as someone who works in both AI and filmmaking, I remember losing my mind when this paper was first released a few weeks ago. It's absolute insanity what the folks at Nvidia have managed to accomplish in such a short time. The paper itself[0] is quite dense, but I recommend reading it -- they had to pull some fancy tricks to get performance to be as good as it is!
No, really, it's a cool application of neural nets. It was unexpected when it first came up and it took a whole day to learn a scene, but a couple of years later it can be done in seconds.
I think the cool part is that a neural net can learn to produce (R,G,B) from (X,Y,Z,angle) by using a clever encoding trick with sin() and cos() for the input coordinates. And the fact that a neural net can be a frigging JPEG in 3D.
You're missing this work in the context of the field as a whole. Labs have been releasing papers boasting 2-4x speedups and getting them published at conferences, and then this group comes in and speeds up the original by 1000x. That's a huge leap in capability.
[0]https://nvlabs.github.io/instant-ngp/