46 comments

  • jmugan1 hour ago
    A lot of people are posting here about how bad the end product is, but that is kind of the point. Models have moved beyond generating images to a new kind of benchmark that better exposes understanding of the physical world, and we can use benchmarks like this to measure future progress. (Of course, it will have to be a qualitative/subjective measurement.)
    • IsTom14 minutes ago
      Aren&#x27;t they <i>still</i> bad at understanding how bicycle frame works? Especially the steering part?
      • gegtik3 minutes ago
        Maybe that makes them human..<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.booooooom.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.booooooom.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;bicycles-built-based-on...</a>
      • zh32 minutes ago
        Shhh...you&#x27;ll alert the models :)<p>Totally agree though, anyone with a vague understanding of how bikes works ignores the pelican because they know the bike is unrideable in the first place.
      • edaemon6 minutes ago
        Yes, but I think the idea here is that most models produce very similar pelicans on bicycles, so a different test might be more useful in gauging the differences in models.
    • maxutility1 hour ago
      Agree. The pelican benchmark was interesting a year ago when most models struggled and a good pelican indicated an unusually capable model. Now it’s saturated and uninteresting.<p>A good new benchmark should have awful performance to start and there should be a lot of headroom for improvement. This benchmark is also intentionally difficult and requires the LLM to develop the animation through spatial reasoning and first principals rather than existing video generation pipelines. Similar to how SVG generation was out of distribution for most models a year ago.
    • dofm1 hour ago
      But it&#x27;s another benchmark on how good models are at generating intensely average, unwanted things with unthinking design. Just scaled up.
    • charcircuit3 minutes ago
      Bad? It has a charming style. I would watch the whole book if it was made like this.
  • bredren2 hours ago
    I worked with an LLM to build a ~3D animation of the Back to the Future delorean Time Machine as a way to spice up the hero on a docs page.<p>That took a fair amount of custom tuning and I had to create a tuning view to get some of the behaviors right.<p>But it was enough fun that I generalized it to take in ~any scene description from a film. It goes out and gets more detailed descriptions and film stills if available but also takes custom stills if you provide them.<p>My test scene was the Gauntlet scene from Apocalypto. It is low fidelity but does a pretty amazing sequence with somewhat believable physics of the javelins etc.<p>Here is the docs page with the vertical takeoff &#x2F; 88 miles an hour time travel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contextify.sh&#x2F;docs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contextify.sh&#x2F;docs</a><p>I can share some of the Apocalypto bit if anyone is interested.
    • garganzol5 minutes ago
      The product you&#x27;ve built the animation for is only for macOS, which is a pity cause it has a way wider appeal than macOS market share is. You have low-hanging fruits right there, don&#x27;t miss them.
    • manofmanysmiles2 hours ago
      I am interested, I&#x27;d love to see! I&#x27;m waiting for the day my dad&#x27;s self published books become self produced movies!
  • HarHarVeryFunny2 hours ago
    It seems pretty clear that Anthropic models have been specifically trained to be good at generating three.js (JavaScript 3-D Graphics) code, so given current state of AI code generation in general, I don&#x27;t find three.js models&#x2F;animations as indicative of anything other than the model&#x27;s ability to write three.js code.<p>When Fable was first released the day-1 demos of it on Twitter (presumably from people who were given early access, and&#x2F;or Anthropic employees) were pretty much 100% three.js stuff. Yes, it looks nice, but it doesn&#x27;t tell me any better than an Erdos proof whether the LLM will be able to run my vending machine.
    • fasterik31 minutes ago
      Taking a single paragraph of literary text, which is abstract and ambiguous, and converting it into a 3D animation requires an enormous amount of implicit knowledge about spatial relationships, intuitive physics, everyday objects, and so forth. Not to mention the mathematics of 3D transformations and computer graphics more generally. Saying that it&#x27;s indicative of no more than three.js coding ability is absurd.
    • lowbloodsugar27 minutes ago
      Don’t worry. I’m sure they’re not training it to be good at things like writing database backends, financial services, logistics systems, user interfaces, or anything of economic value. As long as you’re not working on three.js specifically, I’m sure Anthropic isn’t making any progress you should be worried about.
    • abletonlive20 minutes ago
      It’s so funny to see people move the bar from “LLMs are stochastic parrots” and “LLMs can’t write good code” to creating movies from novels is just “LLMs can write good three.js code so nothing to see here”.<p>I wish we had a wall of shame for how much cope there has been in the past 3 years so we can at least remember the unreliable narrators of the times
      • peterleiser2 minutes ago
        But LLM&#x27;s passed the Turing test, so we&#x27;re done, right? ;-) Seriously, though, I agree with you that people keep moving the ball.
  • qwertox2 hours ago
    I&#x27;d rather have them battle on the topic &quot;Who builds a better Google Wave for LLM chats&quot; to explore the space of how AI studios could be.<p>&quot;Getting Started with Google Wave&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eKUAqNGVwX0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eKUAqNGVwX0</a>
    • baxtr13 minutes ago
      It’s a fun idea to re-animate dead google products by feeding product videos to an AI
    • misiti37802 hours ago
      i remember this failing, but this product looks pretty useful in 2026
      • throwaway274482 hours ago
        It looked pretty useful in 2009. Failing to push it was baffling then too.
        • QuantumNomad_2 hours ago
          It was open sourced as Apache Wave when Google shut it down.<p>Years later Apache moved it to read only because of low community activity.<p>The archived git repo on GitHub remains available to clone and revive as a fork.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;apache&#x2F;incubator-retired-wave" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;apache&#x2F;incubator-retired-wave</a>
          • throwaway274482 hours ago
            This doesn&#x27;t explain the lack of marketing. Apache isn&#x27;t exactly known for pushing tech. Google never tried to improve on gmail.
        • khazhoux1 hour ago
          This was the first big secret “you’re not allowed to know what this is or talk to anyone about it” project inside Google. They wanted to be left alone and especially to not have to integrate with the mail team. And everyone heard rumors of gigantic bonuses if they hit whatever milestones, which wasn’t a thing for other projects. All this made them isolated within the company, and when the project was an obvious flop, you didn’t see anyone rushing over to help them.
      • patwolf2 hours ago
        I used it to plan a group beach trip back when it came out. We had a single page shared with everyone going on the trip. The page had live shopping lists, maps, weather forecasts, and other snippets of useful information. Now in 2026 I still can&#x27;t think of any single technology that provides the same utility. Although to be fair, this might be a case of rosy retrospection.
        • tomjakubowski1 hour ago
          Notion pages are pretty good for shared trip planning docs. Although maybe without so many live updating widgets.
      • xnx14 minutes ago
        It was too far ahead of its time.
      • tikhonj2 hours ago
        notion isn&#x27;t too far off<p>wave failed for weird google organizational reasons far more than anything inherent to the product or tech
      • dgellow1 hour ago
        It was awesome when released. I used it a lot, the multiplayer experience was awesome, and the mix of document-forum-wiki is still something I miss
  • toolslive1 hour ago
    Reading the title, I was thinking &quot;Karpathy? I don&#x27;t know this chess player.&quot; (The Pelikan is a well known chess opening, and famous chess players often have book titles like &quot;X&#x27;s Y&quot; where X is the player, and Y is the opening)
  • dundarious2 hours ago
    I can forgive the modeling being godawful jank (windows floating in the air, disconnected from the house). But I expected it to have a better understanding of the text. Instead, we have Bilbo&#x27;s &quot;disappearance&quot; interpreted as him magically transporting or cloaking, and similarly for his reappearance.
    • kiwibyproxy1 hour ago
      which to be fair, happens just a few paragraphs later :) I first watched without sound and thought &quot;oh that&#x27;s the birthday speech disappearance&quot;
  • fzeindl2 hours ago
    Regarding the argument about LLMs having difficulties auditing their work:<p>I wonder whether we are entering the era of throwaway software. Just like cheap plastics and improved processes has enabled us to rapidly manufacture anything we want for a very low price, maybe LLMs give us the same for software. Produce it cheaply and if it breaks throws it away and reproduce it.
    • qrios1 hour ago
      I&#x27;m sure this will become the standard. And plastic is an excellent analogy. Maybe we can take it a step further and compare it to on-demand 3D printing.<p>Why would anyone still use off-the-shelf software when they can have a system that has access to all data, can transform it into any form, and can export it in any format?<p>After years of thinking that I needed to develop a decent movie management system for my own films or a columnar browser for large CSV files, Claude and Qwen each delivered exactly what I needed in just a day.
      • lowbloodsugar20 minutes ago
        This. This is why the burst of posts on HN of “I made this useful tool&#x2F;crate&#x2F;application” were just so sad. The old model was getting what the kids now call aura by developing useful open source products: products where it’s far easier for someone to consume the product than write it themselves. We had people posting things as if that model still existed. Dude, you wrote it with an LLM! Posting them (here) is not only pointless, it’s advertising that the person who wrote it isn’t smart enough to understand that <i>I have an LLM too</i>.
    • 8n4vidtmkvmk2 hours ago
      Yes. It&#x27;s fantastic for one-off tasks.
    • gisely2 hours ago
      Does this make sense with economics of software though? Throwaway products compete with more durable versions of the same product because there is a cost per unit produced that can be minimized by using cheaper materials or production processes that cut corners. With software there is no cost per unit. There might be a market for one-off software that serves a very specific purpose where throwaway software can compete with adapting more carefully engineered software to that purpose, but I am not convinced there is a lot value in this market.
    • skydhash1 hour ago
      &gt; Just like cheap plastics and improved processes has enabled us to rapidly manufacture anything we want for a very low price<p>Have they? Most of the world production is tied down to expensive factories and machines. Yes, we have more products, but that the result of the global trade, which is a very complex system.<p>&gt; Produce it cheaply and if it breaks throws it away and reproduce it.<p>I don&#x27;t know why everyone would ever wants this. It&#x27;s been parroted since forever, but the true usefulness of software is to be able to build it once and runs it indefinitely. If some edge case occurs, I fix it. Which is way cheaper than rebuilding the whole thing. The goal is to have something like OpenBSD&#x27;s ed[0] or dmesg[1], which you only touch every few years or so<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openbsd&#x2F;src&#x2F;commits&#x2F;master&#x2F;bin&#x2F;ed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openbsd&#x2F;src&#x2F;commits&#x2F;master&#x2F;bin&#x2F;ed</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openbsd&#x2F;src&#x2F;commits&#x2F;master&#x2F;sbin&#x2F;dmesg&#x2F;dmesg.c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openbsd&#x2F;src&#x2F;commits&#x2F;master&#x2F;sbin&#x2F;dmesg&#x2F;dme...</a>
  • trentor2 hours ago
    I always thought of the Pelican more of like a gimmicky quick test. There are people who took it as a serious benchmark for overall model performance?
    • NitpickLawyer2 hours ago
      &quot;Draw a pelican on a bicycle&quot; is not a serious benchmark.<p>&quot;Draw an animation of this long ass scene from a movie, and only call me when everything works e2e&quot; can be.
      • ActionHank12 minutes ago
        I feel like we are going to look back on this era of llm usage like we do at the period of time when we thought radiation was magic.<p>Consuming radium and using uranium glass, that’s what we’re doing.
  • eichin41 minutes ago
    Is anyone else getting &quot;mongodb is webscale&quot; vibes? (Except 16 years ago that was a lot smoother, because it used some sort of &quot;render this conversation&quot; engine...)
  • matsemann2 hours ago
    I&#x27;m pretty tired of the &quot;Y made this game in Z tokens&quot; all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it&#x27;s cool that it&#x27;s even possible, but they&#x27;re useless as games. None of them are any fun. They&#x27;re like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.
    • Aurornis1 hour ago
      I’ll never not be amazed that we can type some words and get those results back out.<p>However I do agree that the results are much worse when you try to use them. They look great in screenshots and video clips which makes them perfect for content farmers.<p>All of the LLM generated games I’ve played have been really bad to play, though. I even tried my hand at a simple game, thinking I could iterate on it with prompts to fix some rough edges. After the initial productivity burst every change turned into a slog of tokens with one thing changing and something else breaking it. I would try to use my remaining weekly token budget across Anthropic and OpenAI to refine it at the end of every week but after a couple weeks it felt like I wouldn’t be getting anywhere without scrapping it and going back to having the LLM build it one step at a time with my careful instruction.<p>Which, in retrospect, is the only way I can get usable output of an LLM for anything complicated, so it’s not surprising. It’s a fun reality check project though.
      • techblueberry1 hour ago
        I think it’s interesting to watch that we all have to sort of fine tune our own expectations and build the mental model for how impressive this is.<p>On the one hand I think most of us are incredibly impressed because we know, that quick demo would have taken us months of work to build in the before times.<p>On the other hand the promise is a cure for cancer and the end of all work.<p>So when everyone is telling you “skill issue is why you can’t one shot WoW”. It’s hard to know how you’re supposed to feel about Karpathy advertising one shot custom virtual worlds but giving you slop. Incredibly impressive slop when compared to how long it would take to create it just 3 years ago, not so much compared to Elon saying - “by the end of this year, grok will create a version of the odyssey that competes with Nolan’s”
    • revel2 hours ago
      LLMs are bad at creative work and I don’t see them improving any time soon. Try asking an agent to write a story about raccoons. It will almost certainly involve either stealing food or raiding trash with a 50% chance of having a character named Pip. If a location is mentioned, it’ll be Elm Street.<p>I guess this is the average story and, similarly, the average game is boring and predictable
      • CuriouslyC1 hour ago
        Ironically, they&#x27;re getting worse at creative work because all the RL is collapsing their distributions.
        • dofm1 hour ago
          Worse in a very specific, bland, uninteresting way, too.<p>Early generative AI at least had the virtue of relentless, unsettling weirdness, in the same way that generative art from the late 90s and early 2000s did. A handful of people made creative use of that spooky weirdness.<p>Now it turns out &quot;Airspace&quot; art.
      • MasterScrat53 minutes ago
        I don&#x27;t think this is bad. I want tools that deliver what I envision. The fact that given the same input, I get similar output is something I would rather consider a positive. The imagination should come from the human at the wheel.
      • ben_w1 hour ago
        While they are bad at creative work*, this reasoning isn&#x27;t going to show it.<p>If you took the best, most creative, human writer in the world, and for thought experiment reasons they had amnesia (to mimic AI blank context windows) specifically while you asked them for a story idea 100 times in a row, my expectation is that this human would also give you the same idea at least 80 times out of that 100.<p>* still better than the mean human, but even the top 0.1% of humans aren&#x27;t all professional authors.
        • emp1734456 minutes ago
          Better than the mean human? The mean human creates far better stories while daydreaming. AI enthusiasts have such a distorted view of human capability, it’s bizarre.
      • superdisk1 hour ago
        Heh, tried it and got a story about raiding trash starring Pip. But yep, I&#x27;m well aware of this problem as well. &#x2F;r&#x2F;sillytavernAI is a sub dedicated to trying to coax LLMs into good creative writing but it&#x27;s kinda impossible to do consistently.
      • jmole1 hour ago
        Seriously, what is the deal with Pip! I was experimenting with childrens&#x27; fiction more than a year ago and 9 times out of 10 you&#x27;d get a character named Pip unless you were specific in the prompt not to do so.
        • cautiouscat1 hour ago
          I recently saw a study on this actually. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2605.26492" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2605.26492</a>
          • dofm1 hour ago
            I saw that, tested it in Qwen. Elias Thorne, on the first run, as a clockmaker too.
      • dofm1 hour ago
        Elias Thorne!
      • josh-wrale1 hour ago
        I think the trick is to use LLMs like scalpels instead of hammers. That said, you can place a scalpel in the hands of a deterministic (or not) robot.
    • 8n4vidtmkvmk2 hours ago
      We&#x27;re all just impressed that it&#x27;s even possible. No one is saying these are fun.<p>I guess the next question is if they can be made fun without <i>too</i> much additional work with a human guiding the AI.
      • Jtarii1 hour ago
        How well encoded is &quot;good game feel&quot; in the weights of an LLM. I am guessing not very well.
      • tripleee1 hour ago
        &gt; the next question is if they can be made fun without too much additional work<p>They can&#x27;t. If you think about how these things are trained it&#x27;s blatantly obvious <i>fun</i> is an impossible metric to optimize them for
        • egeozcan1 hour ago
          Training impossibilities aside, how would you even make an optimization loop for &quot;fun&quot;?
          • tripleee1 hour ago
            Brain-computer interface, maybe. Hook a million play-testers up to the output and have it iterate.<p>..feels like there was a black mirror episode about that though
      • minimaxir1 hour ago
        Unfortunately people are saying they are fun for the purposes of ragebait that goes viral, which is half the reason people intentionally post AI slop on social media.
    • Jtarii1 hour ago
      LLMs currently have 0 imagination, I have strong doubts that will be solved any time soon even if they continue to become superhuman at everything else. They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant.
      • egeozcan1 hour ago
        &gt; They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant<p>That&#x27;s oddly specific and it&#x27;d really hurt my cousins feelings :)
        • dofm1 hour ago
          Especially since the whole AI IPO concept seems at least <i>somewhat</i> predicated on creative accounting! ;-)
    • eterm1 hour ago
      Right, but the new phenomena is that we&#x27;ve lost a signal.<p>Used to be if a game looked that good it probably had time spent on the game part too.
      • dofm1 hour ago
        And you could almost always tell a &quot;game construction kit&quot; game from a real one, couldn&#x27;t you? Whatever was missing from those is always missing from these, and it seems just as rare that the game will reach much beyond its origins.<p>Whenever I think about AI games I find myself thinking about Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird and Angry Birds. Three simple, elegant games.<p>It is easy to see what makes Tiny Wings so completely loveable — it has a sculpted, adorable, perfect charm with a cleverly inverted game mechanic that has a calibrated level of exasperation and reward.<p>But why were Flappy Bird and Angry Birds, very basic games with very old game mechanics, so charming?<p>It seems equally impossible to imagine an AI coming up with a game with the quality of any of them, even with maximised creativity. But explaining why for Flappy Bird seems quite difficult, especially when you consider it uses some stolen visuals!
        • knollimar50 minutes ago
          it&#x27;s crazy because I&#x27;ve seen &quot;implement flappy bird on an FPGA with VGA output&quot; as a 2 week project to a human as something immediately understandable.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s the smoothness of motion that makes these games understandable and LLMs seem to consistently fail at that. Ask them to do something snowboarding and they go really hard on the physics since it seems like they don&#x27;t know what kind of approxmations feel good.
      • ben_w41 minutes ago
        I&#x27;ve been hearing similar from a while back, but the blame wasn&#x27;t being directed at AI, it was directed at Unreal&#x27;s defaults now making random indies look like AAA in the screenshots.<p>(It&#x27;s been a while since I was in the game industry, so IDK quite how accurate this is).
    • throwatdem123111 hour ago
      It’s called “demo porn” and it’s really obnoxious and borderline offensive to people that take the craft and art form of video games seriously.<p>If I see one more “one shot MMO” where you just walk around and do absolutey nothing or another menu slop idle battler or rogulike deck builder I’m going to go Postal in Minecraft.
    • tripleee1 hour ago
      It&#x27;s the flashy game&#x2F;movie trailer equivalent for LLMs. Completely unrelated to the real experience, but good for marketing.
    • upmostly1 hour ago
      Unfortunately the Phaser framework has decided to go all-in on this route, and it&#x27;s really disappointing.<p>These one-shot products aren&#x27;t games. They&#x27;re barely even demos. I don&#x27;t even know what to call them. For a mature framework like Phaser to sell-out like this and create a vibecoded platform for vibecoded games is shocking.
    • moron4hire2 hours ago
      It&#x27;s blockchain for gaming all over again, putting the cart before the horse.
    • segmondy2 hours ago
      you&#x27;re tired because you lack imagination.
      • throwatdem123111 hour ago
        It’s the people spamming these shitty games that lack imagination.
        • segmondy38 minutes ago
          people are excited, let them be excited! but more than the excitement is realizing the implications of what this means for building software, first it looks like a toy and then it doesn&#x27;t. the OP is talking about how the games are not playable and fun. who cares? that&#x27;s not the point.
  • baron8162 hours ago
    IMO, the area where AI is going to be most useful over the next couple years is in developing manufacturing processes top to bottom. Maybe a million token budget is too small, but something like &quot;design me a sneaker and all the equipment to manufacture it autonomously&quot;.
    • knollimar46 minutes ago
      They can&#x27;t even run a vending machine. I don&#x27;t want to do a shallow dismissal, but I think there&#x27;s a gulf between my understanding and yours. I hope it&#x27;s me so I learn something.<p>I think LLMs will be excellent glue of &quot;find the right function&#x2F;button and run&#x2F;push it&quot; but design without constraints and they just explode immediately
    • lelanthran28 minutes ago
      &gt; IMO, the area where AI is going to be most useful over the next couple years is in developing manufacturing processes top to bottom.<p>Why do you say this? I have some experience of manufacturing processes and am not seeing where AI would be useful other than to drive the robots which we can already do quite well without AI (see all the dark&#x2F;lights-out factories that already exist).<p>Where do you see it being useful? An example would be nice.
    • hgoel2 hours ago
      I think embodied AI or autonomous experimentation will need to make a lot more progress before that kind of thing is possible.<p>Asking AI to design real world objects doesn&#x27;t work very well because all of its tests involve proxies and thus miss things that are glaringly obvious when the object is actually built.
    • bagels2 hours ago
      You think the bottleneck in creating a sneaker factory is not having an LLM to tell you what machines to buy?
    • aabhay2 hours ago
      Yes but the second order effect of this is that the cost of the tooling goes up since it is now the bottleneck, and therefore the shoemakers that survive do it off of technical complexity, branding, and regulatory capture.
    • billyp-rva2 hours ago
      &gt; &quot;design me a sneaker and all the equipment to manufacture it autonomously&quot;<p>We already have sneaker designs and the equipment to manufacture them. Whatever it spits out is going to be, at best, a mediocre clone of something that already exists. What exactly is the point?
      • baron81657 minutes ago
        Sneaker manufacturing is a very manual process. Nike famously tried to automate it and failed (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;economy&#x2F;trade&#x2F;why-its-so-difficult-for-robots-to-make-your-nike-sneakers-47b882b5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;economy&#x2F;trade&#x2F;why-its-so-difficult-for-r...</a>). Designing and constantly changing all the processes is more expensive than just having people do it by hand. If you can have AI design the process, then the equation switches.
    • Invictus02 hours ago
      Gotta love when a techbro just says some complete nonsense like this with total confidence
      • etdznots2 hours ago
        Grok build me a spaceship to mars, make no mistakes
  • mold_aid31 minutes ago
    The tilde thing remains uniquely obnoxious in a field that seems want to mangle language for fun, so that&#x27;s innovative I guess
  • cocoa192 hours ago
    We must not be using the same opus 5, because if I tried to generate this it would refuse based on copyright grounds.
    • throwatdem123111 hour ago
      Karpathy works for Anthropic so he obviously has full access to everything, and doesn’t have to pay for token burn either.
      • knollimar50 minutes ago
        I saw that &quot;~free&quot; and laughed.
  • barrenko1 hour ago
    This has started to feel a bit like the beginning of railroads and then the steampunk fiction of &quot;let&#x27;s just build railroads to everywhere&quot;. We don&#x27;t need it and there&#x27;s no use for it.<p>As with painting, after a while there&#x27;s nothing really new to paint, we genuinely need 0 new software. We need to fix our broken physical world, our social lives, our kids and what&#x27;s left of our democracies.<p>This software crap is done, leave it to the nerds.
    • fasterik2 minutes ago
      Agreed that software isn&#x27;t going to fix our broken institutions. But we need 0 new software? AlphaFold won its creators a Nobel prize in chemistry and solved a research problem that feeds into every area of biology, medical research, and drug discovery. We still have an untold number problems we need to solve related to human health, energy production, climate change, infrastructure, communications... The list is practically infinite.
    • morbicer1 hour ago
      Beautifully put. Software is ok. It&#x27;s not going to fix our broken world. If AI could at least find cure for some illnesses that would be great. Or decrease social injustice and help with global warming. But it&#x27;s likely going to do the exact opposite.
  • xyzsparetimexyz2 hours ago
    How much are the hobbit houses described in the book? The ones here look exactly like the movie
  • fwlr1 hour ago
    I really dislike this AI programming thing of “Mr LLM, go slam your face into the problem until there’s no problem left, then call me back”. (Not sure if it’s a recent trend or a fundamental nature.)<p>It always brings to my mind some words from Rich Hickey:<p><pre><code> I think we’re in this world I’d like to call “guardrail programming”. It’s really sad: we’re like, “I can make change because I have tests!”. Who does that? Who drives their car around, banging against the guardrails, saying “whoah, I’m so glad I have these guardrails so I can make it to the show on time!” </code></pre> I don’t think I really have a point to make here, other than it just feels like someone’s released a bunch of carnival bumper cars onto the highways.
    • dofm1 hour ago
      &gt; I really dislike this AI programming thing of “Mr LLM, go slam your face into the problem until there’s no problem left, then call me back”.<p>Not difficult to see why the employees of AI firms are thrilled with it though, eh?
    • ben_w1 hour ago
      &gt; I don’t think I really have a point to make here, other than it just feels like someone’s released a bunch of carnival bumper cars onto the highways.<p>I like the analogy.<p>I guess this is why we got this before cars sold without steering wheels: literal guardrails on the literal roads are somewhat more expensive, especially for the people who keep bouncing off them on the way to their destination.<p>Also, where the guardrails are absent: oh look, felonies. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=ai+hacks+company&amp;tbm=nws" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=ai+hacks+company&amp;tbm=nws</a>
    • mister_mort1 hour ago
      Like hitting pinball bumpers, except the high score in the end is the bill you pay the token provider.
  • xnx16 minutes ago
    AI is now somewhere between &quot;Money for Nothing&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0</a>) and &quot;Knick Knack&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9uhM_SUhdaw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9uhM_SUhdaw</a>) in capabilities.
  • dekhn1 hour ago
    I&#x27;d like to see the Silmarillion, specfically both Ainulindalë and the Fall of Numenor. At this point a visual model would probably produce something better than Amazon (but presumably not Jackson).
  • dofm1 hour ago
    Anthropic spokesman [0] Andrej Karpathy is here to tell you about token-wasting loops, and insists on the weird idea that they are &quot;~free&quot;, when in fact, they are fuelled by expensively burning investor money.<p>[0] Seriously. Get used to mentally prefixing his and Boris Cherny&#x27;s name like this, every time you see them quoted. These people are speaking while employed; there is no chance they are not aligned with the employers who will make them wealthy. The tech industry does like to pretend that for some reason AI people, uniquely, speak thoughts unbiased and for themselves or even for science or humanity.
  • hkalbasi1 hour ago
    This makes me think about using a game engine and a coding agent instead of current video generation AIs. It will probably cost much more, but it will have almost zero consistency problems. Is this line explored?
  • skybrian2 hours ago
    Still images seem like a better quick test because we can see them at a glance. Maybe ask it to make a comic?
  • wiradikusuma2 hours ago
    Do you guys notice that LLM can create fancy viz&#x2F;animations by coding them instead of leveraging what we humans usually use (e.g Lottie, After Effects)?<p>I wonder if Flash is still popular... LLM can use that instead...?
  • OtherShrezzing1 hour ago
    &gt; I also like this kind of examples because no one in their right mind would ever spend the time to write something this custom<p>This is an odd take, given that Karpathy is certainly aware that the LotR films absolutely did create Bag End in digital format; that their creation was outstandingly high quality; and that Claude’s output here very obviously “leans heavily” on their prior art.
  • serf2 hours ago
    you don&#x27;t really need screenshots if you have an engine expressive enough for the scene generation while ensuring the visual appearance of the engine output itself is feasible.<p>that&#x27;s why these things are actually pretty good at openscad&#x2F;freecad&#x2F;F360 mcps , the visual reality is enforced and guaranteed by rigor in the interpretation engine that is anchored to human physical reality.
  • croes1 hour ago
    &gt; I also like this kind of examples because no one in their right mind would ever spend the time to write something this custom<p>There are people in their right mind who would do that and their are already examples of people who did similar things.<p>But maybe not in the future if people would confuse all the effort with AI
  • wslh1 hour ago
    If you like this check: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47400868">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47400868</a> it can be used to generate animations (not games) as well.
    • knollimar43 minutes ago
      I know this is a plug but I thought of it, too! I hope this is the next benchmark they saturate.<p>I like where Karpathy is going; I had the same thoughts about LLM generated slop scenery. I just want some variety of scenery for the goblins to get massacred in in whatever fantasy slop game I play.
  • andrewstuart32 minutes ago
    This is equally bad as a pelican test.<p>LLMs should be tested in the same way people should be tested for a job interview (but often aren’t) - with tasks RELEVANT to usage.<p>So you don’t just randomly pick some random thing to make the LLM randomly do (like many job interviewers do).<p>You start with clear statements about real world usage scenarios. THEN you come up with tests that give insight to how well the LLM&#x2F;hob seeker gets the job done.<p>Please, stop coming up with random tests like it’s Microsoft in 1990 and you’re asking job seekers how the would move Mount Fuji, as a way of assessing their programming skills.<p>No stupid irrelevant pelicans on bicycles and no stupid renderings of Lord Of The Rings. Unless those are relevant use cases.<p>Any test that anyone comes up with must clearly state the context and how the outcome is measured.
  • throwaway898641 hour ago
    It may make sense to switch this to USD&#x2F;Omniverse.
  • xg151 hour ago
    &gt; <i>I gave it the first paragraph of the Lord of the Rings, a 1M token budget (~$10) and asked for three js render of it.</i><p>I think it&#x27;s interesting that the &quot;Bag&#x27;s End&quot; interpretation in the video clearly looks like the one from the movies, but generated here as a three.js 3D asset.<p>It makes sense that the movies (or shots&#x2F;frames from them) were in the training data, and I can also easily imagine an association in concept space between the textual description of Bag&#x27;s End and the frames from the movie.<p>But how on earth does the model then go on and convert the latent representation of those images into coordinates for a 3D mesh, without ever even restoring the image? In what kind of representation are the images from the movies stored that it can do that?
  • Gooblebrai1 hour ago
    I can&#x27;t believe the video demo is $10
  • bbstats1 hour ago
    This is awful
  • andy991 hour ago
    Benchmarks like the pelican thing are about correlation with “how good the model is”. Better models produce better pelicans.<p>It’s a useful benchmark (aside from being “cute”) because of its simplicity, both in how many output tokens it takes (though I understand some models think a lot now to do it) and how easily one can subjectively judge. It’s this efficient as a benchmark of performance.<p>Making a long video takes way more tokens, and presumably is a lot tougher to easily compare. swillison has a presentation that’s pelicans from 2023-present (roughly) showing the progression. Imagine “lord of the rings videos from 2026-2029” or whatever, it would take a long time to watch and be harder to judge, and probably just end up being a comparison of screenshots anyway.<p>TLDR I feel like the post misunderstands the role of the pelican thing though if find it very hard to believe he really doesn’t understand, so maybe I’m missing something.
  • quantumleaper2 hours ago
    I&#x27;m sad that Andrej Karpathy went from being one of the most reasonable, trusted, and credible voices in AI to peddling marketing slop for Anthropic.<p>8 months ago, he was (very reasonably) claiming that reliable agents are at least a decade away, but this now goes against the interest of his employer, so the narrative has been changed.
    • novia1 hour ago
      He makes a very good point here about llms or lrms not being good at taking video as inputs, and i think he&#x27;s signaling his intent to help change that. He&#x27;s pointing at an open problem. This isn&#x27;t a carefully structured blog post, it&#x27;s just a tweet.
    • azan_2 hours ago
      &gt; 8 months ago, he was (very reasonably) claiming that reliable agents are at least a decade away, but this now goes against the interest of his employer, so the narrative has been changed.<p>Or maybe over these 8 months agents improved a lot? You know, few years ago many AI experts predicted that things we are routinely doing now with AI are decades away. I mean how can you look at this post and not be impressed? It&#x27;s insane what AI is currently capable of.
    • Rexxar2 hours ago
      What narrative has changed ? I just see an experiment with a very perfectible result and some reflections about what capacity are currently missing to have better results.
    • budsniffer9522 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • azan_2 hours ago
        Yeah, it appears that if your prior is that AI can&#x27;t be good, no evidence can convince you that actually current models are extremely capable.
      • micromacrofoot2 hours ago
        you&#x27;re doing the exact same thing by making the inverse claim without any information, at least the original comment claims some change for someone to investigate... all you&#x27;re doing is disagreeing as an opportunity to be snarky
  • stackedinserter1 hour ago
    It would be better to ask model to render segmented 3d, with placeholders, like magenta is water, blue is sky, green is grass, purple is Frodo&#x27;s face, etc, then pass the result through img2img model to properly &quot;render&quot; it.
  • c0rruptbytes2 hours ago
    perfect benchmark to burn more tokens - convenient
  • blitzar2 hours ago
    I think the pelican test is better.
    • criddell2 hours ago
      I&#x27;d like to see tests of things the current AIs are bad at, like drive a car. Or maybe take instruction to complete some novel activity to test how well they can learn.
  • forrestthewoods2 hours ago
    As a former gamedev watching non-gamedev AI talk about games is so amusing. They really truly do not understand anything about games or consumer entertainment.<p>There’s a reason AI slop games have literally zero engagement. Last summer that stupid flying game blew up. Maybe a million people “played” the game. Where play means they clicked a link and checked it out not because of what the game was but solely because of how it was made.<p>In terms of concurrent players that game wouldn’t have cracked the Top 5,000 on Steam.<p>My metric for AI games is “number of players who spent more than 15 minutes playing”. I’m not aware of any vibeslop that has achieved 1 such player.<p>Now obviously LLMs are transformative for game dev. But “hyper custom worlds you can drop into” shows an extreme ignorance of what players want imho.
  • epolanski2 hours ago
    I wish there was a timeline where I never ever had to see the pelican SVG test ever again.
  • shapefrog2 hours ago
    &quot;Check the current situation and make a new Iran Lego (tm) truth bomb video.&quot;
  • nozzlegear2 hours ago
    Don&#x27;t miss Elon Musk&#x27;s reply:<p>&gt; @elonmusk 13h<p>&gt; <i>Yah</i><p>&gt; 158 replies, 74 reposts, 1400 likes<p>Thanks Elon, you goofy fuck<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;2083761408932458568" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;2083761408932458568</a>
    • mdp20211 hour ago
      Can someone please translate that expression? What would that mean?
      • rzzzt1 hour ago
        Affirmation?
        • mdp20211 hour ago
          Well, in that case - if it is just a &quot;hear, hear&quot; - I do not see why the utterance from that actor would be of note.<p>Maybe nozzlegear wanted to suggest some importance on Musk remaining a bet-ter on the general tech, regardless of the competition?
          • rzzzt1 hour ago
            This gets me thinking (although there is not much to divine from three letters). Maybe it&#x27;s a Jennifer Lawrence GIF-inspired &quot;Yeah, right&quot; then? Downplaying the significance?
            • mdp202125 minutes ago
              To some online sources, it is used for both.<p>&gt; <i>&quot;Yah&quot;: slang spelling of the word &quot;yeah&quot;</i> (which of course can also be used ironically)<p>&gt; <i>Merriam-Webster: &quot;Yah&quot;: used to express disgust, contempt, defiance, or derision; probably imitative of the sound of retching</i>
    • blitzar2 hours ago
      Concerning
  • miltonlost2 hours ago
    Tech bros continue wasting money to make the absolute worst art
    • mdp20211 hour ago
      &gt; <i>wasting money</i><p>Testing, assessing, tasting...<p>We also do it when we build other things - this is just a different scale.
    • azan_1 hour ago
      Do you think this was supposed to be art? Wow.
  • trlhaq2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • mdp20212 hours ago
      Theft of what? Why - aside from the fact that your accusation are irrelevant to the submission and arguments absent -, you do not know verbatim paragraphs (we do)?<p>You cannot come and place your personal positions as assumptions. To me, there is absolutely no theft. And we cannot play a game of &quot;Yes!&quot;&#x2F;&#x2F;&quot;No!&quot; here.<p>By the way: are we having a surge of this?
      • ssdg161 hour ago
        &gt; Theft of what? &gt; By the way: are we having a surge of this?<p>We do have a surge of pro-AI sealions, yes. Any objection is countered with one or more three word questions.
        • mdp20211 hour ago
          &gt; <i>pro-AI sealions, yes</i><p>Very devoid of intelligence note.<p>&gt; <i>Any objection</i><p>Objections are arguments. That post did not start an argument - it was as ideological as the Brigades. Devoid of what we want to have here (I believe).<p>I have stated and do state: what is published is assumed as read (only, probably not read for lack of resources). If it is in the libraries, it is there to be read.
    • david-gpu2 hours ago
      Try reading what Karpathy said again before reinforcing your biases.
      • trlhaq2 hours ago
        Yeah, pretend that you never used 2023 models that quoted everything verbatim. To put it in a way that you&#x27;ll understand:<p>No bias. No speculation. Just facts!
  • theproblemisyou2 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • yourewrongsorry2 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • hn22fazjsv1 hour ago
    Screenshotting for later
  • matchagaucho2 hours ago
    It&#x27;s difficult to think in exponentials.<p>But this demonstrates we&#x27;re a couple orders of magnitude away from generating 1:1 hyper-personalized entertainment and media for individuals, rather than the masses.
    • hgoel1 hour ago
      I don&#x27;t really get the desire for hyper-personalized entertainment. People are very good at pointing out things they dislike, but not very good at coming up with how to fix them (common wisdom in game design).<p>On top of that, a decent chunk of the joy of entertainment is the social aspect.
    • dgellow1 hour ago
      If that becomes a thing, that will be fun 2 weeks, then become a gimmick only a small niche will be using. What’s the point in having a hyper personalized entertainment? People want to experience the games, movies, tv shows, books others created and are also experiencing
    • skippyfish2 hours ago
      I very much doubt that. We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation and it hasn&#x27;t really changed the nature of human expression. I don&#x27;t see my friends getting wildly creative. I mostly see it used for spammy blogs, spammy books, and cringeworthy corporate marketing - basically, a <i>negative</i> signal, rather than &quot;ooh, AI image, I&#x27;m in for a treat&quot;. Is your experience different? If not, what changes with moving images?<p>Ultimately, most people don&#x27;t have ideas for the kinds of personalized entertainment they want, and they don&#x27;t want to be in charge of content production (even if you have an LLM do most of the work). I don&#x27;t doubt that there are niches for it, especially stuff like porn, and I&#x27;m sure that pros (game studios, film studios) will leverage AI more and more, but I suspect that most of us will just want to sit on the couch, watch Spiderman XVIII, and then be able to talk about that shared Spiderman XVIII experience with all our friends.
      • timacles4 minutes ago
        All small business marketing material now looks exactly the same.<p>LLMs produce an extremely small range of artistic expression, and its kind of ironic, that while it certainly looks functionally good. It immediately becomes noise because everything looks identical.<p>So companies are going to have to hire creatives again, in order to stand out, and be &quot;creative&quot;
      • darkwater2 hours ago
        I&#x27;m mostly seeing the impact of GenAI images in everydays life for example in the small posters small associations or individuals usually attach on streets to promote some small local event. We went from just text created with PowerPoint and maybe some stock image just a Google search away to now images depicting the topic closely. But yeah, it&#x27;s not like a revolution.<p>And this personal media thing, yeah maybe for terminally online persons that are REALLY into a sub-genre but otherwise, it&#x27;s too much effort, I agree. Until we get machines that can read our (subconscious) mind, that will not exist.
        • morbicer1 hour ago
          I yearn for the old days of bad photoshop&#x2F;wordart&#x2F;powerpoint flyers.<p>They were visually bad but honest and sometimes soulful or playful.<p>The AI slop that&#x27;s everywhere now looks superficially more professional but it&#x27;s very busy, samey, unnatural and it really turns me off.
      • lukeschlather2 hours ago
        &gt; We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation<p>Not even close. Current AIs have very poor spatial awareness, they can generate some kind of scene but they can&#x27;t tell you where objects are in the scene, nor can they move objects into different places. They&#x27;re very useful but it&#x27;s difficult to be very creative with them because they can&#x27;t update an image to make it more aligned with your vision for what should be in the image.
      • matchagaucho2 hours ago
        <i>Ultimately, most people don&#x27;t have ideas for the kinds of personalized entertainment they want</i><p>1:1 AI entertainment probably won&#x27;t be a cold start experience.<p>Much like the &quot;Choose Your Own Adventure&quot; books of the 80&#x27;s, consumers choose a baseline template, customize the characters, and interact at various points within the plot.
      • potsandpans1 hour ago
        &gt; We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation<p>No, we don&#x27;t. It&#x27;s quite good, but it&#x27;s nowhere near perfect. For example, you can see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genai-showdown.specr.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genai-showdown.specr.net&#x2F;</a> or others that highlight how far from perfection we still are.<p>&gt; and it hasn&#x27;t really changed the nature of human expression.<p>It sure has changed our discourse. Look at hackernews, where people just can&#x27;t help themselves to engage in ragebait and flamewar comment threads about llm generated accusations. We&#x27;ve got half the people convinced that looking at ai content is like consuming food.<p>I&#x27;d venture a guess that it&#x27;s too early to determine how this technology will change expression. A good analog would be photography, which caused a similar meltdown in the arts at the time.<p>&gt; I don&#x27;t see my friends getting wildly creative.<p>Maybe you don&#x27;t have creative (enough) friends.
    • futureshock2 hours ago
      Judging by the Seedance 2.5 demos today, I’d say it’s not that many orders of magnitude away now.
    • dude2507112 hours ago
      I kind of like a sense of community even if it means losing out on personalisation.
    • Teever2 hours ago
      Amazon recently kiboshed a new Stargate television series. The fan community was quite heartbroken because the Amazon had involved some of the writers from the original television series and apparently one of the reasons that they cancelled the show before it made it to production was that the felt that the proposed story would appeal too much to the fans and not new people.<p>The fans were real heart broken about this but I think you&#x27;re right on where this is going. We&#x27;re not going to be seeing the dominance of centrally produced content like this for much longer, like sure, I think there will be big blockbusters will stick around, but I think the day is coming where media becomes a choose your own adventure sort of scenario.<p>It&#x27;ll be interesting to see where this scales to. there will definitely be some amazing solo projects but we&#x27;ll also see the like 4 player co-op version of productions and then the larger mine-craft server &#x27;Minas Tirith&#x27; scale ambitious projects that involve a few dozen people. And of course passive consumers will remain a thing, or people who just provide some suggestions or nudges for what they&#x27;d like to see others make.<p>But I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;ll be dominated by big companies like Disney, Netflix, Amazon or Paramount.<p>I&#x27;m sure a lot of them will suck but it&#x27;ll be neat to see the inevitable Seinfield - Star Trek Voyager cross over episodes.<p>Elaine and B&#x27;Elanna Torres feud after a transporter accident leaves the crew stranded the delta quadrant. Jerry attempts to date 7of9 but is rebuffed as she finds Kramer&#x27;s quirky bluntness more relatable. George panics after someone compares him to Neelix.