Reddit Aged Like Milk: Photorealistic AI Video Was Declared Impossible 3 Years Ago
Description
A screenshot from the Reddit subreddit r/agedlikemilk posted by user justausernamehereman. The title reads: '"Photorealistic videos from a few sentences is something only our great-grandkids *might* have"'. The embedded discussion shows two comments from 3 years ago: one person says 'Imagine in a few years when we can make photorealistic videos from just a few sentences. AI is crazy.' (downvoted to -2), and the reply smugly states '"Few years"? Lmao text to video isn't gonna happen in our lifetime bud, and especially not photorealistic. Maybe our great-grandkids might have it lol.' (upvoted to 14). The post caption notes 'In light of recent developments from OpenAI and Sora text to video.' The post has 1.7K upvotes and 216 comments
Comments
18Comment deleted
The most upvoted comments in tech subreddits age like milk left in a server room -- confidently wrong and increasingly sour with every passing GPU generation
The fastest way to look like a fool in tech is to say something is impossible. The second fastest is to give a timeline
Those commenters forgot that Moore’s Law now measures transformer layers per quarterly earnings call
The same developer who said text-to-video won't happen in our lifetime is probably still waiting for their COBOL-to-Rust migration tool while GPT-5 is already refactoring their legacy codebase and generating the unit tests they never wrote
Nothing captures the AI hype cycle quite like confidently predicting something won't happen in our lifetime, only to be proven wrong before your comment even leaves the Reddit cache. The commenter's 'great-grandkids' timeline got compressed to 'next quarterly earnings call' faster than you can say 'transformer architecture.' It's the technical equivalent of declaring 'we'll never need more than 640K of RAM' - except now the feedback loop is measured in months, not decades. At this rate, by the time you finish reading this, there's probably a new foundation model that makes Sora look like Windows Movie Maker
Turns out 'not in our lifetime' was just two model doublings, a diffusion-transformer, and someone else's GPU budget
AI timelines: obsolete before the next checkpoint save, turning 'great-grandkids tech' into today's fine-tune prompt
Apparently won’t happen in our lifetime translates to about two GPU procurement cycles
This comment will be seem only by bot, human will cease to exist Comment deleted
only happened because venture capital decided it's the new big thing that will fix everything (read: make them lots of money) - if it weren't for that, we could be working on actual problems instead of feeding the machine that makes magic with money Comment deleted
Hey, if we get ASI from it we might get a cancer cure or something Comment deleted
cancer is 100 different things and some of those things are already gradually being cured. "a cure for cancer" is like saying "a cure for virus" anyway I don't think medical AI has much to do with where the money is flowing currently Comment deleted
And because AI companies shamelessly disregarded copyright laws when doing their ML homework. Comment deleted
one lead to the other. this is more effect than cause I think Comment deleted
Why do you say it like it’s something bad tho 🌚 Comment deleted
🌚 I'm not explaining that bro Comment deleted
I think its more easy to just grow new organs then cure cancer organs. Comment deleted
Reminds me how in 2013 i was told no way computers gonna recognize Russian internal passport scans and fill the database. Now it's possible even with the old ones in cursive. Comment deleted