daring-rss

My thanks to Obsidian for sponsoring last week at DF. Obsidian is a remarkably flexible and powerful writing and note-taking app that is designed to adapt to the way you think. Obsidian helps you create connections and links between your notes so you can organization your thoughts. You can create links between everything — ideas, articles, lists, locations, books — anything you can put in a note, you can link to other notes.

Obsidian’s guiding principles:

Free for personal use
Available on all operating systems
Interoperable, local Markdown files
No tracking, no account required
Private, end-to-end encrypted
Easy to modify with API, plugins, and themes
100% user-supported, no VC funding

Obsidian exemplifies the mindset of a proper power-user tool: it makes easy things easy, and hard things possible. It’s also the sort of Markdown-based tool that does things with Markdown that I never would have imagined when I created it.

They’re offering a special deal for DF readers: sign up for their optional add-on sync service, Obsidian Sync, by 1 January 2024 and you’ll get 5 times the storage space — 50 GB for the price of 10 GB. Get started simply by downloading Obsidian for free.

 ★ 

My thanks to Obsidian for sponsoring last week at DF. Obsidian is a remarkably flexible and powerful writing and note-taking app that is designed to adapt to the way you think. Obsidian helps you create connections and links between your notes so you can organization your thoughts. You can create links between everything — ideas, articles, lists, locations, books — anything you can put in a note, you can link to other notes.

Obsidian’s guiding principles:

Free for personal use
Available on all operating systems
Interoperable, local Markdown files
No tracking, no account required
Private, end-to-end encrypted
Easy to modify with API, plugins, and themes
100% user-supported, no VC funding

Obsidian exemplifies the mindset of a proper power-user tool: it makes easy things easy, and hard things possible. It’s also the sort of Markdown-based tool that does things with Markdown that I never would have imagined when I created it.

They’re offering a special deal for DF readers: sign up for their optional add-on sync service, Obsidian Sync, by 1 January 2024 and you’ll get 5 times the storage space — 50 GB for the price of 10 GB. Get started simply by downloading Obsidian for free.

Read More 

As hinted by their team over the weekend, Beeper is going to play the cat-and-mouse game with Apple. From cofounders Eric Migicovsky and Brad Murray on the Beeper blog:

Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now
sign in with an Apple ID. Messages will be sent and received via
your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently
working on a fix for this.

In other word, what’s broken is the implicit creation of an iMessage account based on the cellular phone number of your device. I described this process in broad terms in a footnote on my column yesterday. It’s a “magic” process that’s been part of iMessage since it first debuted as an iOS-only feature in iOS 5. (It’s worth rewatching Scott Forstall’s introduction at WWDC 2011. I know Apple is not going back, but man, I do miss live on-stage demos.)

The “magic” is that you don’t have to sign up for a new account, or create a new username or account identifier. You just send a message from your phone number to another phone number, and if both numbers are registered for iMessage, the message goes over iMessage instead of SMS, even if you don’t have an Apple ID. Beeper had that working last week. Now, Beeper users need to have an Apple ID, and sign into that Apple ID within Beeper. (Beeper should actively encourage users to create and use an app-specific Apple ID password for Beeper.)

I can confirm that today’s update to Beeper Mini in the Play Store restores the ability to use iMessage, if you’re signed into an Apple ID.

We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and
we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as
things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on
subscriptions again. If you want to keep supporting us, feel free
to leave the subscription on 🙂.

Good on them. Like I wrote, it was irresponsible to charge a subscription fee for a service they can’t guarantee access to.

Beeper Mini launched on Tuesday and rocketed to top 20 of Play
Store charts. It was an instant hit. From what we can tell, Beeper
Mini was the fastest growing paid Android application launch in
history. In the first 48 hours, it was downloaded by more than
100,000 people.

Making it free (instead of a $2/month subscription with 7-day free trial) should only help its popularity, but I think it’s an open question how much demand there is for this. iMessage users might wish their Android-owning friends installed it, but are typical Android users interested?

Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac
relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar
method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.

That’s news to me. Beeper Cloud was relying on Mac relay servers prior to October. And I think regardless of whether the relay servers are Macs or Linux boxes, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a sketchy idea to entrust a relay server with your Apple ID credentials. But I think this recent change to Beeper Cloud means that you can use an app-specific password with that, too, just like with Beeper Mini — you never need to share your actual Apple ID password.

 ★ 

As hinted by their team over the weekend, Beeper is going to play the cat-and-mouse game with Apple. From cofounders Eric Migicovsky and Brad Murray on the Beeper blog:

Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now
sign in with an Apple ID. Messages will be sent and received via
your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently
working on a fix for this.

In other word, what’s broken is the implicit creation of an iMessage account based on the cellular phone number of your device. I described this process in broad terms in a footnote on my column yesterday. It’s a “magic” process that’s been part of iMessage since it first debuted as an iOS-only feature in iOS 5. (It’s worth rewatching Scott Forstall’s introduction at WWDC 2011. I know Apple is not going back, but man, I do miss live on-stage demos.)

The “magic” is that you don’t have to sign up for a new account, or create a new username or account identifier. You just send a message from your phone number to another phone number, and if both numbers are registered for iMessage, the message goes over iMessage instead of SMS, even if you don’t have an Apple ID. Beeper had that working last week. Now, Beeper users need to have an Apple ID, and sign into that Apple ID within Beeper. (Beeper should actively encourage users to create and use an app-specific Apple ID password for Beeper.)

I can confirm that today’s update to Beeper Mini in the Play Store restores the ability to use iMessage, if you’re signed into an Apple ID.

We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and
we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as
things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on
subscriptions again. If you want to keep supporting us, feel free
to leave the subscription on 🙂.

Good on them. Like I wrote, it was irresponsible to charge a subscription fee for a service they can’t guarantee access to.

Beeper Mini launched on Tuesday and rocketed to top 20 of Play
Store charts. It was an instant hit. From what we can tell, Beeper
Mini was the fastest growing paid Android application launch in
history. In the first 48 hours, it was downloaded by more than
100,000 people.

Making it free (instead of a $2/month subscription with 7-day free trial) should only help its popularity, but I think it’s an open question how much demand there is for this. iMessage users might wish their Android-owning friends installed it, but are typical Android users interested?

Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac
relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar
method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.

That’s news to me. Beeper Cloud was relying on Mac relay servers prior to October. And I think regardless of whether the relay servers are Macs or Linux boxes, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a sketchy idea to entrust a relay server with your Apple ID credentials. But I think this recent change to Beeper Cloud means that you can use an app-specific password with that, too, just like with Beeper Mini — you never need to share your actual Apple ID password.

Read More 

The three-day saga of an unauthorized iMessage client for Android.

Beeper is a company founded by Eric Migicovsky, who is best known as the founder of the now-defunct Pebble, which made groundbreaking smartwatches a decade ago. Migicovsky founded Beeper to create a meta-platform for disparate messaging apps — a single messaging client that could connect to dozens of different platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter DMs, and more. Until this week, Beeper was best known for an app it has now rebranded as Beeper Cloud. Beeper Cloud works as a single client for a slew of different messaging platforms — including iMessage — by way of relay servers. For each Beeper Cloud user, Beeper runs a virtual server in the cloud, and your local Beeper Cloud app communicates with that relay server. For each messaging service you connect to Beeper Cloud, the relay server needs to store your login credentials. You can also self-host your own server, which they describe as “possible, but not an easy task right now”, as it requires Linux system administration skills.

If you’re thinking that running a server instance for each user sounds like something that would be hard to scale, you’re right. Beeper Cloud launched in January 2021, but there remains a (seemingly long) waitlist to get access today, nearly three years later.

If you’re thinking that giving your iCloud account credentials to a third party so that they can sign you into iMessage on a virtual MacOS machine in the cloud sounds like a sketchy idea, you’re correct. It’s a terrible idea.

If you’re thinking that a scheme like this sounds familiar, you’re right — there are a few other “universal chat” services which have also been in the news recently. The best is Texts, a currently-desktop-only $12.50/month app created by Kishan Bagaria, and recently acquired by Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Day One, among numerous other apps and services). Texts directly communicates with the protocols for services like WhatsApp and Twitter DMs, but for iMessage — which of course has no open APIs for third-party clients — communicates via AppleScript and accessibility APIs with Apple’s Messages app running on your own Mac.

The other such service I’m aware of is Sunbird, which was recently in the news for a partnership with upstart Android phone maker Nothing, wherein they created a white-label Android app called Nothing Chat, that brought iMessage support to Nothing phones by way of relay servers running virtual MacOS instances. Turns out Nothing Chat and Sunbird were a privacy disaster, with message contents and attachments stored unencrypted in a database, and some network traffic being transmitted over unencrypted HTTP. This, despite claims at launch that everything was “end-to-end encrypted”. Nothing Chat was available in the Play Store for just four days last month before being pulled after the security issues were discovered.

So, to recap the various third-party apps that support (or in the case of Sunbird/Nothing, supported) iMessage:

Beeper Cloud supports iMessage by way of relay servers in the cloud, to use which you must entrust Beeper with your iCloud account password. An app-specific iCloud password won’t work, because Messages relies upon your system-level iCloud account on MacOS. Beeper also relies upon relay servers for WhatsApp and Signal. Beeper swears up and down you can trust them with this. They even have a client for iOS on the App Store (for now).

Texts supports iMessage by communicating with the local instance of Apple’s Messages app running on the same Mac Texts is running on. No relay servers, and you never give Texts your iCloud password. It’s just one app (Texts) communicating with another app (Messages), both running locally on your Mac.

Sunbird/Nothing Chat supported iMessage using relay servers, and it was revealed to be a security fiasco.

That brings us to this week, when Beeper launched Beeper Mini — a $2/month Android app that worked as a standalone iMessage client, thanks to the reverse engineering efforts of a 16-year-old high school student (who goes by “JJTech1030” on GitHub, and apparently wishes to remain pseudonymous). Beeper Mini’s launch garnered a lot of press attention — blue bubbles for Android, finally.

Quinn Nelson had early access to Beeper Mini, and made an exemplary video showing it in action and explaining in detail how it worked — including using JJTech1030’s open-source proof of concept from the terminal on a Linux laptop. If you’re curious about how Beeper Mini pulled this off and what it looked like in action, watch Nelson’s video.

I installed Beeper Mini on my Pixel 4, and it worked like a charm. In addition to working seamlessly — including support for group chats, tapbacks (albeit substituting animated emoji in place of Apple’s monochromatic badges), undoing sent messages, and editing recent messages — it’s just a really nice chat app. It looks a lot like what I’d imagine an official iMessages Android client from Apple would look like. Just like with an iPhone, Beeper Mini even worked without requiring you to sign in to an iCloud account. Beeper Mini reverse-engineered the way that Apple creates a new implicit iMessage account based on your phone number, via a one-time exchange of keys sent through SMS. But, if you wanted to use your existing iCloud account with Beeper Mini, they allowed you to sign in — which, unlike Beeper Cloud, worked with an app-specific password. When I tried Beeper Mini, I used a secondary iCloud account that I use for testing and product reviews, but even with that account, I would not have signed in if Beeper Mini didn’t support app-specific passwords.

Migicovsky told The Verge and Nelson that Beeper believed Apple would be unable to cut off their technique without also breaking iMessage for a significant number of iMessage users on actual Apple devices. I found that hard to believe, given that part of Beeper’s technique involves masquerading as a legitimate Apple device, re-using device identifiers. Others speculated that even if Apple could cut off Beeper Mini, either through technical changes or legal threats, they wouldn’t, lest they draw the ire of people happy to see iMessage available on Android. E.g., Nilay Patel:

Someone like Beeper finally reverse-engineering iMessage in this
was way inevitable and will cause Apple infinitely more pain and
bad press in trying to shut it down than if it had just made
things interoperable to begin with.

I found that unlikely as well. On Thursday night, two days after Beeper Mini launched, I wrote on Threads and Mastodon:

My prediction is that Apple will make changes — fixing bugs
and/or closing loopholes — that break Beeper Mini. It’s untenable
that there’s unsanctioned client software for a messaging platform
for which privacy and security are a primary feature.

It’s a very nice app, remarkably clever, and for now works like a
charm, but if Apple wanted an iMessage client for Android they’d
release an iMessage client for Android. Seems irresponsible for
Beeper to charge a subscription for an unsupported service.

I think the only way Apple doesn’t break Beeper Mini by closing
loopholes is if they can’t, but I find that unlikely.

Glad I predicted that Thursday night, because on Friday, Beeper Mini stopped working. Apple also issued the following statement, which doesn’t mention Beeper by name, but didn’t need to:

At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading
privacy and security technologies designed to give users control
of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to
protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake
credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques
posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including
the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted
messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make
updates in the future to protect our users.

That last sentence translates to “We’ll keep closing loopholes if Beeper Mini finds another workaround.”

It’s true that a lot of people — including me — wish Apple would release an iMessage client for Android.2 As revealed in a deposition that was part of the Epic v. Apple Fortnight lawsuit, Eddy Cue himself pushed for Apple to release an iMessage client for Android back in 2013, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion. But that’s Apple’s decision to make, and they obviously decided against it, choosing instead to keep iMessage as a value-add exclusively for Apple devices.

What I meant by it being “untenable” for Apple to look the other way at Beeper Mini wasn’t that Beeper made legitimate use of iMessage insecure. That’s part of the point of end-to-end encryption. But it was untenable perception-wise for Apple to allow unauthorized client software on a messaging platform heralded first and foremost for its privacy and security. Apple had even lost control over new account signups. That couldn’t stand, and that seems so obvious to me that I found it hard to believe Migicovsky truly believed Apple would allow it.3

But reading Migicovsky’s remarks to The Verge’s David Pierce in the wake of Apple’s response, it seems he really is surprised:

Founder Eric Migicovsky said on Friday that he simply didn’t understand why Apple would block his app: “if Apple truly cares about the privacy and security of their own iPhone users, why would they stop a service that enables their own users to now send encrypted messages to Android users, rather than using unsecure SMS?”

Migicovsky says now that his stance hasn’t changed, even after hearing Apple’s statement. He says he’d be happy to share Beeper’s code with Apple for a security review, so that it could be sure of Beeper’s security practices. Then he stops himself. “But I reject that entire premise! Because the position we’re starting from is that iPhone users can’t talk to Android users except through unencrypted messages.”

Well, you know, unless they use WhatsApp or Signal or, now, finally, Facebook Messenger. Again, I wish Apple would release an iMessage client for Android. (But what I really wish is that they’d done so a decade ago, before current platforms had gotten so entrenched, country-by-country around the world.) But I don’t buy the argument that Apple is under any sort of ethical obligation to do so. Part of what makes iMessage so valuable is its seamlessness on iPhones — that you don’t even need to create an account when using your phone number as your identifier. What Migicovsky is implicitly arguing is that Apple is obliged to make E2EE messaging as seamless for Android users as they’ve made it for iPhone users.

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Like I wrote the other day, a reckoning was due. In addition to Magill, the chair of Penn’s board of trustees also submitted his resignation.

If Penn wants to see how you do it, they need look no further than right across Walnut Street.

 ★ 

Like I wrote the other day, a reckoning was due. In addition to Magill, the chair of Penn’s board of trustees also submitted his resignation.

If Penn wants to see how you do it, they need look no further than right across Walnut Street.

Read More 

Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:

The FBI investigated a man who allegedly posed as a police officer
in emails and phone calls to trick Verizon to hand over phone data
belonging to a specific person that the suspect met on the dating
section of porn site xHamster, according to a newly unsealed court
record. Despite the relatively unconvincing cover story concocted
by the suspect, including the use of a clearly non-government
ProtonMail email address, Verizon handed over the victim’s data to
the alleged stalker, including their address and phone logs. The
stalker then went on to threaten the victim and ended up driving
to where he believed the victim lived while armed with a knife,
according to the record.

The news is a massive failure by Verizon who did not verify that
the data request was fraudulent, and the company potentially put
someone’s safety at risk. […] As the complaint against Glauner
notes, this “search warrant” was not correctly formatted and did
not include an additional form that is required for search
warrants in North Carolina. That, and the Cary Police Department
confirmed that no such Steven Cooper is employed with the agency,
the document says. The judge who allegedly signed the document,
Gale Adams, was shown the document and told investigators the
signature was not hers either. Most obviously of all, the document
was sent with a ProtonMail email address, which is “not an
official government email address,” the complaint says.

Disgraceful.

 ★ 

Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:

The FBI investigated a man who allegedly posed as a police officer
in emails and phone calls to trick Verizon to hand over phone data
belonging to a specific person that the suspect met on the dating
section of porn site xHamster, according to a newly unsealed court
record. Despite the relatively unconvincing cover story concocted
by the suspect, including the use of a clearly non-government
ProtonMail email address, Verizon handed over the victim’s data to
the alleged stalker, including their address and phone logs. The
stalker then went on to threaten the victim and ended up driving
to where he believed the victim lived while armed with a knife,
according to the record.

The news is a massive failure by Verizon who did not verify that
the data request was fraudulent, and the company potentially put
someone’s safety at risk. […] As the complaint against Glauner
notes, this “search warrant” was not correctly formatted and did
not include an additional form that is required for search
warrants in North Carolina. That, and the Cary Police Department
confirmed that no such Steven Cooper is employed with the agency,
the document says. The judge who allegedly signed the document,
Gale Adams, was shown the document and told investigators the
signature was not hers either. Most obviously of all, the document
was sent with a ProtonMail email address, which is “not an
official government email address,” the complaint says.

Disgraceful.

Read More 

David Thomas, reporting for Reuters:

Apple’s former top corporate lawyer will receive no prison time
after pleading guilty last year to U.S. insider trading charges, a
judge said on Thursday. U.S. District Judge William Martini in
Newark, New Jersey, sentenced Gene Levoff to four years of
probation and 2,000 hours of community service. Levoff was also
ordered to pay a $30,000 fine and forfeit $604,000. […]

Levoff ignored quarterly “blackout periods” that barred trading
before Apple’s results were released and violated the company’s
broader insider trading policy that he himself was responsible for
enforcing, prosecutors said.

Who watches the watchmen?

 ★ 

David Thomas, reporting for Reuters:

Apple’s former top corporate lawyer will receive no prison time
after pleading guilty last year to U.S. insider trading charges, a
judge said on Thursday. U.S. District Judge William Martini in
Newark, New Jersey, sentenced Gene Levoff to four years of
probation and 2,000 hours of community service. Levoff was also
ordered to pay a $30,000 fine and forfeit $604,000. […]

Levoff ignored quarterly “blackout periods” that barred trading
before Apple’s results were released and violated the company’s
broader insider trading policy that he himself was responsible for
enforcing, prosecutors said.

Who watches the watchmen?

Read More 

Jack Wellborn:

I just recently discovered that you can select and drag multiple
Safari tabs by holding Shift or Command, just as you would to
select and drag multiple items in Finder.

I had no idea you could do this with tabs. Just like making multiple selections in a list view, Shift-click will select an entire range at once, and Command-clicking lets you select (and deselect) noncontiguous tabs. If I’d known you could do this, I probably never would have written the AppleScript I posted the other day — but if I hadn’t written and posted that script, I don’t think I would learned this trick. Once you have multiple tabs selected, you can drag them together to create a new window, or do things like close them all at once.

This same trick works in Firefox and Chrome (and Chrome-derived browsers like Brave), too. This trick does not work in Safari on iPadOS, because iPads are baby computers where you can’t select more than one thing at a time.

 ★ 

Jack Wellborn:

I just recently discovered that you can select and drag multiple
Safari tabs by holding Shift or Command, just as you would to
select and drag multiple items in Finder.

I had no idea you could do this with tabs. Just like making multiple selections in a list view, Shift-click will select an entire range at once, and Command-clicking lets you select (and deselect) noncontiguous tabs. If I’d known you could do this, I probably never would have written the AppleScript I posted the other day — but if I hadn’t written and posted that script, I don’t think I would learned this trick. Once you have multiple tabs selected, you can drag them together to create a new window, or do things like close them all at once.

This same trick works in Firefox and Chrome (and Chrome-derived browsers like Brave), too. This trick does not work in Safari on iPadOS, because iPads are baby computers where you can’t select more than one thing at a time.

Read More 

“Quietly” is a much-abused adverb in headlines, but I think apt for this. Apple’s machine learning research team has simply released this new framework on GitHub, with no fanfare:

The MLX examples repo has a variety of examples,
including:

Transformer language model training.
Large-scale text generation with LLaMA and finetuning
with LoRA.
Generating images with Stable Diffusion.
Speech recognition with OpenAI’s Whisper.

Seems quite useful already today, and expands the groundwork for on-device AI features in the future.

 ★ 

“Quietly” is a much-abused adverb in headlines, but I think apt for this. Apple’s machine learning research team has simply released this new framework on GitHub, with no fanfare:

The MLX examples repo has a variety of examples,
including:

Transformer language model training.
Large-scale text generation with LLaMA and finetuning
with LoRA.
Generating images with Stable Diffusion.
Speech recognition with OpenAI’s Whisper.

Seems quite useful already today, and expands the groundwork for on-device AI features in the future.

Read More 

Jason Snell:

This is so bizarre. NameDrop is a feature that lets you AirDrop
your contact information to someone else. For the feature to work,
both phones need to be unlocked and one has to be placed directly
over the other. The entire new tap-to-connect system is built to
use physical proximity to confirm consent to sending or receiving
data, replacing the old system in which you could leave your
device open to AirDrop from all users — and receive all sorts of
nasty unwanted stuff from nearby randos.

Once the physical act of tapping is done — it takes a few
seconds, there’s a prominent animation, it’s nothing that is going
to happen accidentally — you are given the option to share your
contact information with the other person, and get to choose which
information is shared! If you only want to share a phone number
and not your home address, you can do that! It’s entirely in the
user’s control. (If someone nefarious approached you and wanted to
steal your information, they’d be better off just grabbing your
unlocked phone and running away with it.)

 ★ 

Jason Snell:

This is so bizarre. NameDrop is a feature that lets you AirDrop
your contact information to someone else. For the feature to work,
both phones need to be unlocked and one has to be placed directly
over the other. The entire new tap-to-connect system is built to
use physical proximity to confirm consent to sending or receiving
data, replacing the old system in which you could leave your
device open to AirDrop from all users — and receive all sorts of
nasty unwanted stuff from nearby randos.

Once the physical act of tapping is done — it takes a few
seconds, there’s a prominent animation, it’s nothing that is going
to happen accidentally — you are given the option to share your
contact information with the other person, and get to choose which
information is shared! If you only want to share a phone number
and not your home address, you can do that! It’s entirely in the
user’s control. (If someone nefarious approached you and wanted to
steal your information, they’d be better off just grabbing your
unlocked phone and running away with it.)

Read More 

Google:

Gemini is also our most flexible model yet — able to efficiently
run on everything from data centers to mobile devices. Its
state-of-the-art capabilities will significantly enhance the way
developers and enterprise customers build and scale with AI.

We’ve optimized Gemini 1.0, our first version, for three
different sizes:

Gemini Ultra — our largest and most capable model for highly
complex tasks.
Gemini Pro — our best model for scaling across a wide range of
tasks.
Gemini Nano — our most efficient model for on-device tasks.

Loosely speaking, Gemini Ultra is competing with GPT 4, and Gemini Pro with GPT 3.5. Nano, the on-device model, will first appear on Pixel 8 Pro phones. It’s unclear to me whether that’s because Gemini Nano is tuned to specifically take advantage of the Pixel 8 Pro’s Tensor G3 chip, or if it will expand to additional Android phones with other silicon.

Google has a 6-minute demo of Gemini in action, and it’s rather incredible. But it also comes with this disclaimer: “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity.” Why not show it in real time, even if it’s slow? It seems like the whole demo ought be considered fraudulent — a fake. What’s wrong with Google as a company that they repeatedly try to pass off concept videos as legitimate demos of actual products?

 ★ 

Google:

Gemini is also our most flexible model yet — able to efficiently
run on everything from data centers to mobile devices. Its
state-of-the-art capabilities will significantly enhance the way
developers and enterprise customers build and scale with AI.

We’ve optimized Gemini 1.0, our first version, for three
different sizes:

Gemini Ultra — our largest and most capable model for highly
complex tasks.
Gemini Pro — our best model for scaling across a wide range of
tasks.
Gemini Nano — our most efficient model for on-device tasks.

Loosely speaking, Gemini Ultra is competing with GPT 4, and Gemini Pro with GPT 3.5. Nano, the on-device model, will first appear on Pixel 8 Pro phones. It’s unclear to me whether that’s because Gemini Nano is tuned to specifically take advantage of the Pixel 8 Pro’s Tensor G3 chip, or if it will expand to additional Android phones with other silicon.

Google has a 6-minute demo of Gemini in action, and it’s rather incredible. But it also comes with this disclaimer: “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity.” Why not show it in real time, even if it’s slow? It seems like the whole demo ought be considered fraudulent — a fake. What’s wrong with Google as a company that they repeatedly try to pass off concept videos as legitimate demos of actual products?

Read More