Exactly. Personally I’m fine with both:

1) Forward looking demoes that demonstrate the future of your product, where it’s clear that you’re not there yet but working in that direction

or

2) Demoes that show off current capabilities, but are scripted and edited to do so in the best light possible.

Both of those are standard practice and acceptable. What Google did was just wrong. They deserve to face backlash for this.

This kind of moral fraud - unethical behavior - is tolerated for some reason. It's almost like investors want to be fooled. There is no room for due diligence. They squeel like excited Taylor Swift fans as they are being lied to.

As long as you’re not the last one out, “being fooled” can be very profitable

This shouldn't be a surprise. Companies optimize for what benefits shareholders. Or if there's an agency conflict of interest, companies optimize for what benefits managements' career and bonuses (perhaps at the expense of shareholders). Companies pay lip service to external stakeholders, but really that's a ploy to reduce attention and the risk of regulation, there is no fundamental incentive to treat all stakeholders well.

If lying helps, which can happen if there aren't large legal costs or social repercussions on brand equity, or if the lie goes undetected, then they'll lie. This is what we necessarily get from the upstream incentives. Fortunately, lying in a marketing video is fairly low on the list of ethical violations that have happened in the recent past.

We've effectively got a governance alignment problem that we've been trying to solve with regulations, taxes and social norms. How can you structure guardrails in the form of an incentive system to align companies with ethical outcomes? That's the question and it's a difficult one. This question also applies to any form of human organization, including governments.

Well put. I’m not touching anything Google does any more. They’re far too dishonest. This failed attempt at a release (which turns out was all sizzle and no steak) only underscored how far behind OpenAI they actually are. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in the OAI offices when this demo video went live.

Do you believe everything verbatim that companies tell you in advertising?

If they show a car driving I believe it's capable of self-propulsion and not just rolling downhill.

A marketing trick that has, in fact, been tried: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...

Used to be "marketing tricks" were prosecuted as fraud.

still is. Nikola's CEO, Trevor Milton, was convicted of fraud and is awaiting sentencing.

Oh. Good to hear. Thank you.

If I recall correctly, that led to literal criminal fraud charges.

And iirc Tesla is also being investigated for fraudulent claims for faking the safety of their self driving cars.

Hmm, might I interest you in a video of an electric semi-truck?

When a company invents tech that can do this, how would their ad be different?

No, but most people tend to make a mental note of which companies tend to deliver and which ones work hard to mislead them.

You do understand the concept of reputation, right?

this was plausible

Seems reminiscent of a video where the lead research department within Google is an animation studio (wish I could remember more about that video)

Doing all these hype videos just for the sake of satisfying shareholders or whatever is just making me loose trust in their research division. I don't think they did anything like this when they released Bert.

I agree completely. When alphazero was announced I remember feeling like shocked over how they stated this revolutionary breakthrough as if it was like a regular thing. Alphafold and Alphacode are also impressive but this one just sounds like it was forced from Sundar and not the usual deepmind

Loose trust lol. https://youryoure.com/?lose

I too thought it was able to accept video.

Given the massive data volume in videos, I assumed it processed video into pictures by extracting a frame per second or something along those lines, while still taking the entire video as the initial input.

Turns out, it wasn't even doing that!

"phase"?

My friend, all these large corporations are going to get away with exactly as much as they can, for as long as they can. You're implying there's nothing to do but wait until they grace us with a "not evil phase", when in reality we need to be working on restoring our anti-monopoly regulation that was systematically torn down over the last 30 years.

I, too, was fooled to think Gemini has seen and heard through a video/audio feed instead of showing still images and prompting though text. While it might seem not much difference between still images and a video feed, in fact it requires a lot of (changing) context understanding to not make the bot babbling like an idiot all the time. It also requires the bot to recognize the “I don’t know it yet” state to keep appropriate silence in a conversation with live video feed, which is notoriously difficult with generative AI. Certainly one can do some hacking, build in some heuristics to make it easier, but to make a bot seems like a human partner in a conversion is indeed very hard. And that has been the most impressive aspect of the showed “conversations”, which are unfortunately all faked :(

I went back to the video and it said Gemini was "searching" for that music, not generating it. Google has done some stuff with generative music (https://aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com/experiments/music-lm) but we don't know if they'll bring that into Gemini.

I bet OpenAI and MS do the same, but people have a positive perception of them due to the massive chatGPT hype wave.