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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

#571

Post by amatwl »

sourcegrift wrote: post #329
DonnyV wrote: 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.

NetDocs was an effort in 2000/2001 that is sometimes characterized as a web productivity suite. There was an internal battle between the Netdocs and Office groups, and Office won.

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

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

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

#572

Post by lloeki »

im3w1l wrote: post #484
10u152 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, I work with industrial control systems. We’d call this “smoke and mirrors”. Sometimes the client would insist on seeing a small portion of a large project working well before it was ready. They’d misunderstand that 90% of the bulk of the work is not visible to the user but they’d want to see a finished state. We’d set up a dummy HMI and have someone pressing buttons on it for the demo, and someone in the nex…

To me it sounds like a useful thing, for communicating your vision and getting early feedback on whether you are building the right thing. Like uh, a live action blueprint. Let's say the client is like "Email???? That's no good. It needs to be a text message". Now you have saved yourself the trouble of implementing email.

Definitely a useful thing to do to validate UI/UX/fitness.

Relying on blackbox components first mocked then later swapped (or kept for testing) with the real implementation is also a thing, especially when dealing with hardware. It's a bit hard to put moisture sensors on CI!

That said...

I would have recommended at least being open about it being a mockup, but even when doing so I've had customers telling me "so why can't you release this tomorrow since it's basically done!? why is there still two months worth of work, you're trying to rip us off!!!"

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

#573

Post by sinuhe69 »

dougmwne wrote: post #83

I was fooled. The model release announcement said it could accept video and audio multi-modal input. I understood that there was a lot of editing and cutting, but I really believed I was looking at an example of video and audio input. I was completely impressed since it’s quite a leap to go from text and still images to “eyes and ears.” There’s even the segment where instruments are drown and music was generated. I t…

I, too, was fooled to think Gemini has seen and heard through a video/audio feed instead of showing still images and prompting though text. While it might seem not much difference between still images and a video feed, in fact it requires a lot of (changing) context understanding to not make the bot babbling like an idiot all the time. It also requires the bot to recognize the “I don’t know it yet” state to keep appropriate silence in a conversation with live video feed, which is notoriously difficult with generative AI. Certainly one can do some hacking, build in some heuristics to make it easier, but to make a bot seems like a human partner in a conversion is indeed very hard. And that has been the most impressive aspect of the showed “conversations”, which are unfortunately all faked :(

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

#574

Post by sinuhe69 »

I, too, was fooled to think Gemini has seen and heard through a video/audio feed instead of showing still images and prompting though text. While it might seem not much difference between still images and a video feed, in fact it requires a lot of (changing) context understanding to not make the bot babbling like an idiot all the time. It also requires the bot to recognize the “I don’t know it yet” state to keep appropriate silence in a conversation with live video feed, which is notoriously difficult with generative AI. Certainly one can do some hacking, build in some heuristics to make it easier, but to make a bot seems like a human partner in a conversion is indeed very hard. And that has been the most impressive aspect of the showed “conversations”, which are unfortunately all faked :(

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

#575

Post by Shorel »

lumost wrote: post #398
renegade-otter wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't know how to do anything else. A product requires commitment, it requires grind. That 10% is the most critical one, and Google persistently refuses to push products across the finish line, just giving up on them and adding to the infamous Google Product Graveyard. Honestly, what is the point? They could just maintain the core search/ads and not pay billions of dollars for tens of thousands of expensive…

If they tried to focus on ads, then they wouldn’t have the talent to support the business. They probably don’t need 17 chat apps - but they can’t start saying no without having other problems.

They only hire some talent to prevent other companies to hire them.

It's a way to strangle the competition. But also not good for the industry in general.

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

#576

Post by mejutoco »

onion2k wrote: post #547
DonnyV wrote: 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…

None of that matters. They'll still make heaps of profit long into the future unless someone beats them in Search or Ads. AI is a threat there, but it'd require an AI company to transform the culture of Internet use to stop people 'Googling', and that will require two things: something significantly better than Google Search that's worth switching to, and a company that is willing to reject whatever offer Google make…

I would love to see internal data on volume of search at google. Depending on the interpretation of them chatGPT can meet both of your requirements. Personally, I still search instead of chatGPT mostly, but I have seen other users chatGPT more and more.

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

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

#577

Post by wokwokwok »

phire wrote: post #552
wokwokwok wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree: but I just wanted to say that there are specific subdomains where you can mitigate some of these issues. For example, generating json. You can explicitly follow a defined grammar to get what will always be a valid json output. Similarly, structured output such as code can be passed to other tools such as compilers, type checkers and test suites to ensure that at a minimum the output you selected passes some…

I agree that the "forcing valid json output" is super cool. But it's unrelated to the problem of LLM hallucinations. A hallucination that's been validated as correct json is still a hallucination. And if your problem space is simple enough that you can validate the output of an LLM well enough to prove it's free of hallucinations, then your problem space doesn't need an LLM to solve it.

> your problem space doesn’t need an LLM to solve it

Hmmm… kinda opinion right?

I’m saying; in specific situations, you can validate the output and aggregate solutions based on deterministic criteria to mitigate hallucinations.

You can use statistical methods (eg. There’s a project out there that generates tests and uses “on average tests pass” as a validation criteria) to reduce the chance of an output hallucination to probability threshold that you’re prepared to accept… for certain types of problems.

That the problem space is trivial or not … that’s your opinion, right?

It has no bearing on the correctness of what I said.

There’s no specific reason to expect that just like you can validate output against a grammar to require output that is structurally correct, you can’t validate output against some logical criteria (eg. unit tests) to require output that is logically correct against the specified criteria.

It’s not particularly controversial.

Maybe the output isn’t perfectly correct if you don’t have good verification steps for your task, maybe the effort required to build those validators is high, I’m just saying: it is possible.

I expect we’ll see more of this; for example, this article about decision trees —> https://www.understandingai.org/p/how-to-think-about-the-ope..., requires no specific change in the architecture.

It’s just using validators or search the solution space.

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

#578

Post by robertlagrant »

hot_gril wrote: post #363
robertlagrant wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that Microsoft's craziness around buying Kin and Nokia, and Windows 8, RT edition, etc etc, was far more fundamental product misdirection than anything Google has ever done.

Microsoft failed to enter the mobile space, yeah. Google fumbled with the Nexus stuff, even though they succeeded with the Android software. But bigger picture, Microsoft was still able to diversify their revenue sources a lot while Google failed to do so.

That's true, although Pixel seems good as a successor, but the big thing Microsoft did was use what they had to get into new markets.

Procuring Azure is a good option for lots of companies because most companies' IT staff know AD and Microsoft in general, and Microsoft's cloud offers them a way to use the same (well, not the same, but it's too late by then) tools to manage their company IT.

I'm not disagreeing with its success, but I do think they had a much simpler journey, as to my understanding a lot of it involved cloudifying their locked-in enterprise customers, rather than diversifying into new markets.

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

#580

Post by larodi »

DonnyV wrote: 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…

Errr sorry what’s the innovation of google docs exactly ? Being able to write simultaneously with somebody else? Ok, so this is what it takes for a top notch docs app to exist? Microsoft been developing this product for ages, Google tried to steal the show, although had little to no experience in producing and marketing office apps…

Besides collaborative reuniting is a no feature and there is much more important stuff than this for a word processor to be useful.

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