I was working on a science experiment (electromagnetics) with my 10-year-old kid that was going to be demonstrated at a science fair in his school. We ran into a hiccup with the experiment that we couldn't debug ourselves. I turned on Gemini live video call to help us root cause the problem. It was able to clearly articulate all the possible issues and eventually was successful in making our apparatus work as expected. Turned out the wire that I was wrapping around the screw had some insulation that was not scraped off well on the side it was connecting to the battery. Gemini was able to capture this detail even though my bare eyes could not. My kid and 2 of his friends were impressed not just by the experiment, but because the live audio/video back and forth we had with the AI was almost magical!
Ha, thanks for sharing this!
I've been building Gemini live since before ChatGPT came out. I am so thrilled to see it actually helping people in the wild!
Neat, but I'd bet it was "guessing" that rather than actually seeing it.
If it’s “guessing” correctly 95% of the time, is that meaningfully different from “seeing” it for most practical purposes?
I just mean that the image input probably didn't affect the output at all. Could have just told it "I'm an amateur doing bulbs and batteries and it doesn't work" and it would give the #1 search result on forums for that which is "did you strip your wire."
I feel like I'm in the audience at a magician show, except most of the audience is breathlessly amazed and doesn't understand how easily tricked they are.
Best comment I’ve seen today.
This really underscores how so much LLM "intelligence" is based off of people's experiences that they wrote about. It saddens me somewhat to see that it has basically all been captured by corporations now, and perhaps in a few years there will be little point in knowing things yourself simply because the LLMs will have gotten so good that there is no point to wasting the extra effort. Of course, this might lead to the atrophy of people's thinking muscles and a dumber and more subservient populace, but does anyone really care? Judging by the meteoric rise in the capabilities of LLMs over the past five years, is it really naïve to expect most knowledge work to be obsolete in the next ten?
The other stuff in this thread about decompiling firmware is a lot more interesting to me, though, seeing as it used to be a fairly demanding but rewarding task that has now been "solved" by Claude. It's a magic trick that is a lot harder to pull off than the other things in this thread.
Yeah. I guess the redelegation of thinking from people to machines has been going on since before LLMs.
Today I got a haircut. At the cash register:
Hairstylist (early 20s): "That's $34. Would you like to leave a tip?"
Me: "Yes, please put an extra 20% on there"
Hairstylist: "Uuuhhhh... sorry, I don't have my phone. Can you google what 20% of $34 is for me?"