AI Video Levels Up, Amazon Blocks Muse, Paramount Stays in CA | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:01)

How many days till Christmas? TBPN's Road to Christmas started weeks ago. We got 94 days until Christmas.

Jordi Hays (0:09)

Double digits.

John Coogan (0:11)

We're so close. Every day, one day closer to Christmas. So get excited, start shopping for presents, start picking out that Christmas tree. How was your weekend?

Jordi Hays (0:20)

It was, couldn't have been better.

John Coogan (0:22)

Yeah, it was good. We were off on Friday. We went to Boston and back basically the same day. Sort of a brutal flight back and forth, a little tired. But I got completely one-shotted by the new AI video model. Seadance 2.5, gone are the days of face swaps. I remember when Dream Booth, this paper came out from Google and it allowed you to very realistically swap your face into a photo. Now, this is something you can just do with a single prompt today. But back then, you had to go and take 10 or 20 different photos of yourself at different angles, different lighting, usually just dug through your camera roll, got them, then you had to feed that into like a Python script that was either hosted on Colab. And then the Colab thing was weird because it was a luck of the draw, what GPU you got. So you would like sign up and create an instance. And then sometimes it would just be like, you got a 1080 TI. And you'd be like, I can't do what I need to do because I need a lot of memory to do a particular thing. And then sometimes it would be like, you got an A100, brother, like lock in. Like it was just random provisioning. And people would be like so excited when they got one or the other.

But there was this musician who was like a guitarist who implemented the paper and then basically distilled it down and figured out how to run. This is a crazy thing, but this guy who's just like a hobbyist machine learning engineer figured out how to get Dream Booth running on like basically commodity gaming hardware. So then you could go and you could take your face, fine tune it and then be able to generate new photos in the style of whatever. It was all built on that open source one, not mid-journey, the other image generator, Ahmad Mustak was the stable diffusion. It was like stable diffusion as the base and then this Dream Booth thing on top. It was super cool because if you actually went through, if you jump through all those hoops, you basically had access to the magic avatar thing, like three months before everyone else and you could send one to a friend and be like, oh, this is cool. Then it was just completely commodified. It became an app and then it just became available in every chat app very shortly after. But the AI video has been moving a lot slower. It's very compute intensive, obviously, since opening, I had to shut down Sora, and it just feels like none of the major American labs are as focused on this. So I got completely addicted to this, had a lot of fun doing it. I'll walk through everything that we did. You no longer need to go get a different app or sign up for anything you can do. I was just texting with Codex remotely. I had a PC that was running this. And then I would just be like, I didn't even say, take this video. I would just say, go find some videos and put Jordi in them. And it would just do that. And I didn't even have to upload photos of you. I would just say, go find some reference photography for Jordi across the internet.

Jordi Hays (3:08)

And so far, it seems to have made a lot of sense not to focus on video given that Codex and Claude can connect into all these other tools and models and just give you what you want as a user without incurring any of the costs of focusing to make great models or the actual costs of serving them and having to allocate GPUs.

John Coogan (3:28)

I think people will be having fun. Oh, speaking of Codex, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, creating some of the videos I will show you shortly, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. So the latest turn of AI video models, they're really, really good. Not just for the high fidelity stuff, which we'll show you some of, but even going back to like 90s VHS footage, it can edit anything and it doesn't look weird 90% of the time.