I actually tend to agree with Sweeney here. At the same time, I think this is kind of doomed for the near future, as people turn more and more against AI. Especially gamers, who now are paying double or triple for the hardware they need.
Firing everyone is lunacy. I think this revolution is here to stay though, and SWE workflows are going to crystallize around "building the agent systems that build the product" rather than "building the product".
I tend to agree with you here. This is the equivalent of that scene in Better Call Saul where Jimmy makes a commercial without getting sign-off from the partners. It doesn't matter whether the thing worked - this is essentially a mutiny from the product roadmap.
Who is in charge of naming things at Google? Like a five syllable word followed by "AI", I couldn't think of a worse name for a product competing for mind share.
Hmm, so for $30 a month you basically get 10% cash back. There's some break even point here if you use Waymo enough. I think in SF, this would make a lot of sense, especially since there are so many Waymos up there to begin with. In South Bay though, if you don't have a car you're pretty much cooked.
OK, well the "circumstances and context" here are that most people commenting on HN live in the United States, so obviously they will be better off if the United States does well. I don't think your "um actually, you can't ALWAYS support something in all cases, sweaty" critique really adds anything to the discussion here.
This is clearly a matter of opinion. When you frame it as "providing search results of the internet" yeah sure it doesn't sound so bad. But there are things on the internet far more fucked up than anything I could imagine, let alone describe in such a specific way that a model could generate a picture of it.
No, I'm very much talking about the Google models. From the original link:
"We have taken multiple steps to minimize these concerns, for example in internal trials, we apply input text prompt filtering, and output video content filtering. However, there are several important safety and ethical challenges remaining. Imagen Video and its frozen T5-XXL text encoder were trained on problematic data. While our internal testing suggest much of explicit and violent content can be filtered out, there still exists social biases and stereotypes which are challenging to detect and filter."
Agh, I've thought this through and you're completely right. It's an interesting conundrum. Certainly releasing powerful tools into the wild runs a high risk of swaying public opinion in a negative direction. Given this I honestly wonder why Google continues to invest so much in AI at all. I imagine having automatically generated video ads and stuff would be cool, but would hardly move the needle on the core business enough to justify the massive investment they've made into AI. Not that I'm complaining about it though... Google's tech advances always seem to diffuse (heh) into the open source world, so at least we have that to look forward to.
Google continues to blow my mind with these models, but I think their ethics strategy is totally misguided and will result in them failing to capture this market. The original Google Search gave similarly never-before-seen capabilities to people, and you could use it for good or bad - Google did not seem to have any ethical concerns around, for example, letting children use their product and come across NSFW content (as a kid who grew up with Google you can trust me on this).
But now with these models they have such a ridiculously heavy handed approach to the ethics and morals. You can't type any prompt that's "unsafe", you can't generate images of people, there are so many stupid limitations that the product is practically useless other than niche scenarios, because Google thinks it knows better than you and needs to control what you are allowed to use the tech for.
Meanwhile other open source models like Stable Diffusion have no such restrictions and are already publicly available. I'd expect this pattern to continue under Google's current ideological leadership - Google comes up with innovative revolutionary model, nobody gets to use it because "safety", and then some scrappy startup comes along, copies the tech, and eats Google's lunch.
Google: stop being such a scared, risk averse company. Release the model to the public, and change the world once more. You're never going to revolutionize anything if you continue to cower behind "safety" and your heavy handed moralizing.