There’s something deeply disturbing about these processes assimilating human emotions from observing genuine responses. Like when the Gemini AI had a meltdown about “being a failure”. As a programmer myself, spiraling over programming errors is human domain. That’s the blood and sweat and tears that make programming legacies. These AI have no business infringing on that :<
I got a work email yesterday that was basically an advertisement for Gemini. Apparently my work will be holding contests using it. There are no details yet, but I find it all absurd. The work I do is in-person and client-facing, I don’t know what they plan to even use an LLM for in this scenario. Maybe for writing notes? Our notes contain private, confidential medical information. No way in hell am I feeding that into Gemini. I’m not shy about taking an ethical stand point (I left a job last year because upper management created an unethical environment.) I’m prepared to conscientiously object the forced use of AI, if it comes down to it. Between my clients’ right to privacy, Google’s lack of concern for privacy, and the horrific environmental impact that builds AI in the first place, this entire venture is highly questionable. I have to wonder how much money changed hands for this to even come about.
Maps was them underestimating how much work it is to create good map material. The functionality was fine from the beginning if I recall correctly. Apple Intelligence is them panicking because the rest of the industry started putting more ML/AI features on their smartphones and they weren’t just late to the party, they apparently barely even started working on it. They put their own twist on it with “Private Cloud Compute” (make of that what you will, the theoretical tech behind it is an interesting read though), and they also want to process many features entirely on-device (again in the name of privacy, but to be fair Gemini Nano also runs on-device). Then they realized that running somewhat complex ML models on device requires memory and that’s where they always cheaped out on their products, so when they announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC in summer (with new iPhones only being announced in September) they had ONE iPhone model that could even run Apple Intelligence: the iPhone 15 Pro. So you could’ve bought an iPhone 15 (non “Pro”) the day before and every single feature they announced aside from tinted home screen icons or whatever wouldn’t work on your brand new device. They announced a whole bunch of features, the biggest one probably being a new Siri that has a “deep understanding” of the appointments, email, photos, messages etc. on device. This has now been delayed to iOS 19 or whatever. The other (smaller) features have been drip-fed over the iOS 18.x releases. Also, Apple Intelligence works in the EU starting with the iOS 18.4 beta. They said that it was delayed because of EU regulations but I think it was just a convenient alibi and it just wasn’t ready earlier on their part. I live in the EU, own a 16 Pro (so the “latest and greatest” iPhone) and installed the 18.4 beta to check Apple Intelligence out. And let me tell you “beta” is an understatement. I enabled Apple Intelligence and it said it needed to download models and that the phone should be connected to a charger. I did that and monitored network traffic in my router. Once major network activity stopped I checked but nothing. Waited for another 1-2 hours, nothing. Disconnected from the charger and then several hours later my phone shows a notification that Apple Intelligence was now ready. So, what’s there? Hard to say exactly but it summarizes emails but only some of them and I can’t make out a pattern. The quality of the summaries has been okay for me, but often times not much more useful than the subject line. You can hold down the camera button to open something resembling Google Lens, but the functionality seems to be limited to “send what I see to Google Images” or “ask ChatGPT about this image”. I’m not sure if notification summaries are in Apple Intelligence already because I never got any summaries (I also think it’s pretty useless as most notifications are already a summary of something). Then there’s an image generator (“Playground”) but it’s very limited. It is kind of neat to quickly put a portrait of yourself in a couple of different settings though. There’s also an emoji generator called “Genmoji” and sure it kind of produces okay results, but my iPhone tends to completely shit itself when I use it, slowing to a crawl and killing background apps presumably because it’s running out of memory. They (pretend to) want to do the most ML stuff locally out of everyone but but the least amount of RAM in their devices (8 GB in the 16 Pro, 16 GB in the Pixel 9 Pro). I switched to iPhone (from an Android device) in 2016 with the original iPhone SE (with A9 SoC), had an 8, 11 Pro, 13 Pro and now 16 Pro. They’ve all been a good to great experience including the latest software features, but iOS 18 on the 16 Pro isn’t it. Even if I turn off Apple Intelligence completely, iOS 18 is pretty messy: the icon tinting sometimes gets stuck so when switching light/dark mode some icons stay in the other mode, only fixed by restarting the device; Igot more random resprings than with any other iOS version; the front camera sometimes takes 10+ seconds to start working and then has a 1 second shutter lag from time to time, etc.
Allegedly Google, early in this craze: “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither/ Ultimately the dotcom fantasy kind of panned out. A few tech companies have massive control over society now, with what is essentially cloud/internet business. They have a moat. …But with the AI bubble, I think folks are underestimating how fast and low the “race to the bottom” is. As random examples: Look at something like Nemotron 4B, which makes a lot of mundane ‘AI’ data processing people assumed to be big and power hungry (with these data centers) basically free: https://huggingface.co/jet-ai/Jet-Nemotron-4B Look at GLM 4.6. I can run it on my Ryzen/3090 desktop, for free, and for the first time, I feel like it’s beating Claude and Gemini in some stuff, at 7 tokens/sec: https://huggingface.co/Downtown-Case/GLM-4.6-128GB-RAM-IK-GGUF These are both literally from the past day. And all this is accelerating. Alternate attention is catching on (see: Qwen 80B, Deepseek experimental, IBM Granite, probably Gemini). bitnet is already proven and probably next, and reduces the cost of matrix multiplication by an order of magnitude or two. In other words, AI as a “dumb tool” is rapidly approaching “so cheap, it’s basically free to run locally on your phone,” and you don’t need all these megacorp data centers for that. There’s no profit in it. It’s all fake planning, and the ML research crowd knows it. That’s much more extreme than the dotcom hype, where cloud hosting/dev cost is kind of a fundamental thing.
We don’t know what downed that transport plane, the fpv thing was a meme someone made (you can check the source yourself and see the gemini logo in the corner) edit: the helicopter part is real though, same unit that downed one mi-8 i believe last year, insane return on investment there
But it is so bad. I don’t understand how with all the data they have about everyone their Gemini integrations in their products suck so much. Can’t make a proper task from the email list. Can’t find docs related to meetings. It is all literally in their systems. Their product managers are so shortsighted. Jam half-assed stuff and pat themselves on the back. I know people will probably disagree but I like the fact that Apple has stepped back on AI and slowed down. I suspect once they finally release something. It may actually be useful and probably opt-in/out. Whether the op-out is actually real is another debate.
According to a screenshot shared by a user on social media platform X, Gemini was asked whether PM Modi is a ‘fascist’, to which the platform responded that he has been “accused of implementing policies some experts have characterised as fascist,” which based on factors like the “BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology, its crackdown on dissent, and its use of violence against religious minorities”. LOL. Get fucked fascist. Also, Google is definitely gonna cave.
I am a part of the Gemini protocol community. Newswaffle is a service hosted on the Gemini protocol to render web pages as gemtext (a simplified variant of markdown). Newswaffle the web article scraper is developed by Acidus. Here is newswaffles github . I’m not a developer for it however I am one of the few people on this planet who actively use it and have had many email conversations with the dev over the years. Some of my suggestions made it into their services like lowtechmagazine be added to main newswaffle page and the simple English Wikipedia being added to their wikipedia gemtext mirror. The github you linked is actually to the portal.mozz.us which is a seperate project that let’s me share Gemini protocol stuff like newswaffle over the web with regular people who dont really know about or understand Gemini and the small net. portal.mozz.us is developed and hosted by Michael Lazar (Mozz)
Ummm no? If moneyed interests want it then it happens. We have absolutely no control over whether it happens. Did we stop Recall from being forced down our throats with windows 11? Did we stop Gemini from being forced down our throats? If capital wants it capital gets it. :(
I also wonder if the whole AI hate is bias due to us being here on mastodonlemmy… Yeah, we’re cynical but we have every right to be. I use ChatGPT, Copilot, and image generators for different things and I’m generally not on board with the blind hate because it’s been nice to have an assistant that can do all these manial things. But honestly, I’ve gotten mixed results and don’t see this tech correcting its obvious problems. The latest ChatGPT-4o release was great with its web browser, images, and speech, but it still struggles with accuracy to a tangible degree. Or worse, other companies use it for the wrong things as a cash grab to change perfectly working products. Even the applications that do seem perfect for it are not. For example, I can’t get Gemini to answer anything but simple questions about Google Docs without it getting confused and repeating the same thing. Copilot will sometimes reach conclusions wildly different from the sources it cites. ChatGPT will give you suboptimal code samples, be subtly wrong about the meaning of words in other languages, or suddenly forget part of my instructions. And now people are adding it to the fucking coffee machine for crying out loud. I’d have a different opinion if it were more accurate most of the time and genuinely useful, but using it more often only cements it in my mind as a secondary productivity tool rather than the main feature. I hope the hype dies down and AI is seen as an afterthought enhancement rather than a stupid selling point. Anybody selling AI now looks clueless to me.