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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

#531

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Is this cheating? It sounds like cheating and reflects quite poorly on you.

> It was our first comp sci class ever, we were given raspberry pi's. We had no coding experience or guidance, and were asked to create "something". Garbage in, garbage out.

Wow this is such an awful excuse.

Here’s a whole list of projects intended for kids.

https://all3dp.com/2/best-raspberry-pi-projects-for-kids/

It includes building out a whole weather station which includes a humidity sensor as one of the many things it can do.

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

#532

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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.

Don’t forget that McAfee was delivering virus scanning in a browser in 1998 with active x support, TinyMCE was full wysiwyg for content in the browser by 2004, and Google docs was released in 2006 on top of a huge ecosystem of document solutions and even some real-time co-authoring document writing platforms. 2008 is late to the party for a docs competitor! Microsoft got the runaround by Google and after Google launc…

Google Apps have several other problems as well.

1. Poor Google Drive interface makes managing documents difficult.

2. You cannot just get a first class Google Doc file which you can then share with others over email, etc. Very often you don’t want to just share a link to a document online.

3. Lack of desktop apps.

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

#533
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…

The difference seems to be the top leadership. Nadella is an all time great CEO. Pichai is an uninspired MBA-type.

Nadella is as much of an MBA type as Pichai. Their education and career paths are incredibly similar.

The difference is Nadella is a good CEO and Pichai isn’t.

Part of it could also be a result of circumstance. Nadella came at a time when MS was foundering and he had to make what appeared to be fairly obvious decisions (pivot to cloud…he was literally picked because of this, and reducing dependence on Windows…which was an obvious necessary step for the pivot to cloud). Pichai OTOH was selected to run Google when it was already doing pretty well. His biggest mandate was likely to not upset the Apple cart.

If roles were reversed, I suspect Nadella would still have been more successful than Pichai, but you never know. I’d Nadella introduction to the CEO job was to keep things going as they were, and Pichai’s was to change the entire direction of the company, maybe a decade later Pichai would have been the aggressive decision maker whereas Nadella would have been the overly cautious guy making canned demos.

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

#534
post #330

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…

Ever since the "stochastic parrots" and "super-autocomplete" criticisms of LLMs, the question is whether hallucinations are solvable in principle at all. And if hallucinations are solvable, it would of such basic and fundamental scientific importance that I think would be another mini-breakthrough in AI.

The best one I've run across so far is, "spicy autocomplete".

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

#535

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I was with you until the Tesla hot take. I'd bet dollars to donuts that Tesla doesn't get to level 4 by the end of the decade. Waymo is already there.

I agree, but I also bet Waymo doesn't exist by the end of the decade. Not just because it's Google but because it's hard to profit from.

I could see that in the coming years the value of Waymo for Google is not actually in collecting revenue from transportation fees but to collect multi modal data to feed into its models.

The amount of data that is collected by these cars is massive.

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

#536
post #81
post #75

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"The entire point of the layout is to keep your fingers on the home row." No, that is how you're told to type . You have to be told to type that way precisely because QWERTY is not designed to keep your fingers on the home row. If you type in a layout that is designed to do that, you don't need to be told to keep your fingers on the home row, because you naturally will. Nobody really knows what the designers were thi…

> Nobody really knows what the designers were thinking, which I do not mean as sarcasm, I mean it straight. History lost that information. My understanding of QWERTY layout is that it was designed so that characters frequently used in succession should not be able to be typed in rapid succession, so that typewriter hammers had less chance of colliding. Or is this an urban myth?

My understanding (which is my recollections of a dive into typewriter history decades ago) is that avoiding typebar collisions was a real concern, but that the general consensus was that the exact final layout was strongly influenced by allowing salesmen to quickly type out 'typewriter' on the top row of letters.

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

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineer-driven company. Not enough top-down direction on the products. Too much self-perceived moral high ground. But lately they've been changing this.

Uhh, no, not really; quite the opposite in fact. Under Eric Schmidt they were engineer-driven, during the golden era of the 2000s. Nowadays they're MBA driven, which is why they had 4 different messaging apps from different product managers.

The golden era of the 2000s produced no revenue stream other than ads on Google Search.

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

#538

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Is paid MS Teams is more or less common than paid GSuite? It's hard to find stats on this. GSuite is the better product IMO, but MS has a stronger b2b reputation, and anecdotally I hear more about people using Teams.

Gsuite is clearly a lot better product than Office365. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see many institutions make the wrong choice here. I base about 50% of my choice of employer on what they choose in that area.

GSuite is an awful product for an employer.

If you have a problem there’s no one available to help you.

On the MS side they will literally pull an engineer who is writing the code for the product you have a problem for to help resolve the issue if you’re large enough.

The part you see in your browser isn’t the only part of the product a company has to buy. In fact, it’s not even the most expensive bit. If you see the most expensive plans for most SAAS products (ie the enterprise plans) almost the entire difference in costs is driven by support illustrating the importance and value of support.

Google unfortunately is awful at this.

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we shouldn't be striving to make mediocrity. We should be striving to build better. Unless the devs of the bots are wanting to have a bot built on trying to deceive people, I just don't see the purpose of this. If we can "train" a bot and fine tune it, we should be fine tuning truth and telling it what absolutely is bullshit. To avoid the darker topics to keep the conversation on the rails, if there were a mi…

Sure, but current AI bots are just following the human feedback they get. If the feedback is naïve enough to score the factoid about rubber duckys as correct, guess what, that's the kind of thing these AI's will target. You can try to address this by prompting them with requests like "do you think this answer is correct and ethical? Think through this step by step" ('reinforcement learning from AI feedback') but that…

At the end of the day, if there is no definitive answer to a question, it should respond in such a manner. "While there are compelling reasons to think A or B, neither A nor B have been verified. They are just the leading theories." That would be a much better answer than "Option A is the answer even if some people think B is." when A is just as unproven as B, but because it answers so definitively, people think it is the right answer.

So the labels thing is something that obviously will never work. But the system has all of the information it needs to know if the question is definitively answerable. If it is not, do not phrase the response definitively. At this point, I'd be happy if it responded to "Is 1+1 = 2?" with a wish washy answer like, "Most people would agree that 1+1 = 2", and if it wanted to say "in base 10, that is the correct answer. however, in base 2, the 1+1 = 10" would also be acceptable. Fake it till you make it is not the solution here.

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting perspective on this I’ve heard discussed is whether hallucinations ought to be solved at all, or whether they are core to the way human intelligence works as well, in the sense that that is what is needed to produce narratives. I believe it is Hinton that prefers “confabulation” to “hallucination” because it’s more accurate. The example in the discussion about hallucination/confabulation was that of so…

> Without the ability to confabulate, he would have been unable to tell his story. You can tell a story without making up fiction. Just say you don’t know when you don’t know. Inaccurate information is worse than no information.

If “confabulation” is necessary, you can use confabulation for the use cases where it’s needed and turn it off for the use cases where you need to return actual “correct” information.
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