Google are well-known, like Meta, for making products that never achieve any kind of traction, and are cancelled soon after launch.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've never managed to get Gemini to actually do anything useful (and I'm a regular user of other AI tools). I don't know what metric it gets into the top 2 on, but I've found it almost completely useless.

Haven't Google also famously faked a phone call with an AI some years ago for an event?

https://www.axios.com/2018/05/17/google-ai-demo-questions

True. We at least had a period where they weren't so blatant about it. But now it's robbery in blind daylight.

> Just get text-to-speech to slowly read you the recipe.

Even this feels like overkill, when a person can just glance down at a piece of paper.

I don’t know about others, but I like to double check what I’m doing. Simply having a reference I can look at would be infinitely better than something taking to me, which would need to repeat itself.

You could imagine some utility to something that actually worked if it allowed you to continue working / not have to clean a hand and get your phone out while cooking. (Not a ton of utility, but some). But if it stumbles over basic questions, I just can't see how it's better than opening a recipe and leaning your phone against the backsplash.

Or pick up a bottle of bulgogi sauce?

>>> confused the AI.

>> I will die on this hill. It isn’t AI. You can’t confuse it.

> They "poisoned the context" which is clearly what they meant.

The "demo" was clearly prescriptive and not genuinely interactive. One could easily make the argument that the kayfabe was more like an IVR[0] interaction.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response

“The blue square is red.”

“The blue square is blue.”

“The blue square is green.”

The future is here.

The ability to think. If it can't think in the first place, it can't get confused. Whether it's "real AI" or not depends on semantics of that you consider AI to be:

* If you think it's something that resembles intelligence enough to be useful in the same way intelligence is and to seem to be intelligence, this is clearly it. The "plant based meats" of AI.

* If you think it means actual intelligence that was manufactured by a human, this is not that. It's shockingly impressive auto correct, and it's useful, but it's not actually thinking. This would be "artificially created intelligence"; in essence, real intelligence with an artificial origin. The lab grown meat of AI.

For the latter, I really think it needs reasoning ability that isn't based on language. Plenty of animals can think and reason without depending on language. Language is a great carrier of intelligence, which is why LLMs work so well, but language is not the foundation of intelligence.

That said, I think "confused" is a fine enough anthropomorphization. I refer to things like Bluetooth issues as the machine getting confused all the time. Back in the day, Netflix would often have problems with the wrong image showing for a show, and I called that "Netflix getting confused". We know it's not actually getting confused.

If by "genuinely confused" we are talking about what is generally called the emotion "confusion", then you need meta-cognition to even recognize your thinking is confused in order to then experience it. LLMs can model reflection by using their own output as input, but otherwise lack meta-cognitive processes. Through reflection they can later recognize what they did previously was wrong, but they will never experience "what I am currently thinking seems wrong/does not fit".

However "confusion" can also mean "mistaking one thing for another" or simply "doing the wrong thing", which is something computer programs have been able to fuck up since forever.

Just try asking an AI about the Seahorse Emoji (insert close-yet-comically-incorrect emojis since they won't render here):

_________

ChatGPT: There is a seahorse emoji: — wait, no, that’s a lobster. Okay, for real now:

Here it is: � Seahorse — argh, it’s still not showing properly here.

Let’s try again:

(hedgehog) (sauropod) (T-rex) (otter) (seal) (lobster) …but no actual (squid) or (mermaid) matches…

Okay, deep breath — I checked the official Unicode list. And you’re right: The seahorse emoji does exist — it’s — no, okay really:

(hedgehog) (hippo) (peacock) Still nothing?

Wait — turns out, I was wrong, and you’re right to call me out.

There is a seahorse emoji:

— no!

_________

https://ibb.co/GfpWRXCz

Capacity for will, I would imagine the OP may respond. I'm not averse to the position.

I mean that the recipes for this sauce on the internet have pear as an ingredient and LLM also assumed this, but there was no pear present on a table, so LLM didn't take into account visual data and assumed pear is there too. Which is funny since it was the whole point of the presentation, querying LLM for whatever text in text or voice only mode is nothing new today.

Jesus dude

Didn't Steve flip through 3 iPhones and hardcode the network UI to look like they had good signal?

He faked shit all the time. He just faked it well and actually delivered later.

I'd love to read it as well. More and more these days I miss that era of IT

That's even worse because it would mean that it wasn't the scripted recording that failed, it means the AI itself sucks and can't tell that the bowl is empty and nothing was combined. Either this was the failure of a recorded demo that was faked to hide how bad the AI is, or it accurately demonstrated that the AI itself is a failure. Either way it's not a good look.

It seems extremely likely that they took the context awareness out of the actual demo and had the AI respond to pre defined states and then even that failed.

The AI analyzing the situation is wayyy out of scope here

So MetaAI is basically the dumb cousin of Siri? I didn‘t expect to ever write that.

> the models are unpredictable. This product is going out the door this month

I see a problem.

"unpredictable" and "doesn't work" are different things. As a user, I know it's not deterministic and I can live with "unpredictable" results as long as it still makes sense, but I won't buy something that works 50% of the time.

Live Apple demos were always held together with duct tape in the first place. That first "live" iPhone demo had a memorized sequence that Jobs needed to use to keep the whole phone OS from hard crashing.

You gotta keep your infomercials engaging:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ

Microsoft really nailed the genre. (Although I learned just now while looking up the link that this one was an internal parody, never aired.)

The friend.

I was more clarifying my own hypothesis on what level of "live" this demo was, more so than explaining away the failure mechanics.

I was referring to AI/LLMs in general.

Do you think his algorithms have kind of, you know, sewed the seeds of hatred and rage through our society?

Do you think all the lies an misinformation his products help spread kind of...get people elected who take away the aid which millions of women and children rely on?

Not blaming him for it all, we all play our part, but the guy has definitely contributed negatively to society overall and if he is smart enough to know this, but he cannot turn off the profit making machine he created so we all suffer for that.

The parent said alluded to the dangers of AI, well the algorithms that are making us hate each other and become paranoid are that AI.

But why even have a conversation at all? Who cares if Zuckerberg has a demo that goes awry? Does that satisfy your intellectual curiosity somehow? It certainly doesn't satisfy mine.

I"ve not seen that honestly. I think you are looking for it satisfy your internal narrative you've created.

The idea that anti-AI posts on HN are PR hit jobs (paid for by..?) strikes me as conspiracy theory.

The simple reality is that hype generates an anti-hype reaction. Excessive hype leads to excessive anti-hype. And right now AI is being so excessively hyped on a scale I’m not sure I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been working in tech.

> the people funding the anti-AI movement

You can't be serious.

Quick question: if there is a paid anti-AI movement, where do I send my invoice? May as well not leave money on the table.

We are not bots, we just loathe historically bad-faith actors and especially with the current climate, we will take the opportunity of harmless schadenfreude where we can get it.

So there was no AI. I know there’s a lot of confusion regarding the exact definition of AI these days, but I’m pretty sure we can this one time all agree that an “on rails” scenario ain’t it. Therefore, whatever it is that they were doing out there, they weren’t demoing their AI product. You could even say it wasn’t a live demo of the product.

Its definitely a joke. They were saying it again when the WhatsApp call failed. They were being sarcastic.

CEOs are paid to promote their company, yes, but that doesn't mean they must fake it. The other alternative is to actually believe what they're saying. I don't think Zuck does.

OK, then whose job is it to make important decisions and to define (and explain) the company's strategy? Is that also the CEO?

Felt like the best example of a true believer. I'd say a similar, but less clear version, would be Dario Amodei vs Sam Altman. I don't agree with either, but Dario comes across as a true believer who would be doing AI regardless of the current trends, whereas Sam comes across as a chancer who would be doing cryptocurrencies if that was still big, or social media if that was still the next big thing, evidenced by the fact that he did both of those but they didn't stick so he moved his focus on.

Jobs would have been doing consumer computing hardware whatever happened. Apple in the early days wasn't the success it is now, he was fired and went and started another company in the same space (NeXT).

Any decade now.

The more you spill, the more the book starts to look delicious

To their peers, i.e. their golf billionaire buddies from Fortune-500. They talk with each other and I strongly suspect propagate a whole set of alternative reality ideas among themselves. Like this obsession on the voice activated and controlled everything. Billionaire CEOs probably find it very convenient to pretend to multitask constantly and make voice recordings and commands while doing other CEO tasks or during endless meetings. After all their human secretary can later verify information without taking his time. Meanwhile almost no one from my peer group or relatives uses voice activated anything really, no voice mails, no voice controls, no voice assistants. And I never see people on the streets doing that too.

They don’t want to spend 30 min explaining domain knowledge required to understand a certain super specific case.

Instead they show tech’s quality on a basic highest common denominator use case and allow people to extrapolate to their cases.

Similarly car ads show people going from home to a store (or to mountains). You’re not asking there “but what if I want to go to a cinema with the car”. If it can go to a store, it can go to a cinema, or any other obscure place, as long as there is a similar road getting there.

In their world this is what they think people do

The sociopaths pushing this kinda crap don't live the same lives you or I do. They have people they pay to make decisions for them, or they pay people to do shit like buy their weekly groceries for them or whatever other stupid crap they're trying to sell as a usecase for these useless AI tools. That's why all these demos are stupid shit like "Buy me plane tickets for my trip", despite the fact that 99.9% of people need very specific criteria out of their plane tickets and it's more easily done with currently available tools anyways.

They literally think "What does a regular Joe need in their day-to-day?" and their out of touch answer is "I have all these ingredients but don't know what to cook" or whatever. It's obvious these people haven't spoken to anyone who isn't an ass-licking yesman in a looooong time.

> A Korean tasting dressing. It's 2025, anyone living in a modern country should probably be able to make something that tastes Korean with just a small amount of effort...

Lol are you serious?

What an awful, condescending attitude. No, not "everyone living in a modern country" can make Korean food without a recipe. And tools that reduce the barrier for learning and acquiring new skills should be applauded.

Almost half of Americans cannot cook today. And the number 1 cited reason is a lack of time.

That said, I agree with the grandparent that this isn't really a "killer feature". Nor am I interested in the product. For so many reasons.

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They just need an emotionless android without conscience, who does whatever is in the best interest of raking in money. They don't need technological excellence. Whether people at his company technologically succeed or fail, what matters is, that the company processes all the PII and feeds the algorithms. The rest is just for show.

It's funny because he spent so much money on hair and clothing stylists, jewellery, BJJ coaching, surfing lessons , really made an effort to come across as "cool" and the end result is...you cannot fake who you are, and your actions are what define you and make up your character, he is prime example of that. He cannot escape who he is.

Obligatory https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak

It's kind of like Peep Show, where the writers tried to engineer the most awkward social situations, only without the jokes.

Here's one of my favorites, of Lars doing the Wave dance on stage to ad-lib over connectivity hiccups. For some reason it evoked a lot more empathy from me...

https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=19m35s

This will also not change much, since they want you to use their centralized services for data collection, not local or onsite processing. So you will always have roundtrips and shared resources. For IO this is pretty unacceptable, people get annoyed by millisecond delays.

Nah, more like a 1D chess move. Investors will pay them to invest in AI, so invest in AI, make the stock go up, sell, and leave the dumb investors holding the bag.

2D chess if they're smart: start a new company that competes with the one they just sold to dumb investors. Jack Dorsey is particularly fond of this move.

> They classify a lot of it as R&D and write it off taxes. Taxpayers foot the bill.

Taxpayers do not "foot the bill" for corporations reducing their tax obligations via "write-offs".

See: https://accountinginsights.org/what-does-write-it-off-mean-f...

"That's not a write off!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCP27_vquxQ

If you're taking about the R&D provisions in the OBBBA, that only changes the schedule of the deduction (immediately vs over several years). R&D, like most business expenses were was always deductible. Whether it's prudent or not isn't a factor.

[dead]

None of those things actually have anything to do with being less distracted. If you have a screen in your face throwing all the notifications and bullshit at you that your phone normally does, it is going to be far more distracting. And humans are hilariously bad at multitasking. Taking your hands out of the equation doesn't magically make you better at it. Jesus we think people using their phones while walking or driving is bad, these things are gonna be a disaster.

If people are so addicted to their phone or smart watch that it's giving them back/neck problems, the solution isn't glasses. The solution is to be less addicted to your god damn devices.

Outside of a few niche use case I don't think tech like this will be anything but a net negative.

What nobody seems to be chasing (I assume because screens are flashier) is smart headphones. Imagine you could navigate a webpage with hand gestures and have it read to you while you walk or do chores. In some ways, this is way easier than head-mounted graphical displays; portable audio is already a solved problem. The problem that still needs to be solved is good quality TTS on a portable device, but honestly that seems way more tractable than portable HUDs.

Your vague-posting and straw man arguments are not very good.

Yet even Bill G handled public failure better than Zuck: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jGwy4sb9aO8

Jobs was a clear communicator who emphasized user friendly products in aesthetically pleasing boxes. If Silicon Valley wasn't the most obtuse place on earth he wouldn't have stood out nearly as hard.

The demo was halted because when the AI was asked how to start, it kept assuming that some of the process was already complete and was jumping to the middle of the process (indicating that it was incorrectly analysing the scene).