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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

#91
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its honestly pretty mind boggling that we’d even use querty on a smartphone. The entire point of the layout is to keep your fingers on the home row. Meanwhile people text with a single or two thumbs 100% of the time.

"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…

Hold up young one. The reason for QWERTYs design has absolutely not been lost to history yet.

The design was to spread out the hammers of the most frequently used letters to reduce the frequency of hammer jamming back when people actually used typewriters and not computers.

The problem it attempted to improve upon, and which is was pretty effective at, is just a problem that no longer exists.

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

#92

You can tell whoever put together that demo video gave no f*cks whatsoever. This is the quality of work you can expect under an uninspiring leader (Sundar) in a culture of constant layoff fear and bureaucracy. Literally everyone I know who works at Google hates their job and are completely checked out.

Huh? It was a GREAT demo video!

If it had been real, that is.

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

#94
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 correctness is important. Even when the model has the knowledge it would need to answer correctly, as in this case, it will still lie.

The false statement is after it says the duck floats, it continues "It is made of a material that is less dense than water." This is false; "rubber" ducks are made of vinyl polymers which are more dense than water. It floats because the hollow shape contains air, of course.

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

#95
post #86

The whole Gemini webpage and contents felt weird to me, it's in the uncanny valley of trying to look and feel like an Apple marketing piece. The hyperbolic language, surgically precise ethnic/gender diversity, unnecessary animations and the sales pitch from the CEO felt like a small player in the field trying to pass as a big one.

I’m imagining the project managers are patting themselves on the back for checking all the performative boxes, blind to the absolute satire of it all.

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

#96
I missed the disclaimer. So, when watching it, I started to think "Wow, so Google is releasing their best stuff".

But then I soon noticed some things that were too smooth, so seemed at best to be cherry-picked interactions occasionally leaning on hand-crafted situation handlers. Or, it turns out, faked.

Regardless of disclaimers, this video seems misleading to be releasing right now, in the context of OpenAI eating Google's lunch.

Everyone is expecting Google to try to show they can do better. This isn't that. This isn't even an mocked-up interaction future of HCI concept video, because it's not showing a vision of what people want to do --- it's only showing a demo of technical capabilities.

It's saying "This is what a contrived tech demo (not application vision concept) could look like, but we can't do it yet, so we faked it. Hopefully, the viewer will get the message that we're competitive with OpenAI."

(This fake demo could just be an isolated oops of a small group, not representative of Google's ability to rise to the current disruption challenge, I don't know.)

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

#97
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Hold up young one. The reason for QWERTYs design has absolutely not been lost to history yet. The design was to spread out the hammers of the most frequently used letters to reduce the frequency of hammer jamming back when people actually used typewriters and not computers. The problem it attempted to improve upon, and which is was pretty effective at, is just a problem that no longer exists.

I’m curious how this works because all the common letters seem to be next to each other on the left side of the keyboard

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

#98

I suppose this is a great example of how trust in authentic videos, audio, images, company marketing must be questioned and, until verified, assumed to be 'generated'. I am curious, if the voice, email, chat, and shortly video can all be entirely generated in real or near real time, how can we be sure that remote employee is actually not a full or partially generated entity? Shared secrets are great when verifying bu…

If you can't verify whether your employee is AI, then you fire them and replace them with AI.

The question is if an attacker tells you they lost access can you please reset some credential, and your security process is getting on a video call because you're a fully remote company let's say.

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

#99

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…

I totally agree with you on the confident lies. And it’s really tough. Technically the duck is made out of air and plastic right?

If I pushed the model further on the composition of a rubber duck, and it failed to mention its construction, then it’d be lying.

However there is this disgusting part of language where a statement can be misleading, technically true, not the whole truth, missing caveats etc.

Very challenging problem. Obviously Google decided to mislead the audience and basically cover up the shortcomings. Terrible behaviour.

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

#100

I don’t understand why is Gemini even considered “jaw-dropping” to begin with. GPT-4V has set the bar so high that all their demos and presentations paled in comparison. And it’s available for anyone to use. People have already build mind-blowing demos with it (like https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/ai-po... ). The entire launch felt like a concentrated effort to “appear” competitive to OpenAI. G…

Some other commenter, a former googler, a while back alluded to figuring out the big secret and being thrown for a tizzy at the resulting cognitive dissonance they realize they’ve been buying into. Its never about making a good product. Its about keeping up with the joneses in the eyes of tech investors. And just look at the movement on the stock today as a result of this probable lemon of a product: nothing else mattered except keeping up appearances. CEOs make historic careers optimizing companies for appearances over function like this.
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