Since no-one knows what’s going to happen here, I’ll just drop this and run.
This relates specifically to AI in visual media, but I imagine a similar logic will follow elsewhere.
18 months ago I was given a detailed run-down on a new text to AI system that large ad agency was exploring. At that early stage of the tech, they had two people full time “training” the AI to output in the company style.
6 months ago, those people had a title “prompt engineers” and there were twelve of them on large six figure salaries.
Consensus among them is that in twelve months from now, there will be one left, whose job it will be to continue to steer the outputs as you say, and keep the machine from being influenced by outside sources.
In the graphics world there is a widely held theory that the overwhelming amount of public data available could result in AI creating the “perfect” amalgamation, eventually ending up with a “grey” result, similar to what you would get if you mixed every colour into one pot, so that every publicly available generator will produce a single style with fashion evolution slowed because of the mass of data already analysed.
I don’t know how that translates to robotics, but think it’s an interesting aside.
The ground robotics problem was supposed to be easy to solve. And it is, in the first few months.
One unexpected issue that a lot of algorithms hit is the “fork in the road” problem. If you consider every possible solution, choose the best ones, and then take an average, you usually get something pretty good. Good enough to get a big chunk of that delicious VC money.
But when you try it in a forrest, it finds a fork in the road and averages a perfectly good solution to the left with a perfectly good solution on the right and slams into a tree.
It sounds silly, but I promise you $100M+ has been spent on algorithms that suffer in this context.
Any solution needs to be smarter than combining everything into an average. Just as those “prompt engineers” trained the model to have the style of the agency, what makes it valuable is its ability to make a distinctive solution that is not average.
The prompt engineer is a good title too. So many times I have seen people getting decent first drafts from the LLM and in basic software problems. But they need someone smart to be able to give them the right prompt, evaluate and edit their response. Eventually, that person will be more effective than me at designing, writing, testing, and delivering code. I will have to adapt or be out of a job. I am pretty sure that day hasn’t come. But maybe they are just on the other side of the horizon and coming at me fast.
Nah, those AI based code sets will have subtle and obscure problems. You’ll be even more valuable because unlike person who gets first drafts, you’ll actually understand the underlying software engineering. You’ll be the only one left who can try and fix that mess.
I just thought this had potential - I think it would be easy enough to do by sandwiching the flex layer between two non flex as well - but if you have two heads - well as Zaphod Beeblebrox would say, “Two heads are better than one”.
True multi-material printing will be interesting to watch develop.
There was a wallet on printables base with TPU and PLA combined and he had a great description on how to do it with custom gcode and whatnot, but I can’t find it any more…
It definitely seems a hell of a lot faster and it’s measuring way more points. If I remember right it requires some kind of steel to be able to measure so as long as you have a spring steel print surface you’re good. I guess one of these days I’m going to have to get used to that. Just always printed on glass so that’s my comfort zone lol
