On Thu, May 2, 2024 at 5:48 PM Ulrich Speidel via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

Which brings me back to the question of how important bandwidth is. The answer is: probably more important in the future. We're currently relying mostly on CDNs for video delivery, but I can't fail but notice the progress that's being made by AI-based video generation. Four or five years ago, Gen-AI could barely compose a credible image. A couple of years ago, it could do video sequences of a few seconds. Now we're up to videos in the minutes.

If that development is sustained, you'll be able to tell your personal electronic assistant / spy to dream up a personalised movie, say an operatic sci-fi Western with car chases on the Titanic floating in space, and it'll have it generated in no time starring the actors you like. ETA: Around 2030 maybe?

But these things will be (a) data-heavy and (b) aren't well suited for CDN delivery because you may be the only one to every see a particular movie, so you'll either need to move the movie generation to the edge, or you need to build bigger pipes across the world. I'm not sure how feasible either option is.

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Why shouldn’t the advances in GPU, CPU and storage substitute for bandwidth? Given how compact symbol libraries are today, why shouldn’t one be able to generate this high quality, customized movie entirely locally, streaming characters, backgrounds, and kinematics from a large library? Preloading their library is how image generation, transcription, etc. works today. This surely must be less total real-time bandwidth than the alternative, which pre-renders elsewhere. With each target customized, there will be a little incentive to pre-render elsewhere.

Offset against this potential bandwidth savings — clearly the next step in, say, audiobook generation — is that eventually we will want full stereoscopic 360 environments a la Apple headsets. Plausibly this is in the 16k range at a minimum. The Vegas Sphere is approximately this resolution.

My $.02

Jeremy Austin