Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.

The AI brand fragmentation at Google is not yet a problem because everyone is pretending:

x There are so-called “SOTA” or “frontier” models that are more effective than the other ones (independent of harnessing and routing)

x OpenAI and Anthropic have all the SOTA models and lead all the innovation

x Google’s moat is its search bread/butter (it’s the only reason they’re relevant)

All 3 operating assumptions are - I think - false.

What Google has done that the “cuter products” (Claude, ChatGPT) haven’t is connected relatively standard LLMs to an externally valuable live service.

As more companies realize that is where all the value is (the service) and not in the AI capability, then products (and humans) become important again.

Google should just be Google again, and Gemini should be Gemini, off to the side. Omni confuses everyone (and angers some iykyk), they should resolve “AI mode”, rename Gemma? and consolidate the brand overall so it’s clear what Google is.

Google is search.

It helps people on all sides of the market find what they’re looking for.

I don’t really see how repeatedly reinventing and rebranding the same AI chat UX is accomplishing anything toward that goal.

Prompt engineering tip for Google employees: just add "P.S. Make sure the page works in Firefox too."

Google does anything except launch a new version of Gemini Pro.

Interesting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation.

Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?

So Seedance is good primarily because of TikTok and this because of YouTube. I wonder what portion of all recorded video is privately held in hard drives at people’s homes or Apple photos. Of course there is data labeling and cleaning but is the next evolution just a question of access? Same goes for LLMs. Would people be willing to sell their data? Kind of a messed up way to make yourself obsolete. Or there is a limit to scaling?

I'm still getting major uncanny valley from any of the videos featuring humans, something about them disgusts me. I guess I should be glad I'm still able to distinguish them.

wish some of these frontier models supported 3d.