Don't view generative AI video as just a way to make traditional films more efficiently. Ben Horowitz sees it as a fundamentally new creative medium, much like movies were to theater. It enables entirely new forms of storytelling by making visuals that once required massive budgets accessible to anyone.

AI-powered "vibe coding" is reversing the design workflow. Instead of starting in Figma, designers now build functional prototypes directly with code-generating tools. Figma has shifted from being the first step (exploration) to the last step (fine-tuning the final 20% of pixel-perfect details).

AI generating high-quality animation is more impressive than photorealism because of the extreme scarcity of training data (thousands of hours vs. millions for video). Sora 2's success suggests a fundamental improvement in its learning efficiency, not just a brute-force data advantage.

Hera's target is not just existing After Effects users, but the larger market of people who need motion graphics but find professional tools too complex or expensive. By lowering the barrier to entry, AI tools create entirely new markets of creators, much like Airbnb did for home rentals.

Instead of a complex 3D modeling process for Comet's onboarding animation, the designer used Perplexity Labs. By describing a "spinning orb" and providing a texture, she generated a 360-degree video that was cropped and shipped directly, showcasing how AI tools can quickly create high-fidelity, hacky production assets.

The computational requirements for generative media scale dramatically across modalities. If a 200-token LLM prompt costs 1 unit of compute, a single image costs 100x that, and a 5-second video costs another 100x on top of that—a 10,000x total increase. 4K video adds another 10x multiplier.

Like AI coding assistants for engineers, tools like Hera will not eliminate motion designers. Instead, they automate tedious 'pixel-by-pixel' execution. This frees designers to focus on high-level creativity, strategy, and overall vision, shifting their role from pure execution to creative direction.

Traditional video models process an entire clip at once, causing delays. Descartes' Mirage model is autoregressive, predicting only the next frame based on the input stream and previously generated frames. This LLM-like approach is what enables its real-time, low-latency performance.

Traditionally, designers needed to understand code limitations to create feasible UIs. With tools that render a live DOM on the canvas, this is no longer necessary. If a design can be created in the tool, it is, by definition, valid and buildable code.