Google's Best Gemini Demo Was Faked

Speaking of early-impressions of Gemini, users' confidence in Google might be shaken further to learn that the company pretty much faked the most impressive demo of Gemini. TechCrunch: A video called 'Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI' hit a million views over the last day, and it's not hard to see why. The impressive demo 'highlights some of our favorite interactions with Gemini,' showing how the multimodal model (that is, it understands and mixes language and visual understanding) can be flexible and responsive to a variety of inputs.

To begin with, it narrates an evolving sketch of a duck from a squiggle to a completed drawing, which it says is an unrealistic color, then evinces surprise ('What the quack!') when seeing a toy blue duck. Just one problem: the video isn't real. 'We created the demo by capturing footage in order to test Gemini's capabilities on a wide range of challenges. Then we prompted Gemini using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text.' So although it might kind of do the things Google shows in the video, it didn't, and maybe couldn't, do them live and in the way they implied. In actuality, it was a series of carefully tuned text prompts with still images, clearly selected and shortened to misrepresent what the interaction is actually like.

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