AI is making games, film and hardware easier to reinvent

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 30:22

   or looking forward to? Well, I'll give you my, my version, maybe a little bit of what Chris was saying, but like, I think so many, I mean, look, there's a lot of great demos, a lot of great products releasing right now, but there's, there's this thing I've just observed. I saw it in the internet era earlier and I call it product manager brain, which is product manager is basically designing products for product managers. Right. It's like, it's, by the way, it's the one thing everybody does is they build products for themselves, which is product managers have the story that they're building for other people. And yet somehow all the use cases are, you know, book me a restaurant, you know, to be in San Francisco to go have dinner with my friends who are also product managers, or, you know, book me a plane flight to go to a product management

2. 30:53

   conference where I also get to hang out with all my product manager friends. And so there's this, you know, it's a little, and again, there's a role for this, but it's a little bit like, I think it's like the anthropic, I'm a, what is it, I'm a happy, helpful, harmful, harmless, I'm a happy, harmless, whatever it is, honest assistant, right? And it's a little, which also means i'm the i am the most boring possible thing you could possibly imagine that's going to be constantly lecturing you've asked me a question i'm not allowed to answer right and so it's it's like there's just going to be this this this sort of we just had this very just the nature of the early early companies who just had this very blinker view on human activity on what people are going to want to do and it's your point like with uh with me as an instinct it's it's starting

3. 31:29

   to open up um but like look this is going to be a much more entertaining fun enjoyable exciting By the way, lucrative people are going to make money. There would be all kinds of ways for people to make money, be able to save money, be able to be parts of, you know, participate in parts of the economy, be able to be creators, you know, be able to, you know, create new kinds of art. I mean, just in the last, like, three weeks, there's been an explosion of people making music videos, like DeNovo.

4. 31:54

   Yeah. On, like, an incredible array of, like, creative ideas. Like video games in the last three weeks have blown up. Can we mention that just because that's so striking? Yeah. I mean, I always think, I always find video games interesting because they're kind of the lead. I find that they're often the leading edge of media because it's just a technical culture that kind of iterates quickly. But, like, I just saw one where it's like you can take any two videos.

5. 32:13

   Well, first of all, you can disassemble everything, port them, and just crazy stuff going on now. You can now run, like, Windows games on Unix faster than on Windows. like because of these disassemblers and these AIs are so good. But also there was like this one where you can take any two video games and it will mash them up together and create a combo video game of it, which, you know, just like a crazy new behavior.

6. 32:35

   Super Mario and GTA, right? Spider-Man and Jurassic Park. And it's just literally the crazy, like to Mark's point, it's been I think like two weeks or something. It's like since what, like Opus 5.5 or something. And so it's just like the rate at which this stuff is happening and, like, in a month there'll probably be some other, you know, two weeks there'll be some other big wave of this. You see Epic just yesterday said no more humans, right?

7. 33:00

   And so, like, there's been cultural resistance in the video game industry to AI, but I think that's the first of the dominoes to fall because it's just inevitable because it's a much better way to build things. And it's going to be great for consumers. You're going to have this, at least it's going to be a creative renaissance. You're going to have this, you know, any independent developer can go and build like they have a huge team and still have, I think they can still have a lot of room for human creativity.

8. 33:23

   It's just, it's a superpowers, human creativity. So I think you were mentioning movies. Well, that might take longer. I don't know when that, where that is on the, you know, or that death door meme or whatever. I don't know which door it is, but. You can snap it quite quickly. It's just, I'm completely, I'm just giving you, I'm completely obsessed with this movie Digger that came out and I'm like literally, only person who saw it. You will be 100% tempted to walk out after the first half hour.

9. 33:50

   You will want to. I have a friend who literally took, I have a friend who took her mother to see it. And they walked out after the first half hour. And now the running joke in the family is, oh, Digger 2 is out. Let's, you know, let's enter the theater, you know, just because it's such a comical idea. But so, like, a lot of people have had that but if you actually watch the entire movie there's a reason why they did what they did and it's not what you think it is. And I don't want to spoil it, but like, it's not, it's not the way it is presented at all. It's very clever.

10. 34:12

    Anyway, but like, you know, it's, so it's this incredible creative achievement but it's a 200 million dollar like cash loss for the for for the studio but it's best because it had like 180 million dollar production budget um and so it's like with ai what if that movie had had a 20 million dollar production budget and what if it had made you know or a two or a two million dollar production budget right like that that level of art and creativity um at a lower price would have been great but as a business by the way as a business thing would have been a two million that that would be on a two million dollar budget would have been insanely profitable would have been made the investors back ten times their money And so, yeah, there's a huge thing that's going to open up in the entertainment business.

11. 34:45

    And then the other one, you know, Chris, you and I have sort of, you know, been in and around hardware for a long time. Like my whole career, you know, hardware, you know, I'm a software person. Hardware has always been like Terra Incognita, which is like, you know, there are dragons there, right? Like it's just, it's been so easy to blow up companies going into hardware. And then, again, your point, like just in the last three weeks, so this open source tool drop called REA, Reverse Engineer Anything.

12. 35:07

    And it's this thing, it harnesses an AI model and you point it at anything, it'll reverse engineer it and give you source code. And one of the things that you can reverse engineer now is any piece of hardware, right? And so you have a thermostat that's like pissing you off in your house because it's not like working right. You can point this thing at the thermostat, reverse engineer it, and the AI will write you new code and install it and put a new interface in the thermostat.

13. 35:26

    And the same thing is true for basically anything, like basically any form of hardware can now be taken over and reprogrammed with this stuff. And so all of a sudden, it's just like, I mean, I mean, you take all these spaces, I don't know if anybody's doing this yet, but like just home automation, home automation has always been a complete nightmare of a market and to implement as a customer. If anybody's ever done any sort of, you know, new house build, it's just a nightmare.

14. 35:46

    But like home automation, maybe it should just be an AI bot that just like takes over all the hardware in your house and runs it, however it is that you want to do that. And I have friends that are literally doing this like right now in their own homes. And so there is, we are potentially entering here, like we're entering a renaissance. I just wanted to think about it as like anybody who understands software may sort of automatically be able to do a lot of the things that historically have been difficult in hardware in a way that's just never been conceivable before.

15. 36:10

    And so, yeah, it just, yeah, and then, you know, this sort of multiplicative thing, you know, these, you know, these are kind of the fields that are like closest to end of tech, but then you just, you know, you expand out and you just kind of think, you know, the entire economy.