This looks interesting, but can someone explain to me how this is different from video generators using the previous frames as inputs to expand on the next frame?
See the demo on their homepage. Calling it a world simulator is a marketing gimmick. It's a worse video generator but you can interact with it in real time and direct the video a little bit. Next version of this thing will be worth looking, this one isnt.
There is soo much marketing bs around these things it drives me nuts. and it doesn't help that the large labs and credible individuals like denis use these terms. "world models" are video generator with contextual memory but that term is soo misplaced. when one thinks of a "world model" you expect the thing to be at least be physics engine driven from its foundation, not the other way around where everything is generated and assumed at best.
> why you decided for a UX that each transition required a new slide?
Not OP but I imagine conceptually for a newcomer to 3D or animation that's actually great onboarding. They do not have concepts of keyframes but they do know about slides.
When it becomes really long and complex... then IMHO it's not for the same audience anymore. They can install Blender or whatever other tool they need.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. Honestly, I don't know. It seemed pretty easy to do that way at that time. But I'd accept PRs that could improve the product.
I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, while also pointing to the missing pieces in our understanding of the brain and consciousness.
I also work in the field, specifically with sleep slow-wave enhancement.
Blood flow as a proxy for brain activity I always felt was a weak measure, as the brain activity involved across all manner of operating our biological systems, so is the increased blood flow measured in fMRI a response to cognition, or autonomic activity? What does that oxydation mean.
EEG is similarly flawed when we try to equate "brainwaves" to emotions and consciousness. I think we're almost better off measuring HRV, a much simpler measure, and more reliable.
I'm fascinated that so many people who discuss brainwaves think of them as actual "waves", when it is just how we plot electrical activity which creates a visual wave like pattern.
However, and this is specifically related to our work in sleep, we can detect slow-waves (I dislike that term, it's the synchronous firing of neurons) and we are able to stimulate this restorative brain function through sensory perception during sleep, and even create slow-waves in a lab using TMS.
Research linked on our website [1]
I agree the industry needs to stop projecting what we hope we're seeing with what is actually being measured, and we don't understand enough about how the brain works, but I think completely throwing away any brain related measures we have is going too far.
I wonder why they added this to the finger rather than adding this capability to the watches they are already making? One handed operation is one reason, though I'd think a UX could be designed to make this an app on the watch, rather than a stand-alone device.
Seems like overkill, particularly when other rings do bio-metric tracking, so is this focused on a big enough problem to want to solve?
"Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff."
This interacts directly with the Pebble App, so I would be shocked if the watches never get an equivalent app.
We regularly get contacted by people in Europe who want to buy our product, but we haven't been providing support due to the cost of certs, and other regulatory needs (medical/wellness device).
We want to help people in the EU, but with laws like replaceable batteries, it's going to push us further and further away from being able to do that.
Our product is designed to be refurbished, but not user-replaceable.
At the same time, how many products do people give up on because of battery life, and is this a non-issue with future battery chemistries?
Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore, or is it more likely they've broken the screen, cameras, etc to the point where it doesn't make sense to replace those anymore? Or they just want the newest thing?
> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore, or is it more likely they've broken the screen, cameras, etc to the point where it doesn't make sense to replace those anymore? Or they just want the newest thing?
This is why repairability isn't restricted to just the battery. And buying the newest thing every year is kinda frowned upon here in the EU now. I'm sure some people still do it but most people aren't flashing their new phone around anymore. And phones have become boring anyway. The latest Samsung S25 is mostly the same as the S23, exact same form factor, cameras. Just a bit faster and a bit more memory.
But the government sets a baseline here to stimulate sustainability. I really agree with it, this planet has to be usable for a lot longer. And economic growth isn't everything.
We have to move away from consumerism for the sake of it and I think we're making good inroads here in the EU. Not to mention it means there's more money left over for important stuff like doing things with friends.
Anecdotally, 2023/24 all media in Germany was full of ads for shops trading refurb phones. Most of those talked lower prices, but some mentioned sustainability.
The first article does not look to be informative; it values the EU smartphone market at around 465 million USD, which is impossibly low. If you assume a smartphone is valued at $1,000, a market of that size would only amount to 465,000 devices sold; this is around 0.01% of the EU’s population.
The second article links to a paper which appears to be more informative (though it has not been peer reviewed):
> For example, in the United States, the average expected life span (replacement
cycle length) of consumer and enterprise smartphones was 2.67 and 2.54 years, respectively, in 2023, while in the UK almost 30% of surveyed consumers use their smartphone up to two years and 41% up to 4 years.
and
> Furthermore, evidence shows that European, American and Chinese consumers have reduced the replacement rate of their smartphones, increasing their average life cycle (see Figure 1). These data suggest that consumer preferences are changing, and new opportunities arise for companies who want to find new profitable ways to meet the needs of their customers.
Those numbers would be more realistic, amounting to around a thousand dollars spent per each EU citizen per year; this seems a little high if replacement rates are hovering around 3 years on average, but not impossible like the other figure.
What I don’t understand is why it would be written “USD 448.87 million.” This convention is common in accounting and finance as well, but they usually make an indication of it in a column header.
> Is there any evidence that Europeans aren’t buying new phones at the same rate that they used to?
I bet it is the case, not because it is frowned upon, but because tpeople have less money, the prices of phone increased a lot and the increase of performance and usefulness is plateauing.
> We want to help people in the EU, but with laws like replaceable batteries, it's going to push us further and further away from being able to do that.
We want to help people, but only if and when it’s profitable for us to do so on terms we decide for you.
Yes its perfectly fine, thats my point. They arent spiting the EU, they are just responding to the legislation by not entering that market. If EU voters are unhappy they can take it up with their government.
That's not what a lot of proponents of these laws argue. They often state that if a company is making something unavailable in the EU due to one of the laws that the company is throwing a fit or being spiteful.
And it's also probably true, especially for $MEGACORP. But in general the concept of this kind of laws, as others mentioned, it's to make companies internalize the whole cost of their product impact on the environment. It is GOOD if it drives the price up. At some point people will find it too expensive and they will simply not buy it because it's not worth the cost.
Yes, a free market isn't the answer to everything. It will never optimise for sustainability unless this is a conscious consumer choice factor. It's way too important to leave it to that though. Hence regulation.
Just change the underlying economic incentives - but nobody is even barely there yet, except maybe the EU. Doughnut Economics, when are you going to save us (& the planet)?
That's an unfair representation of the situation. There's nothing about this device that implies "disposable". The EU is definitely the problem here. I think the problem is the EU loves legislating entrepreneurial creativity into the dirt.
Speaking personally, I've never broken/damaged a phone. Since the Pixel 1 started requiring removal of the screen in order to swap the battery, 100% of my phone replacements have been because the battery isn't good anymore. (Granted, I would've gotten a new phone eventually regardless, when the old one stopped receiving security updates.)
> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore
Pretty much exclusively? The last 4-5 iPhone purchases in my family have all been due to dying batteries (plus a couple of off-brand battery replacements by local cellphone techs).
Nothing else on iPhones really ever breaks, provided you keep some sort of case on it. The only non-battery failure I've ever had was a corroded lightning port (on a iPhone that was regularly used in a salt-chlorine swimming pool). And of course a couple of replacements due to critical banking apps that have drop support for old iOS versions...
And what did you do with them? Throw them away? I bought and used an iPhone 11 for a year last year, and it came with a perfectly functional, replaced battery.
People on HN have such a blind spot around old, used phones which thrive in secondary marketplaces. You'd think iPhones are filling dumpsters with the rhetoric here but they actually hold their value remarkably well, which means they have a much longer useful life. A replaceable battery is different from a user-replaceable battery. The former is a sustainability concern, the latter is just a feature.
The ones that aged out of running needed software are still sitting in a cabinet somewhere. A couple of the others were killed off when their battery pack swelled, and another didn't survive a local tech's efforts to replace the battery...
With batteries that could be replaced without delaminating the whole device, (and ideally, an open boot loader), I'd be able to make use of most of them.
BTW this also works the other way: I find myself to avoid US products more and more because they tend to come with inbuilt obsolescence, or, for digital products, with dark patterns preventing subscription cancelling.
I'm not who you asked that question, but I'd guess it's because it requires "proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product."
It'd be hard to design/manufacture a device that reliably remains waterproof after a typical not-specially-skilled owner opens it up to replace a battery. It's really common to hear of people damaging watches due to water ingress after battery replacements, getting seals or orings seated just right isn't something every user is going to be able to do.
I can imagine some medical devices have similar sealing requirements, perhaps even more robust sealing methods since they might need to be exposed to regular disinfection grade cleaning with chemicals harsher then just water. I could easily understand why a company may design a medical device that its heat-glued together for sealing purposes in a way that can only reasonably be done (and redone) at the factory.
I killed an original Pebble when I Dremelled it open to replace the battery, and failed to hot glue seal it well enough and it got wet inside.
Having said that - I dislike this design choice for the Index 01. I can see myself becoming reliant on this right before they sell out to Garmin or whoever and tell all their customers to FOAD again. Trust is very hard to win back.
> I can see myself becoming reliant on this right before they sell out to Garmin or whoever and tell all their customers to FOAD again. Trust is very hard to win back.
This product is perfect for that case, though: you have to decide to buy another one each time the battery runs down, which aligns seller incentives with the user/purchaser. The danger cases are mainly when the seller gets up front money and then has to provide something indefinitely.
> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore
Yes. I'm not bothered about the latest thing, and every phone I've replaced has been because of two things: the battery has degraded until it's unacceptable, or it no longer gets OS updates.
> We regularly get contacted by people in Europe who want to buy our product, but we haven't been providing support due to the cost of certs, and other regulatory needs (medical/wellness device).
I understand your point but being safe is not an option
> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore
I just had to change the battery of my phone, and I wish that it would have been just a swap to do. Actually because it wasn't, I add to buy a temporary phone the time I needed to have the parts and the tools
> We want to help people in the EU, but with laws like replaceable batteries, it's going to push us further and further away from being able to do that.
All I could think of was "Wow, the regulation works better than expected".
It's incredible the other side think of themselves as "We want to help people in this environment we don't understand, but receiving pushback" and yet they don't want to adjust, no, it's the environment that is wrong, even if it's built up by people.
I may not be a typical user, but I've run my last few iphones and macbooks until the battery gave up the ghost. I haven't really needed more features or raw horsepower for quite some time, so the battery ends up being the limit I hit.
iPhones and MacBooks can be serviced to replace the battery.
My iPhones typically get a fresh battery around the 3-year mark, or whenever the battery health dips below 80%, and do a second tour of duty with someone in the family. In all cases so far, the OS goes out of support and apps stop working before the second battery degrades.
In my last two phones I had to replace the battery 2 and 4 years in. One because it swelled, the other because it couldn't hold charge. Both cases I got a few extra years of usage from the phone. I'm in the EU, and I support this sort of regulation.
My personal experience: Electric toothbrush and razor. I especially hate the razors, you can replace the head, they could last a lifetime, but the battery is practically dead after two years. Toothbrushes are improving, the last one has 3 years of service and still work ok.
I'm using an Oral-B electric toothbrush from 2009. The (non-replaceable) battery needs to be charged about every 3-5 days now, which is not a problem because it sits in its charging stand every night.
My wife bought some cheap electric toothbrush that runs on AA batteries, which can be rechargeable and have a lifespan independent of the gadget.
I keep getting the feeling that the tech media is it's own worst enemy, or it shows how little tech media like the verge understands about technology.
Though I agree that language is not intelligence, suggesting that the AI boom is only about LLMs, or that LLMs do not create value is incredibly misleading.
I disagree with the base concept that to justify the current investment, we must arrive at AGI.
Estimates put total AI investement at $1.5T.
Is it a lot? Sure.
But what is going to come out of it.
Faster and likely improved results from medical imaging.
Lower cost and widespread ability to create images and videos, denting the multi-trillion dollar marketing industry.
Self-driving and advanced driver assistance, lives saves, costs reduced.
Improvements in education and low-cost tutoring available to more people.
Let's say these investements just break even with spend. Isn't that better for society?
I know people are going to say "but what about the radiologists"?
We have a shortage of GPs and doctors to care for an aging population. These highly trained doctors can do more in the medical community.
What about the actors/directors/sound engineers, etc in the media industry. This will likely shrink, but we can't ignore their expertise entirely. This industry won't go away. A friend is a voice actor. He isn't being replaced, however, he is getting less work, not because of the final production, but because in the pre-production phases, they don't need his expertise because they can use AI as 'good enough".
The lens I look at this through is my grandfather, who developed film for a living. That job disappeared. Nobody cried out for the film developers when we made the shift to digital. We create more imagery now than ever before, more people are employed in the imaging business than ever before.
As a (former) software engineer myself, do I believe AI will replace engineers?
I think this is true as much as packages replaces engineers. When I started programming, there weren't a ton of open-source packages and there weren't a ton of tools like NPM, Cargo, for managing packages. I saw the transition from "write most of the code yourself" to "lego-brick" style programming. It didn't reduce the amount of programmers, it increased what we could do, and allowed us to do more interesting work than boilerplate.
The contraction of events and the semantic residue, into tokens, symbols, metaphors, sentences, images, segments, parameterized in any way shape/form, is irrelevant next to the semantic load the event contains in a variety of analog states.
No creativity emerges from this, just the mimicry of the tokens, symbols in their reduced, modeled parameters.
That's the problem with LLMs and frontiers, RL. It's all subject to the bottlenecks of math and symbols.
The analog load of semantic (use tasks, actions, variance, scales), the immensity of the nested forms these take between brain, body, screen, canvas, aren't replicable as creation.
It's not information or stimuli we engage with, these are convenient false reductions we're realizing are inconvenient. There's much more the brain, eye detect in reflection. The words and symbols are an aftereffect the computer detects on its way to disregarding the events.
We see this aftereffect as creativity, thinking, etc only as a clever illusion the words, tokens hand us. Nothing more.
I disagree with your view on creativity, and indeed find LLMs to be remarkably creative. Or perhaps, to sidestep the anthropomorphization issue, I find that LLMs can be used as tools to produce creative works, greatly amplifying one's creativity to the point that a "near 0 creativity" subject (whatever that is) can create works that others will view as profoundly creative.
In truth, I don't think there's likely to be a correct definition for what "creativity" is. We're all just moving each other's goal posts and looking at different subject aspects of our experience.
What I do know is that I have talked to dozens of people, and have friends who have talked to hundreds. When shown what LLMs and generative models can do, there's a significant portion of them who label this work as creative. Rather than deem these people ignorant, I would rather consider that maybe if enough people see creativity somewhere, perhaps there is something to it. LLMs creating poems, stories, connecting concepts which you wouldn't otherwise see connected, birthing ideas in images that video which had never existed before.
Of course, I'm aware that by this logic many things fall apart (for example, one might be tempted to believe in god because of it). Nonetheless, on this issue, I am deeply on the creativity camp. And while I am there, the things I get LLMs to create, and people I know do so as well, will continue to induce deep emotion and connection among ourselves.
If that's not creativity to some, well, that's life, full of creative ways to define creativity or eschew it from the world.
LLMs can't innovate form. And form/format innovation is the core of creativity. Neither can RL or frontier. That's creativity, the ability to sense wordless states beyond existing status quo cause effect exchanges. Tokens have no game here. It's that simple, it's how cutting-edges are broken through. It's always trapped behind the aesthetics input, that's just another fatal blow to it's ability to create.
I'm not concerned with "hundreds" of people's opinions. And stories, poems, these are dead/dying forms.
You may be on the creativity camp, stay there. It's generic as creativity. From my POV, someone building a hybrid between game and movies, this tech is dead dull artifactual, like a fossilized version of art.
Yes of course we have definitions of creativity, see Anna Abraham. "creativity is doing something unique and new, using existing networks for things they weren't designed for"
And we have the wordless processes that materialze as affinities and events in the imagination.
I'm very struck by coders who are neither engineers, scientists, nor creatives in the arts, yet have the false intuition and self-delusion that this code is creative. Nonsense.
I'm afraid LLMs have zilch in comprable abilities to both as they exclude words, symbols, tokens etc.
Perhaps in their basic form but you could do a variation on them like
>AlphaEvolve is an evolutionary coding agent for designing advanced algorithms based on large language models such as Gemini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaEvolve
which came up with a novel improvement in matrix multiplication
It's not evolutionary, that's functionality. There are no algorithms in nature.
Evolution is a tinkering process that finds by selection, and functionality is what we post-hoc add to the success.
Anything reduced to symbols is simply functionality within models, to claim it's creative is illusory. Creativity, imagination, etc exist in a realm beyond, and preceding symbols, metaphors, etc. Creativity is 'thinking around symbolic bottlenecks'.
The matrix multiplication breakthrough is still under the glass ceiling symbols provide. A new way to do math isn't the same as visual scale invariant paradoxes. It's not creativity, the word is a metaphor, the closer word is optimization.
As a (rather obsessive, perhaps compulsive) poet, I will indeed remain in my camp :)
(I do get what you're saying. Yet, I am not convinced that processes such as tokenization, and the inherent discretization it entails, are incompatible with creativity. We barely understand ourselves, and even then we know that we do discretize several things in our own processes, so it's really hard for me to just believe that tokenization inherently means no creativity).
Keep in mind there are events, they are real. Words are just symbols we use to make the thoughts or the events cohere as memories, but they're artifacts that have no direct connection to the thoughts. Nor do any tokens, symbols, codes, etc. These are bottlenecks. They have no analog, they lack specificity. Creativity is the ecological exchange between body and ecology to make records that engage paradox wordlessly.
That's what the article's big reveal is about. The events (which can be externalized creatively) are not really creative as words. That's a big problem for the species in general. That's a glass ceiling no one is recognizing or taking notice of. And that sort of gives you an idea how poetry and code are trapped behind it.
> Let's say these investements just break even with spend. Isn't that better for society?
That's a big leap you're making. Because you're first of all assuming that all of what you describe will happen (show me a true self driving car outside of test cases for example).
And on top you're saying that it breaks even with spend. Which is something we simply don't know. My guess is that every vendor is subsidizing to gain market share.
I don't want to debt utility. But when it's accurately priced, will we see where it's useful
It's largely around LLMs, plus some generative image models. That is _where the money is_. Sure, some people are doing some CV stuff that might have some medical applications, but no-one's spending tens of billions of borrowed money on datacenters for _that_.
> or that LLMs do not create value is incredibly misleading.
They're not suggesting that.
Fundamentally, the current economic bubble around 'AI' is based on 'AGI' being achievable, soon. Otherwise, the valuations and amounts of money being spent simply do not make sense. LLMs being somewhat useful will not cut it; the spending implies expectation of dramatically increased capabilities, soon.
>>the spending implies expectation of dramatically increased capabilities, soon.
Even more than that, the spending is a death-race in expectation of:
1) a team reaching runaway superintelligence,
2) that it will be winner-take-all for the first team to get there, and
3) fear that somebody else will get there first.
So, everyone is spending as much as they can beg, borrow, or steal because in their view, there is only first place or being part of the underclass ruled by the other team that gets there first.
This is not about just making useful products/services that can increase productivity for their customers.
The shortage of doctors and medical professionals is artifical though, and unevenly distributed. Technology like AI isnt going to solve for structural issues like health insurance and private equity hospital takeovers distorting the healthcare market.
“ The lens I look at this through is my grandfather, who developed film for a living. That job disappeared. Nobody cried out for the film developers when we made the shift to digital.”
This is how progress has created so much human suffering, by impacting people in a way just sparse enough that you can believably imply “no one cried out for x”.
Yes they did, it impacted thousands if not multiples of that; many in ways that they never recovered from. Some of them probably committed suicide, or ended up homeless, or in some other way had their life destroyed. And that impact reverberated onto their friends, families and communities. And maybe the New York Times even wrote an article about it, but we collectively as a society ignored that suffering.
(I make this remark merely as a gag. I think you pinpoint an issue which has been unresolved for ages and is knee-deep into ethics. One could argue that many of our disagreements about AI and progress (in a broader sense) stem from different positions on ethics, including utilitarianism).
I’m a utilitarian, but a transparent one. I think most people are uncomfortable saying “I acknowledge the pain and suffering it took to make my iPhone, and the tradeoff is worth it.”
Is this more than recursive video? If so, how?
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