Trivia: Claude Shannon proposed the idea of predicting the next token (letter) using statistics/probabilities in the training data corpus in 1950:
"Prediction and Entropy of Printed English"
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shannon1950.pdf
This really resonates. I am in the CS academia and I feel like I am losing "friends" who used to share the same values and social identity with me at an unprecedented speed. I wonder if it is possible to gather people like this and regroup our social circles.
It could in theory. The model generates a depth image per frame, so each pixel becomes a small 3D point. It also assumes that the 3D scene is static. From this, you can then simply register all the frames into a huge 3D point cloud by unprojecting the pixels to 3D and render it anyway you like (using a classical 3D renderer) and it will be consistent.
Though, a problem is that if the generated video itself has inconsistent information, e.g., the object changes color between frames, then your point cloud would just be "consistently wrong". In practice this will lead to some blurry artifacts because you blend different inconsistent colors together. So when you turn around you will still see the same thing, but that thing is uglier and blurrier because it blends between inconsistent coloring.
It will also be difficult to put a virtual object into the generated scene, because you don't have the lighting information and the virtual object can't blend its color with the environment well.
Overall cool idea but obviously more interesting problems to be solved!
It's interesting to see the trend of the attitude towards GenAI in Hacker News through out the years. This is totally vibe based and I don't have numbers to back it up, but back in 2022-2023, the site was dominantly people who mostly treat GenAI as a curious technology without too much attachment, and some non-trivial amount of folks who are very skeptical of the tech. More recently I see a lot more people who see themselves as evangelists and try very hard to boost/advocate the technology (see all the "LLM coding changes my life" posts). It seems that the tide has turned back a little bit again since we now see this kind of posts surfacing.
For me, I kind of wish this site to go back to the good old days where people just share their nerdy niche hacker things and not filling the first page with the same arguments we see on the other parts of the internet over and over again. ; ) But granted I was attracted by the clickbait title too, so I can't blame others.