AI video generation and filmmaking

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.