I've been watching these videos for about an hour now.
I really want to call this the "Suno moment" for AI video.
Prior to Sora 2, you had to prompt a lot of clips which you then edited together. You had to create a starting frame, maybe do some editing. Roll the dice a lot.
Veo 3 gave us the first glimpse of a complex ensemble clip with multiple actors talking in a typically social media or standup comedy fashion. But it was still just an ingredient for some larger composition, and it was missing a lot of the soul that a story with a beginning-middle-end structure has.
Sora 2 has some internal storytelling mechanic. I'm not sure what they did, but it understands narrative structure and puts videos into an arc. You see the characters change over the course of the video. They're not just animated Harry Potter portraits. They're alive. And they do things that change the world they're in.
Furthermore, Sora 2 has really good "taste" and "aesthetic", if that makes sense. It has good understanding of shot types, good compositions, good editing, good audio. It does music. It brings together so much complexity in choice and arranges them into a very good final output.
I'm actually quite blown away by this.
Just like Suno made AI music simple and easy - it handled lyrics, chorus, beat, medley, etc. - this model handles all of the ingredients of a 10 second video. It's stunning.
Sora 2 isn't the highest quality video model. It doesn't have the best animation. But it's the best content machine I've ever seen.
I can see this, it's extremely impressive from a technological standpoint, and I've already been caught by the first convincing fakes on Reddit (an army person giving an anti-Trump speech). But I'm also worried, as it's a super easy channel to create convincing fakes, mass produced 'content' for mass consumption, etc.
Now these things aren't new, fake videos / images go back decades if not a century. But they took some effort to make, whereas this technology makes it possible for it to take less effort than it took for me to write this comment.
Of course, it's always my choice; if I stop visiting Reddit and touch grass instead it really won't affect me directly.
Maybe some MAY end up in compiliations in ten years, much like Vines do today. But there will be a million times more tiktoks and a billion times more AI generated videos than there were vines, so if 0.01% of vines became memetic, the amount of AI generated ones will be infintesimal.
Content is all ephemeral on some time scale, but you can cache the near-term content to maximize the views and cut back on compute costs. Some model or human made it (the cost), it's trending (the value), so keep it around for a bit.
Everything has a relevancy and penetration decay curve.
The funny thing is, I think this law applied in the classical era (1950's, 1990's, etc.), we just weren't creating at scale to realize it.
Maybe it's just one dominant variable: novelty. I'd be curious to see how we might model this.
every day a dozen critical of Musk/DOGE discussions land on HN main, and zero non-critical/positive ones
it is an illusion of being surrounded by brigades of conservatives censoring you, if anything - the opposite is true
when I tried submitting a positive take on recent happenings in DC - my own post was flagged withing 5 minutes, and I was chastised for posting a link to nazi platform (it was a link to X longpost)
Yeah it's a pattern for sure. Lotta folks seem to not want other people to talk about this kind of thing. Same goes for most other Trump administration articles.
I get not wanting to read it, but that's not what flagging is for IMO...
Well, I agreed with the parent's comment until I clicked on your link. I'm not american, but I understand how important these topics are for you. However, /active is completely filled with US government news and politics. I would not access HN if that was the homepage, honestly.
I guess the HN crowd are too able to understand what's happening. There's too much specific criticism here. Who is blocking these discussions? Where else can we go? Every day the discussions here are blocked. YCombinator has taken a side and it is a worrying one.
There are a very large number of discussion venues online that do not tend to penalize controversial political issues. Many of them have strong political biases (but, then again, so does HN.)
I'm aware that there are other discussion forums but the demographic here has a very specific technical knowledge which is hugely relevant to current events. I want to see these things discussed by people with that knowledge. Other forums have different userbases. That's why it's distressing to see YCombinator take such a clear side in this, or at least not seem to care about the clear abuse of the flagging system.
I agree. If the articles were "Major government IT system crashes and loses data" or "NASA victim of cyber-attack" or "United States Digital Service product roadmap," then the articles would be on-topic and unflagged. But, as soon as the words Elon or DOGE enter the picture, they're insta-flagged. Yes, these topics tend to get heated but that doesn't make them off-topic or irrelevant to a tech news site, or justify user flagging.
Are you being serious. All this stuff has been going on for decades, and the data has been public for years. If you think this is corruption, not an argument I'm trying to have (a lot of it is fwiw,) then wait till you see what these guys have planned haha.
