jowday

Worked adjacent to the AV space 5~ years ago. This wasn’t my area but I remember learning that this was a robustly solved problem long ago.

GoreTex is a bad example - it's gonna delaminate after a year or so of heavy use and is pretty much impossible to repair after that. Which also undercuts ACRONYM's messaging about their GoreTex products being some kind of like, buy-it-for-life rainjacket.

I’m sure there’ll be a PS6, but it honestly seems like non-portable consoles are on their way out. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s no next-gen TV console XBox at all, or if it’s just a MS branded gaming PC.

From someone that worked in the industry ~6 years ago, it's clearly going well for them - frankly, they're expanding and scaling way faster than I would have thought possible in 2019. They've got something like 6 cities running right now and what, 3-4 more announced?

Another thing to keep in mind is that rideshare revenue in the US is extremely geographically concentrated in urban cores. This is why every AV company was targeting SF as their first city (excepting Waymo, which did some stuff in PHX). 'Hyperfocused expansion' probably looks a lot closer to tackling new, novel areas in different metro areas rather than, say, expanding down in to San Jose and the central valley.

These things, they take time.

They've clearly hit (or projections confidently show they'll hit) a point where each car is profitable. I worked in the space for a while - platform upgrades (new cars, sensors, etc) are planned out years in advance and are pretty complex processes. But generally, each upgrade was a massive decrease in cost per car. (usually 50% cheaper or more). So also possible they want to wait for the next platform transition.

Weird, I thought it was one of the best movies I've seen in the last few years. Wasn't at all what I expected to see, but was incredibly memorable and impactful.

F1 on the other hand was maybe the worst offender as far as literalism is concerned.

Dude, I explicitly replied that I pinpointed it to Next. The moment I removed the Image tag and replaced it with a regular <img />, it resolved itself. I didn’t even say I was using three, did I?

The most confusing part is that it only happened really intensely on just one developer's machine.

I'll admit that the way we were using the image tag was a little unusual, but still something that was imminently supported by a plain HTML image tag.

My point is more that Next is such a bizarre black box that things like this were a regular occurrence.

To clarify: yes, it was the next Image tag. The moment we switched to using a plain image tag it resolved itself.

Lee Robinson from Vercel is gonna show up in this thread as soon as he wakes up, don’t worry.

Don’t ever use Next. Terrible developer experience, vendor lock in, weird undocumented conventions that make building anything other than some kind of B2B SaaS CRUD site full of undocumented foot guns. My favorite thing I’ve encountered is the Next <Image /> tag somehow dropping the FPS on a webgl scene on the same page to 2 FPS.

> Plus, you've got the very large challenge of learning a rich, high-quality 3D representation from a very small pool of 3D data. The volume of 3D data is just so small, compared to the volumes generative models really need to begin to shine.

Isn’t the entire aim of world models (at least, in this particular case) to learn a very high quality 3D representation from 2D video data? My point is if that you manage to train a navigable world model for a particular location, that model has managed to fit a very high quality 3D representation of that location. There’s lots of research dealing with NERFs that demonstrate how you can extract these 3D scenes as meshes once a model has managed to fit it. (NERFs are another great example of learning a high quality 3D representation from sparse 2D data.)

>That said, our belief is that model-imagined experiences are going to become a totally new form of storytelling, and that these experiences might not be free to be as weird and whacky as they could because of heuristics or limitations in existing 3D engines. This is our focus, and why the model is video-in and video-out.

There’s a lot of focus in the material on your site about the models learning physics by training on real world video - wouldn’t that imply that you’re trying to converge on a physically accurate world model? I imagine that would make weirdness and wackiness rather difficult

> To be clear, we don't yet know what shape these new experiences will take. I'm hoping we can avoid an awkward initial phase where these experiences resemble traditional game mechanics too much (although we have much to learn from them), and just fast-forward to enabling totally new experiences that just aren't feasible with existing technologies and budgets. Let's see!

I see! Do you have any ideas about the kinds of experiences that you would want to see or experience personally? For me it’s hard to imagine anything that substantially deviates from navigating and interacting with a 3D engine, especially given it seems like you want your world models to converge to be physically realistic. Maybe you could prompt it to warp to another scene?

Why are you going all in on world models instead of basing everything on top of a 3D engine that could be manipulated / rendered with separate models? If a world model was truly managing to model a manifold of a 3D scene, it should be pretty easy to extract a mesh or SDF from it and drop that into an engine where you could then impose more concrete rules or sanity check the output of the model. Then you could actually model player movement inside of the 3D engine instead of trying to train the world model to accept any kind of player input you might want to do now or in the future.

Additionally, curious about what exactly the difference between the new mode of storytelling you’re describing and something like a crpg or visual novel is - is your hope that you can just bake absolutely everything into the world model instead of having to implement systems for dialogue/camera controls/rendering/everything else that’s difficult about working with a 3D engine?

What was hard to understand about it?