Big things happening at the end of the year.

Advent of Code is a programming staple for this month, but OpenAI is getting festive as well.

And the roster of text-to-video models is growing with another impressive addition.

But where does all of this generation lead?

Lots to cover this week:

• Finally!

• Text to Video

• Advent of Code

• Quality Quantity

• Just Plain Media

Finally!

If you haven’t figured out by now, I’m kind of a fan of o1-preview and o1-mini.

And as of yesterday, with the start of OpenAI’s 12 Days of Shipmas, the full version of o1 is available!

No longer o1-preview.

Everyone with the Plus plan gets access to the full version of o1, but they also announce a Pro plan yesterday that’s $200 per month instead of $20 per month but it’s supposed to allow for unlimited* use of the o1 family of models and include a o1 pro mode which I haven’t tried yet.

I’m not doing a ton of medical research but it could be useful for writing complex code so I’m tempted to bump my subscription and try it out.

o1 pro may be the key unlock for a corporation-as-a-service…

Day 2 of Shipmas should be starting soon as I write this, so I’ll be anxious to see what’s announced next, but rumor has it the release of Sora may be the grand finale, which is probably a good thing because another Sora competitor was open-sourced this week and it looks surprisingly competitive.

More below!

Text to Video

It’s almost hard to even comprehend this is happening at this point, but there’s a number of comparable engines available for generating video from text.

Many of them have reached the point where you have to stop and ask, “Wait, is that real?”

Huayuan is the new open-source text to video model made public this week and it looks surprisingly life-like.

It’s hard to tell that some of these videos aren’t real.

Crazier still is there’s multiple options these days to turn words into video.

Really incredible.

And the Hunyuan model isn’t crazy huge so you could potentially run it on your own computer, which may be a quick weekend project for me.

Now to find cool things to do with all of these ways of generating video…

Advent of Code 2024

It’s that time of year again.

Advent of Code started on December 1.

I’m a little behind now though, I got stuck on part 2 of Day 4 and need to catch up, but the coding puzzles have been good so far!

And having recently brushed up on Go, writing solutions is much smoother than last year when I was still adjusting to Go syntax.

As a result I’m already 100% farther having made it past Day 2 which is where I stopped last year...

I’ll keep the goal realistic and shoot for 8 Days this year, if not all 25.

Let me know if you end up giving some of the puzzles a shot, always a good time to brush on your programming puzzle solving skills.

Happy coding!

Quality Quantity

The original project I had in mind when I quit working full time was to build tools to help create YouTube content.

At the time I was also programmatically generating videos for a side project which was part of the inspiration.

With the videos I’ve reference recently, and the trend of TikTok and YouTube shorts becoming powerhouse sources of marketing, I can’t help but be pulled back to those projects.

I have the skill set, I just needed better execution.

As I’ve mentioned, with your typical engineering mindset, I tend to go and build things without getting much feedback, but this time around it’s time to solve the distribution problem all together.

Staying ahead of the curve, or at least with the curve for a while because TikTok trends change every day at this point, video marketing is going to be a powerful tool for the next few years before AI video generation gets completely out of hand as mentioned above.

I think there’s a real opportunity to combine video and content automation with simple, useful apps to rapidly develop, market and iterate on what works and what doesn’t.

Leverage AI to create quality quantity.

Still ironing out some of the bottlenecks I ran into in the past but I’ve got an idea of where to head.

More on that soon.

Just Plain Media

Kallaway is a new name for me on YouTube, but he’s produced quality videos recently.

With this recent one, he talks about how social media is changing, and pointed out a really obvious trend that I somehow missed, even though it’s something I constantly do.

It’s basically the heart of this newsletter.

Social media is turning into just plain media that is primarily for consuming not socializing.

His prediction is with all the generative AI - see above - people will tending toward specialized, small private groups where they can be social with people focused on similar goals.

He also predicts an opportunity for a new “human-only” social media platform with heavy restrictions on posts to make sure it’s actually a human behind the account.

Luckily I would bet there’s a few more years till things completely move in that direction, but I can see how the trend has already started.

Cohorts and mastermind groups are all the rage right now so there’s certainly a growing demand.

Interesting ideas to consider where social media ends up, and worth watching his full video to hear more about it if you have 20 minutes to spare!

And that’s it for this week! The full o1 is finally here, and Sora may soon follow. So much AI’ing to do.

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

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