No doubt the next "breakthrough in computational efficiency for generative AI" will be an algorithm that receives a prompt, passes it unchanged to an image search website, and returns one of the pre-existing image from the third row of the results.
Someone tried that!
Unity heavily promoted Atlas, a tool that described itself as "cutting-edge generative 3D AI technology to enable the creation of assets and virtual worlds in a fraction of the time it takes using traditional methods" back in June of last year, when they were adding the "AI" tab to the unity asset store (right next to "decentralization").
It was removed from the storefront after only a day, since it turned out to just be searching Sketchfab for existing models.
