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

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

#401

That's not the only thing wrong. Gemini makes a false statement in the video, serving as a great demonstration of how these models still outright lie so frequently, so casually, and so convincingly that you won't notice, even if you have a whole team of researchers and video editors reviewing the output. It's the single biggest problem with LLMs and Gemini isn't solving it. You simply can't rely on them when correctn…

This seems to be a common view among some folks. Personally, I'm impartial. Search or even asking other expert human beings are prone to provide incorrect results. I'm unsure where this expectation of 100% absolute correctness comes from. I'm sure there are use cases, but I assume it's the vast minority and most can tolerate larger than expected inaccuracies.

There's a huge difference between demonstrating something with fuzzy accuracy and playing something off as if it's giving good, correct answers. An honest way to handle that would be to highlight where the bot got it wrong instead of running with the answer as if it was right.

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.

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

#402
OK I get that everyone’s hype sensitive and I absolutely remain to be convinced on Gemini’s actual ability

BUT

The fact this wasn’t realtime or with voice is not the issue. Voice to text could absolutely capture this conversation easily. And from what I’ve seen Gemini seems quicker than GPT4

Being able to respond quicker and via voice chat is not actually a big deal.

The underlying performance of the model is what we should be focussing on

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say it again and again: sales, sales. Money is earned in enterprise domains. And this business is so totally different to Google in every way imaginable. Senior Managers love customer support, SLAs - Google loves automation. Two worlds collide.

Google Workspace works through resellers, they train less people, and those people give the customer support instead. IMO Google's bad reputation comes from their public customer support.

If you want the kind of support that, when there is a fault with the product, can get the fault fixed - then unfortunately Google Workspace's support is also trash.

Good if you want someone else to google the error message for you though.

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

#404
post #259

This is so crazy. Google invented transformers which is the bases for all these models. How do they keep fumbling like this over and over. Google Docs created in 2006! Microsoft is eating their lunch. Google creates the ability to change VM's in place and makes a fully automated datacenter. Amazon and Microsoft are killing them in the cloud. Google has been working on self driving longer than anyone. Tesla is catchin…

I was at MS in 2008 September and internally they had a very beautiful and well functioning Office web already (named differently, forgot the name but it wasn't sharepoint if I recall correctly, I think it had to do something with expense reports?) that would put Google Docs to shame today. They just didn't want to cannibalize their own product.

Classic innovator’s dilemma!

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

#405
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying we need a Ministry of Truth to protect people from themselves? This is the same argument used to suppress "harmful" speech on any medium.

I've gotten to the point where I want "advertisment" stamped on anything that is, and I'm getting to the point I want "fiction" stamped on anything that is. I have no problem with fiction existing. It can be quite fun. People trying to pass fiction as fact is a problem though. Trying to force a "fact" stamp would be problematic though, so I'd rather label everything else. How to enforce it is the real sticky wicket t…

And who gets to control the "fiction" stamp? Especially for hot button topics like covid (back in 2020)? Should asking an LLM about lab leak theory be auto-stamped with "fiction" since it's not proven? But then what if it's proven later?

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

#406
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google really hasn't launched a decent in-house product since Gmail What about Chrome? And Chromebooks?

Sorry if this was a joke and I didn't spot it. Chrome was based on WebKit which was itself based on KHTML if memory serves. Chromebooks are based on a version of that outside engine running on top of Linux which they also didn't create.

Chrome as a project was still a Google thing even if they used Konqueror's rendering library.

The process model was the novel selling point at the time from my memory [1].

[1] https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone use paid GSuite for anything other than docs/drive/Gmail ? In all companies I've worked at, we've used GSuite exclusively for those, and used slack/discord for chat, and zoom/discord for video/meetings. I know that MS Teams is a more full-featured product suite, but even at companies that used it, we still used Zoom for meetings.

My company uses Meet. It works great! I like it more than Zoom.

It's a lot better than it used to be. In 2020, universities that already had GSuite (which includes Meet) still paid to put their classes on Zoom. Personally I like Zoom more today, mostly because even my high-end laptop can struggle with Meet.

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

#408

A big red flag for me was that Sundar was prompting the model to report lots of facts that can be either true or false. We all saw the benchmark figures that they published and the results mostly showed marginal improvements. In other words, the issue of hallucination has not been solved. But the demo seemed to imply that it had. My conclusion was that they had mostly cherry picked instances in which the model happen…

i think this was demonstrated in that mark rober promo video[1] where he asked why the paper airplane stalled by blatantly leading the witness. "do you believe that a pocket of hot air would lead to lower air pressure causing my plane to stall?" he could barely even phrase the question correctly because it was so awkward. just embarrassing. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHZSrtl4zX0&t=277s

Yeah, this was so obvious too. Clearly Mark Rober tried to ask it what to try and got stupid answers, then tried to give it clues and had to get really specific before he got a usable answer.

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at MS in 2008 September and internally they had a very beautiful and well functioning Office web already (named differently, forgot the name but it wasn't sharepoint if I recall correctly, I think it had to do something with expense reports?) that would put Google Docs to shame today. They just didn't want to cannibalize their own product.

Microsoft demoed Office Web Apps in 2008 L.A PDC it seems: https://www.wired.com/2008/10/pdc-2008-look-out-google-docs-...

Funny, I asked Google Bard to guess what the actual product name was from the comment.

"It was probably Office Web Apps. It was a web-based office suite that was introduced in 2008. It included Word Web App, Excel Web App, Powerpoint Web App, and OneNote Web App. It was not SharePoint, but it was based on SharePoint technology."

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

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google always does fake advertising. “Unlimited” google drive accounts for example. They just have such a beastly legal team no one is going to challenge them on anything like that.

What was fake about unlimited google drive? There were some people using petabytes. 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.

What about when gmail was released and the storage was advertised as increasing forever, but at first they just increased it infinitesimally slower and then stopped increasing it all.
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