Those impressive demos, e.g. the cup shuffling seem to have been "staged". The end results are correct, but the method of getting them is nowhere near as fluid and elegant as in the demo. They used a series of still images with carefully crafted prompts. More info: https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/12/how-its-made-gemin...
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The movie Steve Jobs dramatises this famous fakery. The scene is set in the frantic moments just before Jobs presents the original Macintosh to the world in 1984. The Macintosh 128K can’t say “hello” as Jobs demands, so Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld suggests using a more powerful 512K, which would not be available until later in 1984.
And it’s what actually happened. “We decided to cheat a little,” the real Hertzfeld confirmed on his site Folklore. They really did switch out the machine so the demo would work.
The on-stage demonstration Apple pioneered has since produced all manner of theatrics, some brilliant and some ham-handed, and all in their own ways not exactly real. Microsoft’s recent “workplace” demos at its Build developer conference are very clearly a dramatisation.
Last year a man, hard hat at a cocky angle, strode across stage and pretended to use construction equipment wrong to show how Microsoft’s AI could identify and tag unsafe practices on a worksite. It was so garishly theatrical I don’t think anyone genuinely thought it was real.
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FAANGS have historically been shameless about this kind of lying.
> The question is, why does Google get hammered so hard for them?
I don't think Google gets hammered any harder than, say, Apple does for this sort of thing. But Google seems to fake demos a lot more than other FAANGs do (or perhaps they're less competent about hiding their misbehavior).
You do understand that Google have been constantly touting their "hidden" technology that is far beyond anything on the market? And now with various companies entering AI race and integrating AI in their toolset, it is expected that Google would have the best result using their "hidden advanced tech".
Yet Google opted for staged demos, rather than the real "advanced" that they allegedly had. That raises questions from the stakeholders...