[HN Gopher] Project Astra
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Project Astra
Author : cs702
Score : 80 points
Date : 2024-05-14 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| CephalopodMD wrote:
| Looks like GPT 4o was released just to try and beat them to the
| punch here. OpenAI must have known about this demo. Very space
| race.
| npilk wrote:
| I think the difference in demo style between OpenAI's GPT-4o
| (yesterday) and this is interesting. Google's videos feel more
| like a mixture of brand marketing and pandering to shareholders.
| OpenAI's videos yesterday felt much more like a casual tech demo
| among colleagues. Hard to explain the exact differences that make
| me feel that way.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Maybe because OpenAI's demos were actually done live
| 317070 wrote:
| This other video seems to have been done live: https://twitte
| r.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/179046325982242023...
| _xander wrote:
| One company is led by engineers, the other is led by MBAs
| camel_Snake wrote:
| Do people consider Altman an engineer?
| infecto wrote:
| If you reread it was plural. Indicating it was not ceo vs
| ceo but rather employees vs employees.
| crakenzak wrote:
| Greg Brockman et al.
| swyx wrote:
| the astra video is exactly in the style of existing google ads.
| disembodied voice, POV camera. so we're desensitized to them.
| in contrast the openai videos all had engineers front and
| center, excited to show off their work.
|
| not hard to explain... im sure theres more elements but this
| has to be the first principal component
| deanCommie wrote:
| It was also, on the theme that you mentioned, incredibly,
| unnecessarily horny.
|
| And Sama leaned into that, tweeting "her" yesterday ->
| https://twitter.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666
|
| I'm not trying to cancel anyone, it wasn't malicious, and it
| wasn't offensive. But it's definitely something, and not
| everyone's chill about it.
|
| But it's not a problem because Google doesn't compete with
| OpenAI (IMO). Google competes with Microsoft which will add
| all the necessary polish to de-hornify the OpenAI stuff for
| the corporate customers.
|
| Meanwhile the core OpenAI tech ultimately demos better and
| offers it's value proposition to a legion of startups better
| than Google.
|
| In summary, if you're an engineer of building on top of a
| model, OpenAI seems better.
|
| And if you're a CTO/CIO trying to pick a horse to sign an
| enterprise contract with, Google seems better.
| amenhotep wrote:
| "incredibly"??? You have very different standards for
| horniness than I do.
| Zaheer wrote:
| It's hard to tell with Google what's actually being released VS
| speculative demos. At first glance it all seems ahead of OpenAI
| but it's hard to tell how much of this is actually 'real' and
| will be in our hands.
| summerlight wrote:
| There is a demo booth, so I assume that this is probably
| working but not at a production level.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Ffs, why not just stick to Google lens/assistant branding?
|
| Google just can't seem to keep internal org politics separate
| from the user facing product line.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Google assistant would be the perfect name to cover everything
| since that's the idea, an assistant. Not sure why they have
| 1038474 names it's ridiculous
| electriclove wrote:
| It's a lot of hype. If they took the money spent on creating
| these ads and used it to actually get these products out and in
| users hands, we might actually have some competition in this
| space
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Maybe I'm just lacking imagination, but I simply don't know what
| I'd use this for. I wanted to identify a plant the other day, but
| I really don't need a realtime answer, and I found what I was
| looking for by searching.
| adammarples wrote:
| To identify plants, use Seek, it's amazing. Where it can't get
| an exact match it still gives you the family/class etc
| numbers wrote:
| How many different AI project names will Google come up with?
| Most other companies have versions or suites they kinda get
| behind and start giving them specifiers but Google keeps renaming
| and coming up with new names for each of their AI products
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| You need to launch a "new" product to get promo. So you just
| wait until a team gets reorged, rebrand their work by pitching
| to some hapless VP, launch something half baked in time for
| I/O, get the promo, and move on to your next victim.
| astrange wrote:
| It sounds like they're doing the "we're an engineer-led
| company" thing of just releasing their products with the
| codenames instead of coming up with a marketing name for them.
| adolph wrote:
| _demo video that Hassabis swears is not faked or doctored in any
| way_
|
| A demo video is the lowest form of product demonstration,
| something that reeks of not ready for a live performance, much
| less everyday use.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| > "What does this remind you of?"
|
| > "Schrodinger's cat"
|
| No, "great question!" No endless explanation of what
| Schrodinger's cat means, just a quick and concise answer. For
| systems we intend to use as assistants and not conversation
| partners, I think this is close to the ideal response length.
| kibibu wrote:
| No fake little laugh either, which was by far the creepiest
| part of the gpt4o demo
| 1_more_user wrote:
| I have a feeling for the longest time that product management at
| Google is a mess. There seem to be different products doing about
| the same type of work with little to no cohesive experience
| between them. Gemini, Search and Astra come to my mind in this
| case; though they have shown advances in Gemini integration with
| search (even though gemini is still a separate app????)
| summerlight wrote:
| Astra seems to be an internal ptoject name? Demis said it will
| be eventually integrated into the regular app IIUC.
| xnx wrote:
| Official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXVvvRhiGjI
| RigelKentaurus wrote:
| I saw the Google I/O keynote today. What really bugs me is that
| Google has all this awesome technology, and they can't figure out
| a better example to showcase it other than the old "make a
| restaurant reservation"? I'm excited about the possibility of AGI
| but this is not earth-shattering.
| summerlight wrote:
| Google's PR needs some serious works. I am not even sure if
| they are dogfooding the actual product...
| omeze wrote:
| Looks awesome, but all of Google's multimodal assistant demos of
| recent past have been faked :/ will believe it when I can use it
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| How useful will Project Astra be once its users are the product?
| iamleppert wrote:
| Sundar just keeps throwing different AI to the wall and see what
| will stick. His leadership destiny is in layoffs and offshoring
| Google, not innovation.
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