r/MachineLearning - [R] OpenAI opensources Jukebox, a neural net that generates music

I'm very glad that the article includes a "Limitations" section, because while to most untrained listeners (and even trained listeners), these samples seem miraculous, in reality what is happening is that this is simply a more-impressive version of what has already been available. Specifically, Jukebox is able to provide locally-coherent sounds, which are recognizable as "music", but over long-term horizons it loses large-scale structure. They mention this themselves, and rightly so. While this is very impressive, it is primarily just an exercise in how nice they are able to make their short-term "sentences" sound (to borrow an analogy from speech synthesis). However, the broader challenge of long-term structure and musical form (here an analogy might be novel-length narrative structure) remains an open problem.