3 ms·

Here's a thing you can do right now, today. - Go down to your local Ray-Ban store. - Ask to play with a pear of the Meta glasses. - Activate "Live AI mode"

by ctoth 1y ago

Here's a thing you can do right now, today. - Go down to your local Ray-Ban store. - Ask to play with a pear of the Meta glasses. - Activate "Live AI mode" - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world. Contrary to your (potentially misremembered?) history, nothing at all like this was possible in 2019. I remember finetuning an early GPT-2 (before they even released the 2B model!) on a large corpus of Star Wars novels and being impressed that it would mention "Luke" when I ran the produced model! Now I wear it on my head and read restaurant menus with it. Use it to find my Uber (what kind of car is that?) Today I am building my raised garden beds out back and reading the various soil amendments I purchased, talking about how much bloodmeal to put over the hugelkultur layer, having it do math, and generally having a pair of eyeballs. I'm blind. The amount of utility I get out of these things is ... very hard to overstate. If this's "moribund," sign me up for more decay.

amazingamazing 1y ago
Hasn’t Google lens been doing that for almost a decade now?
- acchow 1y ago
  Like how Google Translate has been translating between languages for a decade+ now...? There's been a stepwise jump in the capabilities of AI that's changed "products" from mostly fun to actually useful
  - amazingamazing 1y ago
    Are you implying that google translate was not useful to anyone prior to chat gpt3?
benatkin 1y ago
The Facebook glasses aren't as relevant as the LLMs doing many thinking tasks that people get paid to do. A lot of it is as a productivity multiplier, and I'm not saying it's all doom and gloom, but it's transformative.
- nativeit 1y ago
  But why should anyone in the general public get excited about a productivity multiplier? If history is any indication (and it appears to be repeating itself with worrying frequency), then all of that benefit will be hoarded by the upper crusts of society while labor is further marginalized. At this point, even as a technology enthusiast and longtime evangelist, I find myself sympathizing with the luddites.
- bandrami 1y ago
  If it's a productivity multiplier, where is the output of that productivity? Is there a bunch of new software I can download? A bunch of books I can read? What's all this alleged new productivity actually producing besides Ghibli memes?
api 1y ago
One thing that’s fascinating to me is that these straight out of sci-fi things are novelties or demos, and don’t seem all that popular. Most people just aren’t interested. It’s the “boring” stuff that’s interesting: automating drudgery work, a better way to research, etc. I’ve been predicting for years that glasses — whether AR or VR — are and will remain niche. I don’t think most people want them.
- afavour 1y ago
  > Most people just aren’t interested. Which makes sense, really. Buying an expensive pair of glasses so that I can point at an object and say “what is that” is a cool parlour trick but I can imagine very few scenarios where I’ve wished I had that functionality. Realtime translation… absolutely a feature I’d use. For a week a year, max. IMO the killer, everyday application just isn’t there yet. I’m still not sure what it would be.
  - glhaynes 1y ago
    And those are also all things that a smartphone can do (often a little worse, admittedly). Which you'll have with you anyway because of all the things it does much better than glasses can and likely ever could.
- Bjartr 1y ago
  These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere. Even post dotcom bust there was still this generally shared understanding that you probably shouldn't meet people you met on the Internet and you shouldn't get in strangers cars. Today we use the Internet for the purpose of summoning strangers to us for the purpose of getting in their cars, and it's completely banal to do so. These shifts take time and in the early-adopter stage the applications look half-baked, or solutions looking for a problem. That's because most of them are. The few that aren't will accrete over time until there's a solid base.
  - asadotzler 1y ago
bolobo 1y ago
> - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world. Maybe it's me having an extremely low imagination, but that stuff existed for a while in the shape of google lens and the various vision flavor of LLMs, and I must have used them.... 3 times in years, and not once did I think "Gosh I wish I could just ask a question aloud while walking in the street about this building and wait for the answer". It's either important enough that I want to see the wikipedia page straight from google maps and read the whole lot or not. > an AI which can read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world. I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations, privacy, bad phone signal or my bad english accent. I get that is certainly an amazing tools for people with vision impairments, but that is not the market Meta/OpenAI are aiming for and forcefully trying to shove it into. So yes, mayyybe if I am in a foreign country I could see a use but I usually want to get _away_ from technology on vacation. So I really don't see the point, but it seems that they believe I am the target audience?
- ctoth 1y ago
  > I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations I see. Perhaps your eyeballs missed the part where I said I'm blind? The entire purpose of my comment was to push back against this idea that AI is stuck in 2022. It's weird and nonsensical and seems disingenuous, especially when I say "here are things I can do now that I couldn't do before" and the general response is "but I don't need to do those things!"
  - kikimora 1y ago
    You describe new ways of feeding information into the model and new ways model presents outputs. Nothing radically changed in how model transforms inputs into outputs.
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    I think they did miss that, but to be fair you probably should have opened with that. It’s great that AI is enabling new use cases for blind/partially-sighted people! It’s encouraging to hear your perspective. At the same time, I’m sure you can imagine that the “killer app” for a blind person might seem less useful to a fully-sighted person. Imo there are still useful aspects, and you raise good examples, but the “second pair of eyes” aspect in particular is low-value for me.
msteffen 1y ago
For a long time I held a sentiment similar to the parent comment, and then my brother sat me down, took out his phone, put chatGPT into conversation mode, and chatted with it for about five minutes. That was the second time I was truly amazed by chatGPT (after my first conversation, where I got it to tell me a fair bit about how Postgres works). Its ability to hold a natural, context-aware conversation has gotten really amazing. I somehow agree with the op, that I don’t think I’m much closer to hiring chatGPT for a real job in 2025 than I was in 2022, but also you that there has been meaningful progress. And in particular, products that are transformative for disabled people are usually big improvements to the status quo for abled people too (oxo good grips being the classic example—transformative for people with arthritis, and generally just better for everybody else)
- nine_k 1y ago
  ChatGPT and its kin is already being hired massively as first-line customer support. Voice synthesis and recognition is really good now, too, so it's both online chat bots and phone support bots.
  - snackernews 1y ago
    Does it satisfy customer support requests at a much higher rate than previous generations? Every time I’ve encountered an AI first-line support agent I still find myself looking for the quickest escalation path to a real human just like before.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  > after my first conversation, where I got it to tell me a fair bit about how Postgres works See, I always start with conversations about things I already know about, and they bullshit me enough that I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia when asking them about things I don't know about. They output a lot of things that seem plausible but the way they blend fact and fiction with no regard for the truth keeps me extremely distrusting of them. That is to say: after your conversation, did you ask for citations and go read the primary sources? Because if you did not, the model likely mislead you about Postgres in subtle ways.
- 1y ago
globnomulous 1y ago
Am I mistaken in thinking that much of what you're describing would be considered computer vision, and that computer vision was already largely capable of these things in 2019 and before? I vividly remember a live demonstration of an on-device AR-and-object-recognition program at the 2014 Facebook developer conference.
lisper 1y ago
> Ask to play with a pear [sic] of the Meta glasses. Ironically, this typo is very likely a result of AI dictation making a mistake. There are a lot of common misspellings in English, like "their" and "there", but I've never seen a human confuse "pair" and "pear". So yeah, there are cool demos you can do that you couldn't five years ago. But whether any of those cool demos actually translate into something useful in day-to-day life where the benefits outweigh the costs and risks is far from clear.
- ctoth 1y ago
  Actually dictation would be more-likely to get this right! This was my typical human failure. Vastly more attributable to me reading with speech rather than Braille.
  - lisper 1y ago
    OK, well, I stand corrected. Still, a dictation transcription failure was plausible.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world. This certainly provides benefit to those with limited vision, which is great. But that is a very small segment of consumers. Besides those, how many other people do you know who are actually _using these glasses_ in the real world? Google Glass came out 10 years ago.
BoredPositron 1y ago
And we had these toys with higher latency in 22 with gpt3. The better tooling and integration hides the extremely slowed down pace of innovation in base models all while throwing mountains of compute at it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
The comment quotes the article as stating that (so-called "tech") "[v]enture capital is moribund except for AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI." How does this personal anecdote relate to the observation that (so-called "tech") "[v]enture capital is moribund except for AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI." Is venture capital involved with the Meta Ray-Ban glasses that we are advised to try for free.

by ctoth 1y ago

amazingamazing 1y ago

Hasn’t Google lens been doing that for almost a decade now?

acchow 1y ago
Like how Google Translate has been translating between languages for a decade+ now...? There's been a stepwise jump in the capabilities of AI that's changed "products" from mostly fun to actually useful
- amazingamazing 1y ago
  Are you implying that google translate was not useful to anyone prior to chat gpt3?

benatkin 1y ago

The Facebook glasses aren't as relevant as the LLMs doing many thinking tasks that people get paid to do. A lot of it is as a productivity multiplier, and I'm not saying it's all doom and gloom, but it's transformative.

nativeit 1y ago
But why should anyone in the general public get excited about a productivity multiplier? If history is any indication (and it appears to be repeating itself with worrying frequency), then all of that benefit will be hoarded by the upper crusts of society while labor is further marginalized. At this point, even as a technology enthusiast and longtime evangelist, I find myself sympathizing with the luddites.
bandrami 1y ago
If it's a productivity multiplier, where is the output of that productivity? Is there a bunch of new software I can download? A bunch of books I can read? What's all this alleged new productivity actually producing besides Ghibli memes?

api 1y ago

One thing that’s fascinating to me is that these straight out of sci-fi things are novelties or demos, and don’t seem all that popular. Most people just aren’t interested. It’s the “boring” stuff that’s interesting: automating drudgery work, a better way to research, etc. I’ve been predicting for years that glasses — whether AR or VR — are and will remain niche. I don’t think most people want them.

afavour 1y ago
> Most people just aren’t interested. Which makes sense, really. Buying an expensive pair of glasses so that I can point at an object and say “what is that” is a cool parlour trick but I can imagine very few scenarios where I’ve wished I had that functionality. Realtime translation… absolutely a feature I’d use. For a week a year, max. IMO the killer, everyday application just isn’t there yet. I’m still not sure what it would be.
- glhaynes 1y ago
  And those are also all things that a smartphone can do (often a little worse, admittedly). Which you'll have with you anyway because of all the things it does much better than glasses can and likely ever could.
Bjartr 1y ago
These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere. Even post dotcom bust there was still this generally shared understanding that you probably shouldn't meet people you met on the Internet and you shouldn't get in strangers cars. Today we use the Internet for the purpose of summoning strangers to us for the purpose of getting in their cars, and it's completely banal to do so. These shifts take time and in the early-adopter stage the applications look half-baked, or solutions looking for a problem. That's because most of them are. The few that aren't will accrete over time until there's a solid base.
- asadotzler 1y ago

bolobo 1y ago

> - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world. Maybe it's me having an extremely low imagination, but that stuff existed for a while in the shape of google lens and the various vision flavor of LLMs, and I must have used them.... 3 times in years, and not once did I think "Gosh I wish I could just ask a question aloud while walking in the street about this building and wait for the answer". It's either important enough that I want to see the wikipedia page straight from google maps and read the whole lot or not. > an AI which can read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world. I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations, privacy, bad phone signal or my bad english accent. I get that is certainly an amazing tools for people with vision impairments, but that is not the market Meta/OpenAI are aiming for and forcefully trying to shove it into. So yes, mayyybe if I am in a foreign country I could see a use but I usually want to get _away_ from technology on vacation. So I really don't see the point, but it seems that they believe I am the target audience?

ctoth 1y ago
> I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations I see. Perhaps your eyeballs missed the part where I said I'm blind? The entire purpose of my comment was to push back against this idea that AI is stuck in 2022. It's weird and nonsensical and seems disingenuous, especially when I say "here are things I can do now that I couldn't do before" and the general response is "but I don't need to do those things!"
- kikimora 1y ago
  You describe new ways of feeding information into the model and new ways model presents outputs. Nothing radically changed in how model transforms inputs into outputs.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  I think they did miss that, but to be fair you probably should have opened with that. It’s great that AI is enabling new use cases for blind/partially-sighted people! It’s encouraging to hear your perspective. At the same time, I’m sure you can imagine that the “killer app” for a blind person might seem less useful to a fully-sighted person. Imo there are still useful aspects, and you raise good examples, but the “second pair of eyes” aspect in particular is low-value for me.

msteffen 1y ago

For a long time I held a sentiment similar to the parent comment, and then my brother sat me down, took out his phone, put chatGPT into conversation mode, and chatted with it for about five minutes. That was the second time I was truly amazed by chatGPT (after my first conversation, where I got it to tell me a fair bit about how Postgres works). Its ability to hold a natural, context-aware conversation has gotten really amazing. I somehow agree with the op, that I don’t think I’m much closer to hiring chatGPT for a real job in 2025 than I was in 2022, but also you that there has been meaningful progress. And in particular, products that are transformative for disabled people are usually big improvements to the status quo for abled people too (oxo good grips being the classic example—transformative for people with arthritis, and generally just better for everybody else)

nine_k 1y ago
ChatGPT and its kin is already being hired massively as first-line customer support. Voice synthesis and recognition is really good now, too, so it's both online chat bots and phone support bots.
- snackernews 1y ago
  Does it satisfy customer support requests at a much higher rate than previous generations? Every time I’ve encountered an AI first-line support agent I still find myself looking for the quickest escalation path to a real human just like before.
dingnuts 1y ago
> after my first conversation, where I got it to tell me a fair bit about how Postgres works See, I always start with conversations about things I already know about, and they bullshit me enough that I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia when asking them about things I don't know about. They output a lot of things that seem plausible but the way they blend fact and fiction with no regard for the truth keeps me extremely distrusting of them. That is to say: after your conversation, did you ask for citations and go read the primary sources? Because if you did not, the model likely mislead you about Postgres in subtle ways.
1y ago

globnomulous 1y ago

Am I mistaken in thinking that much of what you're describing would be considered computer vision, and that computer vision was already largely capable of these things in 2019 and before? I vividly remember a live demonstration of an on-device AR-and-object-recognition program at the 2014 Facebook developer conference.

lisper 1y ago

> Ask to play with a pear [sic] of the Meta glasses. Ironically, this typo is very likely a result of AI dictation making a mistake. There are a lot of common misspellings in English, like "their" and "there", but I've never seen a human confuse "pair" and "pear". So yeah, there are cool demos you can do that you couldn't five years ago. But whether any of those cool demos actually translate into something useful in day-to-day life where the benefits outweigh the costs and risks is far from clear.

ctoth 1y ago
Actually dictation would be more-likely to get this right! This was my typical human failure. Vastly more attributable to me reading with speech rather than Braille.
- lisper 1y ago
  OK, well, I stand corrected. Still, a dictation transcription failure was plausible.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

> - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world. This certainly provides benefit to those with limited vision, which is great. But that is a very small segment of consumers. Besides those, how many other people do you know who are actually _using these glasses_ in the real world? Google Glass came out 10 years ago.

BoredPositron 1y ago

And we had these toys with higher latency in 22 with gpt3. The better tooling and integration hides the extremely slowed down pace of innovation in base models all while throwing mountains of compute at it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

The comment quotes the article as stating that (so-called "tech") "[v]enture capital is moribund except for AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI." How does this personal anecdote relate to the observation that (so-called "tech") "[v]enture capital is moribund except for AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI." Is venture capital involved with the Meta Ray-Ban glasses that we are advised to try for free.