00:05:38 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:05:38] S1: An essay. No. If you're gonna put out an essay that was clearly written by AI Oh. You should be required to put out a video game that accompanies it. Yeah. That's sort of playable that gets the [00:05:47] S0: instead of a instead of a market map, make it a Fortnite map. I want to be able to play in the different, you know, town is a popular AI startup. Might land on a market map, should land on the virtual Fortnite map. I like as well. Who else said this? Yufan Yee. I think this was interesting. There there's another there there's some debate over this last one whether there was like a different harness involved. But same thing, give it a Zillow listing, can three d model the house. So this it's it's always with these new releases, it's interesting what makes you feel the AGI or not. Realistically, Frontier Math, tier four, I think they scored 99% on that. Terminal Bench Science 0.1. They're just numbers to me. Like, they they they don't do anything for me emotionally because I don't have any grounding in how hard those particular things are. And also, I sort of I sort of assume the computers are good at math. [00:06:47] S1: And you didn't get past algebra and like, look how successful you are. [00:06:50] S0: Right? Exactly. Exactly. So so those accomplished [00:06:56] S1: all of this off of algebra one. Yeah. Yeah. Freshman level math Olympiad.
00:07:01 · John Coogan
[00:07:01] S0: Yeah. Exactly. So those are never really feel the AGI moments for me. But this but I I've actually spent hundreds if not thousands of hours in three d modeling software, mostly in Cinema four d and Houdini. And it was really fun. I really enjoy making three d renders and motion graphics. And it was also useful when I was making YouTube videos. But every step in building a scene requires you gotta watch a YouTube tutorial, then you gotta look up how all the different functions work. And then ultimately, you're tweaking settings in literally four dimensions because it's a three d scene, but then over time you have to map where the camera goes, where the different objects are moving, how things progress over time. And it can also be very compute intensive. So there's there's a whole bunch of times where just to preview the scene in low res, you might have to cache and load and and pre bake certain animations so that you can just see what it looks like and then you're like, bah, it's not there. I got to go back and change some setting for some sort of smoke simulation or some sort of fracturing that's going on. And so it's fun, but it is extremely cumbersome. And ultimately, you're doing this on a two dimensional screen and it can be very time consuming and frustrating. And so by the time I stopped spending time on motion graphics, is around 2021, I'd been building the YouTube channel and hired a few a few editors. Some of them were good at After Effects. Some of them learned Blender. Blender was ascendant at that time. So Blender is the open source community led effort. Cinema four d is a closed source piece of software, very expensive, was very expensive. Was like over a thousand dollars to get a license that would be good for like a year. Then they eventually went subscription. And so there were pieces of software that were used by Hollywood but were very expensive, very high barrier to entry, so you didn't have as much of a flourishing ecosystem. Blender at in 2021 was clearly on this trajectory where it was going to build this ecosystem and become very, very popular. And it and it did. But by 2021, I was able to hire video editors who were able to go do scenes in Blender. But still, it was a huge ask if I was like, for this YouTube video, I was posting every single week. I'd like a motion graphic to illustrate something.
00:09:24 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
And I did this one where we built a three d battleship board for this US China Military Competition competitive analysis. And I mean, it's like it sort of ties up an editor for a week while they're working on this and and this just speeds all of that up. So you're gonna get back to like the is it over for motion designers that worry about job displacement. I think we've been through enough of these cycles that hopefully we're Jevan's paradox pill at this point. We imagine [00:09:53] S1: a world comp it to software engineering. [00:09:55] S0: Yeah. Exactly. [00:09:56] S1: There's a lot more three d renders. It seems like seems like everything something is unlimited. Anything that can be rendered will be rendered. Yep. And and it's just and and more people are going to try to make something themselves Yeah. And then hit the point where they're like, okay. There's this sort of area where where the models Yeah. Can't can't get it to a 100%. Now I need to actually go find, you know, find somebody who's an expert [00:10:25] S0: Yeah. [00:10:25] S1: Work with them.
00:10:25 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:10:25] S1: Work with them. [00:10:26] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And so we're back on the is this AGI question. The Wall Street Journal said, yes. We are entering the era of artificial general intelligence. It's in the journal. They've declared it. Although entering the era, like, the door the house is AGI, the door and we are enter we're like almost in the AGI era according to The Wall Street Journal. I don't know. Stripe called it AGI. Didn't they call it AGI January 1? Something like And there's been various calls. Tyler Cowen called it AGI like three years ago. He was ready to rock. [00:11:03] S1: I think that was GPT four. [00:11:05] S0: Something like that. No. It might have been o one. I think o one he was like this is a this is AGI. But it's clearly artificial, clearly intelligent. [00:11:13] S1: And don't don't you think he'll end up looking like pretty good in the fullness of 100%. On that call? [00:11:18] S0: 100%. [00:11:19] S1: Because it clearly is this like timeline of spectrum. Yeah. I do like to imagine the the the Stripe, the colossians just like at at like just after midnight Yeah. You know. There's champagne, maybe some sparklers, some fireworks and they just go, that's it. It's AGI. It's AGI.
00:11:36 · John Coogan
[00:11:36] S0: But the question is no longer is it artificial? We know it is. The question is no longer is it intelligent? We know it is at a lot of different tasks. The question is how general is it? Because Blender is open source, can be downloaded and copied a million times into reinforcement learning environments. We know that OpenAI bought quote tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac studios to do computer use training on. And so the question is, is it only good at Blender? Will it work in Cinema four d? Will it work in Houdini? Will it work in a small piece of software that does three d modeling that has been fall has fallen by the wayside? Now there's an interesting dynamic here where I was in the boat of I could see that Blender was going to be the new hot thing, the best tool that I should have moved, but I already had so many plug ins and textures and rendering and I knew the layout that I downloaded Blender, opened it up and I was like, I don't really don't want to have to get over this learning curve even though I know in five years Blender is going be way better than Cinema four d. There's this switching cost. Now, you're in this weird world where it's pretty good if you're a software company where the Frontier Labs bullseye lands on you. And I'm I'm thinking about Slack, like Alex Wang at Meta just moved them to Slack off of Teams where they had like an internal workspace thing. And specifically he said For Benioff. Give it up for Benioff, truly. And specifically he said Slack is better for work with AI agents. And why is that? Well, it's because the Frontier Labs all use Slack and so they have Slack as a reinforcement learning environment and so it got really good at Slack. And I think that even though there are open source Slacks and you can vibe code a Slack competitor, as we have tested, Slack was the logical tool to pull off the shelf for the AI companies, for the AI agents, for the models and Blender seems to be that. So the interesting thing is that I I do wonder if people will wind up shifting from Cinema four d to Blender because the models are better at Blender? Or will the models generalize and say, yeah, this looks a little bit different because it's a slightly different piece of software, but I've trained so many hours in Blender that I can also do Cinema four d or also do Houdini.
00:13:51 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
Because some of those other softwares are better at certain things. Some of them are better at smoke simulations. Some of them are better at water simulations. There are advantages Yeah. To each piece. I don't want to degrade any particular piece of three d software. I love them all equally. [00:14:08] S1: But I think There are some reports that it's that it's quite effective at at video editing.