Source (Bluesky)
Transcript
Here’s an example that Google’s Josh Woodward, VP of the Gemini app, Google Labs, and AI Studio, shared in a blog post about how Personal Intelligence can work. Google also put together a similar example in a video that I’ve embedded below:
For example, we needed new tires for our 2019 Honda minivan two weeks ago. Standing in line at the shop, I realized I didn’t know the tire size. I asked Gemini. These days any chatbot can find these tire specs, but Gemini went further. It suggested different options: one for daily driving and another for all-weather conditions, referencing our family road trips to Oklahoma found in Google Photos. It then neatly pulled ratings and prices for each. As I got to the counter, I needed our license plate. Instead of searching for it or losing my spot in line to walk back to the parking lot, I asked Gemini. It pulled the seven-digit number from a picture in Photos and also helped me identify the van’s specific trim by searching Gmail. Just like that, we were set.
Working so hard to find a problem for the solution they’ve invented.
And they are going to destroy even the tiniest amount of progress we have made in countering carbon emission climate change. All progress complelely gone because their datacenters will use 10x more energy than we did before in a time where we should be looking to reduce our energy spending.
They will literally destroy all of us for the sake of shortsighted billions to their already huge pile of billions.
people are forgetting how insanely power-hungry daha centers running crypto and HPC was/is. nevermind that all DCs were already replacing their equipment every third year. ai dcs aren’t magically more power-dense, so blocking the building of new ones goes a long way.
in a time where we should be looking to reduce our energy spending
Data centers are definitely a problem, but all progress in curbing carbon emissions points toward increasing energy use. The problem (that has been put off for too long) is that power generation itself relies too much on carbon heavy products. We should have carbon neutral, or even negative, power generation by now, but it’s been fought and put off for decades now, so this is what we get to deal with.
For some of the situations they put forward, if you just imagine that at one point they had a personal assistant do this for them in the past, then these stupid scenarios start to make more sense.
They think it’s great because it replaced the only underling they ever directly interacted with and they assume that’s going to work with all the other jobs
It’s not even a solution. AI can be useful in some specific fields (if used properly), but LLMs are literally a scam. They’re selling a virtual parrot as the computer from Star Trek.
That screenshot is such pyscho behavior. “Our algorithm will access any and all data it can on you to answer your question, whether you ask it to or not! Isn’t that great??”
I mean the reality is the major problem is that they already have all that data. This is just making you aware of the fact.
I remember probably 12 or 15 years ago my phone popped up a notification informing I’d last been at a restaurant I was in a year prior and would I review / update the info about it…
That’s when I went and disabled location tracking (for whatever that’s worth)
i love people describing use cases for ai because it’s always like “a good use case for ai is incredibly niche situation that will happen to you like maybe once a year if we’re generous where a problem presents itself that could be solved very easily without ai”
Business idiots. The people making decisions about products are idiots out of touch with the day to day life of typical people.
Good thing the person working the tire counter wouldn’t be able to recommend tires or be able to look up the trim on your vehicle
But they might try to sell you something you don’t need, unlike Gemini lmao
Oh yeah, zero chance of Gemini just being another medium for advertising
And there is no cost at all, ever, for this “assistant” that has full access to every aspect of our life. Free and without consequences forever!
Lol at the article, yes tyre shops are often extremely busy with very long lines and also the people in line would definitely not allow you the courtesy of taking 10 seconds to go check your number plate in the parking lot.
These AI use cases people demonstrate are so braindead.
yes tyre shops are often extremely busy with very long lines
You can’t get appointments at your tyre shops? I just book a slot in their agenda a few weeks before. Show up, put the car on the bridge, wait 15-20 minutes and I’m off.
I haven’t used a car in decades, but I remember that this is how it used to be. As far as I know, it’s been that way for almost as long as there’s been cars. Did something change that we weren’t told about?
Shit, I get pissed off when the menu is behind a QR code i have to scan.
I literally don’t have a QR-capable app on my phone, they can direct me to a written menu if they expect me to order something.
Was at a restaurant that couldn’t once I just walked away
Your camera will do it.
No my camera will not do it. I use Open Camera for photos, it does not have QR capabilities and that’s exactly the way I like it.
No.
Yes.
I think they know their phone better than you do.
You’re right, they probably have a Motorola Razr.
Or numerous thousands of other types of phones. QR code scanners aren’t a universal thing at all.
Maybe.
I have multiple different phones, and none of them are capable of doing such. I’ve had to install a 3rd party QR code scanner app.
All those phones are recent enough to still be used by a significant amount of people, so it’s not even an “ancient” tech thing, only very recently did it change.
The only mobile device I have that has it built into the camera app is my iPad, for which I have no use case for actually scanning QR codes.
Not if I don’t let it.
binary eye on fdroid barcodes and qr codes
Good example of an app that I intentionally do not install on my phone.
Why?
It’s not a technology standard that I want to normalize by acquiescence. QR codes can be used as social engineering anti-patterns, particularly against normies (Encode a shortened URL that sends your phone directly to malware), while the most common brick and mortar uses have been both anti-labor and anti-consumer. They’re abused as a marketing tool that pretends to be novel while effictively just adding technological cruft and overhead to everyday life. I already have a URL bar on my browser and I would much rather just type your website into it myself.
isolate your browser, use urldna.io and binary eye lets you see the link
if you have a browser that downloads random content or even has download perms, what are you doing man
I’m not using QR codes.
Wow the article, giving up that much info and privacy just for a stupid 5 second convenient. Tyre size is available on the sidewall, car number plate should be the thing you remember and commited to your memory or taken picture and then put it on “favorite”, tyre brand and type should be recommended by the shop that sell them instead of Gemini. Billion dollar project for this dumbass tech and dumbass public is buying it. Next we throw away our critical thinking so billionaires can control us very easily.
Waiting for all the people who call Pizzacake’s comics “strawmen” to flock to this post and do the same.
no you see it’s only wrong when a woman does it /s
I just don’t think her comics are very funny. She isn’t really wrong but she is preaching to the choir a bit most of the time. That’s why her comics get up voted so much.
That said half the comments in any pizza cake thread is people complaining about pizza cake so I don’t really engage with them that much.
Ok. I wasn’t talking about people who don’t find her funny, I was talking about the people who call her comics strawmen.
Funny how that never happens.
The number of competent experts who are impressed by an LLM wielded in their qualified field is as vanishingly infinitesimal as legitimate and justifiable invocations of the term ‘AI’.
Those who have expressed the greatest enthusiasm for ‘AI’ are typically the farthest removed from actual, nuanced comprehension.
It’s a grift economy built on statistically luke-warm, vibe lobotomised corpses.
Once i got a got a good response detailing everything I wanted, didn’t happen again… LLMs are random loot box for dev
I’m a professional that works with software dev and I can say that LLMs and all the agent stuff keeps flipping between “surprised at what it can do” and “oh another big sign that it’s just a really fancy text predictor”.
At best, it has reduced the number of times I reach out to colleagues for a problem I solve myself in the process of explaining it and has helped me find obscure settings to fix obscure issues. For coding, I’m still not sure whether or not it saves time. It can write things quickly but it embeds all kinds of assumptions in there and might not even follow instructions.
Like it’s safer to think of it as a conversation partner who can pretend to be many different people, including experts in the topics you discuss, but also has ADHD so severe it can switch what it is pretending to be mid-sentence. Even when you ask it to explain what happened after the fact, it just makes up more bullshit because it doesn’t have thoughts or awareness, it just predicts tokens.
I ask a question, they give me the wrong answer. I tell them they gave me the wrong answer. They apologize, and then repeat the same mistake in the next answer. Or they give me a different wrong answer. I eventually give up and solve it with a web search.
I don’t know if my questions are about really obscure stuff or what, but it’s really annoying. Like, I know that they’re only predicting tokens, but how hard is it to program them to go “Okay, we’ve already established that this pattern of tokens is wrong, so I’m not going to include it in the next answer”.
They have no sense of “truth”, it’s a complex graph and weights that predict the most likely next token. You can change the output by doing training or adjusting the context by changing the prompt (also temperature that affects the randomness).
The training data affects what it will predict, but if the training data includes a debate, then both sides get encoded into the weights and the context is what determines what “side” of the debate your response gets. It can’t determine the truth; the truth doesn’t even factor in to what its output is (even if it “talks” about the truth in that output).
That’s… Not how getting tires works? You pull up to whatever garage you go to, ask to get your tires replaced, and it’s done in a few minutes with literally no other input needed (if it goes smoothly anyway). Even if you’re going to a weird corporate place they’re going to check over your car instead of asking you anything.
with literally no other input needed
Wait, you just let them put on whatever they can get the highest margin on?!
There’s a vast difference between different tire types in terms of stopping distance, wet handling, wear, road noise, comfort, … When I walk into a tire place, you can bet I come prepared with a short list of tires that I’m willing to consider, and a pre-estimation of the price of those tires in my tire size.
Also, the tire size is literally just 3 numbers, and it’s literally there on the tire. Why wouldn’t you know that about your car?
The expectation is they will put on the exact same brand and model of tires if they have it, and the closest equivalent of they don’t.
There’s definitely middle ground there, if you rock up to a tyre place near me they’ll generally ask if you want a cheapo, mid range or premium tyre, you’re welcome to preorder off the website or they’ll get something for you if you have something in mind. Mom pootling around town in her 3 door euro hatch doesn’t need a set of Toyos.
I will say, it never ceases to amaze me the sheer number of no-name Chinese tyre brands that exist. I must’ve put 30 different brands of cheap tyres on cars over the years.
I mean there are multiple different ways tires get replaced. My process involves taking the bad wheel off of my car and having a friend drive me to the shop. The tire guy looks up the specs on my tire and I tell him to put the cheapest possible replacement on it. He takes the wheel in the shop, performs his profane black magic ritual (I have no idea how tires go on wheels), and comes out with a shiny new tire attached to the dusty old wheel, that I then take home and slap on my car.
That said, there is no situation where you’d lose your place in line. Worst case scenario, the tire guy is going to walk out to your car with you to check what tires it needs
Knowing gemini it told him the wrong size of tires and it hallucinated the options and the plates
The plate it probably got correct but from the wrong car and gave the correct tire size for the basic tires but you have the aluminum rims.
Lmao Gemini gonna pull up the random car that you snap a photo of because they almost kill you.
Not knowing your own licence plate number is indicative of being out of touch. Normal people need to know it to operate many parking ticket machines, when paying their registration, car insurance, parking in hotel car parks.
I can imagine when you have assistants to do all this you might think it’s a boon to have a digital assistant help you with basic world skills. Even just the arrogance of asking an LLM for tyre information instead of asking someone at the tyre shop.
I just don’t have a good memory. I’m very in-touch. The in-touchiest, in fact .
If you’re a good company drone and get a leased car, you switch license plates every free years.
The example is still bs where I live. You have to show your registration papers that has the license plate on it and they’ll register the odometer in a database to prevent fraud. Using AI to get your odometer doesn’t work.
I think I’m pretty in touch. I just don’t have a car.
I hate when restaurants go the other way, with menus on your phone through a QR code. Obviously much more convenient than having a physical menu, which is why so many restaurants in the past printed their menus on tiny phone-screen sized booklets.
QR code menus seemed to really take off when COVID was around, which made sense, but I guess restaurants got used to saving on printing costs and now they’re here to stay.
The only time this makes sense, is if they have a whole digital order thing going, not saying that I like that, but then at least its consistent. What I hate most is if the fucking qr code is just a link to their website, and not even the menu section. Might as well have a sign on the table that says “just google it” or something…
He doesn’t know his own licence plate?
He probably gets a new car every three months lol
To be fair, I don’t have my own license plate memorized. Only reason the tire shop wants it is to double check the make and model, and if you don’t know the make and model of your car, you should take the bus instead
