Someone mentioned previously that guassian splats are ideal extension of Ai image generation into 3d and they might have turned out correct

They’re basically voxels after we abandon Cartesian 3-dimensionality (which imposes cubes)

More like point clouds since they are not constrained to a grid.

NERF is more like voxels though.

What do you mean NERF is like voxels? It is very much NOT like voxels

The original NERF paper had a voxel-like grid, but instead of regular voxels with a single color per grid cell, they had an MLP in each cell that models the color as a function of position and angle.

The literal definition of a NeRF and rendering function in the original paper are a continuous non-discretized vector-field and sampling based render function.

I'm sorry, you're right. I got confused with some other papers like Plenoxels that use voxels.

Most of the time they aren't that good at approximating geometry. They are good at approximating the "appearance" of geometry. However, many regularization techniques and priors can be introduced to make the Gaussian splatting technique better at geometry approximation.