[ben_w]

If you generate a new image 60 times per second, that's reasonably described as "60 fps", this is how the output of video game engines has been described for at least 25 years*.

If everyone's doing that all day every day on each eye, that's a reasonable guess of an upper bound: you as a human cannot actually consume more even if you make it.

GANs can already do that speed, but any given GAN is a specialist AI and not a general model; diffusion models are general, but they're slower (best generation speed I've seen is 4-5 frames per second on unknown hardware). LLMs aren't really suited to doing images at all, but can control other models (this is what ChatGPT does when "it makes an image" — it calls out to DALL•E).

* how long I've been paying attention to that, not a detailed historical analysis

[_heimdall]

Sure, I supposed you could calculate a limit by looking at how many human eyes there are, how many frames per second they can see, and max resolution visible. That still isn't actually a limit on how many images could be made, only how many could be consumed.

That said, if we got to such a massive scale I'd expect us to hit other limits first (electricity available, best produced, storage space, network transmission, etc.).

Or did I totally misunderstand your example here? I may have misread it completely, if so sorry about that!

[ben_w]

> Sure, I supposed you could calculate a limit by looking at how many human eyes there are, how many frames per second they can see, and max resolution visible. That still isn't actually a limit on how many images could be made, only how many could be consumed.

Sure, absolutely. But I can say the same of food, which is why I drew the analogy between them previously.

> That said, if we got to such a massive scale I'd expect us to hit other limits first (electricity available, best produced, storage space, network transmission, etc.).

Difficult to guess when the quality isn't yet at the right threshold: GANs are already this speed on phone hardware*, so we're not bounded on that specific combination with available electrical energy; on the other hand, 2 years ago I was seeing images for about 3 kJ, which is in the region of hundreds of kilowatts for 2 eyes at 60 fps, which is absolutely going to be a problem… if they were limited to that hardware and with that model (though both are moving targets, I'd be very surprised if the unknown hardware that I've seen doing 4-5 fps was burning 12-15 kW, but it's not strictly speaking impossible it really was that power hungry).

* Specifically: on an iPhone 11, BlazeStyleGAN model was generating images in 12.14 ms, which is just over 82 fps — https://research.google/blog/mediapipe-facestylizer-on-devic...