#daringfireball

Facebook's building its execution muscle for AI even if it's just slapped a text box to all their products. From a large company perspective that highlights ownership and execution. #ai #openai #meta #facebook #tech

Justin Searls writes: I’ve been pairing with ChatGPT (using GPT-4) every day for the last few months and it is demonstrably terrible 80% of the time, but 20% of the time it saves me an hour of headaches, so I put up with it anyway. Nevertheless, my experience with Llama 2 was so miserable, I figured Zuck’s claim about Llama 3 outperforming GPT-4 was bullshit, so I put it to the test this…

"Good tools make it clear how they should be used."

This is a great essay about the inherent challenges in an interface that has no clear way to communicate to users how to use it, but you REALLY should click through for the amazing webpage design.

Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation: https://t.co/BNeUKah6sx

In his "Brief Thoughts and Observations" John gruber mentions Apple's improved keynote after the last one at WWDC. It may be improved, but I was struck by what seemed to me a lack of a killer instinct in selling customers on these products. Really they just told us what the products were and forgot to tell us why we needed them.

Just one example. The new iPhone 6s and 6s+ shoot 4k video. In the keynote, they pretty much just mention it as a spec, with no explanation as to why you might want 4k video. Apple supposedly doesn't sell on specs anymore. They don't say how much RAM is in the phones. But simply saying "This phone shoots 4K video" this is like saying, "This iPhone has 2 Gigs of RAM,"and leaving it at that.

Much more compelling would be to show what you could do with 4K video. They might even say, "Why would you want 4k video? Most TV's can't show 4K video; the phone can't show 4K video. And TV's that are 4K, you probably can't see the difference unless it is very large or you are very close. So why would we want to shoot 4K video? Well, look what we can do with image stabilization with 4K." Then they would unveil their new Hyperlapse - like feature in the camera app (which they don't have, but I'm arguing they should) where they shoot video handheld while running around and up stairs and over boulders and then perfectly stabilize the video where it looks like it was shot on a dolly1 - "and the finished video is full 1080p HD.2 This is what professionals do with multi-thousand dollar 4K cameras, but they must then use professional post production software running on pretty high end PC and Mac computers to do the stabilization. We do this built right into the phone." That would be a killer selling feature. (And the 6s can really do this! It probably will if Hyperlapse updates their app to work with the new camera.) It would show the average person why they have to get this new phone. To get an idea of what the demo would look like, check out Hyperlapse.

But they just said, "shoots 4K video."

I'm reminded of the first iPhone announcement, and how Jobs knew how to show killer features. I think my favorite was his prank call to Starbucks from the maps app.

I've noticed that Tim Cook does a lot of telling us how amazing and incredible the products are rather than really showing us. Jobs would say how amazing they were too, but he usually managed to make us believe by demonstrating that amazingness.

It's really one of the most impressive demos of any app. By using the phones' gyroscope and other sensors, it is able to do what used to require pretty intensive computational work in post processing programs like Adobe After Effects. ↩︎