Hi(gh)!

Reading an article in the German new portal "Zeit Online" 
(https://www.zeit.de/digital/2024-07/ki-meta-llama-3-1-newsletter-kuenstliche-intelligenz),

I stumbled upon Mark Zuckerberg's new AI system, Poe 3.1: https://poe.com/

After having extensively played around with graphical AI systems such as 
Stable Diffusion, this is my first experience with text-generating AI 
systems (like the famous-infamous ChatGPT)!

I heard before that such AI systems were pretty capable of generating 
code in a vast variety of programming languages... POV-Ray is a 
programming language, so I tried the archetypical basic scene with 
which, according to conventional wisdom, every budding POVer begins: a 
reflective sphere over a checkered plane. For me, this is my official 
debut scene delayed by 29 years (when I discovered POV-Ray in the first 
place), or at least by almost 24 years, as I posted my first scene here 
(anyone remembering "Afghan Sunrise"?) on September 21, 2000... I'll 
nickname this first regular debut scene "2000 Slightly Delayed", 
alluding to a piece of guitar-driven German electronic music from 1978...

I entered the following prompt:

Generate the POV-Ray code for a reflective sphere hovering over a 
checkered plane under a blue sky!

and, in the blink of an eye, Poe 3.1 generated this piece of flawless 
POV-Ray code:

// Camera
camera {
     location <0, 5, -10>
     look_at <0, 0, 0>
}

// Lighting
light_source { <-10, 20, -10> color rgb <1, 1, 1> }
sky_sphere {
     pigment { color rgb <0.5, 0.7, 1> }
}

// Plane
plane {
     y, 0
     pigment {
         checker
         color rgb <1, 1, 1>
         color rgb <0.5, 0.5, 0.5>
         scale 2
     }
}

// Sphere
sphere {
     <0, 1, 0>, 1
     finish {
         ambient 0.2
         diffuse 0.4
         specular 0.4
         roughness 0.1
         reflection 0.5
     }
     pigment { color rgb <1, 1, 1> }
}

Yes, I'm pretty astounded... but, for an AI using 400 billion parameters 
(according to the Zeit Online article), generating error-free POV-Ray 
code should be of the simpler tasks...

When taking a closer look upon the code, I noticed that the sphere 
(radius 1 unit) is not really hovering above, but in fact touching the 
plane...

And of course I rendered the scene... attached here!

The camera looks down on the sphere, so the blue sky is visible only by 
reflection from the sphere's surface... this is not fully precisely what 
I intended to have it looking like!

But AI outputs are typically randomized within the limits of the given 
prompt (at least I experienced this with the graphical systems)... so 
I'll give this prompt further tries! Watch out!

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

-- 
VBI BENE, IBI BACTRIA!

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