msabalau

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Ursula K. LeGuin

The memoir is fascinating, the audiobook is enthralling.

Of course, he could probably make reading the tax code sound pretty interesting.

People seem to be leaping to the conclusion that this is "product" as opposed to, fundamentally, research work, posted on a lab blog post, showing off a capability they expect to be increasing interesting over time.

Just because they happen to be throwing in the option to sign up to to play with the Genie 4 into an Ultra plan, doesn't mean that this is a material part of the value prop for Gemini.

Presumably, they can learn something from how niche Ultra users interested in tech demos engage with it. If that's an upside, it's really unclear it why it would make sense for "a reveal" to promise something too expensive to deliver to such Ultra users. (None of which means that the suggestion that you are responding to is technically reasonable or possible--just that it is unclear that one should dismiss the idea because one views this through the lens of a consumer "product reveal"

Just because OpenAI had to crawl back from Sora to focus resources, and Anthropic proudly proclaims in their filing that they have been avoiding promising creative opportunities for the same reason, doesn't mean that Google can't continue to do lab/research stuff.

It would be odd if they didn't.

Techincally, isn't the less expensive sub for Gemini Ultra £75 p/m?

It wasn't, generally, a question. People kept buying computers, on faith.

It's just that in 1987. the computers were generally and for the most part, irrelevant to productivity, just like steam and electricity were a promising gimmick for a long time before.. they weren't.

Looking backwards, it is easy to miss this.

I'm not an cliometrician, but my impression is that it took about 4 decades for electricity and steam to do much for productivity.

And it was in 1987 that Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow famously said “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”

I mean, maybe AI will be faster, because it's especially easy to apply compared to generally applicable technologies. There was the Bank of Korea study showing this spring that did show productivity gains with single proprietors--folks who don't have to reorg employees and processes to do something with more abilty or saved time.

But, generally, I don't know that there was an reason to expect that corporate America generally was going to see an AI payoff so soon.

The ending of the original article" was:

"Going forward a U.S. founder selling into European defense or government now needs an answer to “who holds the switch” before the first meeting; and European founders just got sovereignty as a sellable feature.

What was done in a fit of pique will cost the U.S. both leadership and jobs."

Do you agree or disagree with that?

It's not just openclaw, there's OpenAI's Dots and Gemini Spark.

Facebook doesn't have an real advantage to drive adoption other the being free. Which is not a moat because Google, certainly, and OpenAI, very probably, would offer this for free, in the event this capability turns out to be important to consumers.

Gmail, which half of the people in the US use their daily e-mail is certainly strong thing to build an agent on top of.

Just because meta can shove stuff in the faces of people doesn't mean they can succeed at any random thing. Most Facebook users distrust it, and dislike Zuck personally (at least that's what his lawyer said in court) and that's a rather large barrier to succeeding with agents, where trust is foundational.

But my assumption about the speed of product uptake may be skewed by not-valuing Meta's "consumer task running" pitch. But if people actually want this, for some reason, competitors at scale seem very likely to appear instantly.

This really seems more about meta AI team needs more users of their AI to do a good job building AI, and doing this for free is niche where they can get a few more users, rather than this being genius gambit.

Gemini 4 is announced be available to Pro users in the Gemini app.

I mean, I heard rumors too that it would be ultra only, but that doesn't seem to be the case, unless you are specifically talking about antigravity?

Realistically, market adoption isn't going to be the result of terminally online people (like me, I confess) following things way too closely on social.

You can build standard games now, and there is a waitlist for Unity Spark. But there are demos of Unity Spark games now, if you want to see what will be possible.

I was able to spin up a couple of games really quickly--a 2D cosy space exploration game, and a snarky sci fi trivia game. I'd say the the writting for the humorous trivia questions and the cosy interactions was reasonable--this isn't a tool that can only do reskins of old school arcade games. In addition to music and graphics it can do text to speech.

It's still an experiment, simultaneous impressive, and frustrating, with rather unexpectedly low prompt compliance. But, beta.

It really doesn't seem to like shifting from multiplayer to solo play. It seems like you ought to have a strong opinion upfront. (again, early days)

It's natural to think of this quick and easy tool for playing game, but I suspect part of the eventual value will be learning tools and "self gamification" I could imagine doing a variant of my trivial game for memorization or language learning.

What we've seen in the past with generally applicable technologies generally take 20 years to show up as productivity.

There was a Bank of Korea study that showed AI saved workers about 1.5 hours a week, with with no increase in output. Just because I'm more productive at a task, it doesn't mean the people up or downstream of my work benefit. And my time probably gets sucked into meetings. (In the study, solo entrepreneurs did benefit--probably because they own everything end to end)

In term of cool little projects, there's all sort of things that people are doing to improve their own lives or make interesting things. No shame if you're incurious about those.

I mean, I don't know that there is some sort of AI equivalent of the lifechanging magic of rural electrictrifcation. But I don't know that it was ever likely in the near term anyway.

Yeah, that some shumck of an executive at Microsoft happens to have had similar sentimental notions as other members of the literati who hate AI is not an "admission" or even a particularly interesting fact.

Given the process by which "meritocratic" elites are usually selected and trained, it would be odd if this wasn't sometimes the case.

In a quarter with record breaking income of over $100 billion, they also had negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow from their "bank account", because the people selling them chips and building them data centers want to be paid, while the investment itself is depreciated over time.

If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.

It's well reported matter public record that hundreds of thousands people protested, daily. And it's trivial to find polling that showed that about two thirds of Hong Kongers supported the protests, while only a third took your point of view.

Just because it is convenient for the CCP to coerce "confessions" about CIA involvement, and it's convenient for willing accomplices to their dishonest and cruel misrule to pretend that this is relevant, no one else needs to take this seriously.

The person you are replying to seems to have a depth of experience with editing over many years.

It seems pretty clear that AI capabilities are jagged. There are good reasons to believe based on research and the subjective evaluation of experts who are quite friendly to AI that there are some tasks creative tasks that AI has been really quite good at (totally disrupting stock illustrations) some where it does so much better than typical person, but not nearly as well as well as an expert (song creation) and some where, so far, it pretty much fails, and sees almost no progress even as models get better and better. (long form creative writting). Indeed, writting style sometimes seems to fall backwards with recent releases.

Also, it's subjectively, but commonly held to be true that most of the content created when AI can execute well lack taste, unless the human creating with AI has it. The term "slop" exists and in legible for a reason.

I mean, maybe this is just a question of different people speaking about different time horizons.

But it seems perfectly sensible for someone to say that there is a lot of automation that can happen in the near term, and that they see no reasonable evidence that AI can do interesting or even coherent work this space.

I don't know that shallow accelerationist boosterism (or panicked doomer despair ) that handwaves away the distinctive variations AI performnce is that enlightening.