https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nkbqyk/...
https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
Also funny how Meta has been trying to capitalise on both things.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377...
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.
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.
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?
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 thought they were demonstrating interruption handling.
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.
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.
what livelihood are these glasses putting at risk?
I want to get into YC just to use and browse Bookface instead.
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.
They should be mocked and called out, it might leave room for actual innovators who aren't glossy incompetents and bullshitters.
I'm endless amazed that Meta has a ~2T market cap, yet they can't build products.
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.
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?
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
Zuck should have known better and used Ethernet for this one!
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.
The discussion yesterday was fine. If that was the only conversation we had, I wouldn't be worried.
People are people. If you have two communities that anyone can join, eventually the only difference between them (if any) will be the rules.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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...
> 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'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.
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
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.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverWorkWithChi...
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.
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.
Notably though, the AI was clearly not utilizing its visual feed to work alongside him as implied
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.
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!
This place really is Reddit these days, so I guess the link is apt.
You know there is no such things as bad publiciity..
We'll be talking about how obvious it all was 20 years from now
