This just Year 1 of this stuff going mainstream. Careers are 25-30 years long. What will someone entering the workforce today even be doing in 2035?
This might lower the barrier of entry but it's basically a cheaper outsourcing model. And many companies will outsource more to AI. But there's probably a reason that most large companies are not just managers and architects who farm out their work to the cheapest foreign markets.
Similar to how many tech jobs have gone from C -> C++ -> Java -> Python/Go, where the average developer is supposd to accomplish a lot more than perviously, I think you'll see the same for white collar workers.
Software engieneering didn't die because you needed so much less work to do a network stack, the expectations changed.
This is just non technical white collar worker's first level up from C -> Java.
The same thing they're doing now, just with tools that enable them to do some more of it. We've been having these discussions a dozen times, including pre- and post computerization and every time it ends up the same way. We went from entire teams writing Pokemon in Z80 assembly to someone cranking out games in Unity while barely knowing to code, and yet game devs still exist.
There's two ways this goes: UBI or gradual population reduction through unemployment and homelessness. There's no way the average human will be able to produce any productive value outside manual labor in 20 years. Maybe not even that, looking at robots like Digit that can already do warehouse work for $25/hour.
"We need to do a big calculation, so your HBO/Netflix might not work correctly for a little bit. These shouldn't be too frequent; but bear with us."
Go ride a bike, write some poetry, do something tactile with feeling. They're doing something, but after a certain threshold, us humans are going to have to take them at their word.
The graph of computational gain is going to go linear, quadratic, ^4, ^8, ^16... all the way until we get to it being a vertical line. A step function. It's not a bad thing, but it's going to require a perspective shift, I think.
Edit: I also think we should drop the "A" from "AI" ...just... "Intelligence."
Ironically, this is created by some of the most intelligent people.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the prompting approaches we used in our Hands on with Gemini demo video.
which makes it sound like they used text + image prompts and then acted them out in the video, as opposed to Gemini interpreting the video directly.
https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/12/how-its-made-gemin...
> Narrator: "Based on their design, which of these would go faster?"
Without even specifying that those are cars! That was impressive to me, that it recognized the cars are going downhill _and_ could infer that in such a situation, aerodynamics matters. But the blog post says the real prompt was this:
> Real Prompt: "Which of these cars is more aerodynamic? The one on the left or the right? Explain why, using specific visual details."
They narrated inaccurate prompts for the Sun/Saturn/Earth example too:
> Narrator: "Is this the right order?"
> Real Prompt: "Is this the right order? Consider the distance from the sun and explain your reasoning."
If the narrator actually read the _real_ prompts they fed Gemini in these videos, this would not be as impressive at all!
It's that, you know some of this happened and you don't know how much. So when it says "what the quack!" presumably the model was prompted "give me answers in a more fun conversational style" (since that's not the style in any of the other clips) and, like, was it able to do that with just a little hint or did it take a large amount of wrangling "hey can you say that again in a more conversational way, what if you said something funny at the beginning like 'what the quack'" and then it's totally unimpressive. I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm saying "because we know we're only seeing a very fragmentary transcript I have no way to distinguish between the really impressive version and the really unimpressive one."
It'll be interesting to use it more as it gets more generally available though.
P.S. I wonder how these kind of flaws end up in promotions. Bard made a mistake about JWST, which at least is much more specific and is farther from common knowledge than this.
Seems like this video was heavily editorialized, but still impressive.
video: "Is this the right order?"
blog post: "Is this the right order? Consider the distance from the sun and explain your reasoning."
https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/12/how-its-made-gemin...
This is obviously geared towards non-technical/marketing people that will catch on to the hype. Or towards wall street ;)
So the killer app for AI is to replace Where's Waldo? for kids?
Or perhaps that's the fun, engaging, socially-acceptable marketing application.
I'm looking for the demo that shows how regular professionals can train it to do the easy parts of their jobs.
That's the killer app.
I wish I could see it in real time, without the cuts, though. It made it hard to tell whether it was actually producing those responses in the way that is implied in the video.
I can't say I'm really looking forward to a future where learning information means interacting with a book-smart 8 year old.
Real time instructions for any task, learn piano, live cooking instructions, fix your plumbing etc.
Technically still exciting, just in the survival sense.
I suspect the cutting edge systems are capable of this level but over-scripting can undermine the impact
Like how much of what was 'important' to develop a career in the past decades, even in the past years, will be relevant with these kinds of interactions.
I'm assuming the video is highly produced, but it's mind blowing even if 50% of what the video shows works out of the gate and is as easy as it portrays.
I suspect this was a fine tuning choice and not an in context level choice, which would be unfortunate.
If I was evaluating models to incorporate into an enterprise deployment, "creepy soulless toddler" isn't very high up on the list of desired branding characteristics for that model. Arguably I'd even have preferred histrionic Sydney over this, whereas "sophisticated, upbeat, and polite" would be the gold standard.
While the technical capabilities come across as very sophisticated, the language of the responses themselves do not at all.
