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Comment by kouteiheika

17 hours ago

Looks cool, but it's very hard to get me excited about yet another proprietary model for which absolutely zero technical details are released (not even the number of parameters), which is safetymaxxed to the limit, and whose usage quota will (most likely) be so limited that it'll be effectively useless for anyone who doesn't work at Google or doesn't have infinite money.

What an insane set of requirements for a frontier technology and your excitement by it.

  • i think he's bummed out that a cool thing has shipped but: 1. he doesn't get any information about how it works 2. he doesn't get to use it

    sure, it's still a cool accomplishment but i can understand being a little bit frustrated / not as excited for such an announcement.

    • Most cutting edge technologies through history have been 1) somewhat opaque and 2) narrow/exclusive in their deployment. Historically speaking, that's virtually synonymous with "cutting edge technology".

      Whining that I, a random Internet user with limited budget, usecases that the researchers don't care about, and no connection to the researchers, don't get technical details (??) or access (??) on day one is just profoundly goofy shit.

      Obviously being able to use these things right away would be more exciting. But to be unable to get excited by advancements we can't immediately use is... quite entitled.

      16 replies →

  • > frontier technology

    It's just a lame gimmick, this is not 2024 anymore, people have started to get sick of this AI thingie, especially when it comes to video/image generation. That Simon guy with his pelican is the exception that can only be seen on tech forums like this one.

    As to why US (and probably also some Chinese) companies have started pouring hundreds of billions into AI-image generation is beyond my comprehension, but on the other hand I'm no economic genius.

  • If I can’t realistically use it then I don’t care, especially when there’s no independent proof yet it works this well, given a cursory glance. If it trickles down into future developments I can use then cool, but it likely won’t because they want a moat. You don’t have to shield the poor defenseless multi-billion dollar megacorp from the genuine apathy they inspire.

    If this is the best “frontier” they can achieve, then it’s no wonder they haven’t done anything groundbreaking in the space yet that produces practical results.

  • It's another closed world model.

    Only open weights matter.

    We should distill everything else we can into open weights.

    These are exciting for robotics and industrial perhaps, but they have no consumer use case until the lid is blown off and consumers can do whatever they want with them.

    So much societal progress is behind held up because the leading labs want to keep a stranglehold on the tech. Imagine if every PhD or hacker had access to the raw weights.

  • I mean this doesn't seem very insane? Basic info about the model, the ability to actually use it. Google in particular is awful about getting access to their models from the UX side: I don't even bother trying them out unless it's via openrouter.

    • Yeah, I want that too, including the weights and training material. But I am still exited by what one could potentially do with it, by looking at the prompts and generated videos, even if it is cherry picked.

I’ve decide that the best (and maybe only) way for me to interact with google AI models, is on the search results

It’s where I get the most value, and my expectations are very low, no attachment if it goes away

Of course they are mining me for data anyway, but they were doing that before already (and I do have a Gmail account, although I’ve almost completely stopped using Chrome - btw, it’s crazy that you can’t add plugins/extensions to Chrome on Guest mode)

I don't get how Google is so horrible at product. Let me play with this. Otherwise it's DOA.

  • That touches on the core reason not to get excited about these Google releases: They release something cool and then don't iterate on it. Instead they go off building another cool demo instead.

    Gah. Go iterate. Listen to customers, adapt, iterate some more etc etc. That's how products are made.

    • Some companies are so default-alive due to essentially building a money printer that risk tolerance has been tuned down severely.

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I'm not entirely convinced the new models aren't just a rollback to a clean training data state after the current model has been released for a while.