Bilawal Sidhu
@bilawalsidhu
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🌐 Map the Frontier | 🎙️ TED Curator/Host | 🚀 A16z Scout | 🎬 VFX 1.4M+ Subs & 450M+ Views | 🌎 Ex-Google PM, 3D Maps & AR/VR 🥽 https://t.co/uf98Oqqeeu
Austin, TX
Joined December 2010
Everyone's talking about the "square structures" on Mars, but no one's talking about the literal Google data center there. They've had Gmail and Street View on Mars for years. It's a breakaway civilization. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
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It’s wild that Aaron Swartz was aggressively prosecuted for scraping JSTOR articles. Meanwhile huge companies routinely scrape the public internet and sell it for $20/month and all is well. Aaron helped create RSS, Creative Commons, Markdown and a little site called Reddit.
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peak internet: . ai generated cctv footage of police arresting ppl for wearing huge boots. video credit: u/Qemmish
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Before/after of Corridor's latest AI video is wild. They shot video on greenscreen, made virtual sets in Unreal, then reskinned it to anime by finetuning Stable Diffusion. Net result? 120 VFX shots done by a team of 3 on a dime. Bravo! This is a milestone in creative technology🧵
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Midjourney v5 has pushed into photorealism, a goal which has eluded the computer graphics industry for decades (!) 🤯. Insane progression, and all that by 11 people with a shared dream. 🧵 Let's explore what these breakthrough in Generative AI mean for 3D & VFX as we know it.
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OpenAI just dropped their Sora research paper. As expected, the video-to-video results are flipping spectacular 🪄. A few other gems:
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Generative AI is super cool… BUT I’m continually blown away with the work happening in ‘procedural’ 3D modelling. Especially given these plugins are for a free (!) 3D tool like Blender. We needed a fancy Houdini license to do this just a few years ago 🤯.
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Generative AI is cool and all, but procedural 3D modeling just hits different. Check out this Houdini setup by Pepe Buendia. Why this is cool: Instead of manually placing every building and car, this system generates an NYC-style city that builds itself -- automatically
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This guy literally turned blender into a real-time 3d engine with multiplayer support. When I say the merger of offline and real-time rendering is inevitable — this is not what I expected 😂.
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Pika 1.5 is pretty wild. When I said generative AI would let us edit reality, this is not what I had in mind. lol
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Everything here is 100% generated w/ Google Veo 2. I've got early access, and the visual fidelity and prompt adherence is genuinely nuts. Let's test it together and have some fun. Drop your prompts below -- and for the next hour or so I'll reply with videos 👇
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Generative AI is cool and all, but procedural 3D modelling continues to hit the spot
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@TheDemocrats Watching the CNN commentary after the debate — and they clearly beg to differ.
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Remember that 'air head' video made with Sora? Turns out it used a ton of rotoscoping and manual VFX. A 'head' would pop back on, and the balloon colors would keep changing from generation to generation. TL;DR researchers and developers of generative AI tools really need to
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Generative AI is cool and all, but I continue to be blown away by the strides in real-time visual effects. Case in point — ripping through immaculate fluid simulations on an RTX 4090 using EmberGen:
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Ok I take it back. Apple’s ‘Private Cloud Computing’ actually takes ‘Confidential Computing’ to the next level. It’s SO secure that they can’t even comply with law enforcement requests. > No data retention (unlike every other cloud provider).> No privileged access (even Apple
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3D capture is dope for media & entertainment, but the utilitarian applications might be even more impactful - literally x-ray vision making the unseen seen. With tools like Pix4D + RTK GPS (cm level accuracy) you can capture critical infrastructure, and overlay it at real-world
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The production value of these weather broadcasts is really next level — using unreal engine and in-camera VFX to put extreme weather events like Milton into perspective way better 2D graphics ever could
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We’re basically building the matrix inside the matrix, aren’t we?
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3D capture is moving so fast - I scanned & animated this completely on an iPhone. Last summer you'd need to wrangle COLMAP, Instant NGP, and FFmpeg to make NeRFs. Now you can do it all inside Luma AI's mobile app. Capture anything and reframe infinitely in post!. Thread 🧵
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❗EXCLUSIVE: "We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter." . What REALLY happened at OpenAI? Former board member Helen Toner breaks her silence with shocking new details about Sam Altman's firing. Hear the exclusive, untold story on The TED AI Show. Here's just a sneak peek:
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Okay it happened! Snapchat Spectacles AR glasses. Fully standalone. 46 degree field of view. 37 pixels per degree. That’s roughly like a 100” TV screen! 2x snapdragon chips. 45 minutes of battery. Auto transitioning lenses. Designed for co-presence. Spectator mode and more.
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I can no longer walk around a city without seeing a machine-readable 3D model in my head. This is a geometric and semantic 3D model of San Francisco. These maps connect the world of bits and atoms, enabling visual positioning, 3D navigation and geospatial intelligence.
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I just love that this Matrix city project is a massive Houdini project masquerading as an Unreal project :-). Behold 100K+ simulated entities with an interconnected crowd & traffic system utilizing procedural 3d modeling data. That's how you bring a city to life. But it's not
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🧠 AI experiment comparing #ControlNet and #Gen1. Video goes in ➡ Minecraft comes out. Results are wild, and it's only a matter of time till this tech runs at 60fps. Then it'll transform 3D and AR. How soon until we're channel surfing realities layered on top of the world?🧵
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🚀 Big news today with Google + Adobe joining forces!. We're talking about 3D content anchored to the real world at insane scale🌐 And of course, AI had a role to play. I've got early access, and let's just say the physical & digital worlds are blurring 😎 Let's get into it!🧵
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Procedural 3D modeling is super cool, but you don't need to be a Houdini expert to take advantage of it. Here's a stellar Blender plugin called The City Generator by Andreas Dürr that will let you do nearly everything I shared in my previous post. Why it's cool: You can create
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Heads up! Mosaic dropped a pretty wild dataset of 1.26 million 360° images of Prague 🤯. If you're a researcher, creator or developer into 3D/AI/Geo, I think you're gonna wanna play with this. Here's the scoop on this 15 TERAPIXEL dataset & the crazy things you can do with it 🧵
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Q: "After doing AI for so long, what have you learned about humans?" .Sam Altman: "I grew up implicitly thinking that intelligence was this, like really special human thing and kind of somewhat magical. And I now think that it's sort of a fundamental property of matter. " . It's
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AI just took 3D modeling to a whole new level 🤯. Introducing Neuralangelo, a new AI model by NVIDIA that reconstructs mind-blowingly detailed 3D surfaces directly from 2D videos — like photogrammetry on steroids. 🧙🏻♂️. Keep reading to see this crazy magic for yourself 🧵
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X is erupting into a race war. Meanwhile, China just dropped an open-source AI model that absolutely MOGS, using a FRACTION of the compute US labs burn through. - US: "Restricting China's chip access will slow them down.". - China: "Cute. Watch us flex with a $5M training run
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3D scanning and rendering is moving so fast - got my splats up and running and I'm mind blown getting ~100fps for this complex 3D scene ⬇️ 🤯 . 1. WAY faster than NeRF: For comparison, NeRFs would takes around 10 seconds per frame (!) Instead I'm zipping around with FPV controls
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Honestly, is there something you *can’t* do in Blender, because homie built a flight simulator in it 😭
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Prepping for a 25-minute keynote: I exported a PDF of my slides to Gemini 1.5 Pro and dropped in an audio recording of my dry run. Gemini gave me precise feedback down to the slide and timestamp. After incorporating the suggestions, I recorded another round — total game changer.
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Wow! This looks SO much better than Roto Brush in After Effects, it's not even funny. Track-Anything is a video object tracking & segmentation tool based on Meta's Segment Anything Model. That robustness though! No way I'd get a similar result in AE without tons of manual
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ControlNet experiment where I'm toggling through different styles of contemporary Indian décor, while keeping a consistent scene layout. Loving how ControlNet is putting the artists back in control of AI image generation process. 🧵Thread. #ControlNet #StableDiffusion #EbSynth
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When Apple said they were rolling out 'spatial media' this is what I actually expected - 3D video with six-degrees of freedom. Instead Vision Pro users got old wine (VR180 video) in a new bottle (Apple's MV-HEVC format). Conveniently, here's an open source NeRF-based
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3D, AI, NeRFs and oh my! Immersive view is now rolling out to 5 cities, with 5 more to follow. Experience the best of all views, with helpful info layered on top, so you can decide when & where to go. Proud to be part of the team-of-teams that made this maps milestone a reality!
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i'm convinced the killer use case for 3d reconstruction tech is memory capture. my parents retired earlier this year and i have immortalized their home forever more. photo scanning is legit the most future proof medium we have access to today. scan all the spaces/places/things
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Generative AI is cool and all, but procedural 3D modeling continues to hit the spot. Here’s the new ICity beta, which helps you harness the power of geometry nodes in Blender:
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AR multiplayer FPS in China . Who else loved paintball and airsoft as a kid? This would be so hype with none of the mess. Perfect for an urban community. And the P90s make it extra cool 😎 .
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Finally a grounded take on AI & filmmaking from a Hollywood A-lister. I agree with everything Ben Affleck said:. 1. Yes, AI will shatter barriers to entry. Budgets will drop, the number of movies will rise, and more voices will have access to filmmaking. Paradoxically, this'll
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The future of Street View looks like this 😍. Basically City-scale 3D Gaussian Splatting. Thanks to a hierarchical level of detail (LOD) approach, you get real-time rendering of massive scenes at 30+ FPS!. But capturing city scale at street level is SUPER messy, with people,
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Ask and you shall receive. Playing guitar in mixed reality. 🎸 . So much potential to augment real world instruments. Why should pianos have all the fun? 😁. Awesome work by @sergeyglkn
Anyone making an app for Quest 3 that using mixed reality to overlay guitar tabs on an actual guitar fretboard? . Not air guitar, but more like the @PianoVisionAR app tailored to guitars. 🎸
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LiDAR SLAM is so flipping cool . Two different 3D maps captured by robots with an Ouster LiDAR puck + IMU + wheel encoders being merged together into one
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I spent the weekend hacking an AI room makeover using ControlNet & Stable Diffusion, restyling my parent's "drawing room." How soon until this workflow is standard for home décor & interior design? . ControlNet is a glimpse into the AI-infused future of 3D rendering & AR.
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🔥 Unreal Engine 5 is wild. Such a powerful tool for cinematic storytelling! 😻. 📺 Made this short video entirely entirely in-engine with marketplace 3D assets, and a sprinkle of GPT for scripting assistance. Hope you enjoyed my voice acting too 😂 . 🤯 Doing this the “good old
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Sir Demis Hassabis just showed a super low latency demo of Google’s multimodal AI assistant on your phone AND augmented reality glasses. Clearly they’ve been cooking this for a while. The race is on!
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🤯 Wondering why creators like @SirWrender are losing their minds over @WonderDynamics?. Short answer: it’s a middle ground between 3D, VFX and editorial tools ⚔️ . So what took 3 days across many tools — takes 3 minutes in just one tool!. 🧵 Thread (0/8):
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I'm still convinced the killer use case for 3d reconstruction tech is memory capture. No surprise Apple is headed in this direction. Here's a massive scan of the backyard + rooftop of my parent's old house. They're retired now, but their home is immortalized forever. Photo
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20+ labs just worked together to open source Genesis - a physics engine with a VLM agent that turns text prompts into interactive 4D worlds . Think instant physics-accurate environments, camera paths, and character animations - all from natural language 🤯
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What a week for AI! Not yet scary, but a feeling is in the air. Things are heating up and people are conflicted. Why are the brightest minds in AI asking for a 6 month pause, while others say it doesn't go far enough? 🤯. Here's why this debate deserves our attention. 🧵 Thread
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It’s over. After this Sora clip, I can't even imagine doing this the ‘normal’ way with complex 3D/VFX tools. I really thought you'd need 3D engine + generative AI to achieve consistency & quality like this. Turns out all you need more data and compute….
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And they say the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor
Lmao Procreate CEO’s last name is literally CUDA.
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Ed Catmull (Pixar founder) just joined Odyssey's board as they reveal their first 3D breakthrough:. Instantly turning any 2D image into an editable 3D world. World Labs isn't alone anymore. Here's the TL;DR without the hype 🧵
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BREAKING: Just when you thought the Google news was over, there's more!. Android XR is officially official – the Gemini era is coming to VR headsets and AR glasses. Here's the latest, w/o the hype. Let's get into it 🧵
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Zuck's AI strategy in a nutshell:. - Free frontier model for devs.- Undercut closed-source rivals.- Skip cloud wars; instead monetize biz/creator agents.- Harvest fresh data/content for Meta ecosystem.- Profit
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Yep, the visual turing test has been shattered. Images are solved, and video ain’t too far behind. Faced with a daily barrage of algorithmic content, you’ll need to be a forensic or vfx expert to notice the discrepancies. The average internet user ain’t ready for this new world.
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I love how the simplest Al creation tools weaved together tastefully into a cohesive narrative will outperform posts pushing complexity. Creators saying this isn't hard to make are missing the point. Story above all else. Case in point: barbenheimer 😌.
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Multi ControlNet is a game changer for making an open source video2video pipeline. I spent some time hacking this NeRF2Depth2Image workflow using a combination of ControlNet methods + SD 1.5 + EbSynth. 🧵 Full breakdown of my workflow & detailed tips shared in the thread below ⬇
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Taking “AR” videos and running them through a NeRF pipeline is a fun thing to do. Turns out things look even more 🔥 with Gaussian Splatting. But don’t take my word for it. Behold this beauty:
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🚫This is not a NeRF. Not even a Photogrammetry mesh 📐This is Gaussian Splatting at ~130 fps. This was a fun 3D scan to do - I'm blown away by the recovery of complex vegetation and lighting effects. Most NeRF methods aren't nearly as sharp, and photogrammetry would've
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BREAKING: YouTube announced a suite of AI tools for creators! From a dedicated video editing app and AI language dubbing to AI video generation and ideation. Here's the TL;DR: . 1. AI Video with Dream Screen - Visually transport yourself anywhere by typing a prompt. This new
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During Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever's recent trip to Israel, folks didn't beat around the bush. First question: spicy open source vs closed source debate 🔥. Followed immediately by: "Can you tell us more about the base model before you lobotomized it?" 🤣
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Forget physics. Wake me up when Sora (or any other AI model) can do this. This is almost indistinguishable from reality 🤯. Created using Blender, Unreal Engine, Maya, Substance 3D Painter, and Nuke, using 22 UDIMs at 4K resolution by the talented Petter Steen.
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We will be able to turn regular 2D videos into volumetric 4D content sooner than you expect.
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🚘🌌 AI-Powered Joyride: Cyberpunk San Francisco 🌉✨. 🏙️ The world is changing quickly. Brace yourself as reality and fantasy intertwine, with AI turning into lenses through which we'll see the world. 🌐🌆. ⚙ Brought to life by Kaiber Video2Video (featuring ControlNet, Stable
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If you though reskinning 2D videos was fun, how about reskinning 3D captures of the world?. That's exactly what you get when you combine NeRFs with InstructPix2Pix in this new paper by @ayaanzhaque et al. Mini-thread🧵
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Such a dope use of wonder studio. Virtual production and VFX continue to get democratized 🪄. Just imagine how much longer this would’ve taken with a classical approach to rotoscoping, in-painting, 3D tracking, animation, rendering and compositing 😅.
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Is it just me or was today the first time OpenAI was unable to overshadow a Google AI announcement? . Gemini 1.5 Pro is pretty wild. Just dropped in an audio file + hour long video interview, and now it's helping me package it up for YouTube. Multimodality + 1M context window
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BREAKING: Here are the coolest things Google announced today; got the press briefing yesterday and here's my favorites w/o the hype. TL;DR Gemini 2.0 brings multimodal creation, research agents, browser control, and massive compute upgrades. Plus dope research. 🧵 Let's dive in
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Project Perfect Blend at Adobe Sneaks. They better ship this into Photoshop, because the audience went wild 😂 . Basically PBR estimation to de-light and re-light any layer to make compositing a LOT easier. Until then, you can already do this with tools like Beeble today.
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First ever live demo of Samsung’s mixed reality headset running Android XR!. Gemini AI built right in, the Google apps you know and love with a very intuitive UX. Also cool to see Google maps immersive view playing a key role which I cofounded & led product for while at Google!
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Generative AI and NeRFs are super cool… BUT I’m continually blown away with the work happening in procedural 3D modelling 🤯. Especially given the fact that these capabilities are in a free (!) 3D tool like Blender. No fancy Houdini license required 👇.
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ChatGPT's new canvas interface is a game changer. Just used it to create a tesseract/hypercube visualizer with ThreeJS. Loving the unified UX — chat, inline comments, and watching GPT-4o work its magic on the code — all in one place. Does not get old. Claude artifacts have some
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1/ 🌌 Roblox isn't just a video game — it's the world's largest UGC 3D platform. But wait, it gets better!. 🧙♂️ Roblox is now embracing Generative AI, shattering barriers to 3D creation, and creating a TikTok-like flywheel 🔁. 🧵 Thread: here's how the magic is unfolding in 3D 🪄
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Turns out AI generated slop can have real world impact. On Halloween, crowds gathered in Dublin for a parade that didn’t even exist. Police released a statement confirming no parade was scheduled, urging people to “disperse safely.”. The source? A three month old SEO agency
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NeRF compilation time ft. drones, phones and oh my! Photogrammetry ain't new, but it's never looked better thanks to AI. Plus, it's so satisfying to see it breath new life into old 3d scans! Watch the full 4 min video here: #ComputerVision #NeRF #3D #AI
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🤯 Woah! This new AI paper is legit like Adobe Puppet Warp on steroids 📌. Text prompts aren’t the be-all and end-all of AI creation. DragGAN is a perfect example of giving creators fine-grain control over the AI image generation process. Here’s the TL;DR summary: . • 🖌️
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BREAKING: Google just dropped Veo 2 and Imagen 3 -- their next gen video and image generation models. Turns out Google's been closing the gap quietly -- not just on LLMs, but on visual creation too. Here’s everything you need to know w/o the hype 🧵
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I am asking once again — why does China have the best AI video models on the market?. Is it compute? Is it data? Is it algorithmic prowess?. I can get firefly video being a laggard but aren’t most US based models training on “publicly available data”?.
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🥽 Apple Vision Pro is everything we hoped for and then some. But at $3,499 you're either an early adopter or a AR/VR developer. Yet two things change after today:. 1. "Metaverse" will stop being a bad word (even though Apple didn't use the word) - sparking a resurgence in
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All right folks, it's official!. After six incredible years at Google, I'm saying goodbye to the mothership to pursue my dream as a full-time creatorpreneur. I'm beyond excited to ride the wave of AI-enabled creativity and see where this journey takes me! 🌊🚀. 🧵 Thread
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300 cameras recording simultaneously for days. @MrBeast has petabytes of multi-camera footage on a multi-million dollar server that an army of editors remote into and distill 300 x 24 hours into 20 mins. He’s sitting on multimodal training data goldmine!.
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Generative video is dope but AI motion capture is just as cool. Pretty much James Cameron ish in your living room — and that too with just a 2D camera
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Classical 3D rendering is so cooked. In the future, every pixel will be generated, not rendered. But until then, you get generative AI nodes inside Nuke. The sky's the limit when you blend classical visual effects with generative ai. We’re on the brink of fully generative
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BREAKING: Adobe Firefly Video is “the first commercially safe video generation model” — it supports text-to-video, image-to-video and designed for immaculate prompt coherence. Those sample generations look quite impressive — excited to go hands on! I’m at Adobe MAX this week so
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People in the X AI bubble are all switching to Claude. It’s my daily driver too, and I only switch to GPT-4 once I hit my quota. But the rest of the world is still discovering ChatGPT and it continues to grow. Might explain why OpenAI feels less pressure to play all their cards
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NeRFs + ControlNet + EbSynth = 🔥. 🗿 Processed this 3D capture of a statue through Kaiber's video2video workflow . 🤖 Wish there was a bit more consistency across keyframes, but damn these are pretty clean results!. 🔥 Can't wait till this tech is running in real time at 60
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Something about three js 3d graphics running @ 120 fps on an e-ink display just hits different.
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🌟✨Cherry Blossoms glistening & glowing like never before! 🌸😍.🏯 Tokyo-inspired AI video creation 🇯🇵 .🔮 NeRFs + ControlNet + EbSynth = Pure Magic! 🪄
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Jensen Huang at GTC press Q&A: “We’re all prompt engineers. When my wife talks to me, she’s prompt engineering me.” .💀😭
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Seen that viral Lex/Zuck interview inside the metaverse? While novel, Meta's actually been working on this tech since 2019! Here's the TL;DR on how it works:. The idea behind it is simple: capture yourself once in immaculate detail -- whether it's with a fancy "light stage"
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