[joewhatkins]

I’m a little skeptical - at least of the view that we’re a few years away from all animation jobs being dead and ML models producing entire movies or TV episodes e2e from text prompts.

What’s likelier is that ML-based tooling becomes a key part of the animation workflow. Used to generate assets, animations, backdrops, characters, etc, which are then combined by an animator/editor. The examples he cites in the article all fit this mold - the anime character generator he cites in the article uses separate models to generate the character then rig it from facial data.

After working in the self-driving car industry, I’m really skeptical of any claim that rapid advances in one modality or task mean we’re “just 3 years away” from all related tasks being done via ML models. Alexnet et al completely revolutionized perception in self driving cars - between 2014-2017 it was really common to hear predictions that we’d have end to end models driving our cars perfectly in “less than 5 years”. That reality never arrived because ML just wasn’t capable of handling more complex tasks the way it could with object detection. Lots of articles similar to this one talking about what we were going to do with all of the out of work truckers and Uber drivers.

And yeah obviously generative art is a different beast than autonomous driving. And I’ve seen examples from WIP text2video models. But I just want to caution that tons of progress in image and text doesn’t necessarily mean we’re just a year or two away from all related tasks being conquered.

[avereveard]

I think there will be rapid advances and some of them are already happening in unrelated space, but it will be quite far from completely replacing the human in the loop.

especially challenging will be (as it is for self driving) context permanence.

that said, with 3d modelling, rendering etc eating up so much of modern animation costs as it is, it is quite likely that tech as ai art tailored upscalers will merge with technique as dlss to enhance permanence and will help make the cost crash back down to earth, and that will have a big impact as currently only "safer" films get greenlighted due the difficulties from recovering costs.

[bergenty]

Waymo is literally open to the public in multiple cities and does well. FSD is here now.

[joewhatkins]

Yeah, I know, I worked at Waymo.

My point wasn’t that these systems will never work in some capacity - my point is that they’re taking a lot longer to roll out than people predicted, and that the internals of these systems aren’t end-to-end ML models - it’s ML-based perception feeding in to a lot of traditional robotics code, with ML models handling certain prediction tasks in certain spots.

[bergenty]

You clearly know more than me but it definitely looks like it all fit neatly into a 5-10 year timeline which imo is insane for something of this magnitude.

[joewhatkins]

The common refrain in 2015 was that we were < 5 years away from having self-driving cars operating at scale without the need for a safety driver in most major cities in the US.

At this point we have a public robotaxi service in one suburban area and two robotaxi services operating under restricted domains in SF that are open to the public behind a waitlist. The cars have problems with rain, fog, or snow, and expanding to a new city still takes a ton of time. Having joined the industry after the hype of 5 years ago, the reality now is nowhere near the vision companies we’re selling back then.