AI video generation and filmmaking

`2:51:10`

If they downshift on a straight like they do in the movies, I'll call it out. That is the worst. Let me see.

`2:51:44`

I mean, it's crazy. You really have to notice in the... Like, that car didn't have headlights on and the other one did. And that looked like a 60-year-old version of me. But holy crap, the... Wow, that was crazy.

`2:53:27`

It's a good question because I think good art is very dependent on the same thing that good software is depending on: having a vision, having a cohesive idea of what you wanna create. How is it different? How is it novel? How is it going to appeal to people? But I'm not sure that the creative instincts transfer quite as well. Um, I don't know that I would have the creative insights to come up with good video prompts that would create compelling content. But it's funny because I have actually, on TikTok, there's this guy, I'm trying to remember, Goblin something. That creates these... They are shorts, but not super short, maybe a couple minutes, of really interesting sci-fi vignettes. And I think the guy is actually working on a feature-length video right now. Um, and I think that this is one of those abundance moments. There are creative people with that vision all over the place, especially in a genre like film, where before it required a $200 million budget to create, I don't know, a sci-fi movie. Now suddenly, with AI, if you have the right vision for it, you can do that in your bedroom. Now, that story's been told quite a few times in other domains. It used to be true that if you wanted to record a studio album, well, you needed a studio, and you needed to book that. And now you can record at home on your laptop, and you can do a lot of these things, right?

So we've had this democratization process happen with plenty of other domains, but film seems to be one of the last ones.

`2:55:11`

Oh, I'm super excited 'cause I think it's-

`2:55:13`

There's so much garbage being produced right now. It's the same argument with the slob, right? So people for a second were worried about slob in programming, and I was telling them, like, "Have you seen the human slob? It's also pretty bad." And I think if it comes to studio entertainment, I mean, the bar is pretty low, right? Like, the number of great movies I've been dying to see over the past, say, five years, not been a particularly high number.

`2:56:06`

Like the malleable operating system, having the malleable narrative, having malleable entertainment, that man, Game of Thrones, what if we could just forget the last four episodes of slob that was produced-... and then AI-... comes up with-... I don't know-... maybe 100 different variations, and someone else watches that, and I get the version that actually finishes off that show in a way that's fitting.

`2:56:40`

Oh, for sure. Right? And more just to make the argument that talk about human slob. That was an absolute atrocious ending to perhaps one of the greatest pieces of, Movie history, I was about to say, but, um, series history, right? It was so good, and it was actually a compelling argument for the fact that you need that strong vision. And as soon as those showrunners had to go without a script, it went off the rails.

`2:57:14`

No, not in the general definition that it's in all the things. But have I seen AGI in these glimmers? Absolutely. Especially over the last three months, I've seen things where I was thinking to myself, like, "How would AGI look different from this?"

`2:57:34`

What, what more could there be? And I mean, I can quibble at the margins, but on the big picture, I've seen it able to do these long run tasks and coordinate these multiple aspects of it that we're so far beyond that early moment where I'm telling it, "Go do this, package that." And now it can carry out a whole task from these vague instructions. That feels very AGI-like, and that's what's so inspiring about the moment because you catch these glimmers. And then you go, "What if everything was like that?"

`2:58:20`

So, so this is... I'm in that meta phase right now. So I'm building this Amabot system that's managing the development of Omarchy, and I'm using AI to build the bot. And I'm seeing that recurrent loop where I started it on, like, "This is what I want. I want you to be able to have these isolated VM workers and so forth," and then it can do the self iteration. Then it starts running it. It starts noticing its failures. It starts optimizing it. And a lot of that system, Amabot in particular, AI has driven the majority of the design decisions. Like, I had some vague ideas of where I wanted. I wanted to use this brains and hands pattern where the model is running from where the code is executing-... which is actually a really interesting pattern. Again, Toby alerted me to that, where you have a coordinator that runs the model-... but it's manipulating a safe VM where any untrusted code you're pulling down from pull requests or issues or whatever can't contaminate the model. And even in that loop, I keep seeing it catch itself, spotting vulnerabilities, where it's like, "Oh, I actually just took some feedback from a test run. If a clever attacker had embedded a malicious payload in the response of the test run, that could have polluted something. I took it for good thing. I better start treating that as as outside data." And you just go like, it is just... I get why San Francisco is so obsessed with fast takeoff-... because clearly they've seen this 100 times-... more.

They've seen it with all the models that are in-... training now, and we keep getting these little glimpses, like the security breach with Hugging Face, where OpenAI was training this model, and the model starts inventing ways, essentially sending smoke signals to itself through embedding messages in a package manager, where you just go like, first, that's damn clever. Second, okay, that's also a little scary. And third how amazing would this be if we could harness this level of intelligence-... and ingenuity towards productive ends? So this is the it's so over, we're so back pendulum that keeps swinging back and forth-... that AI has just delivered that swing back and forth like nothing else. Like barely a week goes by where it has to swing one way, and then the next week it swings back the other way. Exhilarating.

`3:01:22`

That's exactly what it is. That's exactly why it's so exhilarating and why, as we talked about before we started, it can sometimes be difficult to come out of hyperdrive. That's also one of Toby's terms here. That when you're working directly just one-on-one with agents and you're not looping in other humans, you go so fast, and when the agents are really understanding your intent, or even better, they revise and improve upon your intent to deliver something that was greater than what you asked for And you're doing this with 16 parallel threads. It can be quite difficult to come out of hyperdrive and have to deal with squishy humans. They just, they don't think as fast. They don't move as fast. And I mean, I'm trying mostly to make light of it, but you can also see a dark version of that where someone does end up in an AI psychosis where they're not interested in other humans at all anymore. I mean, certainly don't have that at all, but I do have this sensation at times where I'm really grateful for just the rush of just me and the agents. Like, can I just not talk to anyone else but agents-... for four hours? Like, that's an incredible run.

`3:03:37`

The irony here is it already was. So the number of fake email jobs that currently exist in this world is an absolute epidemic. And-... this, by the way, is not a new thesis. Um, David Graeber wrote this wonderful piece Bullshit Jobs, back in, I think it was maybe early 2010s. Based on a poll he did in the UK asking people, at that time, would... I think the question was something like, "Would it make a difference if you didn't go to work?" For humanity, for mankind. And something like 30-some percent answered, "No, it wouldn't." That a third of workers thought that their job was fake, that it did not produce any worthwhile, valuable outcomes, neither for the community or society or maybe even the economy at all. And this was my argument since day one with startups. This was why we stayed a small company. This was why we didn't want to take VC, because I was so skeptical of the idea that you could get hundreds of programmers, thousands of programmers to do something productive-... as a collective group. And I think what we're seeing right now with some of the layoffs is a testament to that, not AI. It's just that during the pandemic, a bunch of overhiring went on, and now AI is a convenient excuse to slim down. But I do also think AI is going to expose some roles as just not being productive ways for humans to spend their time, and therefore we must come up with new ways of spending their time.

And the one, again, I'm quoting Toby for the third time here, but anecdote that he shared me, or observation was, okay, let's say we all-- we lose half the jobs that are currently happening right now. Do you know that Formula 1 employs literally tens of thousands of people just to run cars around in a circle for spectators? Like, that has, that whole circus has no intrinsic value to society besides the spectacle it produces of amusement and entertainment. We just decided it would be really fun for these, what is it, 12 manufacturers to create these fast cars and constantly tweak their little aero improvements, and we will watch it, and we will spend literally billions of dollars doing it and employ tens of thousands of people towards an ultimately deeply frivolous activity. So if we are liberated from a bunch of drudgery and fake email jobs, maybe we all get employed as F1 style engineers and drivers and mechanics and masseuses and the other 1,500 jobs that are involved in that, and we come up with new things. I think this is... Humans are very poor at imagining what exactly the future's gonna be like.

`3:06:52`

Funny thing is we're already doing that, right? Like, the number of fake email job people who sit on a chair all day long and type into a machine who don't have hard physical labor would be unimaginable-... to folks in the 1800s, right? So the future is always already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

`3:07:30`

Yes. And I don't think you should make light of that. I don't think it's funny. But I also do think it's a necessary component of progress. And I think if we look back upon the Luddites or the folks working the fields, separation has a tendency to reduce empathy. So we have high empathy right now because we know people-... and we are people who are facing these challenges. But- What is our empathy for the Luddites of the early 19th century? Would we wish that all garments were still made by hand weaving? No, we wouldn't. We want the comfort and accessibility and convenience of being able to buy clothing off the rack. So we must suffer in the moment for future generations to live more prosperously. And that's always been true

`3:09:00`

I do think that suffering becomes more meaningful when you are suffering for a future someone in particular, like your kids. And I think this is one of the great tragedies of the moment, is the falling birth rates are making it more difficult for people to be excited about a more prosperous future that is difficult to get to. Because if we're planting trees of which our children will not sit in the shades, I don't know, maybe we should just make some lumber and burn it all down, right? I think there's a nihilism that can sneak into society much more easily when we are not DNA invested in the future, when we are not liable to our own offspring to propel forward. So I think these are bad trends to merge at the same time, that we have these falling birth rates and these problems with coupling, and the fact that we need to keep our chin up about the future and be... I mean, you don't even have to be excited about it in this literal ecstatic sense that I'm portraying here, but I think you should be hopeful, and I think you should be working towards that hope, and I think it's much easier to do so when you have literal skin in the game.