🤖 AI Summary
Overview
This episode dives into the groundbreaking technology behind Mirage, a real-time generative video model developed by Dean Leitersdorf and his team at Descartes. Mirage transforms live video feeds into entirely new styles in just 40 milliseconds, opening up revolutionary possibilities for gaming, creativity, and AI-driven experiences. The conversation also explores the philosophical implications of AI, the future of work, and the societal shifts that may accompany the rise of AGI.
Notable Quotes
- AI is going to leave the creative stuff to us. It’s going to do the stuff that is well-defined—and that’s great.
- Dean Leitersdorf, on the evolving role of AI in human creativity.
- A better definition of AGI is when it is economically profitable to leave your AI on all the time. It’s always working, always doing something.
- Dan Shipper, on the practical benchmarks for AGI.
- We’re enabling people to take stuff that’s in their imagination and apply it to the real world.
- Dean Leitersdorf, on Mirage’s transformative potential.
🎮 Revolutionizing Gaming with Mirage
- Mirage allows users to modify live video streams in real time, enabling endless possibilities for gaming. For example, players can transform Minecraft into Barbieland or apply a winter filter to GTA-V.
- Dean Leitersdorf explains how Mirage integrates with game engines, enabling developers to texture and modify games effortlessly, even using vibe-coded prototypes.
- The technology could democratize game creation, allowing anyone to build immersive worlds without needing specialized skills.
🧠 AI and Creativity: A New Medium
- Mirage is positioned as a tool to unlock new creative experiences, bridging imagination and reality. Users can transform live video feeds into fantastical scenes, such as turning a trash can into an elephant or adding animated characters to their surroundings.
- The upcoming app, Delulu, will allow users to experiment with AI-generated images and videos, fostering creativity and self-expression.
- Dean Leitersdorf emphasizes the importance of making AI accessible to everyone, from kids to grandparents, to create a new era of interactive creativity.
📈 AGI and the Future of Work
- Dean Leitersdorf predicts that AI will surpass humans in many economic tasks within 12-18 months, leading to significant societal shifts. He envisions AI freeing humans to focus on creativity and philosophical exploration.
- Dan Shipper counters with a more cautious timeline, arguing that AGI’s ability to self-prompt and continuously learn is still years away.
- Both agree that AI will redefine productivity, enabling both larger corporations and smaller teams to achieve unprecedented scale and efficiency.
🏛️ Philosophy and the Rise of Generalists
- The conversation draws parallels between ancient Athens, a society of generalists, and the potential for AI to empower modern generalists. With AI handling specialized tasks, individuals can focus on broader, creative pursuits.
- Dean Leitersdorf highlights how AI can overcome organizational bottlenecks, enabling flat structures where generalists thrive.
- The duo explores how AI could lead to a renaissance of creativity, akin to the philosophical breakthroughs of ancient Greece, by giving humanity more time to think and innovate.
🔧 Building Mirage: Technical Challenges
- Mirage’s real-time capabilities required breakthroughs in GPU optimization and autoregressive video modeling. Dean Leitersdorf describes writing assembly code for NVIDIA GPUs and training models to predict the next frame in live streams.
- The team overcame significant hurdles, such as error accumulation and repetition loops, to enable infinite video streams without degradation.
- The technology combines diffusion models with autoregressive transformers, creating a new class of AI models called livestream diffusion models (LSD).
AI-generated content may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as a sole source of truth.
📋 Episode Description
We had Dean Leitersdorf on the pod and he did something no guest had ever done.
Mid-sentence, he transformed from a startup founder in a black t-shirt to a wizard with light shooting from his hands. Then, he was in a white-walled game universe, and when he picked up the tissue box on his table, it morphed into a gun which he could shoot by moving his arm.
He did it with one of his products, Mirage: It takes any live video feed (like Dean on the pod) and instantly renders each frame into a new style of your choosing—40 milliseconds from input to output.
Dean is the co-founder and CEO of the creators of Decart which makes Mirage. They recently raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation to build a new era of real-time generative AI experiences like this.
Realtime generative video models are going to change video games forever, and Dean is on the forefront: imagine creating endless variations on existing titles, like GTA-V with a frigid winter filter, or taking a bare-bones vibe-coded prototype and using Mirage to texture it.
But games are just the beginning, Dean sees Mirage as opening the door to a new medium, a new experience created by AI.
In this episode, we take a look at how Mirage works under the hood, and what the Decart team learned about the future of software while wrestling with its toughest research problems. We also debate AGI—how close it really is, what counts as progress, and what kind of society it might create. This episode is a must watch for anyone interested in the future of gaming, creativity, or if you just want your mind blown by what’s already possible.
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Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:00:47
A demo of Mirage, the first real-time video-to-video model in the world: 00:02:38
How Mirage can take your vibe-coded game to the next level: 00:06:22
The new architec