Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice

Garbage in, garbage out.

Looking at this a different way, they gave first-year students, likely with no established pre-requistites, an open-ended project with fixed hardware but no expectation to submit the final project for review. If they wanted to verify the students actually developed a working program, they could have easily asked for the Pi's to be returned along with the source code.

A project like this was likely intended to get the students to think about the "what" and not worry so much about the "how." Faking it entirely may have gone a bit further than intended, but would still meet the goal of getting the students to think about what they could do with this computer (if they knew how)

While university instructors can vastly underestimate student's creativity, they are, generally speaking, not stupid. At the very least, they know if you don't tell students to submit their work, you can often count on them doing as little as possible.

Literally all that matters is that they passed.

Under Eric Schmidt they were engineer-driven, during the golden era of the 2000s. Nowadays they're MBA driven, which is why they had 4 different messaging apps from different product managers.

2008 is late to the party for a docs competitor! Microsoft got the runaround by Google and after Google launched docs they could have clobbered Microsoft which kind of failed to respond properly in kind, but they didn’t push the platform hard enough to eat the corporate market share, and didn’t follow up with a share point alternative that would appeal to the enterprise, and kind of blew the opportunity imo.

I mean to this day Google docs is free but it still hasn’t unseated Word in the marketplace, but the real killer app that keeps office on top is Excel, which some companies built their entire tooling around.

It’s crazy interesting to look back and realize how many twists there were leading us to where we are today.

Btw it was Office Server or Sharepoint Portal earlier (this is like Frontpage days so like 2001?) and Microsoft called it Tahoe internally. I don’t think it became Sharepoint until Office 365 launched.

The XMLHTTP object launched in 2001 and was part of the dhtml wave. That gave a LOT of the capabilities to browsers that we currently see as browser-based word processing, but there were efforts with proprietary extensions going back from there they just didn’t get broad support or become standards. I saw some crazy stuff at SGI in the late 90s when I was working on their visual workstation series launch.

So why did they never release that and went with Office 365 instead?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/netdocs-microsofts-net-poster-...

https://www.eweek.com/development/netdocs-succumbs-to-xp/

What about Chrome? And Chromebooks?

Is that supposed to be a vote of confidence for the current state of Google search?

> So who is losing?

The people who use their products, which are worse than they’ve been in decades? The people who make the content Google now displays without attribution on search results?

What would the ideal setup in your opinion?

[0] yes, not literally nobody. I know about the Windows 2.0 Excel or whatever, but the user base compared to WordPerfect or 1-2-3 was tiny up until MS was able to start driving them out by leveraging Windows in the early-mid 90s.

Globe dot com was basically Facebook, but the critical mass wasn't there. Nor were the smartphones.

The difference is Nadella is a good CEO and Pichai isn’t.

Part of it could also be a result of circumstance. Nadella came at a time when MS was foundering and he had to make what appeared to be fairly obvious decisions (pivot to cloud…he was literally picked because of this, and reducing dependence on Windows…which was an obvious necessary step for the pivot to cloud). Pichai OTOH was selected to run Google when it was already doing pretty well. His biggest mandate was likely to not upset the Apple cart.

If roles were reversed, I suspect Nadella would still have been more successful than Pichai, but you never know. I’d Nadella introduction to the CEO job was to keep things going as they were, and Pichai’s was to change the entire direction of the company, maybe a decade later Pichai would have been the aggressive decision maker whereas Nadella would have been the overly cautious guy making canned demos.

Also "interesting" to see the if results being SEO spam generated using AI will keep seo search viable.

Now, I don't know how diverse the AI workforce is at Google, but the YT thumbnails show precisely 50% of white men. Maybe that's what the parent meant by "surgically precise".

I don't mean to imply that companies should avoid displays of diversity, I just mean that it's obvious when it's inauthentic. Virtue signaling in exchange for business is not progress.

It’s the stillness between “beats” that does it, I think, and the very-constrained and repetitive motion.

That's what Apple keynotes feel like now. It seems like each year, they're trying to make their presentations even more essentially 'Apple.' They crossed the uncanny valley a long time ago.

I believe it is Hinton that prefers “confabulation” to “hallucination” because it’s more accurate. The example in the discussion about hallucination/confabulation was that of someone who had been present in the room during Nixon’s Watergate conversations. Interviewed about what he heard, he provided a narrative that got many facts wrong (who said what, and what exactly was said). Later, when audio tapes surfaced, the inaccuracies in his testimony became known. However, he had “confabulated truthfully”. That is, he had made up a narrative that fit his recall as best as he was able, and the gist of it was true.

Without the ability to confabulate, he would have been unable to tell his story.

(Incidentally, because I did not check the facts of what I just recounted, I just did the same thing…)

What if the input sequence says "the following is truth:", assuming it skillfully predicts following text, it would mean telling the most likely truth according to its training data.

I would say it’s worse than Google search. Google tells you when it can’t find what you are looking for. LLMs “guess” a bullshit answer.

I think you're slightly mischaracterising things here. It has potential to be at least slightly and possibly much better than that. This is evidenced by the fact it is much better than chance at answering "novel" questions that don't have a direct source in the training data. Why it can do it is because at a certain point, to solve the optimisation problem of "what word comes next" the least complex strategy actually becomes to start modeling principles of logic and facts connecting them. It is not in any systematic or reliable way so you can't ever guarantee when or how well it is going to apply these, but it is absolutely learning higher order patterns than simple text / pattern matching, and it is absolutely able to generalise these across topics.

You do understand the concept of reputation, right?

If lying helps, which can happen if there aren't large legal costs or social repercussions on brand equity, or if the lie goes undetected, then they'll lie. This is what we necessarily get from the upstream incentives. Fortunately, lying in a marketing video is fairly low on the list of ethical violations that have happened in the recent past.

We've effectively got a governance alignment problem that we've been trying to solve with regulations, taxes and social norms. How can you structure guardrails in the form of an incentive system to align companies with ethical outcomes? That's the question and it's a difficult one. This question also applies to any form of human organization, including governments.

[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/inc.flide.vi8/

No, that is how you're told to type. You have to be told to type that way precisely because QWERTY is not designed to keep your fingers on the home row. If you type in a layout that is designed to do that, you don't need to be told to keep your fingers on the home row, because you naturally will.

Nobody really knows what the designers were thinking, which I do not mean as sarcasm, I mean it straight. History lost that information. But whatever they were thinking that is clearly not it because it is plainly obvious just by looking at it how bad it is at that. Nobody trying to design a layout for "keeping your fingers on the home row" would leave hjkl(semicolon) under the resting position of the dominant hand for ~90% of the people.

This, perhaps in one of technical history's great ironies, makes it a fairly good keyboard for swype-like technologies! A keyboard layout like Dvorak that has "aoeui" all right next to each other and "dhtns" on the other would be constantly having trouble figuring out which one you meant between "hat" and "ten" to name just one example. "uio" on qwerty could probably stand a bit more separation, but "a" and "e" are generally far enough apart that at least for me they don't end up confused, and pushing the most common consonants towards the outer part of the keyboard rather than clustering them next to each other in the center (on the home row) helps them be distinguishable too. "fghjkl" is almost a probability dead zone, and the "asd" on the left are generally reasonably distinct even if you kinda miss one of them badly.

I don't know what an optimal swype keyboard would be, and there's probably still a good 10% gain to be made if someone tried to make one, but it wouldn't be enough to justify learning a new layout.

I would agree completely that it’s not ready for consumers the way it was displayed, which is my point.

I do want to add that I believe that the right way to do these types of new product rollout is not with these giant public announcements.

In fact, I think generally speaking the “right” way to do something like this demonstrates only things that are possible robustly. However that’s not the market that Google lives in. They’re capitalists trying to make as much money as possible. I’m simply evaluating that what they’re showing I think is absolutely technically possible and I think Google can deliver it even if its not ready today.

Do I think it’s supremely ethical the way that they did it? No I don’t.

Yeah the feedback loop with consumers has a higher likelihood of being detrimental, so even if the iteration rate is high, it’s potentially high cost at each step.

I think the current trend is to nerf the models or otherwise put bumpers on them so people can’t hurt themselves. That’s one approach that is brittle at best and someone with more risk tolerance (OpenAI) will exploit that risk gap.

It’s a contradiction then at best and depending on the level of unearned trust from the misleading marketing, will certainly lead to some really odd externalities

Think “man follows google maps directions into pond” but for vastly more things.

I really hated marketing before but yeah this really proves the warning I make in the AI addendum to my scarcity theory (in my bio).

(I say this in jest, as a PGP user)

A local model could send relevant still images from the camera feed to Gemini, along with the text transcript of the user’s speech. Then Gemini’s output could be read aloud with text-to-speech. Seems doable within the present cost and performance constraints.

    :%s/Google/the team
    :%s/people/the promotion board

I'm not saying there have been no improvements in AI. There is and this includes Google. But the reason why ChatGPT has really taken over the world is that the demo is in your own hands and it does quite well there.

Though because you don’t see the answers it doesn’t show you, it’s hard to really validate the quality, so I’m still wary, but when I look for specific stuff it tends to find it.

wout paywall: https://archive.vn/Gz614

For mainstream stuff on the other hand ChatGPT is great. And I'm sure that Gemini will be even better.

It's a computer. That's why. Change the concept slightly: would you use a calculator if you had to wonder if the answer was correct or maybe it just made it up? Most people feel the same way about any computer based anything. I personally feel these inaccuracies/hallucinations/whatevs are only allowing them to be one rung up from practical jokes. Like I honestly feel the devs are fucking with us.

The problem is a matter of degree. These models are substantially less reliable than humans and far below the threshold of acceptability in most tasks.

Also, it seems to me that AI can and will surpass the reliability of humans by a lot. Probably not by simply scaling up further or by clever prompting, although those will help, but by new architectures and training techniques. Gemini represents no progress in that direction as far as I can see.

Of course, I agree that if we want computers to “think on their own“ or otherwise “be more human“ (whatever that means) we should expect a downgrade in correctness, because humans are wrong all the time.

First, we know they are imperfect. People seem to put more faith into machines, though I do sometimes see people being too trusting of other people.

Second, we have methods for measuring their imperfection. Many people develop ways to tell when someone is answering with false or unjustified confidence, at least in fields they spend significant time in. Talk to a scientist about cutting edge science and you'll get a lot of 'the data shows', 'this indicates', or 'current theories suggest'.

Third, we have methods to handle false information that causes harm. Not always perfect methods, but there are systems of remedies available when experts get things wrong, and these even include some level of judging reasonable errors from unreasonable errors. When a machine gets it wrong, who do we blame?

At least we won’t have to worry about it obtaining god-like powers over our society…

How much inaccuraciy would that be ?

Just like the hype with AI and the billions of dollars going into it. There’s something there but it’s a big fat unknown right now whether any part of the investment will actually pay off - everyone needs it to work to justify any amount of the growth of the tech industry right now. When everyone needs a thing to work, it starts to really lose the fundamentals of being an actual product. I’m not saying it’s not useful, but is it as useful as the valuations and investments need it to be? Time will tell.

This insistence on comparing machines to humans to excuse the machine is as tiring as it is fallacious.

As others hinted at, there's some bias because it's coming from a computer, but I think it's far more nuanced than that.

I've worked with many experts and professionals through my career ranging across medicine, various types of engineers, scientists, academics, researchers and so on and the pattern I often see is the level of certainty presented that always bothers me and the same is often embedded in LLM responses.

While humans don't typically quantify the certainty of their statements, the best SMEs I've ever worked with make it very clear what level of certainty they have when making professional statements. The SMEs who seem to be more often wrong than not speak in certainty quite often (some of this is due to cultural pressures and expectations surrounding being an "expert").

In this case, I would expect a seasoned scientist to say something in response to the duck question that: "many rubber ducks exist and are designed to float, this one very well might, we'd really need to test it or have far more information about the composition of the duck, the design, the medium we want it in (Water? Mecury? Helium?)" and so on. It's not an exact answer but you understand there's uncertainty there and we need to better clarify our question and the information surrounding that question. The fact is, it's really complex to know if it'll float or not from visual information alone.

It could have an osmimum ball inside that overcomes most the assumed buoyancy the material contains, including the air demonstrated to make it squeak. It's not transparent. You don't know for sure and the easiest way to alleviate uncertainty in this case is simply to test it.

There's so much uncertainty in the world, around what seem like the most certain and obvious things. LLMs seem to have grabbed some of this bad behavior from human language and culture where projecting confidence is often better (for humans) than being correct.

Deception isn't always outright lying. This video was deceitful in form and content and presentation. Their product can't do what they're implying it can, and it was put together specifically to mislead people into thinking it was comparable in capabilities to gpt-4v and other competitor's tech.

Working for Google AI has to be infuriating. They're doing some of the most cutting edge research with some of the best and brightest minds in the field, but their shitty middle management and marketing people are doing things that undermine their credibility and make them look like untrustworthy fools. They're a year or more behind OpenAI and Anthropic, barely competitive with Meta, and they've spent billions of dollars more than any other two companies, with a trashcan fire for a tech demo.

It remains to be seen whether they can even outperform Mistral 7b or some of the smaller open source models, or if their benchmark numbers are all marketing hype.

LLMs do none of this. They pose as a confident expert on almost everything, and are just as likely to spit out BS as a true answer. They don't cite their sources, and if you ask for the source sometimes they provide ones that don't contain the information cited or don't even exist. If you hired a researcher and they did that you wouldn't hire them again.

If a tool is broken, you seek to fix it. You don't just say "ah yeah it's a broken tool, but it's better than nothing!"

All these LLM releases are amazing pieces of technology and the progress lately is incredible. But don't rag on people critiquing it, how else will it get better? Certainly not by accepting its failings and overlooking them.

They might have been trained/prompted with misinformation, but then it's the people doing the training/prompting who are lying, still not the LLM.

The ones that do are people I do my best to avoid interacting with.

LLMs act more like the latter, than the former.

If by ship, you mean put directly into the public domain then yes.

https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/publications/2023/08/...

and for more interesting takes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WXvfeTPujU&

Is there some sense in which this isn't obvious to the point of triviality? I keep getting confused because other people seem to keep being surprised that LLMs don't have correctness as a property. Even the most cursory understanding of what they're doing understands that it is, fundamentally, predicting words from other words. I am also capable of predicting words from other words, so I can guess how well that works. It doesn't seem to include correctness even as a concept.

Right? I am actually genuinely confused by this. How is that people think it could be correct in a systematic way?

I mean apply this logic to a boat, right? Is the entire atmosphere part of the boat? Are we all on this boat as well? Is it a cruise boat? If so, where is my drink?

> Oh, it it's squeaking then it's definitely going to float.

> It is a rubber duck.

> It is made of a material that is less dense than water.

Full points for saying if it's squeaking then it's going to float.

Full points for saying it's a rubber duck, with the implication that rubber ducks float.

Even with all that context though, I don't see how "it is made of a material that is less dense than water" scores any points at all.

Disagree. It could easily be solid rubber. Also, it's not made of rubber, and the model didn't claim it was made of rubber either, so it's irrelevant.

> It floats because it's rubber [with air] as opposed to being a ceramic figurine or painted metal.

A ceramic figurine or painted metal in the same shape would float too. The claim that it floats because of the density of the material is false. It floats because the shape is hollow.

> It's not false to say a house is made of wood.

It's false to say a house is made of air simply because its shape contains air.

Also, lighter-than-air balloons are intentionally filled with helium and sealed; rubber ducks are not sealed and contain air only incidentally. A balloon in a vacuum would still contain helium (if strong enough) but would not rise, while a rubber duck in a vacuum would not contain air but would still easily float on a liquid of similar density to water.

The reason why it seems like a nitpick is that this is such an inconsequential thing. Yeah, it's a false statement but it doesn't really matter in this case, nobody is relying on this answer for anything important. But the point is, in cases where it does matter these models cannot be trusted. A human would realize when the context is serious and requires accuracy; these models don't.

Of course the ultimate skeptic would say one test doesn't prove that all rubber ducks are the same. I'm sure someone at some point in history has made a rubber duck out of material that is less dense than water. But I invite you to try it yourself and I expect you will see the same result unless your rubber duck is quite atypical.

Yes, the models will frequently give accurate answers if you ask them this question. That's kind of the point. Despite knowing that they know the answer, you still can't trust them to be correct.

AI is in the "hold it together with hope and duct tape" phase, and marketing videos claiming otherwise are easy to spot and debunk.

Reading the comments of all these disillusioned developers, it’s already damaged them because now smart people will be extra dubious when Google starts making claims.

They just made it harder for themselves to convince developers to even try their APIs, let alone bet on them.

This was stupid.

All they've done is completely destroy my trust in anything they present.

This is common in all industries. Take gaming, for example. Game publishers love this kind of publicity, as it creates hype, which leads to sales. There have been numerous examples of this over the years: Watch Dogs, No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. There's a period of controversy once consumers realize they've been duped, the company releases some fake apology and promises or doubles down, but they still walk out of it richer, and ready to do it again next time.

It's absolutely insidious, and should be heavily fined and regulated.

But I recognize we're all different programmers in different circumstances. But at a minimum, I'd like to be honest with my work. My bosses seem to agree with me and I've never been pressured into hosting a fake demo or lie about the features.

In most cases, demos are needed because there's that dogfood problem. Its just not possible for me to know how my (prospective) customers will use my code. So I need to show off what has been coded, my progress, and my intentions for the feature set. In response, the (prospective) customer may walk away, they may have some comments that increases the odds of adoption, or they think its cool and amazing and take it on the spot. We can go back and forth with regards to feature changes or what is possible, but that's how things should work.

------------

I've done a few "I could do it like this" demos, where everyone in the room knew that I didn't finish the code yet and its just me projecting into the future of how code would work and/or how it'd be used. But everyone knew the code wasn't done yet (despite that, I've always delivered on what I've promised).

There is a degree of professional ethics I'd expect from my peers. Hosting honest demos is one of them, especially with technical audience members.

The eventual removal of that tier and anything even close speaks to Google's general issues with cancelling services, but that doesn't mean it was less real while it existed.