It’s a very small set of buyers that are in that price range. Total annual domestic box office revenue is like $10 billion, maybe $50 billion for global TV and film. And that’s revenue, not profit, and a lot of costs are going to marketing, not to filming and casting. That’s a lot of money, but it’s not the scale that OpenAI and Anthropic are at.
Video generation would only make sense at that scale if it was targeting individual consumers, but then it’d need to cost something that consumers are willing to pay - which practically is probably a few hundred per year at most among US consumers, and much less globally, so again it doesn’t solve for the size of the AI companies.
I don’t see a way that video generation becomes a big industry without making generation much much cheaper.
Aren't these two largely separate questions? Viability versus if a given incumbent has interest in a market of a given size. With the combination of (at minimum) streaming platforms, the box office, and advertisements video and audio generation would be viable at a remarkably high price point (as compared to the current token prices for other sorts of things). And as the price comes down presumably the market would grow larger - by how much I have no idea but there are certainly a great deal of currently underserved niche markets.
I think the idea that people are willing to consume an even more slopful Netflix is dubious.
There's has already been a decade of complaints about trash content in excess of available viewing hours.
The thing with media consumption is that there exist a finite number of eyeball-hours available, and it's a zero sum game against other non-media consumers.
You’re unfortunately vastly overrating the world before Ikea. I have the furniture passed down from the 70s and 80s and it’s all falling apart and made from plywood.
You have to go back to the 30s and earlier before you get furniture that will stand up like that, and making that furniture new today would cost more than almost anyone could afford.
And the only 30's - 60's furniture that survives will be mostly solid cabinets; they are neither in style (if you care) anymore, but more importantly they're no longer practical, as they were built for different lifestyles and - habits. Writing desks are cute in theory but nobody sits down to write letters anymore.
You are correct, I used Ikea as a generic name for cheap plywood stuff. But there was still strong furniture being built in that era, it didn't all stop in the 1930s, if anything, because a portion of the population even in the global north had not converted to a "modern" post-WWII lifestyle as we see in the movies.
Engineers are expensive, especially good system engineers who are trained in your code base. Very possible that this just hadn't gotten to the top of the priority list.
I don't understand why you need training on your code base to design a cache format for read only vs rw workloads, but anyway yours is a comment about neglect, not the "evil" that would happen if you did that design
I see your point but disagree. Engineering is about constraints. Time, materials, labor, scope.
The “evil” of premature optimization is that it’s a misapplication of priority. If I have an acute medical problem that needs attention, it’s not the right time to talk about chloresterol and statins, get my broken leg set.
There’s always a tension between engineering management who needs to deliver a solution to the business and engineers who want to deliver a beautiful object.
> I don't understand why you need training on your code base to design a cache format
Because anyone willing to come in just to design your cache format is going to expect payment that is many multiples more than the engineers you already cannot afford? Long-term employees cost less, which brings them closer to being affordable, but you have to be able to keep them busy for long periods of time to realize that reduction in cost. A engineer who doesn't understand your codebase isn't going to be useful for very long.
At the gas stations near me, at the start of 2025, I could get a gallon of gas for around $1.85. The stations near me are now up to around $4.30, a 250% increase. I don't know if I'd quite call it a crisis, but certainly it's a major shock.
It's worth noting that Polymarket (and all other prediction markets using money) has some fundamental problems that cause inaccuracy. Most notably here, the elections are still several months out, so you're asking people to put up 97 cents to get a dollar back in three months. But for that time frame I could also put 97 cents in treasuries and get 98 cents back, so the market won't be accurate within 1% of reality, and treasuries are considered a good deal safer than Polymarket.
In addition, there can be issues related to fees, Kelly betting (if the correct bet is 98%, don't want to bet all the way to 98% or you have no returns and you definitely don't want to put all of your wallet in on it in case it goes against you), and so on.
So this isn't a "3% chance of the elections happening" it's "3%, plus or minus the rate of return over three months, plus or minus all the other related issues". I don't know if that gets you down to zero percent, but it definitely gets you closer.
(Yes Polymarket has tried to do some things to resolve these issue, no they don't work very well.)
Plus the percent chance that Polymarket doesn't accurately resolve the market. It'll never hit 100% odds because there's value in buying the the 1,000,000 to 1 odds and maybe turning $1 into $1,000,000 from an administrative issue on the market.
You can sell your bet at any time, though. So if you put $100 on NO while it's at 3¢ and then sell them next week at 4¢, you're getting $133 back. You're not necessarily betting on the outcome, but on the sentiment over time.
That's true, but then the people you're selling to have to want to buy the shares. And if you're buying YES at 97%, you're not going to be able to sell the YES shares to anyone at much higher - because eventually someone has to hold it to the end.
It's true that this isn't as true for NO, because a small change can give a huge return, but that's asymmetrical. So there's incentive for traders to buy NO, hoping that it moves down, but not an incentive for traders to buy YES, since it doesn't have any room to go up.
In many areas, this is left up to the parents - minors can't buy alcohol at stores, but parents are legally allowed to give alcohol to their children to drink.
I think the distinction the comment is drawing is about the legality of it not the practical feasibility .
It would be illegal under the currently proposed
/implemented laws and also open up social media to liability, which wouldn’t be true for other products like Alcohol or fire arms that require minimum age to buy but not give to children
Video generation would only make sense at that scale if it was targeting individual consumers, but then it’d need to cost something that consumers are willing to pay - which practically is probably a few hundred per year at most among US consumers, and much less globally, so again it doesn’t solve for the size of the AI companies.
I don’t see a way that video generation becomes a big industry without making generation much much cheaper.
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