>I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick.

Hasn't Google been doing this forever? I can search random things in my photos (like pictures of an old car I owned).

For a bit, and to a degree, yes. Last-decade image recognition and tagging teased what might be possible and is genuinely useful.

The new LLM-ish tools promise that users can be more vague and casual in what language they use and more elaborate in how specific they mean to be; and that the queries (and operations) can span more diverse data sources.

Are there examples of new tools based on recent AI advancements that perform better than Google Photos image recognition?

Google highlighted the delta that recent advancements brought to their products:

https://blog.google/products/photos/ask-photos-google-io-202...

Wow they announced this back in May and it's still not available for me.

Or better than Picasa almost 10 years ago.

iOS has been doing this for a bit too. I don't use it enough to really know how good it is but I can definitely look for cats or people I know. Haven't used Apple Intelligence yet so maybe that's better as well?

Google photos is way, way, way better than apple photos at this. It’s not even a competition.

I have my sister’s dogs named in my google photos library. Every time I a take a picture of either dog, they are automatically tagged and added to a shared album I set up for my sister.

I have nieces and nephews with photos from newborn age to 10+ years old, and it has managed to organize them across their growth and ages. It’s incredible. I can search for “<niece name> <vacation area>” and get every photo of her on a certain vacation to make a family scrap book.

Apple photos search and tagging is pitiful in comparison.

But one of the two you can have on your device and do not have to pay rent

Yeah, it seems based on the advertising from the various AI vendors, they are showing its use by summarizing emails/phone call/etc. Things like being able to search text messages for info blah blah. The only one I've seen pushing online searches is Google, but that seems like duh! for them to be pushing. Circle something in an image and take me to a listing of that something for sale. Of course that's Google's direction.

But that whole find me something on my mutliple gigabytes of storage on my device account definitely seems like the mass appeal

>But that whole find me something on my mutliple gigabytes of storage on my device account definitely seems like the mass appeal

This is such a mundane use of AI, but unsurprising Apple would sell it as revolutionary.

Mundane or not, it’s actually useful, a meaningful improvement, and should work consistently well.

That is in contrast to a lot of fancy AI demos which are a great party trick, but fall apart in actual usage, with their reliability being “maybe it will work this time, maybe it won’t, just keep retrying :)”.

Apple is pretty well-recognized for usually being a bit late to the party, but at least delivering stuff that’s polished.

Just look at this thread of people sharing how Gemini broke all their commands and automations. The Apple Intelligence Siri on the other hand works just fine (even if new features are arriving slowly).

It's not very mundane, it's quite difficult to search for things when you don't know exactly what the thing is. Computers are laughably bad at this. I can tell a friend to find something in my room and give a vague description of the object. But with a file on my computer, I need to know actual content in the file. And images or video? Forget about it, if you don't remember part of the filename or what subdirectory it's in then it's gone.

It's great for spooks too. Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.

I'm not sure that a hallucinated image of something is better than the original image when you're doing spywork.

The difference between whether someone has 4 or 5 fingers, whether they're holding a gun versus a random object, or whether they're mixed-race or caucasian, all seem like they would be pretty important things. Likewise, car number plates, signage in the photo that help identify where it is, metadata of the image itself (often more useful than the image), are all incredibly important. All of those are things that AI is absolutely terrible at lmao.

He's not talking about generating images, he's talking about classifying existing ones.

> Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.

I'm not sure how a bunch of probably-correct keywords that miss a lot of the important aforementioned details in the image is more useful than the image itself, or it's metadata. Both of which would be lost. My point applies equally with respect to image classification, too.