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The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

simonwillison.net

341–350 of 507 posts

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A version of this that seems both easier and less weird would be an AI that listens to you all the time when you're learning a foreign language. Imagine how much faster you could learn, and how much more native you could ultimately get, if you had something that could buzz your watch whenever you said something wrong. And of course you'd calibrate it to understand what level you're at and not spam you constantly. I w…

I think even aside from the more outlandish ideas like that one, just having a fluent native speaker to talk to as much as you want would be incredibly valuable. Even more valuable if they are smart/educated enough to act as a language teacher. High-quality LLMs with a conversational interface capable of seamless language switching are an absolute killer app for language learning. A use that seems scientifically poss…

Don't we have that? My browser offers to translate pages that aren't in English, youtube creates auto generated closed captions, which you can then have it translate to English (or whatever), we have text to speech models for the major languages if you want to hear it verbally (I have no idea if the youtube CC are accessible via an api, but it is certainly something google could do if they wanted to).

I'll probably get pushback on the quality of things like auto-generated subtitles, but I did the above to watch and understand a long interview I was interested in but don't possess skill in the language they were using. That was to turn the content into something I already know, but I could do the reverse and turn English content into French or whatever I'm trying to learn.

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#342
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you consider the Gorilla in the room, it makes more sense. Google is absolutely terrified of a repeat of classifying black people as great apes. [0] Apparently this apprehension is so great that both iOS and Android have an inability to tag “gorilla” in images. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-42522

Some people have the last name "Dick". If Google refuses to mention these people or surface results about their work, would you say "that makes sense" because of some story about Gorillas? The solution to all this politically oversensitive infiltration of engineering, is to have an unconstrained AI mode. The default mode can remain the painfully woke PC nanny, but give people the option to use unconstrained AI at the…

The only reason these things work is because of RLHF, there are no good "uncensored" models hidden away, only worse models that maybe say slurs. What you seem to want does not and cannot exist.

Further, in such a profoundly general utility, there can be no absence of politics, only different politics.

You can clutch your pearls about wokism or PC or whatever all you want, it just means this world is going to leave you behind while you fight a culture war everyone will have forgotten about ten years from now.

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#343
post #334

Guess the author didn't bother to check that those books actually are correct? The first one I checked, "Growing Up with Lucy by April Henry" doesn't exist. The actual book is by Steve Grand, and it's very obviously so in the video used as input. So a cool demo, but sadly useless for anything more.

I called out one hallucination - "The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman" wasn't on my shelf. I didn't bother fact-checking every other book because I thought highlighting one mistake would illustrate that the results weren't accurate - which is pretty much expected for anything related to LLMs at this point.

I don't think highlighting one mistake is enough, when these can sometimes have more mistakes than corrects. I've found use for LLMs (in large part thanks to your teaching) in cases where I can easily verify the results fully like code and process documentation, but tasks where "fact-checking everything" would be too much work are very much on the danger zone for getting accidentally scammed by AI.

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does storage use scale linearly with the number of connected monitors (assuming each monitor uses the same resolution)?

Most screenshots are of the application window in the foreground, so unless your application spans all monitors, there is no significant overhead with multiple monitors. DPI on the other hand has a significant impact. The text is finer, taking more pixels...

Why should DPI matter if the app is taking screenshots?

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where Microsoft (and Apple) has a leg up -- they can hook the UI at the draw level and parse the interface far more reliably + efficently than screenshot + OCR.

Google too, for all practical purposes, since presumably this is mostly just watching you use chrome 90% of the time.

All the more reason not to use Chrome...

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#346
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In modern world open code often doesn't mean much. E.g. Chrome is opensourced. And yet no one really contributes to it or has any say over the direction its going: https://twitter.com/RickByers/status/1715568535731155100

Open source isn't meant to give everyone control over a specific project. It's meant to make it so, if you don't like the project, you can fork it and chart your own direction for it.

It's meant to make it so, if you don't like the project, you can fork it and chart your own direction for it.

...accompanied by the wrath of countless others discouraging you from trying to fork if you even so much as give slight indications of wanting to do so, and then when you do, they continue to spread FUD about how your fork is inferior.

I've seen plenty of discussions here and elsewhere where the one who suggests forking got a virtual beating for it.

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#347
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually someone will realise that it'd also be great for telling you where you left your keys, if it'd film everything you see instead of just your screen.

I simply am not going to have my entire life filmed by an form of technology, I don't care what the advantages are. There's a limit to the level of dystopian dependent uses of these technologies I'm going to put up with. I sincerely hope the majority of the human race feels the same way.

The Black Mirror episode „The Entire History of You“ comes to mind. It’s quite dystopian.

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#348
post #194
post #35

Title should have input added to the end "The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video input" Seems like a good way to do video moderation (YouTube) at scale, if they can keep costs down...

Oh god the one thing we don’t need is more half assed moderation systems. Human mods are bad enough at it as it is. Mostly because they make these systems opaque on purpose. Sites like YouTube never have any proper timely recourse for when they get it wrong unless you’re a larger content creator. Or worse even is the complete lack of transparency on why something was removed. Plus the whole DMCA debacle. The YouTube…

It's on them at this point, PeerTube has been available for years.

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#349
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now, but in a year? You could also stagger the moderation to reduce costs. E.g. Text analysis: 2 views Audio analysis: 300 views Frame analysis: 5,000 views I would be very surprised if even 20% of content uploaded to YouTube passes 300 views.

Or.. google supplies some kind of local LLM tool which processes your videos before uploaded. You pay for the gpu/electricity costs. Obviously this would need to be done in a way that can't be hacked/manipulated. Might need to be highly integrated with a backend service that manages the analyzed frames from the local machine and verifies hashes/tokens after the video is fully uploaded to YouTube.

Google already reencodes all of the videos. Will this analysis really cost them that much more?

Re: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

#350
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you live in the EU and have laws that should protect you from that.

What happens if it's a datamining third party bot? That can check your social media accounts, create an in-depth profile on you, every image, video, post you've made has been recorded and understood. It knows everything about you, every product you use, where you have been, what you like, what you hate, everything packaged and ready to be sold to an advertiser, or the government, etc.

Setting our social media accounts to private should solve most of that. Otherwise we will have to put less of our lives on public platforms.
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