The computer of the future
"What is the web actually for? [...] CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS."
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! had a sketch, generally referred to as "Celery Man", where Paul Rudd goes to work on some sort of advanced looking computer terminal. It appears that his job is to work on generated videos of various virtual dancers that all look like Paul Rudd.
As a vision of how computing of the future should work, it was prescient. With today's technology, that future is now within reach.
Note that generation delays have been removed for this demo such that video generation appears to be much faster than it actually is. Some microphone recording issues have also been manually fixed. Music doesn't work on iOS, so you might want to view the video instead.
View the standalone page here where you can upload your own identity image. Note that:
- Generating videos of people is not allowed by the API, which is ostensibly why this demo uses cats
- Video generation takes a long time
- Video generation is expensive
- You must supply your own API key (this is a static site and your key is only sent to the OpenAI API servers)
Background
The "Celery Man" sketch was originally released on May 2, 2010 and may be inspired by a music video, 1100101 - Das Modul, from 1995.
The above web app was almost entirely vibe-coded (meaning without reading the code) using OpenAI Codex. The app itself uses the Realtime API for voice chat, the image edit endpoint to generate the input to the video generator, and the create video endpoint to invoke Sora-2 to create the videos.
The above APIs, besides the Realtime API, are not particularly realtime, so API call delays have been mostly removed for the pre-recorded demo.
The page uses 98.css for the Windows 98 style windows. It's also noteworthy that there has been a previous attempt to create a web app like this, but it is static and only displays content from the original sketch.
