This week's newsletter is about AI's great bait-and-switch, where companies like OpenAI, Rabbit and Humane raise millions of dollars and make outlandish promises about the future, only to deliver a deeply mediocre version of the present. wheresyoured.at/expectations... - ThreadSky

edzitron.com • 286 days ago

This week's newsletter is about AI's great bait-and-switch, where companies like OpenAI, Rabbit and Humane raise millions of dollars and make outlandish promises about the future, only to deliver a deeply mediocre version of the present.
https://wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality

Comments

arhat.bsky.social•284 days ago

A ways down the post, you say "sorry to rant," but let me tell you Ed, I'm over here cheering at those rants because you're hitting the nail on the fucking head over and over.

This AI bullshit hype machine is as exhausting as it is dumb, and we're better off with someone like you calling it out.

drunkratel.bsky.social•286 days ago

:)

Ask ChatGPT to predict phases of the moon.

alsorae.bsky.social•286 days ago

Thank you. Been beating on this drum every time corporate urges us to find ways to integrate this severely lacking (for now) tech into our workflows.

darthbluesky.bsky.social•286 days ago

ed all those videos on youtube with 'reimagined' trailers starring actual actors that AI can literally grab millions of images from still have trouble showing the same face twice even if it is keanu reeves

anubisthejackal.bsky.social•286 days ago

I once watched "the Rock eating rocks" as animated by AI, and it was existentially upsetting in a way that can only be described as "Lovecraftian".

mightyapollo.bsky.social•286 days ago

Can’t wait for Sora to generate a Keanu Reeves clip so I can web chat with my new “AI Health Bot”(tm) darth.

Keanu’s head changing size as it assures me that the shooting pains in my chest and arm is a hernia due to too much pee pee in my balls and offers to sell me a nutritional supplement.

andrewpaulus.bsky.social•286 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/jstehlin.bsky.social/post/3ksch255dl32n

edzitron.com•286 days ago

OpenAI's generative video app Sora intends to replace filmmakers, yet despite a superficially impressive announcement, Sora takes 10-20 minutes to create 3 to 20 seconds of footage, with absolutely no idea what it'll spit out at the end.
https://wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality

edzitron.com•286 days ago

Sora may let you create footage with text prompts, but it lacks any ability to create consistent shots, because generative AI doesn't know anything and is generating each shot totally fresh. Sora is a compute-intensive AI slot machine that spits out video.
https://wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality

edzitron.com•286 days ago

OpenAI's video generator Sora is dead on arrival, as generative AI *cannot, by default* have any level of consistency. It needs too much training data, too much compute, and it's very likely trained on copyrighted material - whether OpenAI says so or not.
https://wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality

matthopeart.bsky.social•286 days ago

I already know that few if any heads of the top con artists are going to roll. But I wish I was wrong.

edzitron.com•286 days ago

Elsewhere, the Rabbit R1 is an offensive bait-and-switch where a company raised $30m+ to make a $200 gadget to voice control your apps using a "large action model." Yet in reality, it's a borderline-useless Android device, and the Large Action Model may not exist.
https://wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality

edzitron.com•286 days ago

The Rabbit R1's "Large Action Model" claims to be "trained on 800 apps," yet it can only control 4-5. Beneath the surface, it doesn't appear to use AI at all, running insecure virtual machines, automated scripts and a flimsy ChatGPT integration.
https://wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality

edzitron.com•286 days ago

The way that Rabbit's R1 connects to your apps is very insecure - there's no oAuth, no SAML, none of the very basic ways to secure user passwords. They use a virtual machine with a chrome instance, transferring user credentials in their original form.
https://wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality

beejieweejie.bsky.social•286 days ago

Theranos movies🤪🤓!

salviati.bsky.social•286 days ago

The most (and possibly only) profitable use of AI is to create slidedecks for credulous VC investors.

ralanr.bsky.social•286 days ago

The slot machine descriptor is apt. I tried using an image generator once because I was bored, and it felt like I was scrolling through an image board with more tags being added every time.

It felt incredibly unproductive. I can't even draw and I was considering picking up a pen.

asterionhex.monster•286 days ago

300:1 filmed-to-used ratio, for reference for those who don’t know, is not something that happens in actually shooting things. Feature films average about 4:1; commercials, much more demanding in perfection, run 30-40:1. 300:1 takes would get everyone fired in a day

ranamar.bsky.social•282 days ago

If you figure you can fire the entire production crew, though... What's the ratio of man-minutes to minutes of output in those things?
(It's still likely to be a worse result, but you can't just use time-on-set as the ratio anymore.)

asterionhex.monster•282 days ago

I did a shoot last week with mostly non-professionals to make a short about 7.5 minutes long. We shot on one day (about 6 hours; 6 dedicated crew) and edited the next (about 7 hours for one person and another 6-7 divided between 3 people). Anyone doing this for a living will be much faster

asterionhex.monster•282 days ago

Also, those ratios aren’t time on set; they’re footage shot to footage used. All the AI is doing is creating footage and still creating mostly unusable stuff

ranamar.bsky.social•282 days ago

Oh; I went back and read it again and see my disconnect. I had somehow thought that the 300:1 ratio was processing time to output time, (which is also close to that) but it's separately noted that only 1 in 300 results is usable, on top of the processing time thing.

blammarie.bsky.social•285 days ago

So many of the “incredible outputs of AI!” Are things that I would expect to be fired for if I tried to use them for professional stuff tbh.

geographer.bsky.social•286 days ago

Besides all the reasons why these won't replace filmmakers, the thing I'm most baffled about is what they expect to happen once they've replaced them? They need the creativity, vision, and handiwork of actual filmmakers to provide training data to ingest. This stuff just doesn't spawn on its own.

geoffgreen.org•286 days ago

Ed, your newsletters are fantastic. Each one is a stemwinder. Thank you!

moegamer.net•285 days ago

Thanks for these. I subscribed a while back and find it reassuring to read articulate thoughts from people who recognise the dystopian hellscape we're living through. Gives me a small glimmer of hope that one day we might be able to break free while Silicon Valley eats itself.

radiodeadair.com•286 days ago

Just to mention because I know it's hard to get definitive pricing right now, but the A100 is woefully out of date. Its successor the H100 usually runs about $30,000 each, or more depending on supply problems. The Blackwell cards are going to be worse.

One single loaded server costs $3,000,000.

radiodeadair.com•286 days ago

Plus there's the whole racket Nvidia is running right now that if you're a customer and make deals with competitors, they shove your order to the bottom of the list.

amoapostrophe.bsky.social•286 days ago

📌

mikethemadbiol.bsky.social•286 days ago

📌

stephenspower.bsky.social•286 days ago

Everything's an Edsel now.

melhadf.shite.name•285 days ago

Ed I Love your pieces, but can I ask one huge thing with regards to reporting on AI... stop saying hallucinate, it is an error or a mistake not an hallucination.
It's AI attempting to rebrand errors and it does nothing but lead to stigmatising/mislabelling of the condition in people.

jenniferweeks83.bsky.social•286 days ago

Hey, it's in beta

blitzthedragon.bsky.social•286 days ago

Tech startups are the snake oil peddlers of the digital era.

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