Nvidia Reveals Its CEO Was Computer Generated in Keynote Speech

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nbpa/nvidia-reveals-its-ceo-was-computer-generated-in-keynote-speech

by tosh • 5 years ago

178 85 5 years ago

doener• 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28160509

pdeva12• 5 years ago

note that this is only for 14 seconds of the video, when it is very obvious in the video that it is indeed a cgi figure.

wgx• 5 years ago

Here's a time point where the CGI CEO makes his appearance with a 3D transition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAn_oiZwUXA&t=3742s

pdeva12• 5 years ago

actually that timestamp is deceptive since the frame it opens at is the real jensen. this timestamp shows the cgi jensen and its very obvious due to the distance and animation that it is indeed cgi. https://youtu.be/eAn_oiZwUXA?t=3761

toxik• 5 years ago

And the super weird body language. It's cool that they tried but really this is so far from what can be done using video editing tools today.

EveYoung• 5 years ago

Is it just me or does it sound and look a bit out of sync?

deelowe• 5 years ago

Wow. This is quite bad. It looks like animation from the late 90s.

DonHopkins• 5 years ago

I can see in the background he's a huge fan of Spatula City.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE&ab_channel=Movie...

breakingcups• 5 years ago

They overplayed their hand, it's only after the 3d transition which looks worse than most modern AAA game titles... Judge for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAn_oiZwUXA&t=3742s

krishvs• 5 years ago

After seeing the video..its comically bad.

fsloth• 5 years ago

Thanks! I did not immediately realize this since I just jumped to the video. Given the state of the art in various subfields in CGI it would have made it moderately plausible the live CEO would have been rendered as well (in which case it would have been mindbogglingly good).

thereddaikon2• 5 years ago

Given how Nvidia has been with their presentations the last few years, I was entirely expecting Jensen to 100% CGI based on the title. They have a flair for flexing their technology so it would have been entirely on brand for them to do it and then only tell us a year later.

henearkr• 5 years ago

Exactly, they "revealed" nothing, and I'd say the title is misleading...

qwertox• 5 years ago

I was judging the couple of seconds before the transition, and thought it wasn't that bad.

Then I focused on the transition, and the jacket lost all the texture. Later I let the transition play through, and saw that lonely character standing there, zoomed away, awkward hand and arm movement, and I cringed.

Why put any amount of effort into it if this is the result? Almost pathetic.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Damn, kids can do that with blender

Sebb767• 5 years ago

It's quite surprising to me that they actually published the press release. With this quality, it would've probably been better to say nothing and let this one slip quietly.

On the other hand, there's no such thing as bad publicity, I guess ...

Mordisquitos• 5 years ago

On the other hand, there's no such thing as bad publicity, I guess ...

My pet conspiracy theory is that that old cliché is promoted by publicity companies as false advertising aimed at their own customers, the businesses who buy their ad campaigns, to cover their asses regardless of the end result.

fxtentacle• 5 years ago

They focus on the wrong thing, in my opinion. What I took away from NVIDIA's announcement was:

NVIDIA is dog-fooding their Metaverse renderer and all the CGI sequences in the keynote were created using it. As someone considering to build a plugin for it, that's great news. If they use it themselves, you can be reasonably optimistic that it won't have any horrible usability bugs. Plus it now integrates with Blender.

So if I had to come up with a headline, it'd be:

"NVIDIA's Photorealistic Keynote Rendering Software now available for Free to Blender Users"

nabla9• 5 years ago

Even the tiny computer-generated keynote part points to something that can nudge humanity forward.

Namely, the possibility of automating bullshit. Endless mission statements, employee narrated stories, and hand gesturing is very valuable. I would pay $10,000 out of my pocket for the opportunity to never do those product hype videos again.

hobofan• 5 years ago

you can be reasonably optimistic that it won't have any horrible usability bugs

Or alternatively, since they are the ones also building it, they intimately know it's (undocumented) pitfalls and how to work around them and/or they plow through bad DX with a horde of engineers that only a big corporation like them can afford. Dog-fooding doesn't automatically improve a product.

gego• 5 years ago

Share the tech with all the desperate workers in an endless loop of conference vid calls... !

Makes you wonder how important most of the video calls really are...

trhway• 5 years ago

In Strugatski brothers novel "Monday Begins on Saturday" (first published in 1964) employees substituted their dumb clones for themselves to perform various mind numbing low-intelligence work related activities which their employment at a typical research institution of USSR was full of. And the large West corporations do have a lot of that old socialism feel to them :)

pulkitsh1234• 5 years ago

The title is misleading, it makes it seem like he was rendered for the entire keynote.

queuebert2• 5 years ago

Agreed. I was watching the real Jensen thinking, hmmm seems a bit plastic and lifeless, but the rendering looks very realistic. Turns out that's just Jensen.

volta83• 5 years ago

The making of is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqZ9ECm70

They apparently created all slides of the keynote with omniverse in a couple of weeks, and used a lot of technologies for no other reason than just to try them out.

zahrc• 5 years ago

only 14 seconds of the hour and 48 minute presentation were animated.

Useless PR gimmick, which did not impress me at all.

zo1• 5 years ago

From the Vice article: "After this article was published, Nvidia updated its blog post, clarifying that “only 14 seconds of the hour and 48 minute presentation” were animated."

sushid• 5 years ago

They forgot to add "but we've decided to keep the article published for the ad revenue despite it being completely non-newsworthy."

nightcracker• 5 years ago

The correct timestamp of the CGI is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAn_oiZwUXA&t=3761s. It's only ~14 seconds of CGI.

And it's a pretty weak showing. The stiff animation and bad lip sync immediately gives it away to me. And the fact that the CGI Huang is shown ~15 times smaller than the real one is very damning.

It's not clear exactly which part of the keynote speech features CGI Huang (which is what makes the replica so impressive), but if you jump to this part of the presentation you can see Huang magically disappear and his kitchen explode into multiple different 3D models.

So how much was Vice paid for this article?

jstanley• 5 years ago

I was going to comment something like "yeah, yeah, everyone's an expert, it's easy to say you can spot the CGI once you've been told it's there", but then I looked at the video and... wow, that really is a pretty weak showing!

ChuckNorris89• 5 years ago

If you follow the 'VFX artists react' series on YouTube you learn what give CGI humans away pretty easily. Getting CGI humans right is very difficult and few VFX houses, with decades of experience, get it right even with post processing, let alone doing it in real time.

CGI Jensen looks like he came out of a 2009 videogame. Nvidia may have the tech but you can tell it lacks the artistic supervision of a proper VFX house so the end result looks like something their engineers put together in a last minute crunch (which is probably what happened).

tailspin2019• 5 years ago

Yep, this. I've seen more convincing Thunderbirds puppets :)

geoduck143• 5 years ago

I jumped around a bit, and I'd say the video looks like a zoom call with poor internet. The portion that was "cg" wasn't too different that conference calls I've been on where the signal is messed up.

elaus• 5 years ago

After watching the whole making of I also was pretty disappointed of the final result. Each individual part in the making of was pretty solid so I had high expectations.

I guess it was the tight deadline (only a few weeks I think?) that didn't leave them any time to polish the final result.

IfOnlyYouKnew• 5 years ago

So how much was Vice paid for this article?

For journalists, something like that is quite an accusation, and it really doesn’t help anyone to thoughtlessly make it.

Maybe they are stupid, or just have different ideas of what’s newsworthy, or it was a slow news day…whatever. But all of those come down to a difference of opinion, not a statement of fact made without evidence.

“Assume good faith” is in the guidelines here. And while it isn’t explicitly extended to the articles themselves, the reason for including it do extend to other interactions. Mindless cynicism leads to the sort of corrosive distrust that’s eating away at civil societies everywhere.

beeboop• 5 years ago

sponsored content and "native ads" happen all the time in news outlets and channels.

not saying this is an example of it - though it's possible since it looks and reads exactly like a native ad would

liaukovv• 5 years ago

Modern journalism as a whole forfeited it's good faith credit quite some time ago, kinda like crypto scammers.

captainredbeard• 5 years ago

Mindless cynicism leads to the sort of corrosive distrust that’s eating away at civil societies everywhere.

...repeated breaking of trust by institutions has earned that. It is unfortunate and it does eat away at our civil society. The solution is to fix the broken institutions and re-gain trust, not to blindly follow them like livestock!

TroisM• 5 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAn_oiZwUXA&t=3742s

Agentlien• 5 years ago

That looks like when a typical tv show does a "video game" episode and one of the regular cast members gets a character meant to look like them, but in video game form. It does not look like it was meant to seem human.

binkHN• 5 years ago

Thanks for the direct link; I thought it was pretty horrible. At this level, if you're going to take the time to show how awesome your stuff is, maybe partner with a talented team to do it on the level of Disney/Pixar.

causi• 5 years ago

I wonder why the clothing animation is so terrible. Low-budget CGI clothes always slide and float all over the place as if they're frictionless.

geoduck143• 5 years ago

> It's not clear exactly which part of the keynote speech features CGI Huang (which is what makes the replica so impressive),

I think what Vice ment to say was "this video was SO boring, we were multitasting on our phone and didn't see anything out the ordinary from the corner of our eyes."

olvy0• 5 years ago

A tangentially related Dilbert series:

https://dilbert.com/series/71-Dilbert-3D-prints-a-Pointy-Hea...

hiddencache2• 5 years ago

Putting something like that out there is a pretty big risk.

48 hours later there'll be a Luke Skywalker deep fake version of this guy on YouTube created on an old Intel.

qaq• 5 years ago

fake porn clips will prob be what pushes the tech forward not renderings of CEOs

hiddencache2• 5 years ago

Sadly true - the old adage that sex and war drive technological innovation.

queuebert2• 5 years ago

Why not combine the two?

rl3• 5 years ago

The segment of the documentary detailing how the kitchen and CG Jensen were made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqZ9ECm70#t=23m03s

The reason he ended up looking like shit is because it was a combination of dog-fooding their own software (admirable) as well as rushing the production on a tight deadline.

Imagine crunching long hours to make a digital replica of your boss for the hell of it. They even scanned his leather jacket, which is admittedly worthy of a chuckle considering the thing's taken on a life of its own. In the distant future, I imagine the jacket will be embodied with AI and entrusted with carrying the company forward in Jensen's image.

Silicon Valley may have ended years ago, but stuff like this writes itself.

WWLink• 5 years ago

The kitchen thing is pretty fucking awesome though.

lvl100• 5 years ago

I simply do not understand why they are pouring so many resources at Omniverse. They’re reinventing the wheels quite a bit. Leads me to believe this is Jensen’s pet project that no one within the company will go against.

sinuhe69• 5 years ago

Even Gemini Man was not very convincing with all the money and the time and effort they could spend. I don’t believe any other attempt could produce a better result any time soon.

mensetmanusman2• 5 years ago

Imagine in the future when a company like Samsung is led by an immortal (digital) CEO whose script is okayed by the board.

ant6n• 5 years ago

Or maybe the whole of UK will be run be a dead person.

synergy20• 5 years ago

That CGI is so weak and put me into heavy doubt about how great Nvidia's AI really is. It's very disappointing.

musicale• 5 years ago

Nvidia Reveals Its CEO Was Computer Generated

I always assumed tech CEOs were human, but this explains so much...

Nvidia Reveals Its CEO Was Computer Generated in Keynote Speech

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