Pretty incredible
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Rather than what many BigTech companies are currently doing: "Wall Street says we need to 'Use AI Somehow'. Let's invest in AI and Find Things To Do with AI. Later, we'll worry about somehow matching these things with user needs."
- flintknapping
- the distaff activities: carding, spinning, weaving, etc.
- "teamster" as a very highly skilled occupation
EDIT: compare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD2ua6q8FFA&t=475s with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjZX6L5cnUg&t=11s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM
It may not be AI, but this single video blew my mind back in *2013* and I find myself thinking about it often.
As an aside, I hate that people like yourself describe fans of anything they don’t personally understand as cults. It’s an antagonistic framing of a question designed to remove any good faith discussion.
It makes me miss Apple’s old keynote style that they’ve abandoned in favor of the bland, sanitized, over-polished and pre-recorded video keynotes.
I’m honestly over so much of the corporate cynicism and Blind-indification that’s turned what was once a necessary precautionary stance to this demonization or ridicule of people who happen to love their work and where they do it.
But now none of the open source software can compete with AI generative fill, AI denoising, and now AI rotation.
Animators are even more out of a job I guess, but really have been for quite some time I think, almost no animation is entirely hand-drawn anymore.
"But Google does it. If we do it, we will be like Google".
This makes me irrationally happy.
https://lookingglassfactory.com/looking-glass-go-spatial-pho...
which needs multiple views of your image from different angle and tries to make it up with AI.
This demo shows generating a 3D model from a simple 2D shape. It'll fall flat on its face trying to 3D model anything non-trivial which begs the question - who cares?
Also, you'll want to animate the 3D model - which this doesn't do, so you'll soon be back to your usual 3D toolkit anyway.
Were you in my meeting about 40 minutes ago? Because that's almost exactly what was said.
If the big tech companies wanted to be really evil, they could invent a nonsense tech that doesn't work, then watch as all the small upstart competitors bankrupt themselves to replicate it.
This session is "Sneaks" which is held every year, and has a fun, casual atmosphere. i.e. it has a theme, has a celebrity co-host, lots of jokes, food and drink served, etc...
Its basically a bunch of people who are creative, and are having fun nerding out on the tech...
Its a lot of fun.
(I work for Adobe)
The gist is that once a company has a captive audience with no alternatives, investors come first. Flashy (no pun intended :-p), cool features to impress investors become more important than the everyday user experience—and this feature does look super cool!
--
(I say "implied" because that's all they're showing in the video presentation, there may be additional setup involved that they're skipping. This is inside Illustrator though, which has a long history of 3d extensions being very awkwardly shoved into a corner of its toolset.)
So instead of the old workflow:
"visit HR page" → "click link that for whatever reason doesn't give you a permanent link you can bookmark for later"
it's now:
"visit HR page" → "do AI search for the same link which is suggested as the first option" → "wait 10-60 seconds for it to finally return something" → "click link that for whatever reason doesn't give you a permanent link you can bookmark for later"
To a Linux user, yes. To a professional, it was always a cruel joke, it was never close, even a few years ago. It's like saying Notepad++ is a functional IDE, or Kdenlive is a functional replacement for DaVinci Resolve.
I cannot stress this enough: Actual professionals do not think GIMP is a viable replacement, in any way, and never have.
Great demo. This will really help animators and artists.
Most of the ai image generation stuff I've seen from adobe feels late to party in terms of what you can do with open source tools. Where they do compete however is with tight integration, and I guess that's what matters the most to users in the end.
There are plugins for gimp that let you do image generation, inpainting and other things.
As far as what the post shows, it looks very much like current models that generate novel viewpoints of an object, but for illustrations. It might be doable to fine tune this for illustrations and simply vectorise the new viewpoint again. Though this will destroy any structure previously held in the object.
All I'm saying is that we have the tech to do even more than what adobe is doing, we just haven't put it nicely together yet.
Some would say that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable aren't really competitive yet because they haven't had enough investment. If we invested in them enough, and managed them well, they could be like Blender.
GIMP has been in development since 1995. Photopea was initially released in 2013, has been solely developed by one person, and is a far-and-away better Photoshop competitor. The projects themselves are mismanaged. GIMP should (frankly) be abandoned and completely reset, in my opinion, as being a failed attempt at salvaging old code forever. Wisdom is knowing when to keep pushing - and when to give up.
What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"? You figure out the 10 that users find really valuable, another 10 that will be super-valuable with improvement, and eventually drop the other 80.
Especially when if Microsoft tries something and Google doesn't, that suddenly gives Microsoft a huge lead in a particular product, and Google is left behind because they didn't experiment enough. Because you're right -- Google investors wouldn't like that, and would be totally justified.
The fact is, it's often hard to tell which features users will find valuable in advance. And when being 6 or 12 months late to the party can be the difference between your product maintaining its competitive lead vs. going the way of WordPerfect or Lotus 123 -- then the smart, rational, strategic thing to do is to build as many features as possible around the technology, and then see what works.
I would suggest that if Adobe is being slower with rolling out AI features, it might be more because of their extreme monopoly position in a lot of their products, thanks to the stickiness of their file formats. That they simply don't need to compete as much, which is bad.
I don't doubt they will put prices up, just boring they don't need to.
This looks like the perfect tech for a cel shaded game!
So I would love if GIMP started shipping these awesome plugins by default to pick up the pace!
Cool features that excite users (and that they ultimately end of using), and that get investors excited.
(i.e. Adobe mentioned in the day 1 keynote that Generative Fill, released last year and powered by Adobe Firefly is not one of the top 5 used features in Photoshop).
The features we make, and how we use gen ai is based on a lot of discussions and back and forth with the community (both public and private)
I guess Adobe could make features that look cool, but no one wants to use, but that doesn't seem to really make any sense.
(I work for Adobe)
That, by itself, would be a complete deal breaker for professional work.
There's plenty more deal breakers remaining.
It's not "force-feeding". You usually get a little popup highlighting the new feature that you close and never see again.
It's not that hard to ignore a new "magic wand" button in the toolbar or something.
I personally hardly use any of the features, but neither do I feel "force-fed" in the slightest. Aside from the introductory popups (which are interesting), they don't get in my way at all.
For users? Almost everything is wrong with that.
There are no users looking for wild churn in their user interface, no users crossing their fingers that the feature that stuck for them gets pruned because it didn't hit adoption targets overall, no users hoping for popups and nags interrupting their workflow to promote some new garbage that was rushed out and barely considered.
Users want to know what their tool does, learn how to use it, and get back to their own business. They can welcome compelling new features, of course, but they generally want them to be introduced in a coherent way, they want to be able to rely on the feature being there for as long as their own use of those features persists, and they want to be able to step into and explore these new features on their own pace and without disturbance to their practiced workflow.
Each of our decisions to buy or not buy a product, to use or not use a feature, influences the future design of our products.
And thank goodness, because that's the process by which products improve. It's capitalism at work.
Mature technologies don't need as much experimentation because they're mature. But whenever you get new technologies, yes all these new applications battle each other out in the market in a kind of survival-of-the-fittest. If you want to call consumers "lab rats", I guess that's your choice.
But the point is -- yes, it's not only OK -- it's something to be celebrated!
This is a common pattern across many fields. The truly top-end companies are always running ahead of open source.
But that doesn't mean it's a permanent situation. It just means you're looking at it from a point in time where the commercials got there, and open source hasn't yet. Open source will get there, and then Adobe will be ahead on something else.
I've played a bit with "comfyui" over the past few days, a bizarre name for an AI image generation power tool. (And other things, but I have no experience there to know how good it is at those.) It drips with power. The open source world is not generally behind on raw capability. As is often the case, open source's deficiency for generative fill for instance is that A: it offers too much control, too many knobs (e.g., "which of several dozen models would you like to start with?"), and while that's awesome if you know what you're doing, it is not yet at the "circle this and click 'remove'" yet, and B: the motivation and firepower to integrate this all into a slick package is not there. I can definitely do an AI generative fill with open source software, but I'll be exporting an image into comfyui, either building my own generative fill program or grabbing some rando's program online who may or may not be using compatible models or require me to install additional bespoke functionality into comfyui, doing my work, and re-exporting it. The job is done, but it's much more complicated, and most people don't care about the other extra capabilities this workflow yields so for them it's just cost.
It's a very normal pattern in the open source world. Nothing about the current situation particularly gives me cause to worry specially about it.
To be concrete, here's a YouTube video that's to the more advanced side of what you can do in the open source world, which is probably still ultimately simplistic compared to what some people do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijqXnW_9gzc That entire series is worth a look, and there's more it doesn't cover. You can get incredible control over these tools in the open source world, but it involves listening to some guy on YouTube trying to explain why you might to sometimes use a thing called "dpmpp_2m_sde_gpu"... not exactly normie-friendly.
https://www.adobe.com/max/2024/sessions/project-turntable-gs...
Perhaps you mean it doesn't use some of the techniques driving the current AI boom, like LLMs or diffusion models.
There are conferences for Adobe customers to teach them how to use Adobe tools. I think there was recently an Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles. It could have been filed there.
And I haven't seen any "wild churn" at all -- like I said in another comment, a few informative popups and a magic wand icon in a toolbar? It's not exactly high on the list of disruptions. I can still continue to use my software the exact same way I have been -- it's not replacing workflows.
But it's way worse if the product you rely on gets discontinued.
Even the biggest tech companies have limited engineering bandwidth to allocate to projects. What's wrong with those 100 experiments is the opportunity cost: they suck all the oxygen out of the room and could be shifting the company's focus away from fixing real user problems. There are many other problems that don't require AI to solve, and companies are starving these problems in favor of AI experiments.
It would be better to sort each potential project by ROI, or customer need, or profit, or some other meaningful metric, and do the highest ranked ones. Instead, we're sorting first by "does it use AI" and focusing on those.
I mean, is there any Photoshop feature that’s come to dominate people’s workflows so quickly?
People (e.g. photographers) who use Photoshop “in anger” for professional use-cases, and who already know how to fix a flaw in an image region without generative fill, aren’t necessarily going to adopt it right out of the gate. They’re going to tinker with it a bit, but time-box that tinkering, otherwise sticking with what they can guarantee from experience will get a “satisfactory” result, even if it takes longer and might not have as high a ceiling for how perfectly the image is altered.
And that’d just people who repair flaws in images. Which I’m guessing aren’t even the majority of Photoshop users. Is the clone brush even in the top 5 Photoshop features by usage?
I personally started programming, in part, to make simple animations like the ones you see in Scratch, and it’s incredible how accessible the tools are today for anyone looking to bring their ideas to life.
If you look at all the recent Google Docs features rolled out, only a small minority are AI-related:
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...
There are a few relating to Gemini in additional languages and supporting additional document types, but the vast majority is non-AI.
Seems like the companies are presumably sorting on ROI just fine. But, of course, AI is expected to have a large return, so it's in there too.
They were double charging me for photoshop for two years. I caught them and it took 60 minutes on the phone to get them to do something about it.
They have an entire cancellation department. (!)
Ex - I can absolutely get exactly this same rotation feature using open toolchains, they just haven't been nicely consolidated into a pretty package yet.
So to recreate the same thing adobe is doing here I currently have to:
1. Use the 3d-pack in comfy-ui to get stack orbit camera poses for my char (see: https://github.com/MrForExample/ComfyUI-3D-Pack scroll down to stack orbit in the readme)
2. Import those images back into the open source tool manually.
Is it as convenient? Nope - it requires a lot more setup and knowledge.
Is it hard to imagine this getting implemented in open source? Also nope. It's going to happen, it just won't be quite as quick.
Still, when I first heard of Adobe Firefly, my initial reaction was “smart business move, by exclusively using images they have the rights to”. Now seeing Turntable my reaction is “interesting tool which could be truly useful to many illustrators”.
Adobe can be a bad and opportunistic company in general but still do genuinely interesting things. As much as they deserve the criticism, the way in which they’re using AI does seem to be thought out and meant to address real user needs while minimising harm to artists.¹ I see Apple’s approach with Apple Intelligence a bit in the same vein, starting with the user experience and working backwards to the technology, as it should be.²
Worth noting that I fortunately have distanced myself from Adobe for many years now, so my view may be outdated.
¹ Which I don’t believe for a second is out of the goodness of their hearts, it just makes business sense.
² However, in that case the results seem to be subpar and I don’t think I’d use it even if I could.
Generative ML technologies may dramatically change a lot of our products over time, but there's no great hole they're filling and there's basically no moat besides capital requirements that keeps competitors from catching up with each other as features prove themselves out. They just open a few new doors that people will gradually explore.
Anxiously spamming features simply betrays a lack of confidence in one's own product as it stands, directly frustrates professional users, and soaks up tons capital that almost certainly has other places it could be going.
Still not enough to make me pay for Adobe Creative Suite (I just dabble these days), but the target demographic will be all over it.
Programmers making things for other programmers will always be forgiven as long as it works. Programmers making things for the general population will not be forgiven to the same extent if at all. As soon as someone releases something that is polished, it will be used even if it doesn't work as well.
The HN guidelines rightfully urge us to make substantive comments that advance the discussion and avoid shallow dismissals.
There might actually be a similar open source model already.
But I think to create it you would build it from a database of 3d assets that you could render from many angles. Probably quite similar to the way the 2d to 3d works. I don't know maybe the typical 2d to 3d models will work out of the box or with some kind of smoothing or parameterization. Maybe if you have a large database of parameterized 3d models then you combine that with rendering in 2d from different angles then you can basically use the existing 2d to 3d model.
I'm better off now, but I have a long memory and prefer to vote with my wallet by paying multiples to any competitor...which generally speaking is better for me and everybody else, since competition is the mother of innovation.
Apropo, Marmoset Toolbag 5 is out; it comes with a permanent license, it has a huge materials library, and the interface is very snappy and it doesn't feel like it has been programmed using Electron. You don't need to pay for Substance Painter this year.
Ah, and Adobe's latest exploit was a confusing TOS that more or less stated they would use your work that you edited locally with their software to train their AI models. I think they walked that one back when the wave of outrage hit them.
Also, Lightroom is one of the worst camera tools out there. It's only known because ADOBE...
Discussion should assume good faith and responses should become more substantive, not less, as the conversation goes on.
A version of this was available in Photoshop for a long time, but I think the feature was deprecated and removed completely this year. I had used it for a few things here and there, but dedicated 3D tools were much better if you were working in that space.
Yes, that’s the impression I got out of it too. I disapprove either way. I’d sooner defend a good argument against my point than a bad argument in favour of it.
I come to HN for reasoned, thoughtful, curious discussion.
All of this is orthogonal to Adobe's business practices. You should expect them to operate the way they do given their market share and the limited number of alternatives. I personally have almost moved completely to Affinity products, but I expect that Adobe should be better placed to execute products and for Affinity to be playing catchup to some extent.
At least, the Transformer didn't. The abstract idea of a language model goes way back though within the field of linguistics, and people were building simplistic "N-gram" models before ever using neural nets, then using other types of neural net such as LSTMs and CNNs(!) before Google invented the Transformer (primarily with the goal of fully utilizing the parallelism available from GPUs - which couldn't be done with a recurrent model like LSTM).
Sounds like famous last words to me.
The corporate landscape is filled with the corpses of companies that thought they didn't need to rush to adapt to new technologies. That they'd have time to react if something really did take off in the end.
Just think of how Kodak bided its time to see if newfangled digital photography would actually take off and when... and then it was too late.
Edit/ apparently I misunderstood it's only possible with vectors - getting close though to the reality mentioned!
This is a testable claim: where were Adobe in previous hype cycles? Googles "Adobe Blockchain"...looks like they were all about blockchains in 2018 [0], then NFTs and "more sustainable blockchains" in 2022 [1].
[0] https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2018/09/27/blockchain-and-...
[1] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/adobe-moves-to-sustainable-bl...
I think another, perhaps more relevant reference could be the replacement of hand-painted cells with computer-generated frames for animation. It replaced one kind of artist with another. Nobody got all that worked up about it, in the long run.
The discussion you started is about spamming features to see what sticks, as set against making deliberate, selective product decisions as you confidently observe your market.
It's possible that a company that ideologically sets itself against delivering any generative AI features ever might miss where the industry is going over the next 10 or 20 years. But we were never talking about that, were we?
Unfortunately, this gets you some comments that want to disagree with that less specific, initial aside. I’m not sure if people just read the first paragraph and respond entirely based on that, without realizing that it is not the main point of the rest of the post. Or if they just don’t want to give up the ground that you did in the beginning, at all, so they knowingly ignore the rest of the post.
I don’t really know what to do about this sort of thing. It seems like… generally nice to be able to start a post with something that says basically: look I’ve thought about this and it isn’t an uninformed reflexive take. But I’m trying to give up on that sort of thing. It isn’t really logically part of the argument, and it ends with people arguing in a direction that I’m not really interested in defending against in this context.
But it does seem a shame, because, while it isn’t logically part of the argument, it is nice to know beforehand how firm somebody’s stance is.
My wife's an artist and says they had a shitty version of this but this is crazy.
Do you remember two years ago when ChatGPT came out, and people here on HN were confidently declaring it was the end of Google Search, unless Google proved they could respond immediately? And Google released Gemini less than six months later to demonstrate that Search wasn't going to go the way of Kodak, and it still took people a while to calm down after that?
And the AI revolution is moving a lot faster than the digital photography revolution. We're not talking about "the next 10 or 20 years". You seem to be severely underestimating the power of competition and technological progress, and the ability for it to put you out of business.
You're suggesting the correct approach is "deliberate, selective product decisions as you confidently observe your market." What happens when your deliberation is too slow, your selectivity turns out to be wrong, and your confidence is ill-founded? Well, the company that was willing to experiment with a lot more features is more likely to build the winning features and take over the market while you were busy deliberating.
I'm surprised to be having this conversation on HN, where the start-up ethos reigns supreme. The whole idea of the tech world is to try new things and fail fast, because it's better for everyone in the long run. That's what the big corporations are doing with AI features. Isn't that the kind of thing that tech entrepreneurs are supposed to celebrate?
But the discussion is a little better if we take a little sip every now and then, perhaps even slightly performatively. The “ground-state” of big open Internet discussion sites like this is dismissive and cheap, so it is good to have active pushback occasionally.
As a side note, a similar phenomenon occurred with the Adam optimizer, where the ratio of public/scientific attribution to novelty is disproportionately large (the Adam optimizer is very minor modification of the RMSProp + momentum optimization algorithm presented in the same Graves, 2013 paper mentioned above)
https://www.adobe.com/max/2024/sessions/project-turntable-gs...
In the 2010's more mature companies explored adopting this same model, especially those that had themselves been founded the decade prior. What came out of it was a lot of spaghetti making a mess all over the walls, and the floors, and the ceiling. There were half-baked ideas everywhere, and a few genuine revolutions, but the quality of pretty much everything tanked.
Optimistically, we now seem to be at the starr of a pendulum swing back from that, but with little time to scrape off all the spaghetti that continues to drag everything down.
Many of us are sick to death of the startup ethos. We want tools that work consistently and aren't constantly changing because someone at the company got bored.
The reusable/stackable block is of course a key part of the design since the key insight was that language is as much hierarchical as sequential, and can therefore be processed in parallel (not in sequence) with a hierarchical stack of layers that each use the key-based lookup mechanism to access other tokens whether based on position or not.
In any case, if you look at the seq2seq architectures than preceded it, it's hard to claim that the Transformer is really based-on/evolved-from any of them (especially prevailing recurrent approaches), notwithstanding that it obviously leveraged the concept of attention.
I find the developmental history of the Transformer interesting, and wish more had been documented about it. It seems from interview with Uszkoreit that the idea of parallel language processing based on an hierarchical design using self-attention was his, but that he was personally unable to realize this idea in a way that beat other contemporary approaches. Noam Shazeer was the one who then took the idea and realized it in the the form that would eventually become the Transformer, but it seems there was some degree of throw the kitchen sink at it and then a later ablation process to minimize the design. What would be interesting to know would be an honest assessment of how much of the final design was inspiration and how much experimentation. It's hard to imagine that Shazeer anticipated the emergence of induction heads when this model was trained at sufficient scale, so the architecture does seem to at least partly be an a accidental discovery, and more than the next generation seq2seq model that it seems to have been conceived as.
"If I asked people what they wanted they would've said faster horses," or whatever Henry Ford is falsely accused of saying.
There was a brief moment in time where freehand was just a better and faster drawing tool than illustrator (which is whats is shown here) but from there on psp, ill & indesign have pretty much killed all competition out there.
The formats they use are sigularly stupid and arcane for legacy reasons, they are all mem hogs and inefficient to the extreme - but nothing beats that unholy trifecta and it is used it or die.
Now to get the point: generative fill is one of the absolute killer features of psp - in an instant it does what could take multiple hours to do previously with 5-10 sec of watching a loader.
There are many mor gamechangers and this really looks like another
I just don't know what you're talking about. What mess? What quality tanked? The picture you're painting is quite simply not what I see. Not at all, not even close.
The tools I use continue to work just fine. And I can point to tons of useful feature improvements and upgrades since the 2010's, that make a meaningful positive difference to both my productivity and my leisure. So I don't want to see companies suddenly become super-conservative in terms of releasing features. I want them to keep doing what they're doing.
Which I'm reading as "Demo-ready, but far from production-ready."
Somewhat relevant: my experience with Photoshop's Generative Fill has been underwhelming. Sometimes it's wrong, often it's comically wrong. I haven't had many easy wins with it.
IMO this is a company that doodles with code for its own entertainment, not a company that innovates robust and highly useful production-ready features for the benefit of users.
So we'll see if Mr Spinny Dragon makes it to production, and is as useful as billed in the demo.
At the same time, apparently their generative autofill is top notch. It's just a shame the industry decided to mix together ML tools with generative art, so that it's hard to tell which from which on a casual glance
Well, I confess I got a little bit confused here :/ . What's the purpose then for such an innovative solution if not commercialized?!
There’s always been a significant gap in capabilities once you looked past the surface.
I find this sentiment is common among FOSS advocates who don’t actually professionally use those tools.
I am definitely an advocate for free tools closing that gap, but I both design content professionally and contribute to OSS projects to close that gap. So I feel quite confident in saying that gap has always been large when compared to the Adobe suite.
The only people who would actually equate them are people not professionally using these tools everyday.
Even paid apps like affinity designer are a fraction of the functionality of Illustrator.
Again, a great product but people are just dead wrong if they compare them as an absolute.
And as we all know, this is why the iPhone has been so successful despite bringing Android-like features years after they were launched.
See example: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9606161/53874756-0...
This modern idea of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll like it” ruins that of course, but if someone bought CS6 they can still be using it today. If adobe went bankrupt 5 years ago they could still be legally using it today (they’d have to bypass the license checks if the servers go down, which might be illegal in the US, though). If adobe goes bankrupt tomorrow and I have a CC subscription, I can’t legally keep using photoshop after the subscription runs out.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which this type of research is motivated by big-picture, top-down thinking. In reality, it's a bunch of empirically-driven, in-the-weeds experiments that guide a very local search in a intractably large search space. I can just about guarantee the process went something like this:
- The authors begin with an architecture similar to the current SOTA, which was a mix of recurrent layers and attention
- The authors realize that they can replace some of the recurrent layers with attention layers, and performance is equal or better. It's also way faster, so they try to replace as many recurrent layers as possible.
- They realize that if they remove all the recurrent layers, the model sucks. They're smart people and they quickly realize this is because the attention-only model is invariant to sequence order. They add positional encodings to compensate for this.
- They keep iterating on the architecture design, incorporating best-practices from the computer vision community such as normalization and residual connections, resulting in the now-famous Transformer block.
At no point is any stroke of genius required to get from the prior SOTA to the Transformer. It's the type of discovery that follows so naturally from an empirically-driven approach to research that it feels all but inevitable.
This is clearly incorrect to some, not to others. This point being unclear to some, leads to those people assuming that the commonly observed strong negativity is generalized response to all shape and form of new technologies, rather than that specific emotional reaction to current generation of still somewhat Lovecraftian generative AI outputs.
A bit like what if a non-vision super LLM was to characterize anti-genAI sentiment and create "techno-luddite artist" persona. But there's across-modal component to it that they don't capture, so that falls flat.
$80 CAD/mo for the whole suite minus the substance stuff (prices are regional). For the average freelancer in Canada, that’s not a consequential barrier to entry. That’s <$1k for a year for everything.
If I charge a rate of something like $40/hr, that’s two hours in a month? <2% of revenue. Am I going to risk spending that much extra time fussing with something else for 2% more $$?
Meanwhile Blender gets a lot of investment because the competition is much more expensive. CA$305/mo for Maya and I need to augment it with an adobe subscription for any non-3D work.
People buy products for the novelty all the time. Sometimes they are disappointed with what they got, sometimes they discover new things. Take this very feature being discussed. How many people need it if Adobe released it today? How many would like what they see and decide to buy or renew?
> Given the option (in the absence of monopoly) they will search for another company that treats them correctly.
Are we still talking about product features?
While someone who just needs a functional vector graphics editor and is not being paid to use adobe software might prefer inkscape. Speaking from personal experience, there.
> I also think “AI art” can be harmful to artists and more often than not produces uninteresting flawed garbage at an unacceptable energy cost.
But this... this is really fuckin cool
What Adobe does is wrap those things in an easy to use app, and then charge for it, and hopefully not change their licensing again to grab everyones shit again.
Regarding the scheduler (dpmpp) sure adobe doesn't tell you those things, but thats because they found one that worked, removed the options and packaged it up with a bow, comfy and a111 and forge etc, are more complex because they give you EVERYTHING and let you have at it. There are frontends that wipe all that away but they arent successful because like the linux world, people in opensource want to be able to tinker with all the internals and shit, which is why opensource tends to see some groundbreaking optimizations, like taking the Flux model from requiring 30+gb of vram to run to running on 6gb of vram lol
I'll admit I have no idea what % of Adobe licensees/subscribers are individuals and small visual/graphic design firms (who choose Adobe for personal reasons) compared to larger companies (news agencies, web-design body-shops, etc) where employees use the tools given to them despite any personal preferences for rivals like Procreate, etc - and the rest: students, hobbyist photographers, etc.
...but none of the aforementioned market-segments seem like they'd make "AI" (whatever that means) any part of their purchasing-decision. Buzzwords only help sales when the audience is ignorant and/or impressionable; and when your audience are well-informed, seasoned (and cynical) professionals then buzzwords have the opposite effect and damage a company's credibility.
...so I'm not sure who, exactly, Adobe is trying to message with their press-copy for Adobe Firefly (their "generative AI for business" product); perhaps it's just a charade meant only for their shareholders? I'm glad they aren't copying Microsoft and shoving AI branding where it really doesn't belong and compromising the user-experience (...at least not so the same extent).
It really couldn't
What Adobe can afford is wholesale irrelevant; so long as their ARR metrics keep going up YoY and investors continue to plow money into their stock, what objectively matters to them is what you, the nominal customer beholden to proprietary lock-in, must afford...that's what Wall Street ambiguously refers to as "value creation".