Malick is also unique in that while I love his work, I understand anyone who can't get into them and finds them dull or pretentious. It's as if some people are tuned to his frequency and others just receive white noise.
When you're tuned to it, it's a timeless meditative, spiritual experience. Our wedding bands carry the words of the Tree of Life's 'Mrs. O'Brien': 'Unless you love, your life will flash by'.
I hope he can finish 'The Way of the Wind' in times for Cannes this year.
Not many directors able to produce fully avant-garde work with those budgets and that mainstream distribution. Closest I can think of is Harmony Korine around his commercial peak but that lasted a few years not decades.
For me this is a seminal article, which almost eight years later still raises eloquently the most critical barriers to practical adoption. I read it again after reading the formal verification thread.
I swear by Mindmapping Applications (e.g. Xmind, Mindmanager) - one file every month (extractable with a python library for LLM evaluation).
One top-level branch is a prioritized Inbox with a Pending branch at the top (Item half-completed, but awaits external action, e.g. an order has to arrive).
One top-level branch with Done, which is a folder with a branch for each week, then day, where I dump completed items into
One top-level branch for ongoing subscriptions with alerts
Collapsed top-level branches for Hobbies and Family Ideas and things-to-do
With xmind, you can easily tag the task progress of each item.
Took me 8 years, including a really beautiful Android ToDo Concept which I build and ended up abandoning :D
Why do people keep on saying that corporations will pay these price-tags?
Most corporations really keep a very tight lid on their software license costs. A $250 license will be only provided for individuals with very high justification barriers and the resulting envy effects will be a horror for HR.
I think it will be rather individuals who will be paying out of their pocket and boosting their internal results.
And outside of those areas in California where apples cost $5 in the supermarket I don't see many individuals capable of paying these rates.
This isn't really out of line with many other SaaS licenses that companies pay for.
This also includes things like video and image generation, where certain departments might previously have been paying thousands of dollars for images or custom video. I can think of dozens of instances where a single Veo2/3 video clip would have been more than good enough to replace something we had to pay a lot of money and waste of a lot of time acquiring previously.
You might be comparing this to one-off developer tool purchases, which come out of different budgets. This is something that might come out of the Marketing Team's budget, where $250/month is peanuts relative to all of the services they were previously outsourcing.
I think people are also missing the $20/month plan right next to it. That's where most people will end up. The $250/month plan is only for people who are bumping into usage limits constantly or who need access to something very specific to do their job.
We just signed up to spend $60+/month for every dev to have access to Copilot because the ROI is there. If $250/month save several hours per month for a person, it makes financial sense
$60/month pays off if it saves even an hour of developer time over a month.
It's really not hard to save several hours of time over a month using AI tools. Even the Copilot autocomplete saves me several seconds here and there multiple times per hour.
Typically you have to confirm additions and cancellation is just a press of ESC key. Ctrl+z is available too.
Even when the code is not 100% correct, it's often faster to select it and make the small.fix myself than to type all of it out myself. It's surprisingly good about keeping your patterns for naming and using recent edits as context for what you are likely to do next around your cursor position, even across files.
And why AI hype train didn't work on gaming industry? why it didn't save hundreds of hours from game devs times to get latest GTA anytime sooner?
I'm not sure it's correct that we need to measure the benefits of AI depending on the lines of codes that we wrote but on how much we ship more quality features faster.
When Docker pulled their subscription shenanigans, the global auto parts manufacturer I work for wasn't delighted when they saw $5 (or was it 7?)/month/user, but were ready to suck it up for a few hundred devs.
They noped right out when it turned out to be more like $20/month/user, not payable by purchase order, and instead spent a developer month cobbling together our own substitute involving Windows Subsystem for Linux, because it would pay off within two months.
The big problem for companies is that every SaaS vendor they use wants to upsell AI add-on licensing upgrades. Companies won’t buy the AI option for every app they’re licensing today. Something will have to give.
Nobody outside of the major players (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Salesforce) has enough product suite eyeball time to justify a first-party subscription.
Most companies didn't target it in their first AI release because there was revenue laying on the ground. But the market will rapidly pressure them to support BYOLLM in their next major feature build.
They're still going to try to charge an add-on price on top of BYOLLM... but that margin is going to compress substantially.
Which means we're probably t minus 1 year from everyone outside the above mentioned players being courted and cut revenue-sharing deals in exchange for making one LLM provider their "preferred" solution with easier BYOLLM. (E.g. Microsoft pays SaaS Vendor X behind the scenes to drive BYOLLM traffic their way)
I foresee a slightly different outcome: If companies can genuinely enhance worker productivity with LLMs (for many roles, this will be true), then they can expand their business without hiring more people. Instead of firing, they will slow the rate of hiring. Finally, the 250 USD/month license isn't that much of a cost burden if you start with the most senior people, then slowly extend the privilege to lower and lower levels, carefully deciding if the role will be positively impacted by access to a high quality LLM. (This is similar to how Wall Street trading floors decide who gets access to expensive market data via Reuters or Bloomberg terminal.)
For non-technical office jobs, LLMs will act like a good summer intern, and help to suppress new graduate hiring. Stuff like HR, legal, compliance, executive assistants, sales, marketing/PR, and accounting will all greatly benefit from LLMs. Programming will take much longer because it requires incredibly precise outputs.
One low hanging fruit for programming and LLMs: What if Microsoft creates a plug-in to the VBA editor in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.) that can help to write VBA code? For more than 25 years, I have watched non-technical people use VBA, and I have generally been impressed with the results. Sure, their code looks like shit and everything has hard-coded limits, but it helps them do their work faster. It is a small miracle what people can teach themselves with (1) a few chapters of a introductory VBA book, (2) some blog posts / Google searches, and (3) macro recording. If you added (4) LLM, then it would greatly boost the productivity of Microsoft Office power users.
I don’t see any benefit to removing humans in order to achieve the exact same level of efficiency… wouldn’t that just straight-up guarantee a worse product unless your employees were absolutely all horrendous to begin with?
An indie film with poor production values, even bad acting can grip you, make you laugh and make you cry. The consistency of quality is key - even if it is poor. The directing is the red thread throughout the scenes. Anything with different quality levels interrupts your flow and breaks your experience.
The problem with AI video content at this stage is that the clips are very good 'in themselves', just as LLM results are, but putting them together to let you engage beyond an individual clip will not be possible for a long time.
It will work where the red thread is in the audio (e.g. a title sequence) and you put some clips together to support the thread. But Hollywood has nothing to fear at this stage. In addition, remember that visual artists are control freaks of the purest kind. Film is still used because of the grain, not despite it. 24p prevails.
You might want to look up NeuralViz on YouTube. 180k subscribers. They've been building out an entire cinematic universe using AI video tools. And it's by far the funniest show I've watched in years. So the claim that "let you engage beyond an individual clip will not be possible for a long time" isn't true. People are already doing it.
I hadn't seen these before, but they're working because of the limitations of the technology.
The format of the shows are mostly clip-based - man on the street, news hour, etc - and obviously the jokes are all written by someone with a good sense of humour.
Not to discount that this is, as you say, an example of someone using AI to successfully create characters and stories that resonate with people. it's just still very much because of a creative human's talent and good taste that it's working.
Ok, I went from being pleasantly surprised to breakout laughter at that point.
But I also think this points out a big problem: high-quality stuff is flying under the radar simply because of how much stuff is out there. I've noticed that when faced with a lot of choice, rather than exploring it, people fall back into popular stuff that they're familiar with in a really sad way. Like a lot of door dash orders will be for McDonalds, or people will go back to watching popular series like Friends, or how Disney keeps remaking movies that people still go to see.
Since the first GenAI started popping up, many people have glossed over the fact that they are just tools. All the anger from artists and keyboard warriors completely ignored the fact that you still need skill and time to make something good with these tools.
Artists aren't going to be replaced by AI tools being used by me on my iPhone, those artists were already replaced by bulk art from IKEA et al. Artists who reject new tools for being new will be replace by artists who don't. Just like many painters were replaced by photographers.
The Dor Brothers on YouTube have also been making some very funny, stylized music videos with AI. They've managed to use the limitations to their advantage
You don't need to make an entire movie out of this. One or two scenes that are difficult or impossible to film on a certain budget is enough to lift the production value of a movie. One can use this as CGI replacement, for example to produce a couple seconds scene of an ancient city and stretch that out with fake panning.
You can also use it as a communication tool such as making a "live" storyboard to prep location, blocking, maybe even as notes for actors.
Yeah, I did an amateur short once as part of a college assignment and doing the storyboard was the most difficult part for me as I'm not a good drawer at all. Getting the idea for a certain shot from my head to the paper was a struggle.
Being able to express visual ideas with words is one of the most powerful things of this AI craze. Text/code is whatever.
There’s already more good content than anyone can watch. It’s impossible to disentangle strength of the art from strength of distribution. Google, the world’s biggest distributor of culture, is focusing on this problem they do not need to solve, instead of the one everyone in art actually suffers from, because: they’re bad at this. It’s that simple.
AI video may be to Hollywood as photography was to painting. Photography wasn't "painting, but better" - it was a different thing. AI-native video may not resemble typical Hollywood 3-act structure. But if it takes enough eyeballs away from Hollywood then Hollywood will die all the same.
I think you're contradicting your own argument. Painting didn't die from photography.
Photography increased the abstract and more creative aspects of painting and created a new style because photography removed much of the need to capture realism. Though, I am still entranced by realist painting style myself, it is serving different purpose than capturing a moment.
I'm not an expert so I may be wrong about all this. But my impression is that Pictorialist photography aped painting for 50 years. Photography only came into its own as a "photography native" art form with Stieglitz and people like that around ~1905. By that time, non-representational painting styles like Cubism had already sucked the remaining juice out of painting, with Duchamp's 1917 urinal perhaps deserving credit for the coup de grace. Today painting is a shadow of what it once was - and public interest and auction prices reflect that. Museums occasionally have abstract painting exhibits but they're poorly attended because the public dislikes them. Ask a person on the street what their favorite painting movements are and likely every name will be more than 100 years old, possibly hundreds of years old. Compare auction prices between pre-1917 paintings and post-1917 paintings. Besides a few middlebrow pop artists like Dali or Warhol, meme painters like Pollock, or trendy political painters like Basquiat or Johns, the older paintings will be orders of magnitude more in demand. Painting used to move the conversation forward, now nobody cares.
Well if you want to really be pedantic, they said every name, not average answer, so if most people reply with a blank state, that is still not in the set of every name, because they're not names. So the ones who actually do reply with a name are, as I agree with them, likely to be older than 100 years.
I watched Tree of Life in the cinema. I was spellbound. It spoke directly to me, no mental processing of a story, I was tuned to this film. I didn't feel its time.
As the film ended a girl behind me said to her friends 'this was the biggest piece of shit I have ever seen'. I understood her and it was a perfectly fine opinion. She didn't 'get it', but it didn't have to do with taste or intelligence or anything like this. She was just not able to receive it - as if it was a signal sent she could not process.
Our wedding rings have these words from the film engraved: 'unless you love, your life will flash by'. We married late - our kids were already almost at school. The love in the words is about the love of your family, just like in the film.
And why the Thin Red Line is perfect - just view the "Swing Scene" as a work of religious art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s40YpEsVkxk
The inner monologue of Ben Chaplin's private Bell about what the role of love is when you encounter war, asking 'Who lit this flame in us' is a visual prayer.
I know what you mean, I had the same effect from the David Lynch Dune movie. I went in blind, had no idea what I was about to see other than that it was scifi.
Put it on and didn't even make it to a chair before I was spellbound. I stood for the whole movie, feeling as if ages had passed while I was rooted to the ground like a mountain watching seasons pass in stop motion.
I've watched it maybe 6 times since, nothing has quite recaptured that perfect first watch.
I think I loved everything about The Tree of Life except for the scenes with Sean Penn. Whatever mysterious antipathy the girl behind you in the cinema felt for the movie, I felt for Sean Penn. The kind and probably accurate interpretation is that actors are at the mercy of their directors and editors in movies like this, but his scenes don't feel like they're part of the same movie.
The Tree of Life was one of the only films I’ve ever considered walking out of, I hated every moment of it. I’m delighted to hear you were spellbound by it.
I actually walked out of it. I was not alone, several others did before me.
I saw it without knowing what it was about, it was a summer evening, I was alone and just decided to see a movie as I passed the theatre.
When I came home and learned it was the same director as the Thin Red Line, I was blown away. Same director of both the best and the worst movie I have seen.
That’s totally valid. I think the film either resonates deeply or not at all, and both responses are completely legitimate. I can absolutely see how it could feel pretentious drivel to some. I assume for me it directly evokes emotions of my childhood (catholic upbringing by a loving mother).
I also really appreciate you being happy for me. That's true empathy.
It's unfortunate that the thread was flagged, I did not want to give the impression of trying to 'start a flamewar'.
I am a real transatlanticist - I was on the green card path (5 yrs with H1Bs), but returned to Europe for family reasons.
I don't want this split - I want to know, if people see it as an issue and I want to know the possible consequences and workarounds and how we can work together.
It's totally different. There was negative public sentiment, but the diplomatic relations still were stable and good. Germany wanted to be convinced, but could not be. Tony Blair went with Bush.
This time it is diplomats that are raising the flags. It actually has not yet arrived in the public sphere as drastically as it has in the policy side.
