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

simonwillison.net

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

#371
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently moved my macOS installation to an external Thunderbolt drive - it's faster than the internal SSD.

Can you share the Thunderbolt drive you got?

https://glyphtech.com/products/atom-pro?variant=321211999191...

Shipped to the UK for me added a bit to the overall price with shipping and import duty but it was still better value for money and hugely reliable brand than anything I could have bought domestically.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently moved my macOS installation to an external Thunderbolt drive - it's faster than the internal SSD.

Considering storage is a wasting asset and what Apple charges, this makes perfect sense to me.

The funny thing is Apple even have a support article on how to do this (and actually say in it "may improve your performance") I literally followed it step by step and it was very easy and had no issues.

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

#373

> It looks like the safety filter may have taken offense to the word “Cocktail”! I opened up the safety settings, dialled them down to “low” for every category and tried again. It appeared to refuse a second time. Google really is its own worst enemy. Their risk management people have completely taken over the organization to a point where somehow the smartest computers ever created are afraid of using dangerous word…

It just goes to show that the big corporations can't be trusted to develop this technology. Their incentives are too skewed. We need open/public organizations working on this stuff.

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody would complain on HN if Google Gemini was generating pictures of Lincoln existing as a... gasp ... white person. This absurd level of woke censorship is not doing them any good.

If you put in a fictional story that in the future computers could generate any image, but would refuse to make images of Lincoln as a white person, people would tell you you were an absolute lunatic confabulating paranoid fantasies that were ludicrous strawmen, but here we are. It's almost as if we should remove "slippery slope" from the list of informal fallacies since lately it's been more true to reality than not…

I never said white Lincoln would be the "only" thing censored. It's a prototypical example of the actual censorship that's going on.

And you accuse me of strawmen?

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

#375
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.

No result is better than misinformation.

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Sounds like you'd choose the default woke option, and I'd choose the non-woke option. Choice is healthy. This world will leave you behind if you elect to substitute choice with monolithic wokism or any over-correcting ideology. Meanwhile: > Google is racing to fix its new AI-powered tool for creating pictures, after claims it was over-correcting against the risk of being racist. "It's missing the mark here," said Jac…

So, when you read here that they are fixing it, is that a good thing to you? Do you think that means they are turning down the censorship knob? Because in reality they are only replacing the feedback they already have in place with different feedback.

Again, there is simply no such thing as an "uncensored" model if what you mean by that is something that performs as well as Gemini (or whatever) but has zero external input from human beings. This is just like a basic point about how these things work. Its a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology to say that there is some inner pure "real" model underlying the censored one.

Also why am I "woke" for pointing these things out to you? For dismissing the dichotomy, I am now somehow put on one side of it? Do you really feel this kind of overarching antagonism with everybody? I do not really see myself in either camp here.. I can barely grasp what you guys are even arguing about most of the time!

I'm sorry if I was harsh, but not sorry for being dismissive. There are so many more important things to be worked up about than the performative politics of a giant corporation. It literally means nothing, and changes with the wind. It's like thinking it will never stop raining outside and getting really worked up about it.

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that bad. With Perfect Memory AI I see ~9GB a month. That's 108 GB/year. HDD/SSDs are getting bigger than that every year. The storage also varies by what you do, your workflow and display resolution. Here's an article I wrote on my finding of storage requirements. https://www.perfectmemory.ai/support/storage-resources/stora... And if you want to use the data for LLM only, then you don't need to store the sc…

> That's 108 GB/year. HDD/SSDs are getting bigger than that every year. Cries in MacBook Pro

It's Windows only so it won't run on your Mac anyway :-)

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

#379

> It looks like the safety filter may have taken offense to the word “Cocktail”! I opened up the safety settings, dialled them down to “low” for every category and tried again. It appeared to refuse a second time. Google really is its own worst enemy. Their risk management people have completely taken over the organization to a point where somehow the smartest computers ever created are afraid of using dangerous word…

It could be worse.

I once triggered temporary block (session refused to return anything) when using GitHub copilot because of variable names.

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

#380
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any plan to implement this on macOS or Linux?

I got 90% of this built on Linux (around KDE Wayland) before other interests/priorities took over: https://github.com/Zetaphor/screendiary/

This seems very very interesting. I'm still learning python so probably can't build on this. But like a cheap mans' version of this would be to take a screenshot every couple of minutes, OCR it and send to it gpt for some kind of processing (or not, just keep it as a log). Right? Or am I missing something?
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