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I'm not sure that's true. Not everybody is hounding for information from the web in the first place. Apple's approach of using current-boom AI to help you navi

I'm not sure that's true. Not everybody is hounding for information from the web in the first place. Apple's approach of using current-boom AI to help you navigate and digest your own private trove of multimedia content (photos, videos, apps, notes, structured data, etc) is absolutely useful to people as well, and for some of us, one of the only personal uses of this AI that seems compelling at all. 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. But these features have to work, and work well, and work fast, and be widely known to work, before they'll really win the market. But that's going to take a minute and it might not even happen.

okasaki 2y ago
It's great for spooks too. Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.
- fao_ 2y ago
  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.
  - qup 2y ago
    He's not talking about generating images, he's talking about classifying existing ones.
    - fao_ 2y ago
      > 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.
dylan604 2y ago
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
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  >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.
  - cube2222 2y ago
    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).
  - consteval 2y ago
    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.
itsoktocry 2y ago
>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).
- swatcoder 2y ago
  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.
  - radlad 2y ago
    Are there examples of new tools based on recent AI advancements that perform better than Google Photos image recognition?
    - conradev 2y ago
      Google highlighted the delta that recent advancements brought to their products: https://blog.google/products/photos/ask-photos-google-io-2024/ https://blog.google/products/photos/ask-photos-google-io-202...
      - gumby271 2y ago
        Wow they announced this back in May and it's still not available for me.
    - gsich 2y ago
      Or better than Picasa almost 10 years ago.
- lancesells 2y ago

okasaki 2y ago

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

fao_ 2y ago
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.
- qup 2y ago
  He's not talking about generating images, he's talking about classifying existing ones.
  - fao_ 2y ago
    > 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.

dylan604 2y ago

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

itsoktocry 2y ago
>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.
- cube2222 2y ago
  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).
- consteval 2y ago
  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.

itsoktocry 2y ago

>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).

swatcoder 2y ago
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.
- radlad 2y ago
  Are there examples of new tools based on recent AI advancements that perform better than Google Photos image recognition?
  - conradev 2y ago
    Google highlighted the delta that recent advancements brought to their products: https://blog.google/products/photos/ask-photos-google-io-2024/ https://blog.google/products/photos/ask-photos-google-io-202...
    - gumby271 2y ago
      Wow they announced this back in May and it's still not available for me.
  - gsich 2y ago
    Or better than Picasa almost 10 years ago.
lancesells 2y ago