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
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?
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…
So the AI deeply violates your privacy, then guesses everything based on that. Omg fuck no. Keep that photo scanning AI as far from any of my devices as possible. Fuck google for even thinking this is ok. Holly shit.
gemini why is this guy angry at you
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
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.
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).
Once i got a got a good response detailing everything I wanted, didn’t happen again… LLMs are random loot box for dev
Are there people out there that actually act like this?
Yes, watch any kick streamer.
Why would I want to watch that?
I barely watch streamers and I don’t know much about kick, but isn’t that where a lot of conservative streamers went?
Kick is where you get to watch people die live on camera… Man who was “humiliated and mistreated for months” dies during livestream in France, officials say
It’s the answer to your question. Yes, people are dumb enough that they treat AI as their own brain instead of attempting to find any information whatsoever, even when the information is directly in front of them. This phenomena is most visible on kick streams, where the dumbest possible people make more money than you ever will being a worse person than you (assuming you are not any of type of mentally ill that could be described as psychopathy) could ever be.
You could also just visit anywhere on the west coast of the US where younger gen z happens to exist in public and wait long enough. You’ll hear a ‘hey gemini’ within 20 minutes followed by the dumbest possible question to ever leave the lips of a non-AI human form.
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.
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!
I’ve bought new tires from all sorts of places and people, and nobody ever asked for my license plate number. Is this an American thing?
In fact, these days, I simply order tires online and tell the company to deliver them to one of their many “partners,” i.e. car repair shops. They notify me when the delivery is done, I leave the car there overnight and collect it the next morning. That’s all there is to it.No way in hell VP of Google was buying something, they have an army of slaves for that.
I’m in Europe and some places ask you for your license number to auto detect what car you have. Helpful for less car minded people.
Exceptionally useful for the kind of person who knows they have a 2019 Honda minivan, but can’t for the life of them recall whether it’s a Passport or an Odyssey
I’ll take them over self-proclaimed “car guys” any day. Useful idiots so confident in their skills that they insist that “any moron” can look up the headlights and wiper blades for their “Cummins”, “Duramax”, or “Hemi”. These are the same ones who will also yell at the service manager because the technicians “under-inflated” their tires because they weren’t inflated to the sidewall pressure. Hell, I’ve even had them insist that major issues that could cause an accident if not corrected are “perfectly fine”. Honestly, it wouldn’t be a problem except that everybody else has to share the roads with their rolling death traps.
Or people who have a red car… and that’s all they know about it :)
Gronk, is this real?
Is Gronkh on the fediverse?
Who isn’t?
It is someone with AI brain, so I can totally picture them walking into a tire shop expecting to buy tires without having brought wheels to put those tires on.
If you don’t know the difference between tires and wheels, ask your favorite LLM
Yes, no, maybe
I don’t know Can you repeat the question?
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
