I'd argue that data in this case is more like the actual models they use, their codebase and their engineering talent. Not deep enough in the sauce to say one way or another how big the realistic delta between companies is though.
> What stayed with me was not the swimming. It was that none of it looked planned. She was not spending her afternoon at the lake, she was just going through her day, and the lake happened to be part of it.
Fascinating phenomenon, but this sentence caused me to stop reading and close the tab.
"Slop", I thought.
Now I think about it, I'm not even sure I can put my finger on what about that sentence came across as AI slop.
Hmm, you might be right about that paragraph. I am very sensitive to LLM smells, but I missed this one, probably because the rest of the essay seems handwritten.
Of course, one can never be sure. Many writers are picking up on this style, too, so it could have organic origins.
I feel like this is one of the most damaging parts of the slop problem. Occasionally the slopisms fit into real writing. Sometimes people do just write like this, and we are losing a sense of reality because we keep being tripped up by this nagging little voice
I always observed that as "bring your whole self, as long as your whole self exhibits the exact same behavior and demeanor as every other corporate employee, ideally wrapped in uniquely colored skin for beautiful decorum".
1. Be a developer and you (or a spouse/child/friend) get motion sickness when looking at the phone while travelling.
2. We’ve known the mechanisms of motion sickness (looking at something static while your inner ear indicates you’re moving) from before smartphones were a thing.
3. We already have a ton of information on the phone to know when we’re in a vehicle, how fast we’re moving, direction, so on.
4. Try adding something to the static screen so it moves in tandem with you and thus reduce the cause of motion sickness.
5. Get the people who get sick to try it out.
If anything, I’m surprised it took a decade and a half to come up with it.
And this is exactly how things in large corporations don't happen. Things in large corporations who pay so well that nobody makes it through the recruitment filters and competition who's more than 2% off from being a pure assessment metrics maximiser. In my mind, chasing an idea like this just does not match the type.
Why it isn't likely to have happened before: trying is only easy for a developer who is not only very familiar with the API for reading those motion sensors but also with the API for system wide overlay. This a strict no for your run of the mill to-do list app. Combine that with the requirement of being affected themselves (or someone close), having the idea, having the time to try and no competing side quests that take up all attention. And the requirement of when the experiment was successful, having the kind of access that actually serves as a conduit for ideas not only on paper to someone in the position to make it a product. That's a lot of stars that need to align. Personally I wouldn't even be surprised if there was an LLM angle: would still need someone in the know to try it, but chances are that knowledge combined with a bit of prompting could be a path to PoC implementation that could clear effort thresholds that would stand in the way of conventional coding.
That has nothing to do with the feature being “ideated, then prototyped, then validated”, which is the crux of the conversation. It having taken so long is but a footnote.
> Personally I wouldn't even be surprised if there was an LLM angle
I would bet money there wasn’t. The feature was introduced in early 2024, meaning it has to be thought about, developed, and tested before that.
> And this is exactly how things in large corporations don't happen. Things in large corporations who pay so well that nobody makes it through the recruitment filters and competition who's more than 2% off from being a pure assessment metrics maximiser. In my mind, chasing an idea like this just does not match the type.
What's your evidence for any of this?
I worked for Google and a lot of other large companies, and recruitment does not work like this at all.
If you want to blame the big companies, you should maybe say that people don't get time to chase these things. Google's 20% time was famously nicknamed 120% time, after all. (The joke being that you can get your 20% time, if you put it on top of your 100% working hours.)
This isnt quite right. For one 2) is not required at all! I regularly get sick to the point of vomiting, no screen required. It can even happen while i driving! Looking at a screen with this on helps - looking at a screen can now reduce my motion sickness. neat.
4) - it is not motion but acceleration of all kinds. When the plane takes off, the dots move in reverse. When the train stops (no more motion), the dots continue moving for several seconds. Which is to say, its a little more complicated to get it just right than it would seem!
It's the same decision-making process that tried to do a electric car for years, and canceled it after spending time and money. In that exact timeline, China made great electic cars and new brands, Tesla advanced and Spacex launched dozens or more rockets. Apple is so far from any big new tech, they and market don't even realize it.
Apple had more money and influence than combination of all of them, yet failed with car and VR. Why would anyone think they can't fail much much bigger with AI and LLMs ?
For me, the economics are the exact opposite. I'd pay $1000 for a good gaming VR headset, but not $4000 -- because gaming is just a hobby that isn't really worth that much to me. Gaming VR headsets have been around for well over a decade, I've "been there, done that", and it's just not something that's worth that much money to me. However, I have no problem paying $3500+ for something that creates a new category of productivity and entertainment experiences for me.
Besides that, I actually disagree that the Vision Pro is not good for gaming. It's not good for traditional VR gaming, but using apps like Portal it's phenomenal for, e.g., playing existing PS5 games on a massive virtual screen, which in many ways I actually enjoy more than VR gaming, which is far too limited in comparison.
The market spoke. The overwhelming majority of people don't want to pay $4,000 for a tethered AR experience. You're the minority.
Conversely; the grandparent comment is still right, Apple could have made this a real VR headset without compromising any part of the AR experience. Apple knew that Hololens was a total failure, they saw the pushback on Google Glass, they should have known that people would feel like an idiot buying one of those headsets. Instead of trying to recoup the missed opportunity, Apple doubles down and pretends that those experiences are beneath them.
Anyone with a $300 headset can stream games to it. AVP isn't unique for that, it's was already outsold by the Index and it's eschatologically destined to be outsold by user-respecting headsets like the Steam Frame. It's downright impossible to imagine a world where Vision Pro outsells the Quest.
The overwhelming majority of people don't want any VR device available today at all.
I'm perfectly fine being the minority for now. You say that as if you think I'd have a problem with that. That does absolutely nothing to sway my thinking, which is based on my own principles, not a popularity contest at a single moment in time. You are dramatically underestimating my personal comfort maintaining an unpopular perspective for an extended period of time (years) based on fundamentals.
> Anyone with a $300 headset can stream games to it
No thanks. This is, of course, technically possible, but the quality is so astoundingly low compared to the Vision Pro that, for me, it would be a waste of time. You're welcome to do this if you so please with your time.
I'd imagine that you do have a problem with it. You're reliant on AR experiences, which are reliant on install bases, which the Apple Vision Pro has none of. There is currently no incentive to produce software for this dead platform like there is for iOS or iPad, so much so that you're bragging about streaming games that the hardware could run natively - if Apple respected their users.
It's no skin off my back when you pay $3,500 for that type of mistreatment. Whatever "principles" that led you down that path aren't going to make the Vision Pro a more enjoyable experience. You're virtue signalling a platform that everyone predicted would be a failure.
Couldn't care less. I'm not reliant on anything you just imagined I'm reliant on that supposedly doesn't exist, yet somehow I'm reliant on it. I use the Vision Pro for Mac Virtual Display, movies / entertainment / reading / browsing, and occasional game streaming from the PS5. Those use cases alone justify the product for me.
There is very silly but very simple reason for that. If they let you run MSFS on the Vision, there will be a non-insignificant amount of tiktok videos showing uninitiated people puking after a half an hour in it. There is no breakthrough in Vision that will resolve the nausea issue present in every VR headset, so they're keeping it AR first as the only way to protect against that.
> I will never understand the decision-making process that led to "Let's build an awesome VR headset that can't do gaming".
FOMO, someone else being successful in VR (and now in glasses) is a nightmare scenario for Apple because it's not their platform. They've got a lot to fear from someone else owning the platform, having written the playbook on how that platform would be controlled and exploited at everyone else's expense.
Imagine if Apple doesn't make their glasses: Meta keeps selling truckloads of them, as they get more powerful the smartphone becomes an optional accessory and then an unnecessary one, eventually they become an alternative to a smartphone and an app platform for third party devs.
It's the same story with VR, Apple does nothing and risks Meta or Steam building a viable platform where people want to use software instead of on their iOS devices, until the hardware can replace iOS devices entirely. (although VR is certainly more of a moonshot)
I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because
when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
Loctite already inadvertently does this. If you ask LLMs about threadlocker, or otherwise keeping screws in place, it will respond like a Loctite brochure to you, and usually never even mention competitors. They were ahead of the game!
Some of that may be because the common vernacular uses the word "Loctite" to describe any manner of threadlocker.
It is this way even though Loctite also produces a vast array of products that have nothing to do with theadlocker, and threadlockers are available from a wide variety of manufacturers.
Unlike all the replies to you, this is why I'm very optimistic about the future of hobby blogs. I do a lot of ChatGPT-ing for several different hobbies, and I've found a lot of really interesting personal blogs from that. Way more than I was reading in the pre-AI era.
I'm very much not seeing the problems other people are assuming, like tons of LLM spam on Reddit being treated as fact by ChatGPT. Instead it really does seem, the more I use these tools, the better they are at surfacing real experiences written about by real people.
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
I'm reminded of the mountains of blogspam not intended for human consumption but rather to influence the google page rank algorithm.
This will go about as well as that did unless the models can be smart enough to identify when their training data is trying to coach them into being misleading at prompt time.
If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
I wonder how that's been going, surely by now their entire paid offering is obviated right? LLMs are good enough at making frontends with Tailwind that I'm not sure who buys their templates anymore, even if the Tailwind team did try to make a few mocking AI.
LLMs are good at many things, but subtlety (and ability to slowly do anything consistently over time) is not remotely one of them. I don't know why people keep bringing this idea up - if they were prompted to do something, you would notice. Don't you remember how noticeable it was when chatgpt gave follow up questions for engagement on EVERY damn response? It's got the finesse of a bulldozer.
I encourage people thinking about such things to try and build prompts to emulate this behavior and see how well it does.
Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.
Ads are placed in ways that don't directly connect to a sale already. Billboards, TV (last decade), youtube sponsors, even at least half of traditional internet ads. Generally they'll just see whether sales increase after they start running the ad campaign, if so, it works.
In every single case you've mentioned you're going to have a campaign with an attempt at attribution. Certainly youtube sponsors all use direct attribution with "use my code" etc.
In every one of those cases you can at least do things like count viewers. How would that work for a model that's just subtly biased?
Attribution would be as easy as knowing which chatbot they came from? Unless chatbot publishers (openai in this case) allows you to target based on the attribution, that extra data will not be actionable, anyway.
Things will get there for sure, with ads and other propaganda baked in at the training level with no reliable way to discern the manipulations as an end user. Modern tech companies will sacrifice anything UX related to generate more effective ads and increase ad revenue. The ability to skew the output of a popular model in subtle ways will be an incredibly valuable product to sell. There's just no way companies like Google and OpenAI are going to leave all that money out there for the taking.
People outside the ad world dont get the human attention pool is massively over fished.
Its not just one corp trying to condition you but thousands. Not just via one channel but thro hundreds (sports/news/gaming/streaming/social/movies/tv/radio etc). Basically in such an environment what works at population scale is either spending more than everypne else (see the odessey marketing budget), constantly repeating your message in ever shortening windows, and going viral(which involves doing more and more extreme stuff to capture and keep attention). Openai has now entered that overcrowded environment.
Yeah but OpenAI has the benefit of people actively going there and willingly giving quite a lot of their attention.
It's a lot like Google in that respect. And the suggestion is pretty much the same as suggesting that Google offer a product where they boost your website or product or whatever in organic search results, instead of or in addition to displaying it as a sponsored link or ad or whatever.
It's interesting that, despite all the tracking and stuff, they never went quite so far as to actually sell a premium advertising tier in which they would actually change their search results ranking to suit their customer, at least not as far as anyone knows. It probably would've been quite a big scandal in the 00s if they did it back then.
Could OpenAI pull it off? I don't know enough about the advertising industry to answer, but it's interesting to compare them with Google and to think about why Google themselves might not have done it that way.
There is no need for Premium because who ever wants more reach spends more. Look at online political spending every election cycle. The eyeballs available is not growing much election to election, but ad spend keeps jumping. So they just sit back and milk people who want attention desperatly, and inject more ads, more frequently everywhere on viewer side. Ideally there needs to be a system wide signal that if people have 20 mins of attention to spare a day and it is crossed there is an auto shutdown of all advertising. In the past on TV there were limits on how many ads can be shown, for how long per hour. Today there is no such limit. So corps ad budgets keep rising and consumer attention spans keep shrinking. Platform print cash. Its like how banks worked before central banks took over setting interest rates.
I think both for attribution reasons and because the average user probably won't care, (or won't care enough for an ad-free tier), they can absolutely get away with messages like: "Hey user! Glad to hear you're cleaning your favorite t-shirt. I recommend trying the new BrandName™ stain remover pen based on dozens of reviews. It's perfect for people who value easy stain removal just like yourself!".
That would probably be effective but also very hard to monetize. Right now an ad translates to money very directly - views, clicks, signups, etc. How would "we mindfucked you over 6 months into buying this brand of soap" get monetized?
And inversely, steer away from (named competition).
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
I assume this is what's up with the NordVPN ads flooding YouTube and stuff. No idea who the buyer is, but if I was in the market for a VPN I'd presumedly do a web search, skip NordVPN as having poisoned the well of good will, and choose whoever's next.
Weird conspiracy theory. More than likely it's NordVPN who is buying ads for NordVPN and this is increasing sales of NordVPN (Israeli-controlled company btw) because ads work. Ads especially work on people who say ads don't work on them.
All publicity is good publicity. By raising awareness of Corp B, you'd raise their sales. You have to be more clever than that. Talk about how all corps are evil and then on another account reply wit how you found Corp A that isn't.
Thankfully as of now it appears they're very explicit about what content they share that is sponsored. They might be worried about the legislative backlash if they don't.
Honestly this could be so subtle that you don’t even suggest a particular brand, which would obviously bring a user’s guard up quickly, instead merely suggesting the existing of a product category that the user didn’t know about could be enough for some products or services where it would be worth it for a particular brand to pay even though it would also benefit their competitors.
Yeah, and maybe also suggest slightly better alternatives to things along the way. Like, they could tell people that POWERADE has B vitamins in addition to electrolytes unlike that other leading sports drink, but only a gentle nudge. You would definitely want it to be subtle. The most impactful choices are the ones the target think are their own rather than something slammed in their face over and over again.
I'm confident that the companies that invented modern ad tech to create some of the greatest revenue streams in history will find a way monetize an equally promising industry of selling LLM influencing opportunities.
It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.
Given that this would be the first ever law with any degree of ambiguity ever created, we should create some type of like... room... maybe call it a "court"... where people could "judge" whether a person fell on the allowable or disallowable end of the spectrum
It's a groundbreaking idea but it might work. And who knows, maybe it's an innovation we could apply to other areas of law in case they also ever need to interact with any ambiguity (which hasn't happened yet, of course).
no, the photos you take with the lenses on your phone are not AI generated. They are generated from the sensors on your phone.
Have you seen some of these listings? We are talking about retaining walls invented where they can’t exist, work displayed that hasn’t occurred, etc. if you show up to a property and it’s materially different than the picture that got you there, that should be illegal.
If you want to make an argument that “everything is AI now” go for it. But I’m happy to see existing false advertising laws evolve as technology evolves
iPhones use a variety of AI (though not LLM) techniques every time you take a photo. For example they use semantic segmentation where they recognize different aspects of a photo (faces, skies, skin tones, etc) and process them differently
Android phones sure. The iPhone as far as I have seen has stayed away from gimmicks and AI. "Computational photography" is a long shot away from AI generated images. Everything in the iphone photo actually existed much the same as the photo shows, it's just exposure and color being messed with.
If you use post editing tools like magic eraser and the new reframe / expand tools then that's a different story and shouldn't be allowed in real estate photography.
If you take a photo of your apartment does your iPhone automatically make it twice the size, add modern renovations, paint the walls and add all new furnishings?
An LLM is not as good as a skilled human who has already committed to giving your work a fair read. It is far superior to the quality of read you will ever get from a literary agent unless your parents are Manhattan old money.
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