This is what it has come to? This is artificial intelligence? Billions and billions of dollars spent to narrate a recipe? Something that can be written down on a piece of paper?
I have a copy of the classic "Joy Of Cooking" in the kitchen. It was a lot cheaper, works perfectly every time, and doesn't get ruined if (when) I spill foodstuffs on it.
They just need an emotionless android without conscience, who does whatever is in the best interest of raking in money. They don't need technological excellence. Whether people at his company technologically succeed or fail, what matters is, that the company processes all the PII and feeds the algorithms. The rest is just for show.
I think such an emotionless android would have diligently prepared numerous backup scripts, sets of lenses, actors, demonstrations etc. to cover any failure contingency, since the cost of that is infinitesimal compared to even a slight change in their brand value.
Tangent: if you like cringey social awkwardness comedy (not my usual cup of tea, but in this case it's extraordinary, and hilarious), try "I Think You Should Leave".
How strong does a company's reality distortion field have to be for people to think your friends are going to want to come over to play with a new version of Windows?
I mean, why not "Let's all have wine and cheese and do root canals on each other!"?
Here's one of my favorites, of Lars doing the Wave dance on stage to ad-lib over connectivity hiccups. For some reason it evoked a lot more empathy from me...
Nah, more like a 1D chess move. Investors will pay them to invest in AI, so invest in AI, make the stock go up, sell, and leave the dumb investors holding the bag.
2D chess if they're smart: start a new company that competes with the one they just sold to dumb investors. Jack Dorsey is particularly fond of this move.
If you're taking about the R&D provisions in the OBBBA, that only changes the schedule of the deduction (immediately vs over several years). R&D, like most business expenses were was always deductible. Whether it's prudent or not isn't a factor.
That wasn't prerecorded, but it was rigged. They probably practiced a few times and it confused the AI. Still it's no excuse. They've dropped Apollo-program level money on this and it's still dumb as a rock.
I'm endless amazed that Meta has a ~2T market cap, yet they can't build products.
I don't think it was pre-recorded exactly, but I do think they built something for the demo that responded to specific spoken phrases with specific scripted responses.
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").
It's because their main business (ads, tracking) makes infinite money so it doesn't matter what all the other parts of the business do, are, or if they work or not.
Google are well-known, like Meta, for making products that never achieve any kind of traction, and are cancelled soon after launch.
I don't know about anyone else, but I've never managed to get Gemini to actually do anything useful (and I'm a regular user of other AI tools). I don't know what metric it gets into the top 2 on, but I've found it almost completely useless.
> When you call a business, the person picking up the phone almost always identifies the business itself (and sometimes gives their own name as well). But that didn't happen when the Google assistant called these "real" businesses:
No, because if you read the article you'd see that there's more, like the "business" not asking for customer information or the PR people being cagey when asked for details/confirmation.
>> I will die on this hill. It isn’t AI. You can’t confuse it.
> They "poisoned the context" which is clearly what they meant.
The "demo" was clearly prescriptive and not genuinely interactive. One could easily make the argument that the kayfabe was more like an IVR[0] interaction.
The ability to think. If it can't think in the first place, it can't get confused. Whether it's "real AI" or not depends on semantics of that you consider AI to be:
* If you think it's something that resembles intelligence enough to be useful in the same way intelligence is and to seem to be intelligence, this is clearly it. The "plant based meats" of AI.
* If you think it means actual intelligence that was manufactured by a human, this is not that. It's shockingly impressive auto correct, and it's useful, but it's not actually thinking. This would be "artificially created intelligence"; in essence, real intelligence with an artificial origin. The lab grown meat of AI.
For the latter, I really think it needs reasoning ability that isn't based on language. Plenty of animals can think and reason without depending on language. Language is a great carrier of intelligence, which is why LLMs work so well, but language is not the foundation of intelligence.
That said, I think "confused" is a fine enough anthropomorphization. I refer to things like Bluetooth issues as the machine getting confused all the time. Back in the day, Netflix would often have problems with the wrong image showing for a show, and I called that "Netflix getting confused". We know it's not actually getting confused.
That was my thought — the memory might not have been properly cleared from the last rehearsal.
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?
> Just get text-to-speech to slowly read you the recipe.
Even this feels like overkill, when a person can just glance down at a piece of paper.
I don’t know about others, but I like to double check what I’m doing. Simply having a reference I can look at would be infinitely better than something taking to me, which would need to repeat itself.
Paper get lost, it gets wet, it gets blown around it not weighed down, and when weighed down it then quickly gets covered with things.
Prepping raw ingredients, once has to be careful not to contaminate paper, or at least the thing weighing the paper down that may be covering the next step.
I cook a lot of food, and having hands free access to steps is a killer feature. I don't even need the AI, just the ability to pull up a recipe and scroll through it using the wrist controller they showed off would be a noticeable, albeit small, improvement to my life multiple times per week.
A hardened epaper display I could wash under a sink tap for the kitchen, with a simple page forward/back voice interface would actually be pretty handy now that I think about it.
You could imagine some utility to something that actually worked if it allowed you to continue working / not have to clean a hand and get your phone out while cooking. (Not a ton of utility, but some). But if it stumbles over basic questions, I just can't see how it's better than opening a recipe and leaning your phone against the backsplash.
Credit where it’s due: doing live demos is hard. Yesterday didn’t feel staged—it looked like the classic “last-minute tweak, unexpected break.” Most builders have been there. I certainly have (I once spent 6 hours at a hackathon and broke the Flask server keying in a last minute change on the steps of the stage before going on).
One of the demos was printing a thing out, but the processor was hopelessly too slow to perform the actual print job. So they hand unrolled all the code to get it down from something like a 30 minute print job to a 30 second print job.
I think at this point it should be expected that every publicly facing demo (and most internal ones) are staged.
The CEO of Nokia had to demo their latest handset one time on stage at whatever that big world cellphone expo is each year.
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.
As much as I hate Meta, I have to admit that live demos are hard, and if they go wrong we should have a little more grace towards the folks that do them.
I would not want to live in a world where everything is pre-recorded/digitally altered.
The difference between this demo and the legendary demos of the past is that this time we are already being told AI is revolutionary tech. And THEN the demo fails.
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.
Despite the Reddit post's title, I don't think there's any reason to believe the AI was a recording or otherwise cheated. (Why would they record two slightly different voice lines for adding the pear?) It just really thought he'd combined the base ingredients.
That's even worse because it would mean that it wasn't the scripted recording that failed, it means the AI itself sucks and can't tell that the bowl is empty and nothing was combined. Either this was the failure of a recorded demo that was faked to hide how bad the AI is, or it accurately demonstrated that the AI itself is a failure. Either way it's not a good look.
My layperson interpretation of this particular error was that the AI model probably came up with the initial recipe response in full, but when the audio of that response was cut off because the user interrupted it, the model wasn't given any context of where it was interrupted so it didn't understand that the user hadn't heard the first part of the recipe.
I assume the responses from that point onwards didn't take the video input into account, and the model just assumes the user has completed the first step based on the conversation history. I don't know how these 'live' ai sessions things work but based on the existing openai/gemini live ai chat products it seems to me most of the time the model will immediately comment on the video when the 'live' chat starts but for the rest of the conversation it works using TTS+STT unless the user asks the AI to consider the visual input.
I guess if you have enough experience with these live AI sessions you can probably see why it's going wrong and steer it back in the right direction with more explicit instructions but that wouldn't look very slick in a developer keynote. I think in reality this feature could still be pretty useful as long as you aren't expecting it to be as smooth as talking to a real person
It seems extremely likely that they took the context awareness out of the actual demo and had the AI respond to pre defined states and then even that failed.
The AI analyzing the situation is wayyy out of scope here
It was reading step 2 and he was trying to get it to do step 1.
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.
I have a friend who does magic shows. He sells his shows as magic and stand-up comedy. It's both live entertainment, okay, but he is the only person I've ever seen use that tagline. We went to see him perform once and everything became clear when he opened the night.
"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.
I bet they rehearsed a dozen times and never failed as bad live. Got to give them props for keeping the live demos. Apple has neutered its demos so much it's now basically 2 hr long commercials.
Live Apple demos were always held together with duct tape in the first place. That first "live" iPhone demo had a memorized sequence that Jobs needed to use to keep the whole phone OS from hard crashing.
During that first iPhone demo they also had a portable cell tower (cell on wheels) just off-stage to mimic a better signal strength than it was capable of. NYTimes write-up on the whole thing is worth the read [0].
They also force the developers to make it work, under threat of being fired, and in the ire of Steve Jobs case, being yeeted in to the sun along with their ancestors and descendents.
As much as it'll be "interesting" to see how models behave in real world examples (presumably similarly to how the demos went), I'm not convinced this is a premade recording like what seems to be implied.
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.
Yea the behavior of the AI read to me more like a hard coded demo but still very much "live". I suspect him cutting it off was poorly timed and that timing could have amplified due to WiFi? Who knows. I wasn't there. I didn't build it.
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!
He's the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation, promising technology that puts the livelihoods of millions of people at risk. He deserves every bit of scrutiny he gets.
Yes, the mocking, gleeful negativity really does make me concerned that this place is becoming Reddit. The fact that the highest upvoted post on this thread is just a link to Reddit isn't doing much to help me feel better. And I've been here for at least a decade, so I don't think this is the noob illusion.
There are definitely people aligned with the anti-AI movement who show up in groups for certain articles and chant the same sentences to each other.
And if you look at their other comments often they're generally anti-technology, which makes you wonder why they chose this particular site to hang out on.
I'm not sure if the people funding the anti-AI movement have successfully convinced a swath of longtime HN users, or whether they've simply encouraged new users to swarm HN to try to promote AI skepticism. Or maybe some third possibility.
One thing I do know is if I enter a thread where the anti-AI folks are active, and I make a comment countering their narrative I'll often get responses from new accounts. At least 2 or 3 times, the accounts are so new that they have only a single comment responding to me and were created only a few minutes before responding to me.
As a famous Lisp hacker once said
> One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
Sometimes it's that way with comments too when there are people who feel like they have big goals, like stopping the US from becoming dominant in AI.
We are not bots, we just loathe historically bad-faith actors and especially with the current climate, we will take the opportunity of harmless schadenfreude where we can get it.
Oh please. This isn't like the old iPhone days where new features and amazing tech were revealed during live demos. Failure was acceptable then because what we were being shown was new and pushing the envelope.
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.
So there was no AI. I know there’s a lot of confusion regarding the exact definition of AI these days, but I’m pretty sure we can this one time all agree that an “on rails” scenario ain’t it. Therefore, whatever it is that they were doing out there, they weren’t demoing their AI product. You could even say it wasn’t a live demo of the product.
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.
For tiny stuff, they are incredible auto-complete tools. But they are basically cover bands. They can do things that have been done to death already. They're good for what they're good for. I wouldn't have bet the farm on them.
It's an ad network with an attached optional pair of glasses.
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.
Someone would have to be dumb to give facebook access to collect data from everything they see and hear in their life combined with the ability to plaster ads over every available surface in their field of view. They'd have to be beyond stupid to pay for it.
It's because Zuck doesn't actually believe in anything. Zuck's values, politics, and business goals change with the wind so everything that stems from them feels empty, because it's missing the true drive.
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.
CEOs are paid to promote their company, yes, but that doesn't mean they must fake it. The other alternative is to actually believe what they're saying. I don't think Zuck does.
Felt like the best example of a true believer. I'd say a similar, but less clear version, would be Dario Amodei vs Sam Altman. I don't agree with either, but Dario comes across as a true believer who would be doing AI regardless of the current trends, whereas Sam comes across as a chancer who would be doing cryptocurrencies if that was still big, or social media if that was still the next big thing, evidenced by the fact that he did both of those but they didn't stick so he moved his focus on.
Jobs would have been doing consumer computing hardware whatever happened. Apple in the early days wasn't the success it is now, he was fired and went and started another company in the same space (NeXT).
Somebody said the cooking guy was some influencer person? I noticed that many non-tech people often resort to this excuse, even in situations where it makes absolutely no sense (e.g., on a desktop with only ethernet, or with mic/speakers connected via cable). It's almost like they just substitute "bad wifi" for "glitch".
It's colloquial in the younger generations to use the term Wifi to actually refer to a WAN connection to one's home or building, regardless of Physical Layer Transport.
I often ask clarifying questions to people, to me its part of casual conversation, not an inquisition or anything (because my own behavior would be different if it was)
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
Bad idea to rely on WiFi for an important demo in a crowded environment. It would have worked fine in testing but when the crowd arrives and they all start streaming etc, they bring hundreds more devices all competing for bandwidth.
Zuck should have known better and used Ethernet for this one!
This does not deter me from possibly buying one. The concept is pretty cool and appealing to those who want a distraction free lifestyle. Even if there's a screen in front of you at all times, at least you won't need to hold something in your hands to be able to operate it. That alone is a significant win.
My point is that the device that you keep in your pocket is one that you must take out with your hand and operate with your hand such that you cannot perform its primary functions without using hands. It's true that the Ray-Ban Meta Display can be controlled with hand gestures but doing so is apparently optional. Being able to control and consume content from a smart device while having your hands free to multitask is a big deal.
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.
I do wonder what it will take to replace the default voice command handler. Will it be as locked down as possible or will Meta be happy with any adoption at all?
It's well known Meta AI is shit. But I could probably make an app that can run this demo in an afternoon. The glasses part here is insane and I don't know why everyone is fixated on the tacky AI part. It's like if I invented the car and you complained that it's really hard to crank the windows down. Be happy it's even there!
Right. I just wonder why nobody talks about the risks of bringing camera based glasses to the masses. This is mass surveillance at its best. Without camera, i would say it's a good phone replacement. But considering they try to make everyone use a camera on the glasses, it's clear they don't care.
Why the bleep do they still rely on wifi at conferences like this?? I always insist on a wired connection on its own, dedicated, presenter vlan. Is this running on wifi-only glasses or something? Is that the only medium they can present the tech on? Could they have shielded the room the guy's in?
There's a simple explanation that isn't 'prerecorded'. I'd be very happy to accuse Meta of faking a demo, but that's 1) just a weird way to fake a demo and 2) effect that has easier explanation.
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.
I'd figured it performed image recognition on the scene visible to it, then told the language model it could see various ingredients including some combined in a bowl.
Step 0: You will be making Korean stake. Step 1: Mix those ingredients. Step 2: Now that you mixed those ingredients, do something else.
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.
This is like something right out of the show Silicon Valley. You couldn’t have scripted a more cringe-worth demo.
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.
The mocking, gleeful negativity here concerns me. I am worried that with some of these more polarized topics that the discussions on HN are becoming closer to those on Reddit. The fact that the highest upvoted post on this thread is just a link to Reddit isn't doing much to help me feel better. And I've been here for at least a decade, so I don't think this is the noob illusion.
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.
This thread [1] on Zuckerberg from 7+ years ago doesn't look too different. Top comments saying it's "pretty cringe-y", another posting an image from Reddit and some "Twitter bingo cards". The nature of the situation doesn't really offer much for deep analysis, but the discussion yesterday [2] on the product itself seems fine to me. You might disagree since people are more skeptical rather than being glad Meta is pushing it.
I'm surprised that there isn't more. Everything that this person has touched has made life that much worse for humanity as a whole. He deserves every ounce of criticism and mockery, moreso because he makes himself out to be this savior figure. We should sneer at every attempt at theirs (and other's) awful AI because it's lighting this world on fire. The popping of the bubble cannot come soon enough.
You just don’t seem to understand. Mark wouldn’t hesitate to grind you down to the last atom in order to extract every last bit of value out of you. And you defend the guy because he gave you freebies, or something. I have no words.
When billionaires stop fantasizing about AI allowing them to rid themselves of the filthy peasant class which keeps feeling entitled to take even the smallest fraction of their income from them just because they're also doing all the actual work that makes that income possible.
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.
The failures on stage were kind of endearing, to be honest, especially the one with Zuck. Plus the products seem really cool, I hope I'll be able to try them out soon.
Zuckerberg has negative charisma, it's painful to watch...
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!
Jobs was a clear communicator who emphasized user friendly products in aesthetically pleasing boxes. If Silicon Valley wasn't the most obtuse place on earth he wouldn't have stood out nearly as hard.
Endearing is great for trying to sell a heartfelt, homeade piece of art. It clashes when it's a trillionaire company trying to pretend this product can replace entire sectors of human labor.
One important thing to note: demo didn't fail! (Or, at least not in the way people usually think of)
> 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...
There is a second part that is equally bad, but with Zuck:
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nkbqyk/...
This is what it has come to? This is artificial intelligence? Billions and billions of dollars spent to narrate a recipe? Something that can be written down on a piece of paper?
I have a copy of the classic "Joy Of Cooking" in the kitchen. It was a lot cheaper, works perfectly every time, and doesn't get ruined if (when) I spill foodstuffs on it.
The more you spill, the more the book starts to look delicious
BRB got a book I have to lick real quick.
God, that's actually painful to watch. I can't believe I lasted two minutes.
Mark's definitely mastered optimizing for peak cringe factor while at 1.95T valuation.
They just need an emotionless android without conscience, who does whatever is in the best interest of raking in money. They don't need technological excellence. Whether people at his company technologically succeed or fail, what matters is, that the company processes all the PII and feeds the algorithms. The rest is just for show.
I think such an emotionless android would have diligently prepared numerous backup scripts, sets of lenses, actors, demonstrations etc. to cover any failure contingency, since the cost of that is infinitesimal compared to even a slight change in their brand value.
they have one in the already in the CEO position
Not to put words in the OP's mouth, but I think that was the joke.
Obligatory https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak
Good god...
I was going to say that’s two minutes I won’t get back (and I won’t) but, ya know, schadenfreude.
It's kind of like Peep Show, where the writers tried to engineer the most awkward social situations, only without the jokes.
Tangent: if you like cringey social awkwardness comedy (not my usual cup of tea, but in this case it's extraordinary, and hilarious), try "I Think You Should Leave".
"Brian's Hat" is the 1st one I saw and maybe the best: https://youtu.be/LO2k-BNySLI?si=qEX7STkSOeCVZtK-
Also "Hot Dog Car" https://youtu.be/WLfAf8oHrMo?si=jz5EKwjJZm1UMZau
Nathan for You is almost physically painful to watch, the cringe is so intense I can only take a few seconds at a time.
Canadians do it best. https://youtu.be/tXgfzxXUVsc?si=vBXu20TewUldSBJB
Nathan Fielder is a genius.
The Rehearsal is less in-the-moment cringe and more soul-soaking cringe. Amazing stuff.
Also a tangent, but Microsoft was the OG for corporate cringe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
Developers developers developers developers!
One of the best mashups on youtube came from this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE
Enjoy. :)
Oh my god.
How strong does a company's reality distortion field have to be for people to think your friends are going to want to come over to play with a new version of Windows?
I mean, why not "Let's all have wine and cheese and do root canals on each other!"?
Here's one of my favorites, of Lars doing the Wave dance on stage to ad-lib over connectivity hiccups. For some reason it evoked a lot more empathy from me...
https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=19m35s
robozuck was also having wifi problems
Big tech has spent $155bn on AI this year. It’s about to spend hundreds of billions more https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/02/big-tech-...
Should have just hired a korean cook instead of spending billions of dollars to hire some AI dude to come up with an app to narrate a korean recipe.
Maybe it's a 5D chess move to generate investor pressure on them to not spend that much.
Nah, more like a 1D chess move. Investors will pay them to invest in AI, so invest in AI, make the stock go up, sell, and leave the dumb investors holding the bag.
2D chess if they're smart: start a new company that competes with the one they just sold to dumb investors. Jack Dorsey is particularly fond of this move.
They classify a lot of it as R&D and write it off taxes. Taxpayers foot the bill.
> They classify a lot of it as R&D and write it off taxes. Taxpayers foot the bill.
Taxpayers do not "foot the bill" for corporations reducing their tax obligations via "write-offs".
See: https://accountinginsights.org/what-does-write-it-off-mean-f...
"That's not a write off!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCP27_vquxQ
Obligatory -- "You don't even know what a write-off is. Do you?"
https://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ
If you're taking about the R&D provisions in the OBBBA, that only changes the schedule of the deduction (immediately vs over several years). R&D, like most business expenses were was always deductible. Whether it's prudent or not isn't a factor.
This is the best thing I’ve seen ever. It makes me so happy I can’t even tell you.
As bad as I thought that was going to be, it was worse. And I set the bar very low for anything involving Zuck. #MustWatch
Would be good to change the OP link to this - it's the same clip but plus a bit more.
This is like "The Office" (Original UK version with Ricky Gervais as David Brent) with $2T market cap company.
There is already Hooli!
I really missed seeing Zuck sweat.
OT, but thanks for linking to old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com. The new interface is an abomination.
Reminds me of Jin Yang and his 8 ways to cook an octopus, on silicon valley:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ltFB4WBdDg4
Every added drop of his flop sweat during this disaster just gives me that much more life. Amazing.
"A man's reach should exceed his grasp."
That wasn't prerecorded, but it was rigged. They probably practiced a few times and it confused the AI. Still it's no excuse. They've dropped Apollo-program level money on this and it's still dumb as a rock.
I'm endless amazed that Meta has a ~2T market cap, yet they can't build products.
I don't think it was pre-recorded exactly, but I do think they built something for the demo that responded to specific spoken phrases with specific scripted responses.
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").
It's because their main business (ads, tracking) makes infinite money so it doesn't matter what all the other parts of the business do, are, or if they work or not.
That's Google's main business too, they have infinite money plus 50% relative to meta, and they are still in the top two for AI
Google are well-known, like Meta, for making products that never achieve any kind of traction, and are cancelled soon after launch.
I don't know about anyone else, but I've never managed to get Gemini to actually do anything useful (and I'm a regular user of other AI tools). I don't know what metric it gets into the top 2 on, but I've found it almost completely useless.
Annoying to boot
Please share an example. Your 'almost completely useless' claim runs counter to any model benchmark you could choose.
Haven't Google also famously faked a phone call with an AI some years ago for an event?
https://www.axios.com/2018/05/17/google-ai-demo-questions
> When you call a business, the person picking up the phone almost always identifies the business itself (and sometimes gives their own name as well). But that didn't happen when the Google assistant called these "real" businesses:
That's the whole argument?
No, because if you read the article you'd see that there's more, like the "business" not asking for customer information or the PR people being cagey when asked for details/confirmation.
Well, it _IS_ a rock after all.
At this point, honesty is an oasis that is the 2025 year of scams and grifts. I'm just waiting for all the bubbles to pop.
It's been this way since natural internet user base growth dried up
True. We at least had a period where they weren't so blatant about it. But now it's robbery in blind daylight.
> confused the AI.
I will die on this hill. It isn’t AI. You can’t confuse it.
They "poisoned the context" which is clearly what they meant.
>>> confused the AI.
>> I will die on this hill. It isn’t AI. You can’t confuse it.
> They "poisoned the context" which is clearly what they meant.
The "demo" was clearly prescriptive and not genuinely interactive. One could easily make the argument that the kayfabe was more like an IVR[0] interaction.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response
“The blue square is red.”
“The blue square is blue.”
“The blue square is green.”
The future is here.
Ok, you’ve piqued my interest. What’s required in order for something to be genuinely confused?
Just try asking an AI about the Seahorse Emoji (insert close-yet-comically-incorrect emojis since they won't render here):
_________
ChatGPT: There is a seahorse emoji: — wait, no, that’s a lobster. Okay, for real now:
Here it is: � Seahorse — argh, it’s still not showing properly here.
Let’s try again:
(hedgehog) (sauropod) (T-rex) (otter) (seal) (lobster) …but no actual (squid) or (mermaid) matches…
Okay, deep breath — I checked the official Unicode list. And you’re right: The seahorse emoji does exist — it’s — no, okay really:
(hedgehog) (hippo) (peacock) Still nothing?
Wait — turns out, I was wrong, and you’re right to call me out.
There is a seahorse emoji:
— no!
_________
https://ibb.co/GfpWRXCz
The ability to think. If it can't think in the first place, it can't get confused. Whether it's "real AI" or not depends on semantics of that you consider AI to be:
* If you think it's something that resembles intelligence enough to be useful in the same way intelligence is and to seem to be intelligence, this is clearly it. The "plant based meats" of AI.
* If you think it means actual intelligence that was manufactured by a human, this is not that. It's shockingly impressive auto correct, and it's useful, but it's not actually thinking. This would be "artificially created intelligence"; in essence, real intelligence with an artificial origin. The lab grown meat of AI.
For the latter, I really think it needs reasoning ability that isn't based on language. Plenty of animals can think and reason without depending on language. Language is a great carrier of intelligence, which is why LLMs work so well, but language is not the foundation of intelligence.
That said, I think "confused" is a fine enough anthropomorphization. I refer to things like Bluetooth issues as the machine getting confused all the time. Back in the day, Netflix would often have problems with the wrong image showing for a show, and I called that "Netflix getting confused". We know it's not actually getting confused.
Capacity for will, I would imagine the OP may respond. I'm not averse to the position.
That was my thought — the memory might not have been properly cleared from the last rehearsal.
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?
Yes. Even if the demo worked perfectly, it's hopelessly contrived. Just get text-to-speech to slowly read you the recipe.
> Just get text-to-speech to slowly read you the recipe.
Even this feels like overkill, when a person can just glance down at a piece of paper.
I don’t know about others, but I like to double check what I’m doing. Simply having a reference I can look at would be infinitely better than something taking to me, which would need to repeat itself.
Paper get lost, it gets wet, it gets blown around it not weighed down, and when weighed down it then quickly gets covered with things.
Prepping raw ingredients, once has to be careful not to contaminate paper, or at least the thing weighing the paper down that may be covering the next step.
I cook a lot of food, and having hands free access to steps is a killer feature. I don't even need the AI, just the ability to pull up a recipe and scroll through it using the wrist controller they showed off would be a noticeable, albeit small, improvement to my life multiple times per week.
A hardened epaper display I could wash under a sink tap for the kitchen, with a simple page forward/back voice interface would actually be pretty handy now that I think about it.
You could imagine some utility to something that actually worked if it allowed you to continue working / not have to clean a hand and get your phone out while cooking. (Not a ton of utility, but some). But if it stumbles over basic questions, I just can't see how it's better than opening a recipe and leaning your phone against the backsplash.
Or pick up a bottle of bulgogi sauce?
The Kotaku article on this had a really nice final zinger[0]:
> 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...
Credit where it’s due: doing live demos is hard. Yesterday didn’t feel staged—it looked like the classic “last-minute tweak, unexpected break.” Most builders have been there. I certainly have (I once spent 6 hours at a hackathon and broke the Flask server keying in a last minute change on the steps of the stage before going on).
Live demos are especially hard when you're selling snake oil.
Yeah. Everyone wants to be like Steve but forgets that he usually had something amazing to show off.
Didn't Steve flip through 3 iPhones and hardcode the network UI to look like they had good signal?
One of the demos was printing a thing out, but the processor was hopelessly too slow to perform the actual print job. So they hand unrolled all the code to get it down from something like a 30 minute print job to a 30 second print job.
I think at this point it should be expected that every publicly facing demo (and most internal ones) are staged.
He faked shit all the time. He just faked it well and actually delivered later.
The CEO of Nokia had to demo their latest handset one time on stage at whatever that big world cellphone expo is each year.
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.
If you ever write up a more detailed recollection of that, I would love to read it lol
As much as I hate Meta, I have to admit that live demos are hard, and if they go wrong we should have a little more grace towards the folks that do them.
I would not want to live in a world where everything is pre-recorded/digitally altered.
The difference between this demo and the legendary demos of the past is that this time we are already being told AI is revolutionary tech. And THEN the demo fails.
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 you have a likable presenter, the audience is cheering for you, even (especially?) when things go wrong.
Live demos being hard isn't an excuse for cheating.
Despite the Reddit post's title, I don't think there's any reason to believe the AI was a recording or otherwise cheated. (Why would they record two slightly different voice lines for adding the pear?) It just really thought he'd combined the base ingredients.
That's even worse because it would mean that it wasn't the scripted recording that failed, it means the AI itself sucks and can't tell that the bowl is empty and nothing was combined. Either this was the failure of a recorded demo that was faked to hide how bad the AI is, or it accurately demonstrated that the AI itself is a failure. Either way it's not a good look.
My layperson interpretation of this particular error was that the AI model probably came up with the initial recipe response in full, but when the audio of that response was cut off because the user interrupted it, the model wasn't given any context of where it was interrupted so it didn't understand that the user hadn't heard the first part of the recipe.
I assume the responses from that point onwards didn't take the video input into account, and the model just assumes the user has completed the first step based on the conversation history. I don't know how these 'live' ai sessions things work but based on the existing openai/gemini live ai chat products it seems to me most of the time the model will immediately comment on the video when the 'live' chat starts but for the rest of the conversation it works using TTS+STT unless the user asks the AI to consider the visual input.
I guess if you have enough experience with these live AI sessions you can probably see why it's going wrong and steer it back in the right direction with more explicit instructions but that wouldn't look very slick in a developer keynote. I think in reality this feature could still be pretty useful as long as you aren't expecting it to be as smooth as talking to a real person
It seems extremely likely that they took the context awareness out of the actual demo and had the AI respond to pre defined states and then even that failed.
The AI analyzing the situation is wayyy out of scope here
So MetaAI is basically the dumb cousin of Siri? I didn‘t expect to ever write that.
this isn't cheating. the models are unpredictable. This product is going out the door this month, there is no reason to cheat.
> the models are unpredictable. This product is going out the door this month
I see a problem.
Yeah, I just watched it again and I’m mostly confused why the guy interrupted what sounded like a valid response.
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?
It was reading step 2 and he was trying to get it to do step 1.
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’m mostly confused why the guy interrupted what sounded like a valid response
I thought they were demonstrating interruption handling.
I think he was just trying to get it back on track instead of letting it go on about something that was completely off
Because it was repeating what it had already described rather than moving on to the first step
Adrenaline makes people do interesting things
I have a friend who does magic shows. He sells his shows as magic and stand-up comedy. It's both live entertainment, okay, but he is the only person I've ever seen use that tagline. We went to see him perform once and everything became clear when he opened the night.
"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.
If your friend isn't already aware of Tommy Cooper [1], he's in for a treat.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Cooper
He was so funny, people laughed when he died!
So, wait, is he just a shitty magician and a funny guy, or does he fail on purpose?
The AI, or this person's friend?
The friend.
I bet they rehearsed a dozen times and never failed as bad live. Got to give them props for keeping the live demos. Apple has neutered its demos so much it's now basically 2 hr long commercials.
The new Apple presentations are much more information dense, and tailored to the main (online) audience. They’re clearly better.
More dense but less trust worthy. I don't think they would have pushed apple intelligence the way they did if there was a live demo.
Live Apple demos were always held together with duct tape in the first place. That first "live" iPhone demo had a memorized sequence that Jobs needed to use to keep the whole phone OS from hard crashing.
During that first iPhone demo they also had a portable cell tower (cell on wheels) just off-stage to mimic a better signal strength than it was capable of. NYTimes write-up on the whole thing is worth the read [0].
0.https://web.archive.org/web/20250310045704/https://www.nytim...
That _was_ worth it indeed--thanks :)
There was one demo where Steve Jobs told everyone to turn off their WiFi.
Even with that, Live demos are incredibly more better than hour long demos.
They also force the developers to make it work, under threat of being fired, and in the ire of Steve Jobs case, being yeeted in to the sun along with their ancestors and descendents.
and so boring. I would take Jobs presenting a live demo than any of this heavily-produced stuff.
They are boring infomercials now. The live audience used to keep it from feeling too prepackaged.
You gotta keep your infomercials engaging:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ
Microsoft really nailed the genre. (Although I learned just now while looking up the link that this one was an internal parody, never aired.)
a few moments earlier... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
As much as it'll be "interesting" to see how models behave in real world examples (presumably similarly to how the demos went), I'm not convinced this is a premade recording like what seems to be implied.
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.
Yea the behavior of the AI read to me more like a hard coded demo but still very much "live". I suspect him cutting it off was poorly timed and that timing could have amplified due to WiFi? Who knows. I wasn't there. I didn't build it.
So the live demo failed?
So much negativity.
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.
He's the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation, promising technology that puts the livelihoods of millions of people at risk. He deserves every bit of scrutiny he gets.
> that puts the livelihoods of millions of people at risk.
what livelihood are these glasses putting at risk?
I was referring to AI/LLMs in general.
Yes, the mocking, gleeful negativity really does make me concerned that this place is becoming Reddit. The fact that the highest upvoted post on this thread is just a link to Reddit isn't doing much to help me feel better. And I've been here for at least a decade, so I don't think this is the noob illusion.
There are definitely people aligned with the anti-AI movement who show up in groups for certain articles and chant the same sentences to each other.
And if you look at their other comments often they're generally anti-technology, which makes you wonder why they chose this particular site to hang out on.
I'm not sure if the people funding the anti-AI movement have successfully convinced a swath of longtime HN users, or whether they've simply encouraged new users to swarm HN to try to promote AI skepticism. Or maybe some third possibility.
One thing I do know is if I enter a thread where the anti-AI folks are active, and I make a comment countering their narrative I'll often get responses from new accounts. At least 2 or 3 times, the accounts are so new that they have only a single comment responding to me and were created only a few minutes before responding to me.
As a famous Lisp hacker once said
> One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
Sometimes it's that way with comments too when there are people who feel like they have big goals, like stopping the US from becoming dominant in AI.
I've been here for over a decade. It has become very reddit like in the past few years.
I want to get into YC just to use and browse Bookface instead.
Bots bots bots... tearing down our stars is good business for a variety of vested interests. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
We are not bots, we just loathe historically bad-faith actors and especially with the current climate, we will take the opportunity of harmless schadenfreude where we can get it.
All you're doing here is associating your hopes and dreams with grifters and charlatans.
They should be mocked and called out, it might leave room for actual innovators who aren't glossy incompetents and bullshitters.
Oh please. This isn't like the old iPhone days where new features and amazing tech were revealed during live demos. Failure was acceptable then because what we were being shown was new and pushing the envelope.
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.
But that’s the thing… it’s not a live demo…
I see no evidence of that. It seems like they tried to put the AI “on rails” with predefined steps and things went wrong.
So there was no AI. I know there’s a lot of confusion regarding the exact definition of AI these days, but I’m pretty sure we can this one time all agree that an “on rails” scenario ain’t it. Therefore, whatever it is that they were doing out there, they weren’t demoing their AI product. You could even say it wasn’t a live demo of the product.
You can put the AI on rails by just prompting by it. The latest models are very steerable.
System prompt: “stick to steps 1-n. Step 1 is…”
I can say confidently because our company does this. And we have F500 customers in production.
I don't think it was rigged.
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.
For tiny stuff, they are incredible auto-complete tools. But they are basically cover bands. They can do things that have been done to death already. They're good for what they're good for. I wouldn't have bet the farm on them.
i have a lot of difficulty getting claude to understand arrows in pictures.
tried giving it flowcharts, and it fails hard
Never work with children, animals, and puppets.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverWorkWithChi...
It's an ad network with an attached optional pair of glasses.
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.
Someone would have to be dumb to give facebook access to collect data from everything they see and hear in their life combined with the ability to plaster ads over every available surface in their field of view. They'd have to be beyond stupid to pay for it.
Don’t look up how many users Meta has if you wish to maintain your sanity
[dead]
Sad thing is that even those who won’t buy it will have their privacy infringed upon. We’re all Zucked
Everything is always so cringe with Facebook and Zuck. It was always doomed to fail.
It's because Zuck doesn't actually believe in anything. Zuck's values, politics, and business goals change with the wind so everything that stems from them feels empty, because it's missing the true drive.
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.
CEOs (and other spokespeople) are actors paid to believe things convincingly in front of other people.
CEOs are paid to promote their company, yes, but that doesn't mean they must fake it. The other alternative is to actually believe what they're saying. I don't think Zuck does.
OK, then whose job is it to make important decisions and to define (and explain) the company's strategy? Is that also the CEO?
Why are you comparing 2000s Steve Jobs to Zuck?
Felt like the best example of a true believer. I'd say a similar, but less clear version, would be Dario Amodei vs Sam Altman. I don't agree with either, but Dario comes across as a true believer who would be doing AI regardless of the current trends, whereas Sam comes across as a chancer who would be doing cryptocurrencies if that was still big, or social media if that was still the next big thing, evidenced by the fact that he did both of those but they didn't stick so he moved his focus on.
Jobs would have been doing consumer computing hardware whatever happened. Apple in the early days wasn't the success it is now, he was fired and went and started another company in the same space (NeXT).
As you describe him Zuck sounds very much like the AI he's trying to sell.
I love how they randomly blame the WiFi network, like anyone is going to buy it.
Somebody said the cooking guy was some influencer person? I noticed that many non-tech people often resort to this excuse, even in situations where it makes absolutely no sense (e.g., on a desktop with only ethernet, or with mic/speakers connected via cable). It's almost like they just substitute "bad wifi" for "glitch".
It's colloquial in the younger generations to use the term Wifi to actually refer to a WAN connection to one's home or building, regardless of Physical Layer Transport.
I often ask clarifying questions to people, to me its part of casual conversation, not an inquisition or anything (because my own behavior would be different if it was)
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
It's almost certainly a joke. Everyone knows that the demo failed.
A reference to the 2010 iPhone 4 demo perhaps: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2297843/steve-jobs-wi-fi-m...
Maybe but it really didnt read like a joke..
Certainly didnt seem like a joke.
Its definitely a joke. They were saying it again when the WhatsApp call failed. They were being sarcastic.
Pretty sure it's a meme, like blaming the WLAN cable.
*wifi cable
Bad idea to rely on WiFi for an important demo in a crowded environment. It would have worked fine in testing but when the crowd arrives and they all start streaming etc, they bring hundreds more devices all competing for bandwidth.
Zuck should have known better and used Ethernet for this one!
Should've downloaded more ram for the wifi to work better
More than likely the full response was kept as context despite being interrupted.
Notably though, the AI was clearly not utilizing its visual feed to work alongside him as implied
This does not deter me from possibly buying one. The concept is pretty cool and appealing to those who want a distraction free lifestyle. Even if there's a screen in front of you at all times, at least you won't need to hold something in your hands to be able to operate it. That alone is a significant win.
Right, strapping a screen to your face is less distracting then having a device you can turn off and shove in your pocket...
My point is that the device that you keep in your pocket is one that you must take out with your hand and operate with your hand such that you cannot perform its primary functions without using hands. It's true that the Ray-Ban Meta Display can be controlled with hand gestures but doing so is apparently optional. Being able to control and consume content from a smart device while having your hands free to multitask is a big deal.
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.
It's not a fail, but the correct demonstration of the quality of the service
I do wonder what it will take to replace the default voice command handler. Will it be as locked down as possible or will Meta be happy with any adoption at all?
It's well known Meta AI is shit. But I could probably make an app that can run this demo in an afternoon. The glasses part here is insane and I don't know why everyone is fixated on the tacky AI part. It's like if I invented the car and you complained that it's really hard to crank the windows down. Be happy it's even there!
Right. I just wonder why nobody talks about the risks of bringing camera based glasses to the masses. This is mass surveillance at its best. Without camera, i would say it's a good phone replacement. But considering they try to make everyone use a camera on the glasses, it's clear they don't care.
Ya for real, i dont even care about the LLM/AI part. but the hardware looks really cool
I hope they keep doing live demos. This is much better than prerecorded videos.
Why the bleep do they still rely on wifi at conferences like this?? I always insist on a wired connection on its own, dedicated, presenter vlan. Is this running on wifi-only glasses or something? Is that the only medium they can present the tech on? Could they have shielded the room the guy's in?
You can say fuck on the Internet. It's fine
Deja Vu on this demo -- I've seen this one before,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYsulVXpgYg
This is like a Black Mirror episode. Also, is it a conscious decision to make the TTS sound so robotic?
Maybe it's modeled on Zuck's robotic voice
There's a simple explanation that isn't 'prerecorded'. I'd be very happy to accuse Meta of faking a demo, but that's 1) just a weird way to fake a demo and 2) effect that has easier explanation.
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.
I'd figured it performed image recognition on the scene visible to it, then told the language model it could see various ingredients including some combined in a bowl.
AI: "You've already combined the base ingredients."
Except, no. He hadn't.
Step 0: You will be making Korean stake. Step 1: Mix those ingredients. Step 2: Now that you mixed those ingredients, do something else.
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.
How exactly is this "AI recording plays before the actor takes the steps"?
This place really is Reddit these days, so I guess the link is apt.
These demos whether good or bad go in meta's favor I think
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 is like something right out of the show Silicon Valley. You couldn’t have scripted a more cringe-worth demo.
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.
LMAO. Billions of dollars for this, seriously? Makes Bill Gates Win95 presentation BSOD fail look professional.
And LMAO for all the companies out there burning money for getting on the train of AI just because everyone does so.
What part is supposed to be prerecorded?
The interpretation of this is pretty dumb since its not a recording
Give them a break, small indie company
Yet Meta stock is at all time high
The mocking, gleeful negativity here concerns me. I am worried that with some of these more polarized topics that the discussions on HN are becoming closer to those on Reddit. The fact that the highest upvoted post on this thread is just a link to Reddit isn't doing much to help me feel better. And I've been here for at least a decade, so I don't think this is the noob illusion.
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.
This thread [1] on Zuckerberg from 7+ years ago doesn't look too different. Top comments saying it's "pretty cringe-y", another posting an image from Reddit and some "Twitter bingo cards". The nature of the situation doesn't really offer much for deep analysis, but the discussion yesterday [2] on the product itself seems fine to me. You might disagree since people are more skeptical rather than being glad Meta is pushing it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16803775
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283306
>becoming closer to those on Reddit
People are people. If you have two communities that anyone can join, eventually the only difference between them (if any) will be the rules.
I'm surprised that there isn't more. Everything that this person has touched has made life that much worse for humanity as a whole. He deserves every ounce of criticism and mockery, moreso because he makes himself out to be this savior figure. We should sneer at every attempt at theirs (and other's) awful AI because it's lighting this world on fire. The popping of the bubble cannot come soon enough.
The point of the video isn't even AI, it's VR.
You just don’t seem to understand. Mark wouldn’t hesitate to grind you down to the last atom in order to extract every last bit of value out of you. And you defend the guy because he gave you freebies, or something. I have no words.
This is exactly the behavior I'm describing.
still better than the pre-taped apple events. happy to see these products in action
Maybe it’s the new Silicon Valley trend to fuck up demos so people talk about it more?
You know there is no such things as bad publiciity..
Those WiFi's man, they're always trouble
AI is hot trash. When will this river of garbage stop?
When billionaires stop fantasizing about AI allowing them to rid themselves of the filthy peasant class which keeps feeling entitled to take even the smallest fraction of their income from them just because they're also doing all the actual work that makes that income possible.
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.
These hot takes with no context only make the ai argument stronger.
That sounds a bit too much like "this is good for Bitcoin"
Your vague-posting and straw man arguments are not very good.
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The failures on stage were kind of endearing, to be honest, especially the one with Zuck. Plus the products seem really cool, I hope I'll be able to try them out soon.
Zuckerberg has negative charisma, it's painful to watch...
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 much better? He tossed the camera aggressively to the other person, and then made a snide comment, and that's better than blaming wifi?
Jobs was one of a kind. He had that aura that Bill G et al envied. He admitted so in a video that can be found on YT.
Yet even Bill G handled public failure better than Zuck: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jGwy4sb9aO8
that clip reminds me of how Sundar reacts to these things.
I mean Bill wasnt figuring out how to get back at girls that rejected him in college lol.
Zuck carries that energy no matter what he does nor what amount of wealth he amasses.
Jobs was a clear communicator who emphasized user friendly products in aesthetically pleasing boxes. If Silicon Valley wasn't the most obtuse place on earth he wouldn't have stood out nearly as hard.
Endearing is great for trying to sell a heartfelt, homeade piece of art. It clashes when it's a trillionaire company trying to pretend this product can replace entire sectors of human labor.
Yeah. I’m impressed we have any sort of wave guide display on sale commercially this year.
One important thing to note: demo didn't fail! (Or, at least not in the way people usually think of)
> 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...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrus_pyrifolia
Except that he hadn't already combined the base ingredients.
Maybe I'm missing something; there was no mention of what base ingredients or how to combine them?!
In my understanding the demo was halted because of the apparently non-sensical recipe, but I wanted to say that that recipe was indeed correct.