Is 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.
This landing page feels as haphazardly put together as the Coinbase downtime page last night.
Kidding... I signed up for the waitlist. I have ideas for videos I'd like to use to explain things that I have no hope of creating myself.
Veo 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's confusing for users.
Imagen 3 is awesome though, generates nice logos :D
Agree this is totally confusing.
Even at $1 per 5-second video, I think some use cases (including fun/non-business ones) would still overwhelm capacity.
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't have that much movement. Compare that to Sora'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.
It's impressive as hell though. Even if it would only be used to extrapolate existing video.
Sora 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.
My point is that it isn't obvious at all that Soras way actually is closer to the end goal, it might look better today to have those 1 second beats for every video but where do you go from there?
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's clear OpenAI won't have a super AI monopoly.
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's reasoning for being disinterested in such discussion.
Citation needed?
Although I did not work in AI, I did work at Google X robotics on a robot they often use for AI research.
Maybe some people felt like it was a competition, but I don’t have much reason to believe that feeling is common. AI researchers are literally in collaboration with other people in the field, publishing papers and reading the work of others to learn and build upon it.
When OpenAI suddenly stopped publishing their stuff I bet that many researchers now started feeling like it started to be a competition.
OpenAI is no longer cooperating, they are just competing. They still haven't said anything about how gpt-4 works.
I think this is arguably better than the alternative. With slow-mo generated videos, you can always speed them up in editing. It's much harder to take a fast-paced video and slow it down without terrible loss in quality.
being cautious often puts a dent in innovation
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67650807
The most impressive Sora demo was heavily edited.
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/actually-using-sora/
It'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't care especially when the competition (Google) came out much stronger than expected with their announcements.
If you believe a comment is so bad as to warrant shame and embarrassment, please explain why you think so, rather than being dismissive and spewing insults.
On a related note, that is likely why you’re being downvoted. I wouldn’t be surprised if the comment is soon flagged.
Distortion is easiest when the products really work. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFzXwBZgB88 (posted the day after the short debuted)
https://openai.com/index/sora-first-impressions (no mention of editing, nor do they link to the above making-of video)
>The videos below were edited by the artists, who creatively integrated Sora into their work, and had the freedom to modify the content Sora generated.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240513050023/https://openai.co...
They also just added a link to the making-of video.
The intention wasn't to show "This is what Sora can generate from start to end" but rather "This is what a video production team can do with Sora instead of shooting their own raw footage."
Maybe not so obvious to others, but for me it was clear from how the other demo videos looked.
We really are about this close to infinite jest. Imagine TikTok'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. "Lurking" into oblivion.
But those still require some human input. I'm imagining a sort of genetic algorithm for video prompts, no human editing, input, or curation required.
In fact I would say the comments are too good. They clearly have something ranking them for "niceness" but it makes them impossibly sentimental. Like I watched a bunch of videos about 70s rock recently and every single comment was about how someone's family member just died of cancer and how much they loved listening to it.
Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?
So...you're not cynical, it's an explicit product goal.
Kudos to Google for if not foregrounding, being entirely transparent, about this.
1. safety measures lead to huge quality reductions
2. the devil's in the details. you can make me 1 million videos which look 99% realistic, but it's useless. consumers can pick it instantly, and it's a gigantic turn-off for any brand
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