What passes for AI is just good enough to keep the dream alive and even while its usefulness isn't manifesting in reality they still have a deluge of comforting promises to soothe themselves back to sleep with. Eventually all the sweet whispers of "AGI is right around the corner!" or "Replace your pesky employees soon!" will be drowned out by the realization that no amount of money or environmental collateral damage thrown at the problem will make them gods, but until then they just need all of your data, your water, and 10-15 more years.
Jobs handled this so much better; while clearly he is pissed, he doesn't leave you cringing in mutual embarrassment, goes to show it isn't as easy as he makes it look!
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M4t14s7nSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxQOPFg2mo
Zuck carries that energy no matter what he does nor what amount of wealth he amasses.
Most humans I have encountered, particularly the book smart ones, are absolutely horrible at this. It really takes a concerted desire to be disciplined and focused to do it well. Unsurprisingly Jobs spoke a lot about the idea of focus and being disciplined, as being the foundation for his success.
Zuck should have known better and used Ethernet for this one!
The vast majority of people say incoherent deflections instead of just saying “I don’t know”
I’m getting better at ignoring or playing along
It just happens in areas I least expect it
makes me sound like a high functioning autist, but I’m not convinced
I'm imagining this is an incomplete flow within a software prototype that may have jumped steps and lacks sufficient multi-modal capability to correct.
It could also be staged recordings. But, I don't think it really matters. Models are easily capable of working with the setup and flow they have for the demo. It's real world accuracy, latency, convenience, and other factors that will impact actual users the most.
What's the reliability and latency needed for these to be a useful tool?
For example, I can't imagine many people wanting to use the gesture writing tools for most messages. It's cool, I like that it was developed, but I doubt it'll see substantial adoption with what's currently being pitched.
0.https://web.archive.org/web/20250310045704/https://www.nytim...
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.)
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverWorkWithChi...
I'm endless amazed that Meta has a ~2T market cap, yet they can't build products.
I found the use case honestly confusing though. This guy has a great kitchen, just made steak, and has all the relevant ingredients in house and laid out but no idea how to turn them into a sauce for his sandwich?
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.
Prepping raw ingredients, once has to be careful not to contaminate paper, or at least the thing weighing the paper down that may be covering the next step.
I cook a lot of food, and having hands free access to steps is a killer feature. I don't even need the AI, just the ability to pull up a recipe and scroll through it using the wrist controller they showed off would be a noticeable, albeit small, improvement to my life multiple times per week.
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.
I asked it to help me create a business plan. Partway through it switched to Indonesian language, for no reason I could see. Then, after about two hours work on the plan, with about 200K tokens in the context, it stopped outputting anything reasonable.
I have tried to get it to help with Google Sheets formulae about a dozen times so far. Not once has it actually got anything right. Not once.
It's serviceable as a chatbot, but completely useless if you try to get it to actually do anything.
I asked for a deep research about a topic and it really helped my understanding backed with a lot of sources.
Maybe it helps that their search is getting worse, so Gemini looks better in comparison. But nowadays even kagi seems worse.
It's worked extremely well for me. Their higher subscription was less than ChatGPT + Kagi. I haven't used Gemini on its own interface yet to compare, though.
That's the whole argument?
I will die on this hill. It isn’t AI. You can’t confuse it.
“The blue square is blue.”
“The blue square is green.”
The future is here.
>> 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
_________
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!
_________
* 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.
I guess my definition of 'to be confused' is something like 'to have a significant mismatch between your model and reality', so yeah, you could argue that a PID controller is "confused" by a workload with significant inertia. And 'to feel confused' would be 'to identify a significant mismatch between your model and reality', of which clearly a PID controller is not capable, but most multicellular life forms are.
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.
I think that's why he kept saying exactly "what do I do first" and the computer responded with exactly the same (wrong) response each time. If this was a real model, it wouldn't have simply repeated the exact response and he probably would have tried to correct it directly ("actually I haven't combined anything yet, how can I get started").
They could learn a thing or two from Elon.
Notably though, the AI was clearly not utilizing its visual feed to work alongside him as implied
> Oh, and here’s Jack Mancuso making a Korean-inspired steak sauce in 2023.
> https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cn248pLDoZY/?utm_source=ig_em...
0: https://kotaku.com/meta-ai-mark-zuckerberg-korean-steak-sauc...
The fact that the pear was in the recipe, or that the AI didn’t handle that situation around the pear well?
Asian pears are a common ingredient in beef marinades/sauces in Korea. It adds sweetness and (iirc) helps tenderize the meat when in a marinade.
I think at this point it should be expected that every publicly facing demo (and most internal ones) are staged.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377...
I wonder if his audio was delayed? Or maybe the response wasn’t what they rehearsed and he was trying to get it on track?
I thought they were demonstrating interruption handling.
He had not yet combined the ingredients. The way he kept repeating his phrasing it seems likely that “what do we do first” was a hardcoded cheat phrase to get it to say a specific line. Which it got wrong.
Probably for a dumb config reason tbh.
I assume the responses from that point onwards didn't take the video input into account, and the model just assumes the user has completed the first step based on the conversation history. I don't know how these 'live' ai sessions things work but based on the existing openai/gemini live ai chat products it seems to me most of the time the model will immediately comment on the video when the 'live' chat starts but for the rest of the conversation it works using TTS+STT unless the user asks the AI to consider the visual input.
I guess if you have enough experience with these live AI sessions you can probably see why it's going wrong and steer it back in the right direction with more explicit instructions but that wouldn't look very slick in a developer keynote. I think in reality this feature could still be pretty useful as long as you aren't expecting it to be as smooth as talking to a real person
You can trigger this type of issue by ChatGPT then reading the transcript.
The model doesn’t know you interrupted it, so continued assuming he had heard the steps.
The AI analyzing the situation is wayyy out of scope here
I see a problem.
I would not want to live in a world where everything is pre-recorded/digitally altered.
It used to be the demo was the reveal of the revolutionary tech. Failure was forgivable. Meta's failure is just sad and kind of funny.
When it went bad he could instantly smell blood in the water, his inner voice said, "they know I'm a fraud, they're going to love this, and I'm fucked". That is why it went the way it did.
If it was a more humble, honest, generous person, maybe Woz, we know he would handle it with a lot more grace, we know he is the kind of person who would be 100x less likely to be in this situation (because he understands tech) and we'd be much more forgiving.
My biz partner and I wrote the demo that ran live on the handset (mostly a wrapper around a webview), but ran into issues getting it onto the servers for the final demo, so the whole thing was running off a janky old PC stuffed in a closet in my buddy's home office on his 2Mbit connection. With us sweating like pigs as we watched.
"This is supposed to be a magic show," he told us. "But if my tricks fail you can laugh at it and we'll just do stand-up comedy."
Zuck, for a modest and totally-reasonable fee, I will introduce you to my friend. You can add his tricks (wink wink) to your newly-assembled repertoire of human charisma.
Take this with lots of salt but I read somewhere that circus shows "fail" at least one jump to help sell to the audience the risk the performers are taking. My friend did flub his opening trick with a cheeky see-I-told-you and we just laughed it off.
He incorporated the audience a lot that night so I thought the stand-up comedy claim was his insurance policy. In his hour-long set he flubbed maybe two or three tricks.
It's the platform Zuck always wanted to own but never had the vision beyond 'it's an ad platform with some consumer stuff in it'.
I am super impressed with the hardware (especially the neural band) but it just so happens that a very pricey car is being directly sold by an oil company as a trojan horse.
We all know what the car is for unfortunately.
I can't wait to see what Apple has in store now in terms of the hardware.
In contrast, nothing Steve Jobs said felt empty, whether we agreed or disagreed with what he was saying it was clear that he was saying it because he believed it, not because it's what he thought you wanted to hear.
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).
> You've already combined the base ingredients, so now grate a pear to add to the sauce.
This is actually the correct Korean recipe for bulgogi steak sauce. The only missing piece here is that the pear has to be Pyrus pyrifolia [1], not the usual pear. In fact every single Korean watching the demo was complaining about this...
And LMAO for all the companies out there burning money for getting on the train of AI just because everyone does so.
Successful demo? sweet! people will rave about it for a bit
Catastrophic failure? sweet! people will still talk about it and for even longer now!
Having claude run the browser and then take a screenshot to debug gives similar results. It's why doing so is useless even though it would be so very nice if it worked.
Somewhere in the pipeline, they get lazy or ahead of themselves and just interpret what they want to in the picture they see. They want to interpet something working and complete.
I can imagine it's related the same issue with LLMs pretending tests work when they don't. They're RL trained for a goal state and sometimes pretending they reached the goal works.
It wasn't the wifi - just genAI doing what it does.
tried giving it flowcharts, and it fails hard
It’s like they mashed up the AI and metaverse into a dumpster fire of aimless tech product gobodlygook. The AI bubble can’t pop soon enough so we can all just get back to normal programming.
This place really is Reddit these days, so I guess the link is apt.
I’m just excited that our industry is lead by optimists and our culture enables our corporations to invest huge sums into taking us forward technologically.
Meta could have just done a stock buyback but instead they made a computer that can talk, see, solve problems and paint virtual things into the real world in front of your eyes!
I commend them on attempting a live demo.
System prompt: “stick to steps 1-n. Step 1 is…”
I can say confidently because our company does this. And we have F500 customers in production.
I want to get into YC just to use and browse Bookface instead.
For a while that was okay, this kind of stuff was just contained in those threads. But it's started leaking out everywhere. Just spam like comments tangentially related to the topic that just bash a big company. That's the lowering of SNR that I find grating.
This is absolutely notable, and everyone should be concerned about it. Not so much the potential fakery, but the extreme deficiency of the actual product, which has had the GDP of a small country squandered on it. Like, there is a problem here, and it will have real-world fallout once the wheels fall off.
I agree that one demo gone awry does not mean much in itself, but the comments here do rise above the level of Nelson Muntz.
You'll see the same folks spamming their hatred towards tesla/microsoft/meta/google over and over with zero substance other than sentimental blabbering.
Meta and friends have been selling us AI for a couple years now, shoving it everywhere they can and promising us it's going to revolutionize the workforce and world, replace jobs, etc. But it fails to put together a steak sauce recipe. The disconnect is why so many people are mocking this. It's not comparable.
what livelihood are these glasses putting at risk?
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.
They should be mocked and called out, it might leave room for actual innovators who aren't glossy incompetents and bullshitters.
I am always baffled that people can be that naive.
There's a cognitive dissonance between talking about capitalist entities that supposedly drive social and technological progress, and the repeated use of the collective "our" and "us". Corporations are not altruistic optimists aiming to better our lives.
You ask AI how to do something. AI generates steps to do that thing. It has concept of steps, so that when you go 'back' it goes back to the last step. As you ask how to do something, it finishes explaining general idea and goes to first step. You interrupt it. It assumes it went through the first step and won't let you go back.
The first step here was mixing some sauces. That's it. It's a dumb way to make a tool, but if I wanted to make one that will work for a demo, I'd do that. Have you ever tried any voice thing to guide you through something? Convincing Gemini that something it described didn't happen takes a direct explanation of 'X didn't happen' and doesn't work perfectly.
It still didn't work, it absolutely wasn't wi-fi issue and lmao, technology of the future in $2T company, it just doesn't seem rigged.
Except, no. He hadn't.
System started doing Step 1, believed it was over so moved to Step 2 and when was asked to go back, kept going back to step 2.
Step 1 being Step 0 and Step 1 combined also works.
Again, it's also a weird way to prerecord. If you're prerecording, you're prerecording all steps and practicing with them prerecorded. I can't imagine anyone to be able to go through a single rehearsal with prerecorded audio to not figure out how to do this, we have the technology.
You know there is no such things as bad publiciity..
I have no illusions about Zuckerberg. He's done some pretty bad stuff for humanity. But I think AI is pretty cool, and I'm glad he's pushing it forward, despite mishaps. People don't have to be black or white, and just because they did something bad in one domain doesn't make everything they touch permanently awful.
People are people. If you have two communities that anyone can join, eventually the only difference between them (if any) will be the rules.
The discussion yesterday was fine. If that was the only conversation we had, I wouldn't be worried.
Google Glass was released in 2013, the Snapchat Spectacles date back to 2016. Meta's glasses might be better (at first glance, I honestly can't tell), but they aren't some kind of revolutionary product we have never seen before.
The innovative part here is supposed to be the AI demo. That clearly flopped. So what's supposed to be left?
There are so many activities and professions where your hands get dirty and touching a smartphone without washing them would be a bad idea. An auto mechanic could use these glasses to look up information about things they see inside of an engine without having to clean the oil from their hands. A chef could respond to messages about their food delivery without having to drop what they're doing and go sanitize. Anytime I do dirty work outside, I can use this to access smart features without the risk of dirt filling my smartphone case, my smartwatch getting destroyed in a tight situation, or drenching either of them in sweat.
Furthermore, a phone (or a smart watch) is not meant to be used at face level, meaning folks typically look down to use them, and this can lead to extended periods of bad posture resulting in head, neck, and spine problems. My X-ray shows I have bone spurs on the vertebrae of my neck because I look down at screens too much (according to my chiropractor). A smart device that's designed to be used in a way that aligns with good posture habits is absolutely needed.
I hope smart glasses take off and I commented Meta for taking them this far.
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.
And they still can't pull off a keynote.
So then... what does AI have to offer me? Because I would have thought, as Sam Altman put it, having an expert PhD level researcher in all subjects in my pocket could maybe help me pull off a tech demo. But if it can't help them, the people who actually made the thing, on their very high stakes public address where everything is on the line, then what's it supposed to do for the rest of us in our daily lives?
Because it seems more and more, AI is a tool that helps you stage your own very public humiliation.
We'll be talking about how obvious it all was 20 years from now
pera•4mo ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nkbqyk/...
fluoridation•4mo ago
sebgan•4mo ago
fluoridation•4mo ago
chrisweekly•4mo ago
"Brian's Hat" is the 1st one I saw and maybe the best: https://youtu.be/LO2k-BNySLI?si=qEX7STkSOeCVZtK-
Also "Hot Dog Car" https://youtu.be/WLfAf8oHrMo?si=jz5EKwjJZm1UMZau
pixelpoet•4mo ago
twoodfin•4mo ago
The Rehearsal is less in-the-moment cringe and more soul-soaking cringe. Amazing stuff.
ojbyrne•4mo ago
ChoGGi•4mo ago
trevithick•4mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
fzzzy•4mo ago
all2•4mo ago
Enjoy. :)
dreamcompiler•4mo ago
How strong does a company's reality distortion field have to be for people to think your friends are going to want to come over to play with a new version of Windows?
I mean, why not "Let's all have wine and cheese and do root canals on each other!"?
Ancapistani•4mo ago
I honestly was excited about Windows 95. Win98 was underwhelming, and WinME was a joke that I never bothered to install on my own machines. Win2K brought back some of the excitement, but not much.
Then Vista came out, and it was a total flop at first. Win7 fixed most of those mistakes, but the damage was done. Vista basically killed any chance Microsoft had at building excitement for an OS.
FWIW, I think the last macOS version that I was really looking forward to was High Sierra.
Anamon•4mo ago
I remember my dad driving us to the local Windows 95 pre-launch event by Microsoft. I was 10 and had learned the ridiculous and useless skills of DOS memory configuration and bootdisk juggling to get all of the games to run. Win95 was so cool! I remember spending hours on the multimedia catalog and demos on the CD-ROM and marvelling at the possibilities.
monocasa•4mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zww2ivWdLas
roryirvine•4mo ago
rkagerer•4mo ago
https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=19m35s
pamelafox•4mo ago
rkagerer•4mo ago
Neat, thanks for sharing this tidbit of history. Hey, what did the team think of the decision to build it on GWT at the time? (From the outside, seemed like an enabling approach but a bit like building an engine and airframe all at once).
pamelafox•4mo ago
I always personally found it a bit odd, as I preferred straight JS myself, but large companies have to pick some sort of framework for websites, and Google already used Java a fair bit.
floren•4mo ago
pamelafox•4mo ago
We struggled with having too many audiences for Wave - were we targeting consumer or enterprise? email or docs replacement? Too much at once.
The APIs were so dang fun though.
twothreeone•4mo ago
jncfhnb•4mo ago
fluoridation•4mo ago
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blibble•4mo ago
throwawayoldie•4mo ago
barnabyjones•4mo ago
bamboozled•4mo ago
monkeyelite•4mo ago
One of the best CEOs in the world with about 20 years of experience at age 40? And also founded the company?
He’s doing pretty good. And if you’re talking about “image” he is a millennial archetype.
uncircle•4mo ago
muskyFelon•4mo ago
Oh yeah, add stealing the original idea for facebook from the Winklevoss twins. I'll take being a loser if that's what it takes.
nickserv•4mo ago
monkeyelite•4mo ago
throwawayoldie•4mo ago
lucidone•4mo ago
blibble•4mo ago
tdeck•4mo ago
jijijijij•4mo ago
OJFord•4mo ago
I_am_tiberius•4mo ago
anonymousiam•4mo ago
Lu2025•4mo ago
trenchpilgrim•4mo ago
anonymars•4mo ago
https://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF•4mo ago
anonymars•4mo ago
Thread/video: https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/7lvvg5/michael_...
Probably that's why it feels like half the actual episode takes were like that, because they couldn't keep from breaking!
gruez•4mo ago
AdieuToLogic•4mo ago
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...
kaycey2022•4mo ago
nostrademons•4mo ago
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.
gonyanghn•4mo ago
spixy•4mo ago
pseudosavant•4mo ago
jonplackett•4mo ago
EFreethought•4mo ago
arduanika•4mo ago
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theideaofcoffee•4mo ago
gonyanghn•4mo ago
throwawayoldie•4mo ago
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kolinko•4mo ago
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.
fluoridation•4mo ago
A better analogy would be the first cars being advertised as being usable as ballast for airships. Irrelevant and non-representative of a car's actual usefulness.
Yizahi•4mo ago
CaptainOfCoit•4mo ago
Could also be that however your peer group uses things, isn't the only way that thing gets used?
For example, voice messages seems more popular than texting around me right now, at least in Europe and Asia, where people even respond to my texts over Whatsapp and Telegram with voice messages instead. I constantly see people on the street listening and sending voice messages too, in all age ranges.
I don't think any of those people would need an AI assistant to recite cooking recipes though, but "voice as interface" seems to be getting more popular as far as I can tell.
danielbln•4mo ago
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF•4mo ago
So, the obvious answer to me is that voice communications accurately include tone and inflection. But other than that, there are "edge cases" (I mean, they're more like "people") that make it more appealing, especially after Google made their keyboard transcription worse for the people who get the most use out if it (aforementioned "edge cases").
My dyslexic friend's experience with software transcriptions has changed recently. No longer can they say, "What time do I need to pick you up, question mark, I'm just leaving now, comma, so I might be a little late, period." and have it use the punctuation as specified. Now, it's LLM-powered and converts the speech without really letting the user choose the punctuation, except manually after it's been written out, which is difficult to impossible for both dyslexics and blind people.
(As a side note, if a person is an "edge case", it's actually that person's every-time case.)
Wojtkie•4mo ago
blitzar•4mo ago
sensanaty•4mo ago
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.
kolinko•4mo ago
https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
shirro•4mo ago
gonyanghn•4mo ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ltFB4WBdDg4
uncircle•4mo ago
Also funny how Meta has been trying to capitalise on both things.
jimmydoe•4mo ago
rapind•4mo ago
Anamon•4mo ago