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Comment by CapcomGo | Hacker News Reader

But that's not the point of this update

I know, and I know my comment is dismissive of the incredible work shown here, as we’re shown sci-fi level tech. But I feel I have this kettle, that boils water in 10min, and it really should boil it in 1, but instead is now voice operated.

I hope the next version delivers on being smarter, as this update instead of making me excited, makes me feel they’ve reached a plateau on the improvement of the core value and are distracting us with fluff instead

Sure, but "not enough, I want moar" is a trivial demand. So trivial that it goes unsaid.

It's equivalent to "nothing to see here" which is exactly the TLDR I was looking for.

Everything is amazing & Nobody is happy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U

gpt4 isn't quite "amazing" in terms of commercial use. Gpt4 is often good, and also often mediocre or bad. Its not going to change the world, it needs to get better.

It's an impressive demo, it's not (yet) an impressive product.

It seems like the people who are ohhing and ahhing at the former and the people who are frustrated that this kind of this is unbelivably impractical to productize will be doomed to talk past one another forever. The text generation models, image generation models, speech-to-text and text-to-speech have reached impressive product stages. Multi-model hasn't got there because no one is really sure what to actually do with the thing outside of make cool demos.

Multi modal isn't there because "this is an image of a green plant" is viable in a demo, but its not commercially viable. "This is an image of a monstera deliciosa" is commercially viable, but not yet demoable. The models need to improve to be usable.

Near real-time voice feedback isn't amazing? Has the bar risen this high?

I already know an application for this, and AFAIK it's being explored in the SaaS space: guided learning experiences and tutoring for individuals.

My kids, for instance, love to hammer Alexa with random questions. They would spend a huge amount of time using a better interface, esp. with quick feedback, that provided even deeper insight and responses to them.

Taking this and tuning it to specific audiences would make it a great tool for learning.

"My kids, for instance, love to hammer Alexa with random questions. They would spend a huge amount of time using a better interface, esp. with quick feedback, that provided even deeper insight and responses to them."

Great, using GPT-4 the kids will be getting a lot of hallucinated facts returned to them. There are good use cases for tranformer currently but they're not at the "impact company earnings or country GDP" stage currently, which is the promise that the whole industry has raised/spent 100+B dollars on. Facebook alone is spending 40B on AI. I believe in the AI future, but the only thing that matters for now is that the models improve.

I always double-check even the most obscure facts returned by GPT-4 and have yet to see a hallucination (as opposed to Claude Opus that sometimes made up historical facts). I doubt stuff interesting to kids would be so out of the data distribution to return a fake answer.

Compared to YouTube and Google SEO trash, or Google Home / Alexa (which do search + wiki retrieval), at the moment GPT-4 and Claude are unironically safer for kids: no algorithmic manipulation, no ads, no affiliated trash blogs, and so on. Bonus is that it can explain on the level of complexity the child will understand for their age

Yet.... https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05905

My kids get erroneous responses from Alexa. This happens all the time. The built-in web search doesn't provide correct answers, or is confusing outright. That's when they come to me or their Mom and we provide a better answer.

I still see this as a cool application. Anything that provides easier access to knowledge and improved learning is a boon.

I'd rather worry about the potential economic impact than worry about possible hallucinations from fun questions like "how big is the sun?" or "what is the best videogame in the world?", etc.

There's a ton you can do here, IMO.

Take a look at mathacademy.com, for instance. Now slap a voice interface on it, provide an ability for kids/participants to ask questions back and forth, etc. Boom: you've got a math tutor that guides you based on your current ability.

What if we could get to the same style of learning for languages? For instance, I'd love to work on Spanish. It'd be far more accessible if I could launch a web browser and chat through my mic in short spurts, rather than crack open Anki and go through flash cards, or wait on a Discord server for others to participate in immersive conversation.

Tons of cool applications here, all learning-focused.

People should be more worried about how much this will be exploited by scammers. This thing is miles ahead of the crap fraudsters use to scam MeeMaw out of her life savings.

Watch the last few minutes of that linked video, Mira strongly hints that there’s another update coming for paid users and seems to make clear that GPT4o is moreso for free tier users (even though it is obviously a huge improvement in many features for everyone).

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