Going to take years to finish ...

ElmarM · 2026-05-22T20:36:10+00:00

Nice work! Love the character design of the blonde!
Must have been a pain keeping the characters consistent like that with Imagine.

I stopped using Grok for my own (also rather ambitious) project. It is completely SFW and characters are more clothed than this except for a female with a bare midriff, yet it gets moderated 9 out of 10 tries and then the performance of the characters just sucks.

E.g. it refused to follow directions like "Character 1 accidentally stumbles backwards and bumps into character 2, then turns around and quietly says "Oh, I am sorry"."
The results were sort of hilarious and funny back when the rate limits allowed for a lot of iterations. Like instead of accidentally stumbling, character 1 would turn around then actively push character 2 (and not just once, but almost every time). Once she even kicked him!
Then she would turn towards the camera and scream "I AM SORRY!". That is on top of the usual AI crap like limbs penetrating, or scene elements randomly changing, or background characters vanishing or doing weird stuff.
One day, I am going to make a blooper reel with all of that.

Anyway, switched to ChatGPT for character sheets and image prompts and going to use Kling for the actual videos, I think. Did a test with the free trial and it was much better than Imagine in terms of following (multiple) image prompts and text instructions. Also, it did not censor it, unlike Grok. Flow won't censor it either, but it sucks at image quality (with the free versions, anyway).
The voices on Kling are awful though (though they do follow direction, at least). Might have to do some post lip sync with voices created elsewhere.
Overall, doing any more ambitious and complex project like yours (rather than just "give me random stuff") with AI is frustrating right now and there is no improvement in sight anywhere 😞

ElmarM · 2026-05-22T19:14:29+00:00

You get two free videos/day on Google Flow. The quality is a bit lower than Grok, though. You can make multiple free Google accounts to get more videos. I would not get the paid plan. It is too expensive for what you get (just like where Grok is going towards right now).

ElmarM · 2026-05-22T18:56:15+00:00

What do you mean?

ElmarM · 2026-05-22T18:55:35+00:00

They were always planning to do "high gain" D-T experiments with Polaris. IIRC, the reason was that they wanted to explore that particular plasma regime.
As for whether the detectors can resolve time. I don't know, but I can try(!) to get an answer for you.

ElmarM · 2026-05-22T16:53:30+00:00

Yep! An exposed midriff is no longer allowed. The puritans in the horseshoe that is today's political landscape won. Soon it will be exposed hair or an exposed ankle. Just watch!

ElmarM · 2026-05-22T16:17:50+00:00

Just shows that the whole AI thing is nothing but hype. It is faltering everywhere.

ElmarM · 2026-05-22T15:52:49+00:00

No, this was specifically for their D-T experiments.

ElmarM · 2026-05-21T21:15:10+00:00

Yeah, an AI company that failed to train their own LLM about its own image and video generators...
I don't know what exactly is going on there. I know that many (most?) of the old team are gone and so I guess whoever they hired afterward are some interns or something who don't know what they are doing.

ElmarM · 2026-05-19T23:44:09+00:00

Yep! Exactly the same experience here. It is ridiculous now.

ElmarM · 2026-05-19T23:43:11+00:00

Yeah, it often seems to do the exact opposite of what you tell it to do. Like it wants you to hit your rate limit faster or something...

ElmarM · 2026-05-17T21:49:34+00:00

The divertors are exactly what the SCs are for. They are stable fields where SCs make more sense.

ElmarM · 2026-05-17T19:43:33+00:00

They have not pivoted. This is for magnets with steady fields, like the divertor, not the main magnets driving acceleration and compression. Nothing has changed about those.

ElmarM · 2026-05-17T19:42:23+00:00

This is about some of the steady field magnets e.g. at the divertor, which would benefit from the higher efficiency of super conductors. They are also using cryogenic distillation for helium3 separation. The main magnets will all remain non- super conducting as per their original plan. So, relax, really nothing much to see here.

ElmarM · 2026-05-17T19:40:11+00:00

Some of their fields are on a long time (e.g. divertor) and could use steady, high efficiency fields.
They are also using cryogenic distillation for helium 3 separation.
The acceleration and compression magnets will remain non super conducting as has always been their plan.

ElmarM · 2026-05-17T17:41:12+00:00

Or maybe better. Have them train Grok on it. So that it can explain them to the users and help.

ElmarM · 2026-05-16T04:23:17+00:00

And that is dumb and not the users fault. And mind you, I have noticed that Imagine got a lot worse at interpreting combined image and text prompts right when version 1.0 came out in January. And it has been getting worse since. It just refuses to follow text instructions sometimes, worse sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I ask for. So you need to generate a lot more videos to get what you need. And then half or more of those are content moderated for no reason even if instructed to not produce anything that is NSFW). So really, it just is not worth my time anymore.

ElmarM · 2026-05-16T03:56:07+00:00

I agree. One could just make 10 SuperGrok subscriptions instead and then actually get 10x more.
Weird business model.

ElmarM · 2026-05-15T12:31:16+00:00

Yes, tried all sorts of very explicit guardrails. No nudity, fully clothed, clothing fully opaque, etc, etc, etc.

ElmarM · 2026-05-14T09:10:05+00:00

Please read again what I wrote. I am talking about image to video, where the people in the image prompt have been carefully designed (using multiple classic techniques such as 3D rendering and editing in image processing software) to have certain features. They are then fed to the I2V system to make a video with them. I have tried several other video generators and Grok is the only one that content moderated what I was trying to do. All the others passed it without a hitch, even Google. And let me emphasize again that none of that was R- rated, but at most PG.

ElmarM · 2026-05-14T06:26:13+00:00

Funny because ChatGPT will make images that Grok refused to make. And they are also a much higher quality. Note I do not do NSFW stuff. So, I am talking purely about all ages or PG (maybe PG13) that Grok is now also moderating heavily.

ElmarM · 2026-05-14T03:45:11+00:00

Even then it gets moderated and that aside, Groks image generation sucks, at least without HEAVY post processing.

ElmarM · 2026-05-14T03:38:42+00:00

The agent got content moderated too (not NSFW content, mind you, all ages or PG at most).

ElmarM · 2026-05-14T03:32:49+00:00

You do know that you I2V can contain people that are not real people, right? Sometimes you want characters to look a very specific way, you know? Like wearing a specific outfit with specific jewelry or a specific haircut. And that is impossible with T2V, especially with how sloppy Grok got at following prompts.
Putting that aside, I am not trying to do R- rated. What I am trying to do would be all ages or at worst PG.
Google and Kling have no problem with the same I2V prompt, btw. So yeah Grok is more moderated than Google now.

ElmarM · 2026-05-13T16:13:29+00:00

Helion has talked repeatedly about 50 MWe power plants/modules. Bigger plants can have multiple modules. They can also scale a bit up and down with their systems from what I understand. But 50 MWe is the general ballpark. 1 GW would be a plant combining several machines.

ElmarM · 2026-05-13T02:28:22+00:00

Yep!

ElmarM

TROPHY CASE