Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

41–50 of 683 posts

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

#42

Good, that video was mostly annoying and creepy. The AI responses as shown in the linked Google dev blogpost are a lot more reasonable and helpful. BTW I agree that the way the original video was made seems quite misleading in retrospect. But that's also par for the course for AI "demos", it's an enduring tradition in that field and part of its history. You really have to look at production systems and ignore "demos"…

>You really have to look at production systems and ignore "demos" and pointless proofs of concept.

While I agree, I wouldn't call proofs or concepts and demos pointless. They often illustrate a goal or target functionality you're working towards. In some cases it's really just a matter of allotting some time and resources to go from a concept to a product, no real engineering is needed, it all exists, but there's capital needed to get there.

Meanwhile some proof of concepts skip steps and show higher level function that needs some serious breakthrough work to get to, maybe multiple steps of that. Even this is useful because it illustrates a vision that may be possible so people can understand and internalize things you're trying to do or the real potential impact of something. That wasn't done here, it was embedded in a side note. That information needs to be before the demo to some degree without throwing a wet blanket on everything and needs to be in the same medium as the demo itself so it's very clear what you're seeing.

I have no problem with any of that. I have a lot of problems when people don't make it explicitly clear beforehand that it's a demo and explain earnestly what's needed. Is it really something that exists today in working systems someone just needs to invest money and wire it up without new research needed? Or is it missing some breakthroughs, how many/what are they, how long have these things been pursued, how many people are working on them... what does recent progress look like and so on (in a nice summarized fashion).

Any demo/poc should come up front with an earnest general feasibility assessment. When a breakthrough or two are needed then that should skyrocket. If it's just a lot of expensive engineering then that's also a challenge but tractable.

I've given a lot of scientific tech demonstrations over the years and the businesses behind me obviously want me to be as vague as possible to pull money in. I of course have some of those same incentives (I need to eat and pay my mortgage like everyone else). None-the-less the draw of science to me has always been pulling the veil from deception and mystery and I'm a firm believer in being as upfront as possible. If you don't lead with disclaimers, imaginations run wild into what can be done today. Adding disclaimers helps imaginations run wild about what can be done tomorrow, which I think is great.

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

#43
post #16

I'll admit I was fooled. I didn't read the description of the video. The most impressive thing they showed was the real-time responses to watching a video. Everything else was about expected. Very misleading and sad Google would so obviously fake a demo like this. Mentioning in the description that it's edited is not really in the realm of doing enough to make clear the fakery.

i too was excited and duped about the real-time implications. though i'm not surprised at all to find out it's false. mea cupla i should have looked at the bottom of the description box on youtube where it probably says "this demonstration is based on an actual interaction with an LLM"

I'm surprised it was false. It was made to look realistic and I wouldn't expect Google to fake this kind of thing.

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

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

#44
post #33
post #4

The video itself and the video description give a disclaimer to this effect. Agreed that some will walk away with an incorrect view of how Gemini functions, though. Hopefully realtime interaction will be part of an app soon. Doesn’t seem like there would be too many technical hurdles there.

The disclaimer in the description is "For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity." That's different from "Gemini was shown selected still images and not video".

What I found impressive about it was the voice, the fast real-time response to video, and the succinct responses. So apparently all of that was fake. You got me, Google.

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

#45

I have used Swype texting since the t9 days. If I demoed swype texting as it functions in my day to day life to someone used to a querty keyboard they would never adopt it The rate at which it makes wrong assumptions about the word, or I have to fix it is probably 10% to 20% of the time However because it’s so easy to fix this is not an issue and it doesn’t slow me down at all. So within the context of the different…

Does swype make editing easier somehow? iOS spellcheck has negative value. I turned it off years ago and it reduced errors but there are still typos to fix.

Unfortunately iOS text editing is also completely worthless. It forces strange selections and inserts edited text in awkward ways.

I’m a QWERTY texter but text entry on iOS is a complete disaster that has only gotten worse over time.

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

#47
post #8
post #3

Yes, that was obvious as soon as I saw it wasn’t live I clicked off. You can train any LLM to perform a certain task(s) well and google engineers are not that dense. This was obvious marketing PR as open AI has completely made google basically obsolete with 90% of my queries can be answered without wading through LLM generated text for a simple answer.

>without wading through LLM generated text ...OpenAI solved this by generating LLM text for you to wade through?

GPT4 search is a very good experience.

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.

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

#48

I have used Swype texting since the t9 days. If I demoed swype texting as it functions in my day to day life to someone used to a querty keyboard they would never adopt it The rate at which it makes wrong assumptions about the word, or I have to fix it is probably 10% to 20% of the time However because it’s so easy to fix this is not an issue and it doesn’t slow me down at all. So within the context of the different…

What is the latency is Swype? < 10ms? Not at all comparable to the video.

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

#49
post #10

The Twitter-linked Bloomberg page is now down.[1] Alternative page: [2] New page says it was partly faked. Can't find old page in archives. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-07/google... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-07/google...

I am similarly enraged when TV show characters respond to text messages faster than humans can type. It destroys the realism of my favorite rom-coms.
Post reply on HN