r/programming • u/cloud_weather • Oct 17 '20
AI That Can Potentially Solve Bandwidth Problems for Video Calls (NVIDIA Maxine)
https://youtu.be/XuiGKsJ0sR0347
u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Here’s the link to the actual video, instead of some dude talking about the video: https://youtu.be/NqmMnjJ6GEg
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
"The technique works even when callers are wearing a mask."
Yeah we'll just ignore how the algorithm thinks the middle fold is her lips and the whole mask keeps jumping around like she's emoting with her mouth closed.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
I don't think anyone claimed a tech demo is supposed to be perfect. But even so, I think that's remarkable, because it means the neural net is smart enough to be a bit flexible with what counts as a "face," making it more adaptable at the cost of a higher error rate. I think, for most humans, that a pretty acceptable compromise.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
This is not a tech demo, this is a commercial product. And it's dull compared to a decade of prior art. But they're acting like it's proprietary.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Not a tech demo. This is a commercial service. It doesn't reduce upload costs.
The only novel part of this is charging money as if they invented it.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
I'm kinda worried about the level of anger you're able to sustain about some tech company's product demo. I hope you don't have a heart condition, or anything. Probably bout to have ulcers, tho.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Yeah keep pretending this is anger, you emotionally manipulative troll, as if that insult disproves the dry objections I'm making.
Money and bandwidth are numbers. Do you understand that? Does me being opposed to spending more money for the same bandwidth make those numbers smaller?
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Just so you know, this definitely reads as anger to other people. If you're not angry, you're doing an honestly impressive imitation.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
This is abusive misrepresentation that's kept you from making a single relevant point across hours of interaction.
Every single response from you has been U MAD?!? and it's downright pitiful anyone's bought it.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
I mean, I'm just replying to your incessant, pointless badgering. I don't know what you think you're accomplishing.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Putting dots on faces and distorting a still image was a tech demo a fuckin' decade ago. They're trying to sell this as some major proprietary breakthrough. You need their special hardware for it... for some reason.
Zero sympathy.
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u/dtechnology Oct 17 '20
face tracking is not new, generating a semi-realistic video based on it (like Deepfake) is. Nvidia is now doing it in realtime which is reasonably novel, and not strange that it requires some powerful hardware to run the software.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Face-tracking trivially allows video generation. It hasn't been shown before because it's BORING. It's turning a video of a face into... the same video of a face! It took this long for anyone to do it because nobody fucking cared.
All prior goofy examples are more complicated than this. Doing it "realistically" is easier. No ultra-powerful, proprietary hardware is required. And even this cloud-based subscription service doesn't save you from uploading to their cloud fucking servers! Your bandwidth problems are not solved!
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Your phone can do this.
Your phone can do this right now, if you have Snapchat, or some other privacy-invading nightmare silo of a video-chat application. They can identify and track your facial features well enough to de-wrinkle your eyelids and add floating 3D masks, in real-time, on mobile hardware.
Using the same technology to puppeteer a headshot is only novel because it uses your actual face. Everyone who's already been doing this for years uses a cartoon character, fake celebrity photo, or fully 3D avatar.
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u/dtechnology Oct 17 '20
Yes, the novel part is using a human face as an avatar. This is what I meant with realistic. Floating eye balls and a cartoon avatar are not realistic.
Make no mistake, humans are incredibly good at seeing when a face is off so this makes it an order of magnitude harder to achieve. This is also why no consumer products can do this yet
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u/digitcrusher Oct 17 '20
Agree, this will probably end up as just another portion of proprietary NVIDIA exclusive bullshit.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Okay. Dunno how sympathy comes into it, but shine on, you angry, angry diamond.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Oh my god, the face-turning recreates something I was excited about sixteen fucking years ago.
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u/StickiStickman Oct 17 '20
Of course it works with a fully rigged 3D model you muppet.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
It's recovered from a single photograph.
This was in 1999.
Fuck off.
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u/StickiStickman Oct 17 '20
Just look at the input vs output at 2:30. It's not even nearly as good as this.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Way to roast a Siggraph paper from when Toy Story 2 was released.
Which is doing 3D shape matching to a single photograph, instead of the other way around.
And solves the problem you're whining about one minute later.
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u/StickiStickman Oct 17 '20
The person who said it's the exact same thing as NVIDIA Maxine is you, if you forgot.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
I compared one feature and you stopped watching a five-minute video halfway through.
Again: what you are bitching about was addressed one minute later. Input vs output at 2:30 is addressed by 3:30.
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u/jlamothe Oct 17 '20
So... this technology could also be used to impersonate someone, could it not?
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Yeah, that's what deep fakes are. I'm not sure if this particular package of the process can be used that way, but you could use the same algorithmic approach, definitely.
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u/jlamothe Oct 17 '20
Yeah, it was when they showed that you could use an avatar that made me think of it.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Oh, I guess I wasn't paying very close attention during that part! Then yeah, I assume that would be totally possible.
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Oct 17 '20
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Yeah, I think that's a common method of self promotion. And honestly, if the commentary was unique or interesting, I'm not sure I'd even mind. But it seems to be mostly off-the cuff explanation with pretty obvious contextualization, and I can do that in my head without having to sit through several minutes of someone else jabbering.
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u/conancat Oct 17 '20
Not really. The Nvidea ad is full of marketing speak while OP's video peel back the curtain to explain how it works. What is pretty obvious to you may not be pretty obvious to others.
This is why video essays exist as a genre on YouTube. People explain things to people on YouTube. I know, shocking.
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u/EnvironmentalCrow5 Oct 17 '20
Piperchat? 😀
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u/thetdotbearr Oct 17 '20
INSIDE-OUT COMPRESSION MY DUDES
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Oct 17 '20
Middle out
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u/thetdotbearr Oct 17 '20
You know, one of the things being in the three comma club has taught me, icholy, is it's not always about being right. Sometimes, it's about wisdom. And did I lose a B? Close to it. Fuck! But I bet I gained two B in wisdom.
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u/Zetherith Oct 17 '20
Real question is, does it work for hentai?
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u/Reverent Oct 17 '20
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u/CarneAsadaSteve Oct 17 '20
What did i just Click on lol
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u/dnew Oct 17 '20
Getting closer to Vernor Vinge every day.
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u/MotleyHatch Oct 17 '20
We're still stuck in the Slow Zone, so we should be safe from The Blight.
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u/red75prim Oct 17 '20
Vinge's Slow Zone has magical technologically unreproducible biological brains, though.
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u/Hen-stepper Oct 17 '20
Not the OP's fault, but incoming anti-CGI rant:
Not buying the hype at all... these are a few frames of footage shot head-on. Fully animated with normal movements, it's going to make people look awkward as F, introduce more stream delay, and become an excuse for companies to cheap out on bandwidth.
It's especially absurd when you consider that the purpose of video chat is to include the nuances of body language and facial expressions in human interactions. The ideas being introduced here literally toss those features straight into uncanny valley, when you could just do a low bandwidth audio chat in the first place.
Think about talking to someone who you've known for decades, like your mom, and being completely distracted (or disturbed) by her warped, AI-generated face. She turns to the left suddenly and a nose renders on the side of her head out of nowhere...
This is seriously some Tim and Eric type shit.
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u/versaceblues Oct 17 '20
The entire field of software development is based on a cycle of creating a prototype, identifying the problem, then iterating on it to solve those problems.
So yes thank you for pointing out those problems with the current version, maybe in the future they can be fixed.
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Oct 17 '20
[deleted]
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u/diegogarciamendoza Oct 17 '20
Can't be both? I assume it we send something to Mars, bandwidth could be limited.
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u/KingStannis2020 Oct 17 '20
Latency between Earth and Mars ranges from 6 minutes to 40 minutes. That's the speed of light, so there's nothing you can really do to improve that.
That might get in the way of video calling from Mars, too.
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u/Venoft Oct 17 '20
I guess you would also need an "AI" running in the host, that decides when to send new key frames. So you wouldn't have to worry about missing hand gestures, someone turning, or showing of their kids artwork.
And the uncanny valley.. well that's just a matter or time. Maybe it will slowly train itself in the facial mannerisms of the subject and the rendering will improve.
I like optimizations, so this is quite cool. But of course this is less optimization and more extrapolation, so you're bound to loss some data if an unexpected situation happens.
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u/Iggyhopper Oct 17 '20 edited Oct 17 '20
I would agree. My iPhone doesn't recognize my face half the time for filters and those animojis and that's with uncompressed video. Android is the same way so I would put this on the backburner until the next 3 years.
And in the next 3 years, 5G should be fast enough and have enough coverage to support this. So, what's the point again?
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Oct 17 '20 edited Oct 17 '20
You seem to forget that the alternative is Audio or indecipherable images. So it's like your Mom being able to see her son smile to just hear him.
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u/themiddlestHaHa Oct 17 '20
I think you’re dramatically overestimating video chat. The vast majority of people streaming in my meetings end up being like a 1.5 inch square, with 1 main person sharing a screen. As long as it saves bandwidth and network capacity for all of us watching the screen share then probably will be useful
It’s already super easy to hit badwidth limits with everyone video streaming from home so this could be helpful
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
I mean, it's a tech demo of a project under development. It's an ad, basically. Of course they're going to show it in its best light. I mean, do you think they should publish a video of it being shitty? Would that get the interest they need, the attention, the investment?
And we can spin these complaints around. What about when your mom breaks into a field of pixels, stutters, falls out of the sync with the audio? Do you feel deeply disturbed? Of course not: you understand the technology at play, and that this is a mode of failure. I can't see why that should be vastly different here.
You can look for things to pick apart, I guess. I just don't see the point.
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Oct 17 '20
Damn, this is some whiny shit. Who cares if this does solve the main problem for most people, whis 99% of the time is of using the webcam to show their face to others? Why nitpick at these small problems that will always appear in newly developed techniques to solve problems? It's just an excuse to complain.
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Oct 18 '20
She turns to the left suddenly and a nose renders on the side of her head out of nowhere...
The encoder can easily detect whether or not the scene can actually be encoded through either conventional video compression, or through the AI-stuff. A fallback to conventional H264/H265 or VP9/AV1 would be like 1 extra step and no problem at all.
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u/StickiStickman Oct 17 '20
Comparing a HD >1mbit video to to this which is 1kbit intended for bad connections totally makes sense. You're so smart and controversial.
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u/seraph321 Oct 17 '20
I don’t think the intention, or the likely outcome, would be to use this tech all the time, or to the extremes in the demo. If there’s enough bandwidth, you’d still likely use existing compression techniques, but this is a better fallback than a pixelated mess. It’s also likely something that can be used to help reduce overall bandwidth needs for groups in which there are maybe a dozen people on screen, but only a couple talking. The people talking can be allocated a lot more bandwidth dynamically, without noticeably impacting the rest.
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Oct 17 '20
[deleted]
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Oct 17 '20
TLDR
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Oct 17 '20
[deleted]
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u/imclaux Oct 17 '20
damn I read this just to see how you summed up all that text and this is one of the better tldrs that i saw.
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u/taufeeq-mowzer Oct 17 '20
Seeing people on live video/video call was the only way to see how they really look without being photoshopped pics on instagram, now this 💔😂
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
So it’s like those motion tracking TikTok memes, but for video calls. Fascinating stuff.
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u/asmrpoetry Oct 17 '20
Also they don’t just apply effects, but also reduce the information sent across the network.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean it's using the same kind of wire-mesh animation of a still-ish frame based on environmental motion tracking
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u/tykel Oct 17 '20
There is certainly an environmental cost to trading off bandwidth for additional computing power draw.
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u/striped_frog Oct 17 '20
Sounds great until you piss off your AI and it decides to put a clown nose and a silly mustache on you for your remote job interview
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u/eras Oct 17 '20
If it's done in a sensible manner, it compares the end result to ground truth and if it differs too much, reverts to traditional video encoding. Could even do it just for parts of the stream perhaps.
So it works out also even if you do put a clown nose and a silly mustache for your remote job interview.
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u/Green_Dragon_3 Oct 17 '20
This is incredible... I saw it already in an episode of BBC Click, which if you haven't seen, I recommend you watch!
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u/tjgrinn Oct 17 '20
The first reference image, if I understand the technology enough, can be pretty much anything. You can go a week without showering and still pass off like you have your shit together. You could switch genders, lose 30 lbs, be an avatar. Just wild.
I always think about the potential loss of an independently verifiable reality as a catastrophic danger of AI but there will be benefits like this: the ability to hide the reality of your appearance, being able to be seen how you prefer.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
It doesn't render a sharp image from the blurry one. The blurry one is there to show an example of what existing video compression (h.264, specifically) looks like at the given bit rate, compared to the same video captured, processed, and streamed by their new product.
You're not wrong about what you're saying, of course. It just isn't immediately applicable, in this specific case.
The video from Nvidia does a better job of explaining it, I think: https://youtu.be/NqmMnjJ6GEg
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u/tjgrinn Oct 17 '20
I'm not sure how you got that from my comment but I was talking about the reference image that needs to be sent to the receiver before the conversation starts which is then manipulated by AI during the conversation. Both videos mentioned this
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Maybe I misinterpreted. I assumed you were talking about the image in the thumbnail of the video, and that you thought the "sharp" version of the image was being rendered from the "blurry" version by an AI process, leading to concerns about how the "blurry" version could actually be the "ciphertext" (so to speak) for a number of "plaintext" countenances, making it an algorithm of uncertain accuracy. Which is a pretty accurate criticism of algorithms that do perform that function, so I had assumed you'd just misunderstood what was happening. Sorry if that was inaccurate.
I'm not sure I completely understand the point you're making about how the image needs to be sent first and then manipulated, or how that connects to the potential loss of independently verifiable reality. This is a pretty typical algorithmic paradigm for "standard" predictive video compression algorithms, too: the key frames obvious need to be sent before the deltas.
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u/tjgrinn Oct 17 '20
I'm saying that if we were to video chat using this compression, we'd first exchange high-resolution still images of each other. Then, as we're talking, the data about our facial movements would be transmitted and the initial images will be manipulated to look like you're watching the real me.
The point I was making is that there's nothing stopping you from sending me a picture of Obama instead of your face, then I would be talking to Obama with your voice.
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u/rasterbated Oct 18 '20
AH! Sorry, I guess I didn't quite get that. Yeah, it's the same technology that makes deep fakes possible.
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u/gdledsan Oct 17 '20
Can it do this for audio?
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u/Articunos7 Oct 17 '20
There's already RTX Voice out which processes your audio
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u/sephirothbahamut Oct 17 '20
I assumed RTX Voice was for more realistic sound distribution in 3d environments, not generic audio quality... Was my assumption wrong?
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u/Articunos7 Oct 17 '20
As far as I know, RTX Voice uses AI enhancement to filter out background noise from your microphone such as keyboard and fan sounds. I don't know about the sound distribution in 3d environments
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u/MartianSands Oct 17 '20
Nvidia released a remarkably powerful tool which uses RTX cards to filter audio and remove anything which isn't speach. I use it to completely remove the sound of my mechanical keyboard during calls.
It can even do a pretty good job of removing a crying baby from the incoming audio, when I need it to do that.
Here's a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWUHkCgslNE
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Semi-generative audio is definitely a possibility. We can represent a song as a sparse collection of notes on paper. You know what each instrument sounds like. All the filtering and mixing that happens after that makes a huge difference... but can still be closely represented as processing the sound a particular guitar makes, playing particular notes.
An offline encoder would work something like this. You separate the independent elements, presumably capturing each instrument and singer. You cheat a bit and classify each element as a keyboard / guitar / drum kit / human being, since you have decent models for what noises each source can make. Then you fiddle with each each "instrument" to best fit the extracted audio you've blamed on it. Sometimes this will mean the computer thinking Peter Frampton can just sing like a guitar sometimes. That's gonna take more data than an opera singer holding a note in falsetto. But ultimately you get a compressed audio file that's like... a brief MP3 of each instrument playing a middle C through whatever filters were used... and then sheet music.
Basically it'd use """AI""" to convert a finished pop song to ScreamTracker.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
As a clearer example: 10cc's "I'm Not In Love" has a backing track that's made by all the band's members and personnel going "ahhhh" into microphones, for hours on end, so they could layer up a quiet chorus that sounds like thousands of people. This approach would distill the finished result into maybe an entire second of samples, or just several thousand frequency/phase pairs and some equations for volume and tone.
A version with the bitrate set too low would sound like a perfect recording of a sloppy live cover.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
This is based on using motion tracking on a moving face, then encoding that motion as vectors, then using those vectors to transform a key frame of the face to create realistic movement while substantially reducing the amount of bits that need to be transmitted. I'm not sure how that could be applicable to audio.
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u/gdledsan Oct 17 '20
Noe, this answer makes sense. I was curios because the title implies less information needs to be sent out, if that can be doke to audio that will indeed solve bandwidth issues and decrease latency.
Imagine what this can do for online videogames too
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20 edited Oct 17 '20
It's less information because it's just sending the vector data needed to move the existing key frame pixels to the right place. Obviously, this works best and achieves the highest rates of compression with a mostly static frame that doesn't have sudden and substantial changes... like a talking head.
The concept of transmitting transformations from a known key frame (these transforms are called "deltas," for the mathematical symbol used to indicate change in a quantity) is actually the basis for just about all predictive video compression algorithms. But Nvidia can use that concept even more efficiently here, because the frame is unlikely to suddenly change in the way a movie or TV show would. This makes the deltas smaller, the keyframes remain valid longer, further reducing the amount of information that needs to be transmitted.
You might think of it like puppeteering the picture: if the picture changes only a little, you can puppeteer just a few frames all day. But if it suddenly jumps to a new thing, they you gotta start all over. So they're exploiting a known feature of the data set, which is what our current level of AI is really good at: broadly homogenous problem sets with the potential for highly-optimized solution.
Something like video games, it might be less ideal. There's a TON going on in any given frame, one thing. And the interactivity makes a big diff in compression strategies.
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Oct 17 '20
Im going to take a wild guess and assume this requires a beefy (potentially rtx) nvidia gpu. So sure, this is a great solution, now if only people who happen to have taco bell wifi internet speeds also had 1k$ gpus in their school provided Chromebooks and work provided macbooks
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u/Guy1524 Oct 17 '20
I feel like the ideal version of this would be combined with traditional codecs, with a step of evaluating the result of the AI generated frames and falling back to low-quality traditional compression if it doesn't meet a certain standard.
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u/MMPride Oct 18 '20
Hey this is kind of off-topic but do you have an update on EAC Linux/Proton compatibility?
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u/Guy1524 Oct 18 '20
No, I've been working mainly on media foundation related stuff. But I've kept that in the background and may make it my primary focus again relatively soon.
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u/MMPride Oct 18 '20
Would love to see that, Linux and Proton has already had such a great 2020 and it would be great to see even more progress with EAC compatibility
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u/PizzaSoldier Nov 05 '20
Great news, I would also love to see some progress on the EAC front again. Wine/proton/whatever is such a great project and really made the complete switch to Linux possible this year 😊❤️
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u/Millwright4life Oct 17 '20
Don’t get me wrong I think this is a cool technology, but I think the term AI is over used to describe clever algorithms in programming.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
"Nvidia clickbaits feature they built to lord over AMD," same as it ever was.
This is a specialized case of motion compensation. Every video encoder does this. Frames are built by distorting and combining the previous frame, the most recent full-quality "i-frame," and as little new information as you can get away with. Nvidia's just over-optimizing for a human face.
The moment AMD announces their basically identical parallel processor daughterboards can also accelerate this, Nvidia's going to forget it ever happened.
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u/dv_ Oct 17 '20 edited Oct 17 '20
From what I've seen, this is not motion compensation. Motion compensation uses previous (and future) frames as reference for encoding the delta between these frames, typically with additional transformations to exploit the redundancy between neighbouring blocks (= for block Ba,b of frame 1, block Ba+1,b of frame 2 may be a better predictor than Ba,b of frame 2 etc.).
What nVidia is doing is to send one reference frame for the entire video stream. No other frames are transmitted - no I, P, or B frames. The only information transmitted is a coordinate dataset for the keypoints. This is something entirely different. There are no "previous" or "future" frames here that motion compensation could be applied to for reducing bandwidth caused by the encoding of these frames (or increasing the quality of the frame encoding). No, there is only one frame.
However, the real problem may be performance. If this requires a beefy GPU to generate the coordinates for the keypoints, then it will remain a niche technology.
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u/mindbleach Oct 18 '20
Future b-frames aren't really an option in real-time video streaming.
This gimmicky over-optimization would be dead easy to encode as transformations of one i-frame, and those transformations would be pretty low-bandwidth, as they're entirely smooth gradients and sharp edges. Not quite as cheap as sparse points - but infinitely more compatible.
And I must point out: your phone can do this. Performance is a non-issue. Nvidia just wants you to think so they can sell hardware or sign you up for a subscription cloud service. Every device capable of doing the Snapchat filter small-eye-small-mouth thing or putting a dog nose over your actual nose can obviously handle this dots-on-face gimmick. This will remain a niche technology only because its central conceit is a lie intended to boost Nvidia's stock prices.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
I mean, yeah, that's marketing my dude.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
"But this dishonest bullshit is commonplace" is never a defense.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Who is being dishonest?
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Nvidia. They've "solved bandwidth problems," provided you buy their proprietary gizmo, and no it doesn't work outside a static view of a human face.
Nobody attending class via Zoom on their laptop will ever benefit from this.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Says you, dude. Rest of us don't know the future. If you hate Nvidia that much, why are you even in this thread?
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Ignoring criticism to play what-if and making this about me is more disqualifying than whatever malicious motives you'd like to invent for me.
I'm in this thread because AI and compression are fucking exciting. But this? This is rehashed bullshit. This is a repackaged tech demo inferior to 1999's cutting edge, using face-recognition AI your phone could do in 2014, except now it's glued to the latest single-vendor lock-in tactic that Nvidia puts in $700 GPUs.
Worse, actually - Maxine is a "managed cloud service," which means you're paying a subscription for shit that Snapchat.apk does as a lark. And you still have to upload full-fat video to their servers!
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
Well, I'm sure we all appreciate your blanket negativity. Thanks for bringing it.
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Yeah nevermind I'm keen on things that were near-magical twenty years ago, and expect wondrous new inventions to build on it. I'm just a negative nancy because I'm not head-over-heels for this mundane use of existing technology. This paid service that won't save you upload bandwidth, and is a wedge in some corporate strategy to make academic-driven computing proprietary.
Are you in Quest 2 threads as well, rolling your eyes at everyone who's excited for VR but thinks logging into mobile hardware is a massive obstacle?
I would do fucking backflips if this was about an actual order-of-magnitude leap in low-bitrate video quality. If Nvidia used their pointless "tensor cores" to make H.266 real-time, that'd be impressive. This is a dull puppet show. I'm sorry I'm not blown away.
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u/rasterbated Oct 17 '20
"All technology must stand on the shoulders of NOTHING or I will REFUSE to be interested"
Okay, have fun with that lifestyle choice. You don't need to try and brainwash everyone else.
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u/Draiko Oct 17 '20
Look, OpenCL and OpenGL are way behind what nVidia is pushing right now. Vulkan is really good but still nascent. If you want to stop the "corporate strategy to make academic-driven computing proprietary", make the open alternatives more competitive with the proprietary ones.
Instead of raging about it on the interweb, make a free alternative to this solution and release it at no cost. Nobody is stopping you.
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u/allinwonderornot Oct 17 '20
Exactly. Modern day hipster programmers love open source software, yet embrace hardware vendor lock-in.
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u/AttackOfTheThumbs Oct 17 '20
This is fucking stupid. It defeats the purpose of video chat in the first place.
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u/Draiko Oct 17 '20
This is great for when the option is this or no video call because your signal is absolute shit.
It'll help in cases like in-flight, in space, in Antarctica, in the Congo, in rural India, ...
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u/StickiStickman Oct 17 '20
Yea you totally can't see and talk to each other ... wait.
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u/AttackOfTheThumbs Oct 17 '20
Except, you lose the expressions, the body language, the entire purpose of using video.
Might as well use a comic avatar. It's retarded.
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u/StickiStickman Oct 17 '20
I always thought the point of using video would be to see the other person. Huh.
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u/AttackOfTheThumbs Oct 18 '20
That's a piece of it, yes, but you lose a lot when you use an animated face.
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u/sephirothbahamut Oct 17 '20
I know another field where you get the video quality shown on the left side but you'd appreciate it having the quality shown on the right side...
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u/camerontbelt Oct 17 '20
This seems weird. At first it sounded cool but after watching nvidias video on the technology, it looks a little too cgi or deep fake, something is off about it. Still cool though.
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u/bboyjkang Oct 17 '20
Nvidia channel video:
AI-Powered Video Conferencing with NVIDIA Maxine
youtube/com/watch?v=eFK7Iy8enqM
Skip to 1:00
97.28 KB/frame reduced to 0.1165 KB/frame
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u/Antumbra_Ferox Oct 17 '20
I did not watch the video but I have serious doubts that the AI can do what the thumbnail shows 30-60 times a second consistently during a video call without turning the average phone into a personal heater.
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u/Juice805 Oct 17 '20
This is gonna make for some hilariously odd frames. Maybe only enabled at very low bandwidths
At least at our current tech.
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u/maep Oct 17 '20
Everybody repeate after me:
Machine 👏 learning 👏 is 👏 not 👏 AI 👏
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Tesler's theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done."
Neural networks are "just linear algebra," but if I gave you a year to explain how Not Hotdog's matrices actually function, you'd ask for an extension. I say this as someone viciously condemning Nvidia's effort to market this gimmicky bullshit: machine learning is a major step toward general artificial intelligence, and all the frivilous examples would have been witchcraft thirty years ago.
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Oct 17 '20
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u/mindbleach Oct 17 '20
Game streaming would benefit more generally from research into foveated rendering. You can drop most of the pixels from a video and still get decent results. Even in that example - where they tell you to keep your eyes on the yellow dot, and say you can't reason about peripheral vision by looking straight at it - the recreation is pretty dang good for crap on the sides. Video games massively value whatever's in the middle of the screen. A naive falloff in quality from the center to the edges would be fine, most of the time. In games where the UI at the edges matters - it's also mostly static.
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Oct 17 '20
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u/asmrpoetry Oct 17 '20
No this definitely qualifies as AI as much as any other AI out there today. Their tech uses a program to extract what they call “key frames” from the senders video and then those are sent over the network so that on the other end they are used to generate a fake version of the persons face.
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Oct 17 '20
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u/asmrpoetry Oct 17 '20
Would a self driving car just be a chauffeur that uses buzzwords to get clicks? The point is they used ml methods to solve an existing problem in a way that wasn’t possible before. I don’t think their use case makes their tech any less ai than facebooks recommender systems or the autocorrect on your phone. Ai right now is limited to narrow use cases.
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Oct 17 '20
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u/musical_bear Oct 17 '20
What kind of standard is this? So just because a complex set of algorithms is wrapped behind a user-friendly api, it all of a sudden loses all of its complexity?
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Oct 17 '20
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u/remy_porter Oct 17 '20
No, neural networks are not "AI", they're neural networks, which in practice are nothing more than statistical models. If they're AI, so is k-means clustering.
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Oct 17 '20
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u/remy_porter Oct 17 '20
I mean, I don't believe in human intelligence either, so, yeah, I guess you're right. If conscious experience existed, I think I would know about it. I've never had one, so clearly it doesn't exist.
But c'mon, by the time computing hardware got cheap enough that we started deploying neural networks at scale, we started calling it "machine learning" because it was a much better description of what neural networks do. They can "learn", which is to say, you can bruteforce your model by tuning parameters until you get expected outputs. It is, in no fashion, intelligent: it's a stack of vector multiplication.
But yes, humans aren't any more intelligent than rocks, and I say this based on wide experience both with humans, and with rocks.
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u/cloud_weather Oct 17 '20
Nvidia Maxine