Comment by zozbot234
2 years ago
Good, that video was mostly annoying and creepy. The AI responses as shown in the linked Google dev blogpost are a lot more reasonable and helpful. BTW I agree that the way the original video was made seems quite misleading in retrospect. But that's also par for the course for AI "demos", it's an enduring tradition in that field and part of its history. You really have to look at production systems and ignore "demos" and pointless proofs of concept.
The GPT-4 demo early this year when it was released was a lot less.. fake, and in fact very much indicative of it's feature set. The same is true for what OpenAI showed during their dev days, so at the very least those demos don't have too much fakery going on, as far as I could tell.
A certain minimum level of jank always makes demos more believable. Watching Brockman wade through Discord during the napkin-to-website demo immediately made the whole thing convincing.
AI is in the "hold it together with hope and duct tape" phase, and marketing videos claiming otherwise are easy to spot and debunk.
>You really have to look at production systems and ignore "demos" and pointless proofs of concept.
While I agree, I wouldn't call proofs or concepts and demos pointless. They often illustrate a goal or target functionality you're working towards. In some cases it's really just a matter of allotting some time and resources to go from a concept to a product, no real engineering is needed, it all exists, but there's capital needed to get there.
Meanwhile some proof of concepts skip steps and show higher level function that needs some serious breakthrough work to get to, maybe multiple steps of that. Even this is useful because it illustrates a vision that may be possible so people can understand and internalize things you're trying to do or the real potential impact of something. That wasn't done here, it was embedded in a side note. That information needs to be before the demo to some degree without throwing a wet blanket on everything and needs to be in the same medium as the demo itself so it's very clear what you're seeing.
I have no problem with any of that. I have a lot of problems when people don't make it explicitly clear beforehand that it's a demo and explain earnestly what's needed. Is it really something that exists today in working systems someone just needs to invest money and wire it up without new research needed? Or is it missing some breakthroughs, how many/what are they, how long have these things been pursued, how many people are working on them... what does recent progress look like and so on (in a nice summarized fashion).
Any demo/poc should come up front with an earnest general feasibility assessment. When a breakthrough or two are needed then that should skyrocket. If it's just a lot of expensive engineering then that's also a challenge but tractable.
I've given a lot of scientific tech demonstrations over the years and the businesses behind me obviously want me to be as vague as possible to pull money in. I of course have some of those same incentives (I need to eat and pay my mortgage like everyone else). None-the-less the draw of science to me has always been pulling the veil from deception and mystery and I'm a firm believer in being as upfront as possible. If you don't lead with disclaimers, imaginations run wild into what can be done today. Adding disclaimers helps imaginations run wild about what can be done tomorrow, which I think is great.
What the Quack? I found it tasty as pâté.