If any engineers think that's what they're doing they should be fired. More likely it's product managers who barely know what's going on in their departments except that there's a word "AI" pinging around that's good for their KPIs and keeps them from getting fired.
> 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.