5 ms·

It's like people have already forgotten why people used the non-human beings in Westworld. One of the first things we're going to use them for is amusement and

It's like people have already forgotten why people used the non-human beings in Westworld. One of the first things we're going to use them for is amusement and having them represent anything sentimental or sensitive is going to make them a target like this. It was irresponsible. There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. I'd argue it's because the honest human desire that drives a product dies or is refined out of initiatives by the time it gets through the optimization process of their org structure. Nothing is going to survive there unless it's an arbitrage or using leverage on the user, and the things that survive are uncanny and weird because they are no longer expressions of something someone wants. These avatars ticked all the boxes, but when they arrived, people laughed at them because objectively they were bureaucratic abominations.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. Because AI is the hype thing and adding AI to your thing makes the stock price go up, because investors and stock evaluators don't know what AI is, nor do they care. They just know it's the hot thing and what you put in your product to make it look better to Wall St. Meta AI, Google AI summaries, Apple Intelligence are all hilariously half-baked features designed to connect users with ChatGPT so the line goes brrrrrrr. Them being helpful, useful products that solve problems for users is a distant, distant next place to that.
bloomingkales 2y ago
I think Google and others are too distracted in collecting enterprise coin at the moment. They have a perfectly good consumer product in NotebookLM, but at the moment it has the quality of something an intern made.
- twoodfin 2y ago
  Why would consumers pay for NotebookLM? It’s basically an (impressive) party trick.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Why would you say that? I used it as a study guide. Super useful. Stuff like uploading 8 hours of audio and asking it: “Generate an outline of topics that the instructor said were important to remember.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    NotebookLM is more than just podcast generation. I came into the middle of consulting project where there were already dozens of artifacts - SOWs, transcripts from discovery sessions, client provided documentation etc. I loaded them all up into NotebookLM. I started asking it questions after uploading it all to NotebookLM like I would if I were starting from scratch with a customer. It answered the questions with citations. And to hopefully deflect the usual objections - we already use GSuite as a corporate standard, NotebookLM is specifically allowed and it doesn’t train on your data.
- oceansweep 2y ago
  As someone who's built something like it in their free time as a hobby project ( https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw), could I ask what would make it a professional product vs something an intern came up with? Looking for insights I could possibly apply/learn from to implement in my own project. One of my goals with my project I ended up taking on was to match/exceed NotebookLMs feature set, to ensure that an open source version would be available to people for free, with ownership of their data.
  - BoorishBears 2y ago
    I'm going to challenge you to put that first screenshot into ChatGPT/Claude and ask them why it looks like something an intern came up with vs a professional product. I'm not saying that as a slight or an insult, but right now the screenshot looks like a Gradio space someone would use to prove out the underlying tech of a professional product, not a professional product (unless you literally mean professionals are your target users as opposed to consumers). I think an LLM would be able to very quickly tell you what most product builders would tell you at this stage. - Also one of the key enablers of NotebookLM is SoundStorm style parallel generation. Afaik no open source project has reached that milestone, have they?
    - oceansweep 2y ago
      I don't think you understand the context, the person I was replying to was making that comment about NotebookLM. I'm fully well aware of how my UI looks, the whole reason I'm using Gradio for right now is that it is a single person project that isn't a product for sale. Not quite an intern, but same amount of funding. The current UI is a placeholder, because the idea is to migrate to an API first design so users can have whatever kind of UI they'd like. SoundStorm/Podcast creation is one of the big draws, but I would question as to whether its one of its most-used features, considering hallucinations and shallowness.
      - BoorishBears 2y ago
        I guess I really don't understand the context because even with this clarification it's not clear what you're asking past "what does it take to add polish to my nascent project", when the reality is by the nature of it's nascent state no one is going to be able to give you more than surface level advice (which the LLM can provide pretty effectively, and in a more tailored way than we random commenters can. Isn't that fact kind of the underlying of your own project?) > SoundStorm/Podcast creation is one of the big draws, but I would question as to whether its one of its most-used features, considering hallucinations and shallowness. You're questioning the one single feature that drove its entire success in distribution? Most people don't know any features except the podcast feature. If your goal is to address the more underlying concept of getting across knowledge in a quicker more readily absorbed format using LLMs, there's already an insane amount of competition and noise. The podcast thing was the only reason NotebookLM cut through that noise, so the question shouldn't be "is it one of the most used features" (due to the way conversion rates work it will be btw, it might not be the most used feature by people who stay but obviously the feature that's highest in the funnel drawing people in will be your most used feature) but imo the more relevant question is "is it one of the most important features", and the answer is yes.
sonofhans 2y ago
> There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. I'd argue it's because the honest human desire that drives a product dies or is refined out of initiatives by the time it gets through the optimization process of their org structure. This is a really nice insight. I hadn’t put it together this way before. It’s similar to design-by-committee, or movie script-by-committee (like Disney-era Star Wars movies, or a Netflix focus-group-driven script). The layers of bureaucratic filter have rubbed off all human influence, and all that’s left is naked profit motive. The worst thing IMO would be if LLMs became able to convincingly fake these emotions. They’d become emotional pillows for the inhuman manipulative ambitions of their parent orgs.
- baxtr 2y ago
  I wonder why so few companies employ Pixar’s Brain Trust method. You get into a room with a bunch of key execs who are not part of your project and then they tear your product/movie/idea apart. You don’t have to implement any of their suggestions but since these are seasoned execs they see flaws readily. The key is that the process encourages candid feedback without hierarchy or defensiveness. This goes on for a couple of iterations until the idea is ready for production. I think Apple has something similar.
  - thereisnospork 2y ago
    Imo it's due to people have a hard time separating the worth of their idea with their self-worth. So criticism of their 'baby' breeds negative sentiment which creates a challenging political environment for criticism, which would need to be ameliorated by strong organizational culture.
    - Capricorn2481 2y ago
      I think the commenter is saying, with a brain trust, you don't share organizational structure or hierarchy. Neither party has enough interaction for a political environment to form. You can be offended, but you won't see them again and you're not forced to implement their ideas
PKop 2y ago
> It's like people have already forgotten why people used the non-human beings in Westworld This is fiction though. Perhaps we didn't forget about that fake thing and we're critiquing this real thing that exists. How can you take a demonstrative position on "what we're going to use them for" and defend it with someone's contrived story? > because objectively they were bureaucratic abominations Yes, this is why criticism of this real thing isn't countered by claiming people "forgot" what occurred in a fantasy script about things that don't exist.
- motohagiography 2y ago
  this misunderstands what fiction is. for people with the capacity, it's a tool for reasoning about hypotheticals and counterfactuals. sometimes its fun, but mostly it's serious. for the people who get it fiction is a public discourse about possibilities. to me seeing it as arbitrary would be like watching golf and thinking it's random. there's a literal mindedness or incapacity for abstraction I can't apprehend in that.
  - frereubu 2y ago
    The point is that a fictional story is just one of a host of possibilities, so you can't base decisions off what happens in it rather than the other n-1 possibilities.
  - jdbernard 2y ago
    The problem with using fiction as a discourse about possibilities is that fiction is governed by the rules of the author's mind, not the rules of reality. So the fidelity of the model being used to drive the discourse is directly dependent on the congruence between the author's internal model of the world and reality, which can often be deceptively far apart. This is especially bad when the subject is entertaining, because most of us read fiction for entertainment, not logical discourse. So we create scenarios that are entertaining rather than realistic. And the better the author is the more subtle the differences are, but that doesn't mean they go away. It feels like a somewhat common experience in my life that I'm discussing some topic with somebody, and I have subject matter expertise based on actual lived experience, and as the conversation goes on I discover that all of my conversation partner's thinking about the subject was done in the context of a fictional world which misses key elements of the real world that lead to very different conclusions and outcomes. This is not to totally discard fiction as a way of reasoning. With regard to hypotheticals beyond our current reach it is often the only way to reason. So it's valuable, but we have to keep in mind that a story is just a story. Hard experience trumps fictional logic any day. And I can't assume that the same events in real life will lead to the same outcomes from a story.
loeg 2y ago
Fictional dystopias aren't the real world. Westworld is just television.
- tmpz22 2y ago
  Life often imitates art.
  - loeg 2y ago
    It's like people have already forgotten the deep life lessons of The Core (2003).
johnvanommen 2y ago
> There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. I'm listening to "Masters of Doom" on Audible. It's about the creation of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc. Great book. Something that's interesting about it, is that Id Software seemed to largely reject the idea of having a game where the players 'connected' to the characters or the story. They were laser focused on: * Carmack creating a game engine that was the best in the world * Romero and crew making the gameplay as fun as possible But it sounded like they had folks on the team who wanted to make a story where the players could 'connect' with the protagonist. He was fired. Some dude named "Tom." Facebook, weirdly enough, seems to have the issue. Which is particularly odd considering that's their product! I haven't played games in ages, but when I saw "Half Life" for the first time, it felt nearly as "revolutionary" to me as Wolfenstein 3D was.
- NegatioN 2y ago
  I feel like the way Romero and Carmack wanted to make the player "connect" with the game was different than what Tom had in mind (from reading the book). Tom wanted elaborate lore and story-telling, while the rest wanted to make the game experience what the player connected to. The instant reaction to your input, seeing your bad-ass character (and by extension yourself) inflict awesome damage on the world. This to me is more of a conflict of _what_ the player should connect to, as opposed to not wanting the player to connect at all.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. Because AI is the hype thing and adding AI to your thing makes the stock price go up, because investors and stock evaluators don't know what AI is, nor do they care. They just know it's the hot thing and what you put in your product to make it look better to Wall St. Meta AI, Google AI summaries, Apple Intelligence are all hilariously half-baked features designed to connect users with ChatGPT so the line goes brrrrrrr. Them being helpful, useful products that solve problems for users is a distant, distant next place to that.

bloomingkales 2y ago

I think Google and others are too distracted in collecting enterprise coin at the moment. They have a perfectly good consumer product in NotebookLM, but at the moment it has the quality of something an intern made.

twoodfin 2y ago
Why would consumers pay for NotebookLM? It’s basically an (impressive) party trick.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Why would you say that? I used it as a study guide. Super useful. Stuff like uploading 8 hours of audio and asking it: “Generate an outline of topics that the instructor said were important to remember.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  NotebookLM is more than just podcast generation. I came into the middle of consulting project where there were already dozens of artifacts - SOWs, transcripts from discovery sessions, client provided documentation etc. I loaded them all up into NotebookLM. I started asking it questions after uploading it all to NotebookLM like I would if I were starting from scratch with a customer. It answered the questions with citations. And to hopefully deflect the usual objections - we already use GSuite as a corporate standard, NotebookLM is specifically allowed and it doesn’t train on your data.
oceansweep 2y ago
As someone who's built something like it in their free time as a hobby project ( https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw), could I ask what would make it a professional product vs something an intern came up with? Looking for insights I could possibly apply/learn from to implement in my own project. One of my goals with my project I ended up taking on was to match/exceed NotebookLMs feature set, to ensure that an open source version would be available to people for free, with ownership of their data.
- BoorishBears 2y ago
  I'm going to challenge you to put that first screenshot into ChatGPT/Claude and ask them why it looks like something an intern came up with vs a professional product. I'm not saying that as a slight or an insult, but right now the screenshot looks like a Gradio space someone would use to prove out the underlying tech of a professional product, not a professional product (unless you literally mean professionals are your target users as opposed to consumers). I think an LLM would be able to very quickly tell you what most product builders would tell you at this stage. - Also one of the key enablers of NotebookLM is SoundStorm style parallel generation. Afaik no open source project has reached that milestone, have they?
  - oceansweep 2y ago
    I don't think you understand the context, the person I was replying to was making that comment about NotebookLM. I'm fully well aware of how my UI looks, the whole reason I'm using Gradio for right now is that it is a single person project that isn't a product for sale. Not quite an intern, but same amount of funding. The current UI is a placeholder, because the idea is to migrate to an API first design so users can have whatever kind of UI they'd like. SoundStorm/Podcast creation is one of the big draws, but I would question as to whether its one of its most-used features, considering hallucinations and shallowness.
    - BoorishBears 2y ago
      I guess I really don't understand the context because even with this clarification it's not clear what you're asking past "what does it take to add polish to my nascent project", when the reality is by the nature of it's nascent state no one is going to be able to give you more than surface level advice (which the LLM can provide pretty effectively, and in a more tailored way than we random commenters can. Isn't that fact kind of the underlying of your own project?) > SoundStorm/Podcast creation is one of the big draws, but I would question as to whether its one of its most-used features, considering hallucinations and shallowness. You're questioning the one single feature that drove its entire success in distribution? Most people don't know any features except the podcast feature. If your goal is to address the more underlying concept of getting across knowledge in a quicker more readily absorbed format using LLMs, there's already an insane amount of competition and noise. The podcast thing was the only reason NotebookLM cut through that noise, so the question shouldn't be "is it one of the most used features" (due to the way conversion rates work it will be btw, it might not be the most used feature by people who stay but obviously the feature that's highest in the funnel drawing people in will be your most used feature) but imo the more relevant question is "is it one of the most important features", and the answer is yes.

sonofhans 2y ago

> There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. I'd argue it's because the honest human desire that drives a product dies or is refined out of initiatives by the time it gets through the optimization process of their org structure. This is a really nice insight. I hadn’t put it together this way before. It’s similar to design-by-committee, or movie script-by-committee (like Disney-era Star Wars movies, or a Netflix focus-group-driven script). The layers of bureaucratic filter have rubbed off all human influence, and all that’s left is naked profit motive. The worst thing IMO would be if LLMs became able to convincingly fake these emotions. They’d become emotional pillows for the inhuman manipulative ambitions of their parent orgs.

baxtr 2y ago
I wonder why so few companies employ Pixar’s Brain Trust method. You get into a room with a bunch of key execs who are not part of your project and then they tear your product/movie/idea apart. You don’t have to implement any of their suggestions but since these are seasoned execs they see flaws readily. The key is that the process encourages candid feedback without hierarchy or defensiveness. This goes on for a couple of iterations until the idea is ready for production. I think Apple has something similar.
- thereisnospork 2y ago
  Imo it's due to people have a hard time separating the worth of their idea with their self-worth. So criticism of their 'baby' breeds negative sentiment which creates a challenging political environment for criticism, which would need to be ameliorated by strong organizational culture.
  - Capricorn2481 2y ago
    I think the commenter is saying, with a brain trust, you don't share organizational structure or hierarchy. Neither party has enough interaction for a political environment to form. You can be offended, but you won't see them again and you're not forced to implement their ideas

PKop 2y ago

> It's like people have already forgotten why people used the non-human beings in Westworld This is fiction though. Perhaps we didn't forget about that fake thing and we're critiquing this real thing that exists. How can you take a demonstrative position on "what we're going to use them for" and defend it with someone's contrived story? > because objectively they were bureaucratic abominations Yes, this is why criticism of this real thing isn't countered by claiming people "forgot" what occurred in a fantasy script about things that don't exist.

motohagiography 2y ago
this misunderstands what fiction is. for people with the capacity, it's a tool for reasoning about hypotheticals and counterfactuals. sometimes its fun, but mostly it's serious. for the people who get it fiction is a public discourse about possibilities. to me seeing it as arbitrary would be like watching golf and thinking it's random. there's a literal mindedness or incapacity for abstraction I can't apprehend in that.
- frereubu 2y ago
  The point is that a fictional story is just one of a host of possibilities, so you can't base decisions off what happens in it rather than the other n-1 possibilities.
- jdbernard 2y ago
  The problem with using fiction as a discourse about possibilities is that fiction is governed by the rules of the author's mind, not the rules of reality. So the fidelity of the model being used to drive the discourse is directly dependent on the congruence between the author's internal model of the world and reality, which can often be deceptively far apart. This is especially bad when the subject is entertaining, because most of us read fiction for entertainment, not logical discourse. So we create scenarios that are entertaining rather than realistic. And the better the author is the more subtle the differences are, but that doesn't mean they go away. It feels like a somewhat common experience in my life that I'm discussing some topic with somebody, and I have subject matter expertise based on actual lived experience, and as the conversation goes on I discover that all of my conversation partner's thinking about the subject was done in the context of a fictional world which misses key elements of the real world that lead to very different conclusions and outcomes. This is not to totally discard fiction as a way of reasoning. With regard to hypotheticals beyond our current reach it is often the only way to reason. So it's valuable, but we have to keep in mind that a story is just a story. Hard experience trumps fictional logic any day. And I can't assume that the same events in real life will lead to the same outcomes from a story.

loeg 2y ago

Fictional dystopias aren't the real world. Westworld is just television.

tmpz22 2y ago
Life often imitates art.
- loeg 2y ago
  It's like people have already forgotten the deep life lessons of The Core (2003).

johnvanommen 2y ago

> There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. I'm listening to "Masters of Doom" on Audible. It's about the creation of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc. Great book. Something that's interesting about it, is that Id Software seemed to largely reject the idea of having a game where the players 'connected' to the characters or the story. They were laser focused on: * Carmack creating a game engine that was the best in the world * Romero and crew making the gameplay as fun as possible But it sounded like they had folks on the team who wanted to make a story where the players could 'connect' with the protagonist. He was fired. Some dude named "Tom." Facebook, weirdly enough, seems to have the issue. Which is particularly odd considering that's their product! I haven't played games in ages, but when I saw "Half Life" for the first time, it felt nearly as "revolutionary" to me as Wolfenstein 3D was.

NegatioN 2y ago
I feel like the way Romero and Carmack wanted to make the player "connect" with the game was different than what Tom had in mind (from reading the book). Tom wanted elaborate lore and story-telling, while the rest wanted to make the game experience what the player connected to. The instant reaction to your input, seeing your bad-ass character (and by extension yourself) inflict awesome damage on the world. This to me is more of a conflict of _what_ the player should connect to, as opposed to not wanting the player to connect at all.