You’ll have noticed Blabberize has gone through a redesign. The Blabberize design was made by Alex and myself way back in 2007 and since then we didn’t really change the look of the site. The site was functionally working and as folks built guides and instructions based on that look, it felt like it was more and more of a disruption to change things. Also, given that Alex, Kimi, and I are engineers, we looked at issues in our backlog and always focused on fixing bugs or adding features over style changes. That’s not to say we didn’t want to do a complete redesign, it’s just the task grew over time.
So fast forward to 2026 and AI has changed the world. I think there’s a lot to say about AI. Our position is pretty optimistic and excited about AI and its capability. Having been children of the 90s, we were lucky to see some really incredible leaps of technology. But the advent of Transformer Models and Diffusion Image/Video Generation Models and the advancements of the last few years are literally like science fiction coming to life. I grew up watching Flight of the Navigator and remember the spaceship, Max, and how David talked with the sentient alien robot spaceship and I never imagined I could have a conversation with a machine. But now I routinely have conversations with machines and they help me in my work. It’s wild.
The part that I never imagined or even comprehended were the financial implications of such a development. As AI started to show promise of utility, the way its capability caused the explosion of infrastructure and investment to have money dumped in it is astounding and terrifying. My position is that although AI is incredible and useful, the utility it provides is never going to live up to the profit expectations it has to meet to be profitable against the investment that has been made in these systems.
So that means, right now, we are living in a weird golden moment in time where the general population has access to highly subsidized AI compute. I don’t think this golden time is going to last though. This AI bubble is going to plunge us into a dark time when it pops. When the cost of running AI catches up with its inability to meet its promise of profits—we’re all going to have to pay.
This is all a lot to say and I’m sure you’re wondering how does this relate to Blabberize. Well, Blabberize has utilized AI for some time! In fact, Alex, Kimi, and I were making AI models years ago on consumer hardware. The Simple Animator audio processing and viseme analysis AI were created by us in-house and run on our own infrastructure too. This allows us to be cost-efficient and also have greater control and protection for privacy. Our AI models are not as compute-intensive as the image generation or chat from the larger foundational models (like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini). In fact, this cost is a large reason OpenAI’s own SORA, which was their text-to-video generation model, had to be shut down. It was just too expensive and they had to shut it down, even after they made a billion-dollar agreement with Disney to allow their IP to be used in content created with SORA.
So while this new world of AI is unfolding and we’re trying to figure out where things are going and how Educators are going to navigate a world where students don’t have to do the work anymore; How do you test students on competency? How do you teach when students are not motivated to do something difficult when the AI is able to do it for them? These are big questions. We have some thoughts on this but they’re still coming together. We’re going to be saying more about this in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile though, this shift gave us time to work on something that wasn’t in the path of AI; namely the site design! So we put some time into making the site look much more streamlined and modern, but the functionality of the site is the same. Let us know what you think of the changes!
Thanks,
Mo