iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

Eric Schmidt got a standing ovation from the TED audience this morning. An absolute pleasure to interview him on the red circle. We dove into the big questions—superintelligence, national strategy, open source, and what it means to be human in the age of AI. One for the books.

050

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

TikTok ban imminent, yet funny how things change. >2020: Stressed about TikTok drama at 120K subs. >2024: Sitting at 994K and completely unfazed. Ban it? Cool, I’ll build elsewhere. Keep it? Roger that, I’ll double down. The game is bigger than any one app. Who cares about vanity metrics.

161

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Merry Christmas y’all! 🎄 Pictured: 3d scan vs. ground truth of the feast to follow

080

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

Omnidirectional 3D video of reality — damn near teleportation in a VR headset. This $17,000 VR camera released in 2017 was ahead of its time. 17 cameras → cloud stitching → 8K x 8K stereo VR video. The moment is ripe for a new 4d capture rig optimized for dynamic 3d gaussians. Anyone building one?

1140

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

Check out this Stereo4D paper from Google DeepMind. It's a pretty clever approach to a persistent problem in computer vision -- getting good training data for how things move in 3D. The key insight is using VR180 videos -- those stereo fisheye videos we launched back in 2017 for YouTubeVR 🧵

1132

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

The future isn't just virtual or augmented – it's ambient and intelligent The Google XR unlocked event in NYC

020

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

MKBHD dropped his OpenAI Sora review (after a week of testing) the much hyped AI video model. 5 immediate observations:

120

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

The future of 3D AI took some serious leaps -- from single images to fully interactive, dynamic 3D worlds. Here's what's cooking at the cutting edge: youtu.be/T7bcYSSSC6s

youtu.be

AI Just Changed 3D Forever: Genie 2, World Labs, CAT4D

YouTube video by Creative Tech Digest

020

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Wav2lip can FINALLY rest in peace. Being able to retarget the facial performance of characters in *existing* live action & CG video makes Act-One an extremely useful tool for all types of creators. Nicely done RunwayML!

021

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

the entire bay area quaked hearing that chatgpt pro is gonna cost $200/month

040

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Imagine making 2D concept art for a game world –pressing a button – and suddenly you can walk around an interactive 3D world. That's what Google DeepMind's new paper Genie 2 can do – simulate virtual worlds, including the consequences of any action (e.g. unlock door, jump, swim etc).

280

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Observed: All mega popular tech creators focus on hardware — there's no MKBHD for software. It's literally called "Unbox Therapy" for a reason. Even if people won't buy the devices, there's something about vicariously living through that tech review experience.

120

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Tencent’s open weights Hunyuan Video 13B model looks impressive — oh, and image-to-video and facial performance? They’re coming too. If 2024 was the year open-source LLMs caught up with closed-source AI — 2025 will be the year open-source video catches up.

161

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

World Labs first demo dropped, and it’s consistent 3D worlds from a single 2D image. Decent volume size to move around in — def a big step up from the RGB + depth 360 environments we’re used to e.g. Blockade Labs. Stylized results look good; i’d love to see more photorealistic AI generations!

1112

Reposted by Bilawal Sidhu

Lynn Cherny @arnicas.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Google 2.5D temporal data, very nice.

061

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Augmented reality x-ray vision to “see through” concrete. Your infrastructure won’t just be scanned — it’ll be anchored to reality. Demo: Pix4D reality capture with precise geospatial localization.

041

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

> Sora API leaks on HF > Yep, it’s real > New Turbo variant; way faster > Artists declare war: “Unpaid R&D, PR puppets” > OAI Discord goes nuclear—topic banned > All before my first coffee

031

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

When making city-scale 3D models radiance fields are cool and all — but tried & tested photogrammetry just hits different. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a damn good case in point. Gosh I love geospatial 3D imagery — especially in virtual reality 😍 Video demo: u/lunchanddinner

040

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Just read a neat AI paper called SAMURAI -- it takes SAM 2 (Meta's "segment anything" model) and makes it way better at tracking objects in videos. Basic problem is SAM 2 gets confused when things move fast or there's a crowd of similar objects (big problem for VFX and video intelligence alike).

140

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Ironic that OpenAI’s o1 model hides its chain-of-thought reasoning, while the Chinese DeepSeek-R1 makes it transparent to users. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

020

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

If 10% of engineers at top tech companies are “ghost engineers” you have to wonder — what’s that ratio in bureaucracies around the world? It’s likely flipped — only 20% of people doing the real work. Pareto principle strikes again.

010

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Happy GIS day! Linked up with Array Labs -- they're a YC startup using satellite sensors to build a near real-time 3d map of the world. Here's a peek into a beta reconstruction of San Francisco made entirely from satellite imagery. For the initiated, their goal is essentially Vricon 3D on steroids.

151

Bilawal Sidhu @bilawal.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Mixing photogrammetry, procedural 3D maps and BIM models is a helluva combo. Imagine a world where every city has a digital twin like this -- letting us model not just buildings, but every piece of infrastructure underneath. The ultimate mirror world.

082