@yiningkarlli@mastodon.gamedev.place
2026-04-28 19:04 UTC
Gaussian splats are really cool tech, but I don’t understand why people classify it as AI. It’s point clouds with a ML optimizer; all pretty “classical” stuff. Very cool clever stuff (especially the optimizer), but arguably even less AI than Neural Radiance Fields are, which at least need a neural network to run.
Sure, genAI can generate Gaussian splat clouds now, but that’d be like saying JPG and TXT files are AI tech because genAI can make JPGs and text too.
Replies (1)
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@MomentsInGraphics@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-04-28 19:15
@yiningkarlli@mastodon.gamedev.place Gaussian splats are a "learning-based scene representation." Calling it AI is just trying to link it to the hype. It may also be partially motivated by where we came from: Networks that do the rendering got displaced by NeRF, which got largely displaced by Gaussian splatting. Every step forward has removed an AI component, to the point where there is no neural network left, but people still associate novel view synthesis with AI. Also the papers get published at AI venues.