OpenAI Just Killed Sora

OpenAI has officially shut down Sora — and the story behind its collapse reveals a lot about where AI video is headed. Addy and Joey break down why Sora never found its footing despite early buzz, what the dead Disney-OpenAI deal reveals about strategic miscalculations, and why OpenAI is now redirecting resources toward enterprise coding tools to compete with Anthropic's Claude. 

They also cover Epic Games' 1,000+ layoffs tied to slowing Fortnite revenue, the winding down of virtual production studio Pixamondo under Sony, Google's TurboQuant research paper on LLM compression, and a new Gemini feature that generates websites entirely on the fly.

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The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are the personal views of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of their respective employers or organizations. This show is independently produced by VP Land without the use of any outside company resources, confidential information, or affiliations.

Transcript

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Sora was one of those models where, uh, when I'm making stuff, it's one of those, I don't think about you at all models. The, the Jon Hamm thing in the elevator. The Jon Hamm Badman. Yeah. I don't think about, yes. Like can we edit that meme into this video? Alright. Welcome back to Denoised. How's it going, Addy? I'm back in Tau. Let's do it back in Tau. Yeah. You're on a trip in AI land, right? Yes. All speaking of AI Land League model Fallen Sora, RIP Sora. Yeah. 2024 to 2026. Goodbye, sir. Adios. Yeah. All right. So open AI announced that they are shutting down the SOA app. Mm-hmm. But I believe it is also the whole model, the API access, not further developing it. Big news in the. AI video world though I don't know. I'm, I I'm not, not too heartbroken over this one. Sora was one of those models where when I'm making stuff, it's one of those, I don't think about you at all models. The, the Jon Hamm thing in the elevator. The Jon Hamm admin. Yeah. Don't think about. Yes. Like, so you and I use the Sora app heavily for like those two, three weeks that even I would even call it heavily, uh, I didn't, I like everyone. We got the Sora app. It was a fun novelty and then. Uh, and then you kind of stopped using it, right? I think fun show for a little bit. I think that was huge potential. I mean, I'm not like man about it. I'm kind of sad about it because, um, other companies could have followed suit and figured out a, a genuine TikTok competitor, like at that scale of billions of, uh, videos and all that stuff. I think the move that was, um, the fatal flaw of Sora. The app was, they had the licensed IP stuff in there the first couple of days. Right. And you remember my video of the, like me and Mandalorian stage? It was, it was, it was unlicensed ip, right? Right. It was the Wild West for like the first 48 hours. And that's when I generated my best stuff. And then as the IP stuff started to get taken away, it started to get more boring and boring. And it's like, okay, how many times am I gonna just generate myself? It's only funny to me. You know, like, I want to, and you like you were my buddy on it. You're like, I guess that's Eddie's kind of funny here. Okay. And, uh, I think the approach they should have taken was what Fortnite did with the seasons. So, you know, when Fortnite drops like a Star Wars season, they. They pay Disney for all that stuff. They ingest it into Fortnite and it's freaking fun for the kids, right? Like they get to be Darth Vader and stuff like that. In the same vein of thought, Sora should have done the same, they should have paid for ip. Now I know it's, uh, it's a difficult foreign concept for AI companies to pay for ip, but this is standard practice for media companies and I, I think they would've had more longevity there and for sure, more engagement and less of a fall off as the app got older. I think there's other stuff at play here. So I mean, they're, from their own admission statement, they're trying to cut down on distractions and Sora is a distraction. We talked about this before, like m and e, the film industry is a like big for us, very tiny, insignificant little sliver for these companies. They're more interested in how can the large language models be an enterprise and be useful and be part of a, all these companies, uh, everyday lives, Robotics world models. Autonomous vehicles, making funny meme videos and then potentially also making Hollywood level animations. Tiny market, good for, good for publicity, tiny market, but the social media app and the platform, that's a big market potentially. But that's such a huge lift to then try to go and try to build a TikTok competitor. I think they had that potential route with the Disney deal, uh, where Disney was like invested a billion bucks. They were gonna use the SoTech and kind of build this. Disney plus, you know, interact with Disney characters. That whole deal is dead as well. So that whole, they're getting, Disney's getting their money back and whatever was gonna come of that deal is gone. Maybe Disney will do something with another model or build their own thing, which is totally doable and plausible. They don't really need Sora for that, but I think that, mm-hmm. That. Route was potentially there. I think just as a bigger open AI strategy, I think they're a little, they were doing like a lot of things in a lot of areas. I think getting a little bit lost, Claude has caught up tremendously and Claude has kind of taken over in the coding space. Sure. And Open AI is now putting their resources towards Codex and building these coding tools. Mm-hmm. Because that's where like people will pay and under companies will pay and they actually get. Productivity improvements and given the resources. Yeah. The enterprise revenue is in, um, software automation Yeah. And things like that. Yeah. And I think it's just like a resource issue of like, you have these limited GPUs and where do you train and how do you like allocate that? And obviously video and running these models, these video models is intensive and are you getting returns on that? Yeah. No. Probably not better to focus on like practical uses. Fair enough. And I, I think Sora, the video model, like for example, the Comfy API node. The Sora node. It's one of, I don't know, 15 that you can use today. Yeah. And that's what I'm saying when it's like a model picker choice. Yeah. Like sure there was the Sora app and Sora was like, good for these kind of character Mimi things, but like the quality wasn't there, you know? So if I'm trying to generate something, just like from a basic video generation model, I am usually defaulting to like cling or vo. Yeah. Or you know, then maybe Luma or Runway or something. Ra kind of like C two nowadays. Yeah. See? Oh yeah. Sora, Seedance and yeah, we could talk about them in a second. Right. But, um, yeah, like Sora was very bottom of, it was probably like in the crock category of like models. T models would try. Yeah. Yeah. Alt models I would like get to for what? Uh, for what, you know, we're trying to do here. They sell thorough red hot topic. It's alt bad joke, you know, think. There's two other things. Like for one, I don't fully know what was under the hood and you know, we're not AI scientists, but like you look at VO and. Google and it's very clear like everything that they have been doing around their entire AI ecosystem is somewhat unified and somewhat part of like a large world model. You know, VO Genie, Gemini, they're all like, you know, in this process of like a big, large world model. I don't know if Sora is there. Yeah. And quality bar wise, like all the Google products are hitting the same level of quality across the board. Mm-hmm. And you're like, huh? How? How is it so consistent across the board? So there's must be some grand architecture that we're not aware of. Yeah. And it's like, I don't know if Sora is there, if there was any way that like Sora. Besides being a video generation model, has world understanding, is a world model, could integrate with chat, can like, integrate with all those things and then potentially lead to more lucrative product lines. Like was the plan for SOA ever to be a world model that could potentially work for Robotics or uh, vehicle autonomous vehicles? Like, it's pretty clear that Google's models and what Luma's trying to do and all these other models. I don't know. I don't know enough about what was under the hood, but that could also just be like, it's just, they're like, what's the future for Where can SOA go? Yeah. Like Google to me seems more like Nvidia where they're trying to catch all industries and they have like a big grand plan. Uh, whereas OpenAI, I think they, to me at least, the perception is that they're super pursuing a GI ASI and then. Chad GPT and Codex and all this stuff is just kind of there to make revenue for today, but like their main goal is to just make a GI. Yeah. I mean, yeah. We've kind of forgot about that too. Yeah. The agi, it's the still, yeah, the goal. It's nuclear fusion. It's always 20 years away. Yeah. Yeah. Less so with the story videos. Yeah. You know, the other thing I was wondering, like, you know, Sora had that deal or to make critters, which was supposed to premiere at can to be that. That's right. Kind of. Pixar level animated film for $30 million. Dunno what the deal with that is, but I'm guessing either maybe they finish that up or not, or it's probably dead. My guess. Yeah, if, if we haven't heard of it, yeah, I mean if the film got far enough long, might as well finish it. I would still be shocked if like Sora was the one and only model used in that. Like I like it's gotta be a. A combination of models and methodologies. Yeah. Also, like a side note here, the, uh, image, is it called image Gen? Their image generator? Uh, I think now Imogen was Google's original name, 1.5. It's now just like Chacha BT image, which is Chachi bt image generator. Uh, that's not, that's untouched. It hasn't gotten better. Like they just kept it at the, the quality level from like 12 months ago. Right. My ancient, it's ancient in our standards. Yeah, no, they did one point. Five, which I think came out end of last year. So like, okay. An update, but nothing as earth shattering as like every Nano Banana update has been. Yeah, I think open AI is sort of, um, they see an anthropic as their main competitor, obviously, like Dario and Sam open each other. Uh, so now they're sort of shaping their company to be more one-on-one with anthropic. Like if you look at Anthropic, they don't have an image or video model. They're not messing around with m and e, they're focusing on A-G-I-S-I and code development coding. And yeah. And opening is like, and that works. More of these sort of agentic, open claw esque features. Exactly, exactly. In their app. I know you're not on as X as much, but like Claude has been shipping a like new feature roughly every day, and everyone's like, what the hell? Like there's just like, it's, they're just on a roll of just like some. New feature. Like even yesterday, the new one was, um, like a Claude app can connect to like other apps and you sort of have tile cards in your app, which is sort of this like, kind of making Claude this, you know, your central hub to connect everything. Yeah. And, you know, and, and, and something that's consumer friendly and easy to use. So yeah, I think they're looking at, Claude has sort of just been much more focused on what they're trying to do and mm-hmm. OpenAI has been a little bit more all over the place. And I think it's now like, Hey, we need to like. Focus on what it is we're trying to do. I, exactly. Yeah. I think they're heavily recalibrating and it's a good time for them to do so. Right. They have a new round of funding coming in the a hundred billion dollars or whatever. Mm-hmm. Got funded. So, I mean, Disney's 1 billion is like, okay, take, we're fine without it. And they're gonna just pursue this new direction. I mean, like we, we crap on Sam Altman a lot here. If open AI. Is not a viable business model, then that that does pop the AI bubble and it'll kind of have a enormous blast radius across the board for all of the AI stuff we're doing. Like everything we're touching, you know, cling or Quinn or whatever image model, like everybody will be impacted by the open AI collapse. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I don't feel like they're close to collapsing. Do you feel like they're Yeah, it is on the news a lot. I mean, I mean there's like, yeah, we was talk of an AI bubble, but yeah, I, I, it doesn't, it, I haven't felt that way about like, just like a, like that there would be an overall open AI collapse. Right. So, yeah. I think the soundbite been now when they collapse, like in, well, we can go back and grab our, grab our soundbites from the Disney open AI deal that they, you know, that was a few months ago. Like, we were super like. Wondering what the hell that was about. Right. I thought it was so, parts of it made sense. Parts of it were confusing or like didn't make sense. Yeah. Like putting the stuff in the Disney Plus app or like putting some user UGC stuff in the, in on the Disney streaming platform that was like, is that gonna work? How do they pay it out? How would they. You know, but like something where it's like, hey, I wanna like make a video of myself with, uh, you know, Mickey Mouse, like driving, uh, you know, with Steamboat Willie and driving, driving the boat, steam driving a steamboat, you know, and it's like, okay, that kind of makes sense, you know? Yeah. From just a like Mimi fun, kitschy way to. Make a silly video with characters you like. Sure. I thought, I mean, from day one, that OpenAI should have paid Disney 1 billion instead because this is the most profitable entertainment company in the world and they have all the cool IP and you just kind of like do a big chunky license for $1 billion and then you do you and yeah, I mean, I think, I think I've talked about my conspiracy theory. You know, I, I was. Pretty sure that like open AI is planned. When they released Sora and had like zero IP restrictions was to more of like a showcase to be like, look at, we could do. And then they were like, oh, sorry, we'll roll it back. But then they signed the deal with Disney because it was sort of like, look what we, what we can do and. I've been wondering if the Seedance rollout was kind of the same playbook where it was like, look what we could do, oh, sorry. Sorry. We'll roll it back. Oh, sorry. But we could do this. Wink, wink. Yeah. For media companies to be in bed with a single AI manufacturer is is not ideal. Right now there are just way too many. People competing at the same level. I don't think there's any advantage. It's like, why Right. Disney's smart. Uh, Disney can, you know, if, if they're not, I mean, I'm sure they're trying to build out their own models, but if I don't think so, you know, they don't need to rely on SOA when they can just plug and play with other models and build out their own. App and not have to share the branding with anyone like Sora doesn't and have that strong of a brand that there was like a boost from being like, you can make, uh, AI videos powered by Sora, you know, Disney's the bigger brand Exactly. And their, and their IP characters. Yeah. Also, speaking of focus with blocked, but, um, I was just laughing at the gif of, uh, Javier Baram from F1. Yeah. Everyone, uh, the internet is very happy that Sora has, uh. Has fallen. But, um, they're also, uh, putting their erotic chatbot plans on hold indefinitely. Oh, good. Yeah. So I mean, Frame.io, that was just like such a big waste of environmental resources. Yeah. That added just so much to like, what, what is doesn't sound healthy Yeah. Or useful for anyone. It's bad optics for the entire industry. Oh. My last thought on this was. Just more of like looking back at the long life of Sora. It is a bit crazy how much they fumbled it though, because if we remember back a million years ago, two years ago when Sora was first teased with the clips and the spaceman in the desert and like the girl on the train. And these were like mind blowing images. Like these were like the most realistic, like best looking things we had seen. And then they like didn't do anything with it for months, like half a year at least before they like Right. Actually released it and by the time they released it, cling vo Luma, like everyone had caught up a quality and had publicly available tools that by the time they came out it was like, all right, Sora, that thing that exists. And then I Yeah. About, and it was like heavily gated and expensive. Yeah. Like the whole rollout. Yeah, you had to be on the pro plan. I mean, they built that kind of tool thing that had some interesting ideas, but you know, now everything else has it and does it better. So for how much of a splash they caused two years ago. Uh, and then seeing it shuttered today, kind of crazy.'cause they were, they were like, you know, early movers in that space. Yeah. Goes to show how effective their marketing team is. Okay. Okay. Next up. Sad news. Bummer news stuff. Yeah. Sad news. All right. Two shut down. Or just lay offy announcements. Uh, the first one, you sent this to me. Yeah. Epic Games is cutting over 1000 jobs. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people, man. Epic is not that big of a company. Yeah. Now they're saying that it seems it's all. Related to Fortnite and Fortnite growth and revenue slowing down. Yeah. Do you wanna read, what's your take on it? Sweeney's email on this? Uh, I, I think, yeah, there's a blog post, you know, h his email to his employees, uh, was k kind of frank and kind of honest. And I thought, you know, it showed leadership there. But you know, the reality is this sucks for a lot of people. A lot of people I know. Yeah. Some of the challenges we're facing are industry-wide challenges, lower growth, weaker spending, and tougher cost economics. Current console selling less than last generations, uh, and games competing for time against other increasingly engaging forms of entertainment. Which is ironic because like Netflix is also remember maybe not so much recently, but I remember a while ago they were like, yeah, our competition is just YouTube leisure time, and it's YouTube now. But I remember like a few years ago it was gaming. Oh, like, yes. When they're competing for time of like watch time or leisure time, it, it wasn't against other platforms, it was against. Like gaming and, and, and, and other. Now it's YouTube, but before it was gaming since it's a thing. Now, I should note that the layoffs aren't related to ai. To the extent it improves productivity. We want to have as many awesome developers developing great content and tech as we can. So again, uh, he wanted to decouple this layoff from sort of the Amazon layoffs and all the other big tech layoffs that have happened and has like the AI stink, stink on it, if you will. I mean, I honestly, when I saw the headline at first, I was wondering if that was the reason, if it was gonna be like, we're, we're using AI and we have more efficiencies. We don't need these thousand developers or people, but mm-hmm. Yeah, no, he clarified it's specific to Fortnite and just that. Growth and revenue has slowed down there and that they need these. Yeah. And, um, these layoffs, just want to kind of add that this is after the 700 person layoff that happened. I'm gonna say 2024. Right. You remember that? Okay. Kinda. And that was also along the lines of, um, we need to focus the company around Fortnite. So we're gonna kind of, you know, that's when a lot of like the, the VP talent WA was let go, you know, 'cause Unreal was building and display very heavily and all the LED volume stuff and then. We thought that, okay, that adjustment happened, so now epic's in a really good shape for the next few years, and then now this, so Fortnite has really probably taken a hit revenue wise. And, um, you know, Tim Sweeney to me, doesn't feel like one of the regular big tech CEOs. Like he, he's no Sam Altman, you know, like he's not Andy Jassy or one of those guys. He comes off as like a regular guy. A regular software developer who happens to just be a multi-billionaire and ASI, EO of a really cool company. So, so I think for him to just make this decision is probably hard. And especially 'cause they're a private company, they can kind of do what they want. They don't have to answer to shareholders. So for them to do something that's drastic meant that there is significant internal trouble. Yeah. Do you think doing that year, multi-year long. Apple battle became a distraction or stuck resource. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, that resource or money takes money. It takes, uh, Tim's attention away from other things, but I, I think it was like a David and Goliath thing. It was a battle of principles over anything else, over revenue and. I kinda like that he fought it and he won, like it was No, I did that too. And he was like, he's like, we're the only ones that have resources to fight this. And it's like crushing smaller developers, right? But no one's gonna be able to fight Apple except us. The 30% thing was ridiculous, right? Yeah. But, uh, what Epic needs now, in my opinion, is, uh, they need another Fortnite. They need another massive multiplayer multiverse, uh, multiverse, metaverse type E game. And um, you know, I know they have had other sort of mild hits along those lines, but. If, if like Fortnite revenue falls off, you augment it with revenue from an incoming game, you know, unfortunately you can't just make a hit up. A hit happens when a hit happens. Yeah, that's, yeah. And we know that way too well in the movie and yeah. Yeah. And uh, you know, that seems like a. It, it is tied to an age group and then they age out. And I know you're always trying to get new people in and like, keep it cool, but that, that's tough. Well, that's, that's, uh, it's, it is funny. That's what Roblox is. Um, yeah. Like their current strategy is how to retain their users. Who started playing Roblox when they're 10 and now they're 20, right? Mm-hmm. And they're starting to fall off. Obviously. It's like when you're a 20-year-old, you're not gonna be playing Roblox. So. A lot of what's happening is they're trying to build things inside of Roblox that retains an older audience. One of those things is just having better graphics. You know, like, uh, you don't wanna play mind block, you know, blocky, choppy stuff. When you're 20 years old. You want like hyper real stuff like Call of Duty or Grant Theft Auto. So that's one. The other one is, uh, how about, you know, meeting your partner? Some sort of dating mechanism inside the community. So there, there's a lot of development around that. I don't know, I don't know enough about Fortnite to know if that stuff was happening, but, um, that's how you retain the audience for decades. Yeah, I don't know either. And I don't know if there was like a drop in, 'cause I remember we're always hearing those crazy stats of, um, like digital clothing and items that were like a billion dollars a year alone and just buying, yeah. I think I told you that. Yeah. The, the avatar, uh, the avatar department, which makes Roblox, you know, accessories like hair, shoes, clothes, that department's profit alone is 1 billion a year. Yeah. But it's crazy and crazy, you know, especially if real world expenses are jacking up. Yeah. More expensive to like, just exist and live life in the real world. Digital clothing would probably be one of the first things to, uh, not spend as much money on. Yeah. If your real expenses are, are, are, are increasing. The other weakness that Fortnite has that Roblox doesn't is Roblox runs on any, literally any device, like a crappy Android phone can run Roblox. With Fortnite, you know, you need a nice PC or a console or something, but it sure as hell is not gonna run on a crappy Android phone. I don't think it is. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, and that, that takes away a huge amount of, uh, potential users, right? Like, as like the, the quote unquote gamers, like the hardcore gamers with the Nvidia GPU and stuff like that, as they sort of get bored of it. I mean, you're not picking up new audience. Yeah. I mean, I feel like it's another. Sideways related thing to the ideas of the metaverse. Slowing down or, yeah. The, the other big play that Epic did back, uh, a couple years ago af uh, you know, around the time when they did the first round of layoffs was, uh, UEF and Unreal, uh, engine Fortnite. So it's like a custom version of the engine that you can build your own islands for people to build a little bit more accessible, unreal, for people to build. Yeah, so it's, it's kind of like a equivalent of Roblox Studio where you use Roblox Studio to build uhhuh, build your own level and your game. Uh, UEFN is is that, um, the challenge was, I think, uh, it was incredibly difficult to put a game together that's under two gigabytes or whatever the, uh, limit was. And it, it's not like. Two high school kids can do it. You actually still needed, uh, a pretty solid game developer to come in and then just finish up the last bits. So that never really took off. Like, um, you know, obviously there maybe in the future the solution is something like a cloud code for Fortnite or something that makes it. Right. Easier, where you don't have to be a developer to build out your world. You can just kind of Yeah. Describe and build, and then that's where AI comes in under the hood to help Polish and clean it up and make it usable. Yeah. And, and Apple and Epic are kind of similar in that. Okay. Uh, stick with me on this one. Apple and Epic are kind of similar in the way that they have for the most part. Have not adopted ai, right? Like, oh, you know, if if Epic was early in a big way. Yeah. Like just in, in a fundamentally changing kind of way. Um, if Epic had put ai, let's say AI blueprints or like you said, AI game development and all that stuff into the engine, or maybe, maybe it would've helped, I don't know. I have to imagine stuff like that's coming. And also, I mean, uh, Sweeney's been. I remember we didn't cover this. I think I had that link saved for a while, but we never talked about it where he, uh, was it. Oh, steam, steam. The gaming platform had wanted, enforced a rule that was like, you have to mark if your game used AI in it or something. And he was like, that's a stupid label. Uh, like, you know, every, like, if it was used to help develop, like that's gonna be like. Common for every game and everything. It's gonna use AI in some part to just help speed up development. You know, like where do you draw that label or the line for that. And so it was, I'm paraphrasing with that. I think it was something to that effect. But yeah, it was like not made, it's like a organic label, like not made with AI label, something like that. Something like, and he was like, it was a st It was a stupid thing to like have to label. Exactly. So, you know, they're definitely not anti ai. Maybe it's just a matter of rolling it out into the tools, but I, I would have to imagine that there's some blueprint. Code sidekick thing or something coming to help. Yeah. Speed that up. Regardless of sort of what's going on in Epic. I mean, I, my heart goes out to the, the, the people we're just like, amazing. Everybody, like if you are working at Epic, you are at a caliber, performance caliber, you know, personality caliber, like you're an amazing person if you're working there. I think a lot of those folks, I hope they can kind of transition their way into AI because mm-hmm. You know, just. Me having been, you know, been on both sides and now on the AI side, there is such a room for, uh, people that are creative technologists. Like there's not enough of us in here, um, that, that understand what a frame is, what frame composition is, what, you know, contrast like basic things, right? Yeah. And, uh, having sort of that eye and that lens, but also understanding the technology. Um, I, I think if. You got laid off out of the thousand people, I, you're probably one of them. And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm rooting for you and hope you have a future in AI if you choose to. Yeah, I mean, I'm excited to see what they would develop.'cause I think you are right that they have the skillset of like what the quality we need to be and just if turbocharge with ai, I think there could be some interesting things. Yeah, for sure. Other part two of the, oh man, Pixo. Yeah. Um, they're calling it. Winding down Pix. Sony is winding down Pixo, but yeah. But they're basically shutting down the studios. They're winding it down because a lot of the people are contractors working on projects, so they're finishing up the projects. And then it did say that a lot of people at Pixo would get rolled into Sony and other roles. So I mean, look, it sucks that. You know Pixo, VFX House, early Pioneer and virtual production stuff is, it's still, honestly, it's a little fuzzy'cause they, the brand is winding down. They did say that a lot of the stuff's just gonna roll into Sony. You know, they have that crazy driving rig product. A KERA that we saw cs, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Last year, a Kira that was in LA and then they moved it to Vancouver and it seems like the Vancouver stage is just gonna become a Sony thing. It's still fuzzy, but it sucks. I'm guessing all of their stages are coming down, like the one here in Culver City, inside the Sony lot, which I spent some time in as well as the Vancouver one, and I'm sure they have, I, I think they built one in Saudi Arabia for a customer, if I'm not mistaken. Mm-hmm. So I'm not sure who's gonna support it. You think they're all gonna come down or maybe they'll just do less, have a few of them still up and it'll just be under Sony or like. I mean, regardless. So the PIX News came first before the Epic News this last week. And when I heard that, I was like, oh, that's, that's crazy.'cause I was not expecting that to be under the Sony umbrella and to have sort of the global weight and the resources that Sony has, right? This is one of the most amazing, biggest brands in the world. I thought they were safe, you know, I was like, okay, they're gonna reinvent virtual production. They're gonna kind of take it into VP 3.0 and the future. But then. Turns out, no. Uh, this is the end for them. Uh, yeah, but I mean, if they're like, oh, we're gonna roll people into Sony and whatever, then what's the difference or what's the advantage of just, of getting rid of the Pix brand and the company if you're just gonna downsize a bit, but still kind of keep some of the core stuff and just roll it into the Sony. Group. Like why get, I think it's just like dismantling for parts and trying to get the most ROI you can, right? Like, you've already acquired this thing for however many millions of dollars and now how do you minimize the damage, minimize the loss, um, with this, with this news. So one of the questions I have to ask you, tell me what you think. Yeah. Did the Sony and just, you know, hypothetically speaking here, do you think the Sony. Executives looked at everything that's happening with ai and then they just looked at their VP business was like, wait, this, these two things are in two different lanes that, I mean, if they did, that feels like a big misunderstanding of like what the two things do. Yeah. What is this, do you think It's like, oh, this is jumping the gun.'cause it's like, well look, AI is really good and we don't need these big expensive VFX houses and we don't need stages. Like we're not. At that point yet, and I don't, and it's not like one or the other, like the two work in hybrid. Well, the, the reason I say that is because this, this was like a, like a really scandalous kind of thing. And it was meant to catch headlines like, like a few years back, I think back in 24. Tyler Perry was, um. You know, Tyler Perry has that immense campus in Atlanta, right? Like it's an old military base, turned into a studio lot. And, uh, within that he was gonna build more stuff, including a volume. And that was right around the time Sora and some of the video video models were coming out. And then like he put, he put, oh, that's right. Put everything on ice. He's like, wait a minute. That's right. I'm not building anything right now until I figure out what this thing is. Maybe, but, you know, we've talked about this. Like I, I, there's still uses for this and, uh, look, I mean, dealing with AI stuff, it's basically a little, maybe a little like less people and faster than if you were shooting, you know, like Star Wars style episode one two on a green screen and then capacity and everything later. You still gotta. Deal with all the shots afterwards. And so if you could find a middle ground like House of David where you have a wall, maybe a smaller wall, maybe you don't need a huge, massive wall or a very heavily AI assisted VAD to speed up that process. There are hybrid worlds where like, you know, these two could play hand in hand and you kind of get, can get the best of both worlds. It's not one or the other. It all, it all also depends on the projects. Mm-hmm. And what you gotta do and, you know, potentially projection as well. You know, that could still also have a place and, and be an alternative to having to build up a big LE wall. Yeah, for sure. I, I think, uh, the, but yeah, I mean, if it went, if the executives were in the Tyler Perry Headspace and it was just like all these models, they, they saw the Seedance 2.0 fighting on the roof and they're like, what do we need all this stuff for? No, I don't even think it's the finished final pixel stuff. I think if, if you look at Beeble and Switch X and some of the relining and you're like, wait, that's what a volume does is it relight you, it puts the background in the right place and da, da, da, da, da, and now there's a tool doing that. And ultimately I think the production, uh, always wants to fix it in post anyway. Like, that's like the natural gravity of things in production. Mm-hmm. As you know, you're in production all the time. You're like, uh, I think I'm gonna just spend more time in post than try to do this live here. I mean, it was also the way we're able to cram like, you know, we did four pages and stuff like in a day and was, we were able to do that 'cause we're just filming in a gray box and we're just like, all right, move, move, move. And then we like put all the shots together later in post. Yeah, post is, you know, less post is where it's ATTN. I think ai, post ai, VFX is highly TBD right now. Like we don't know what that's gonna be, but I bet that the executives are, are forecasting that. That's where VP eventually kind of shifts to is instead of, you know. Real time I-C-V-F-X and all the pressure on the stage at that time, shift that into post, but then use AI tools there. Yeah. Yeah. It could be. And it could also just be, 'cause I'm thinking back to NAB last year and sort of what Sony was. Sony was demonstrating and their new, they had new products. In virtual production, they, they had their own, uh, camera track. They had a new camera tracker that they developed. Yeah. Yeah. That was Olu. Olu, yes. Yeah. But I think the vertical for most of those applications is broadcast and live, uh, live events and live performances. So. You know, that could just also be, uh, you know, Sony's a massive company, like how they're thinking of virtual production, like less so in film industry and more so in live broadcasts and, and on live events. Yeah. And, and, um, I don't think Pix mano plays in the broadcast world and there are established. Bonafide broadcast companies that have just owned it, like Ross, right. Grass Valley and Iami and like these big broadcast brands that are building the volumes and the tracking systems and all that. Mm-hmm. There's Pix to who does a good job Density. Yeah. Pix to zero density. Yeah. Yeah. Where they like really just kind of dialed in on the broadcasting space and, and, yeah. That is still relevant and you like needed. Yeah. And P'S differentiator was tier one film and television, right? Like they did mm-hmm. The highest end of what we offer as an industry. And uh, that's just such a small market, unfortunately. Yeah. Going back to Sora, good small market, important for our. Small market. Okay. Do we have some good news next? All right, let's talk about, let's talk about do AI stuff. Okay. So, okay. Lemme try to, well, I'm not even gonna try to explain this paper, but let me, let me compare it to the meme. So Google came out with this new paper called Turbo Quant redefining AI efficiency with extreme Compression. Nice. We've joked about Silicon Valley. And Pied Piper all the time. We wish for that show show to come back all the time. So this paper is being described as basically, if you remember later, the later seasons, PI Piper accidentally came out with the mid middle perfect compression. Middle compression algo. Yes. The compression where in Silicon Valley. And the show lad, it was a magical compression algorithm that would compress the video and make it super small without like losing any quality. And that was their like, kind of golden ticket to their, their big breakthrough. So people are describing this paper as basically Google did the Real Life Pied Piper, middle out algo. Oh, that's great. So in this explanation from Gen Zu, it's basically for LLMs, it was a way to compress, obviously a big issue with LLMs. You have your context window, you have your memory. Once it gets filled up and you're having this kind of conversation, if the context window gets a bunch of stuff in it, then it starts veering. It starts misremembering things, and then it'll start, it'll compress it. If you fill it up and you'll pick up your conversation, but in that compression you'll be like, Hey, what about that thing we were talking about? I'll be like, I don't know what you mean. So it's outside my contact window. Yeah, right. It's like, what are you talk? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't even think it'll tell you that. I'll just be like, what are you, what are you talking about? I don't, I'm not aware. I told you two days ago, I have a dental appointment. It's a recurring conversation I have with open cough. Um, so this compression is sort of like a. LLM compression, six times memory, six x memory reduction, uh, up to aex, faster attention. And that's huge. Those are big numbers, less degradate de degradation. Okay. And I'm very simplified explaining what this is saying. Yeah. Why don't you do my job, Joey, and explain research papers. So see how it is a paper. Yeah. So it's basically a, uh, research paper that. Can in, in theory, take existing con, uh, LLM memory and context windows and compress it. Yeah. Without losing quality. So then you could fit more stuff into the same LLM. My m and e brain instantly goes to how we can apply this. A lot of the newer video models are systems where it's not just a, a video generation diffusion model, but also it's tied in LLMs and context windows, memory buffers, frame buffers, all that stuff. I'm guessing this is gonna be super useful for like a crazy set piece of like, you know, 10 sequences where you want to ke keep a context window across the board of like where all the cameras were, which scenes where, you know, within each scene where the stuff is like, you know, if they have a road full of cars, how many cars were there and all that stuff. So I think. This stuff will be really important in our world as the video models start to get more intelligent or even like, uh, gaming or like genie, like the generative world where yes, the more you move through that world, then the more it can just remember stuff and be persistent. Yeah. I remember when when we did the test, uh, yeah. With the high and uh, like, did I say that right? Lea is, hi. Yeah. Hi is Lea. Lea has been Apple pronunciation. Oh, sorry. And, uh, like we were taking footsteps and you look back and the footsteps were still there. Yeah, yeah. You know, and like that takes memory. Yeah. And that takes attention on the generation side or driving in the desert and then the skid marks were on the road and then you drive back and they're like still there. Yeah. Yeah. And right now, GD is, um, one minute. Memory duration. So yeah, so eight XI mean, we can get to eight minutes. Come on. Yeah. Come on. Pi Piper. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, right as a research paper, but I'm curious when, you know, if this gets adapted in, into actual models and then the dream is just like, yeah, you keep talking to the model and it just has persistent that there is no context window. It's just it. Knows everything, or just remember it's everything. Yeah. I, I think from here on out, we're gonna see these incremental innovations like this that really is like a blip on our radar. We, we will cover it on Denoised and then we'll forget about it next week, but then these things sort of, mm-hmm. Accumulate over time. And then by the end of 2026, we're gonna have something amazing. Yeah. Or like we mentioned these things now and then, you know, you're working on something or trying to think of something in a few months from now and then it's like, oh yeah, wait, what was that thing, that paper that came out or something? That model that like applied to that thing. And then maybe that's the solution for like the project or the, whatever you're working on at the moment. We should have a giant context window for this podcast. So like, because we forget a lot of times what we covered. I have been getting transcripts and working on stuff to try to help surface things. Okay. Other Google update, Gemini 3.1 flashlight can generate websites. On the fly. So basically imagine navigating a website, but everything is being generated. So this could be the future of some sort of hyper-personalized website or web experience where everything you're navigating to is just being built for you. E-commerce, you're like going to the site and like based on your, like what you do, it starts. Building out a, you're not gonna like my answer. Recommended products. Think this is perfect for Nigerian print scammers. That is the dark scientist. Yes. Like, yo, you put, put, put the PayPal link in there and then you see, you know, pay for this thing and it just auto generates some forged website. Yeah, that, I mean, that's a problem with all of the generative stuff where you just make fake images of, uh, Brad Pitt asking you for money that look really good people. But this is like the real time video for. Web design. I think this opens up a lot of new possibilities of just like the very early stages of what, of websites and the web that we know it is like being generated in real time as you navigate through it versus static or just other, you know, data SQL database, other ways that it's being built. Right now, I don't know if we need it. I dunno if we need it because websites are curated, designed by professionals that understand the human psyche, our attention, our, you know, all of all of those things. And I don't know if they think can replicate. It to that extent. I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying. I think the, these, uh, look, again, the, the deep, the deep mind as a whole, as an organization is amazing. Like they're just drop hits after hits. What about user testing and design testing? So like, you're serving a kind of different layouts to everyone that goes to the website to like figure out which is the best. So it's always learning and then like AV testing. Yeah, but it was like a B to the like 10th degree, so everyone's getting like Right. Little tweaks or variations. Sure. And then it's, sure, I can see that it's redesigning the original website based on that learning. I think this is still early stage. I, I think this is like how. Yeah, this is still early of like, what does the new web look like in an AI world? Because on the flip side, the issue that, uh, I keep hitting and it's like a thing with chat bots and agents trying to navigate the web, is when they go to a regular website, it's not a good experience for them to do stuff. Quickly. And so we have MCP and these other ways to like connect to websites, but it's still wild west of figuring out how do we redo interfaces for both AI to like do things on the web without having to like rebuild all the websites. And then also if our own web experience. Is, uh, hey. I mean, if there's anything that happens like new on the web, that's kind of cool because, you know, remember back to the early days of surfing the web and like mm-hmm. GeoCities websites and kind of all these niche websites, and that's kind of been killed and replaced with just algorithm feeds everywhere. And maybe you click off, think half of our audience look at an article, don't know what GeoCities websites are. I, I feel like there's gotta be more. I feel like our audience here's a little older, older, like Rh, I, I had me a few GeoCities websites. Yeah. GeoCities, tripod homestead. It was one. Where were the other ones? Those are the main ones. Geo Cities was like the main, you wanted to build a website and you didn't know what to do. Come to Geo Cities. Nice. All right. So you're like, you don't see you, you're skeptical on this one. I'm man on this one. Uh, prove me wrong. You know, uh, I'm more excited about the, the first one you pied. Piper, I'll, I'll say this is probably one of the most expensive web. Experiences if you're generating, I know it's a flash and it's a light model, but this would still be probably one of the most expensive. Um. Websites a hundred percent. There's probably like to serve up to people 10 GPUs powering that little window right now. Burning like coal or something? Yeah. Maybe it's more for like, uh, uh, you know, Gucci or Hermes, um, web experience. Well, you're getting a bespoke web service up. I think for premium brands like that. You, you want like a website that's like an envelope. It's like. Welcome Joey. And you click on the envelope, right? It unwinds into like a leather, crunchy, leather thing, and yeah, it's super luxurious for that. I think this would be absolutely usable. I agree. So Nigerian princes, like, we know we own, we know you have these bags. We, you don't have these up. You go for it, guys. All right, good place to wrap it up. Let us know what you think of these new potential features you'd see. Uh. Do you see a, well, first off, do you remember GeoCities? And then second off, do you, um, see a potential for generated websites on the fly? Shout out GeoCities, if you remember it. Come on guys. Give us a, give us a couple of GeoCities comments. Also, um, on the Spotify side, if you're listening and, uh, on the stats, we see a lot of people listening who are not subscribers. Come on, just give us one little subscription that helps us immensely. So thank you in advance. Addy is always on the Spotify, so he is looking, he's tracking who he's tracking, who's listening, and who's not a subscriber. No, I'm not. I ca I don't have that visibility. It's not that creepy. He's gonna peer out your window, look like the Mark Zuckerberg looking in. We'd love to have more subscribers, links for everything we talked about@denopodcast.com. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you in the next episode.