by echelon 2 hours ago
> If any engineers think that's what they're doing they should be fired.
Seriously?
Then why is nobody in this thread suggesting what they're actually doing?
Everyone is accusing YouTube of "AI"ing the content with "AI".
What does that even mean?
Look at these people making these (at face value - hilarious, almost "cool aid" levels of conspiratorial) accusations. All because "AI" is "evil" and "big corp" is "evil".
Use occam's razor. Videos are expensive to store. Google gets 20 million videos a day.
I'm frankly shocked Google hasn't started deleting old garbage. They probably should start culling YouTube of cruft nobody watches.
Videos are expensive to store, but generative AI is expensive to run. That will cost them more than storage allegedly saved.
To solve this problem of adding compute heavy processing to serving videos, they will need to cache the output of the AI, which uses up the storage you say they are saving.
https://c3-neural-compression.github.io/
Google has already matched H.266. And this was over a year ago.
They've probably developed some really good models for this and are silently testing how people perceive them.
If you want insight into why they haven't deleted "old garbage" you might try, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Zuboff. Pretty enlightening.
I'm pretty sure those 12 year olds uploading 24 hour long Sonic YouTube poops aren't creating value.
1000 years from now those will be very important. A bit like we are now wondering what horrible food average/poor people ate 1000 years ago.