this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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CEO of Zoom: what if we take deepfake fraud, right, and make it a push-button feature of Zoom (www.theverge.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What’s the elevator pitch now?

With conferencing, again, this is one app. If you look at your calendar, it is not only to join your video meeting but also a lot of other things. You read emails, send a chat message, make a phone call, have a whiteboard session, schedule something with external third parties. What we are doing now, it’s really looking at your entire schedule, how to leverage Zoom Workplace to help you out. Essentially, you can leave Zoom Workplace, and Zoom Workplace can help you get most of your work done, right? That’s our pitch.

That might be one of the worst pitches I've ever heard. Does that actually mean anything to anyone?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Unrelatedly, I need to quickly sneer at another quote:

like in 1995 when the internet was born

1995? How was the Internet born in 1995? Eternal September already started two years ago at that point.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Even Mosaic was 2 years old already in 1995, so the web—much younger than the infrastructure—was a solidly established thing. Did he just make up the number or is that some benchmark, I wonder?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Maybe the “corporate” web?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

AI is, roughly speaking, complete bullshit that should die in a fire.

But...

I work remotely and I would love if I could make Zoom make me look like my hair is perfectly combed, I'm wearing a collared shirt, I'm smiling, and in general I'm presentable and professional-looking without anyone on the Zoom call ever knowing it was a trick.

Not to say I think we'll achieve that any time in the foreseeable future, but one can wish.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

you can readily achieve that with video synthesis and overlay techniques from circa 2016~2017, tbh

(not saying you should, just saying it is entirely possible and has been for years)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I've looked into it a little, and I know there are technologies for achieving that, but then again we've all seen videos of filters failing, yeah?

It'd either have to be so reliable I could depend on it not getting confused and messing up even once even over many years or have some failsafe that made it just look like there was lag or something rather than showing my real face. (But also it couldn't glitch if I stepped out of frame. Like, it'd suck if it decided the lamp behind me was my face or whatever. And probably it couldn't restrict what I could do. Like, I wouldn't want to have to be careful about the angle at which I turned my head or anything.)

And it would have to be sufficiently plug-and-play that it wouldn't take me a year of tweaking, coding, and testing to get right before deploying it for real.

So, I dunno. I haven't experimented with anything like overlay techniques directly, but it still seems implausible to me that anything fulfills all of those requirements.

I suppose I'd also settle for "it glitches sometimes, but not in ways that show how uncombed my hair is and how rumpled my shirt is, but also everyone does it and everyone knows that everyone does it, so it doesn't reflect poorly on you if they discover your secret." But I think we're also a long way off from that.

And to be fair, I'm probably overthinking it to an extent and it probably wouldn't actually reflect poorly on me if I did it. (They might be impressed. Who knows.) But still.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I believe that LLM can represent me anytime.

Talk about having the most replaceable job.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

he admits it dot webp

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

So... what are the chances Zoom ends up recording people in Zoom meetings to use as training data?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I am suspecting this is the real reason everyone is coming out with their own LLM. Pumping massive amounts of arbitrary data sources into them feels justified to the average user and it's a convenient excuse to collect whatever they want without needing to invent "features" which justify it. Yeah thanks for showing me a picture I took 10 years ago snapchat if I wanted to see it I'd look at my photo album but I guess now you have a "reason" to keep it

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

pushing 100%, they already tried to sneak in a TOS provision to do just that

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

lmao, Zoom is cooked. Their CEO has no idea how LLMs work or why they aren't fit for purpose, but he's 100% certain someone else will somehow solve this problem:

So is the AI model hallucination problem down there in the stack, or are you investing in making sure that the rate of hallucinations goes down?

I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed. 

But I guess my question is by who? Is it by you, or is it somewhere down the stack?

It’s someone down the stack. 

Okay.

I think either from the chip level or from the LLM itself.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed.

Wasn't this an unsolvable problem?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

it's unsolvable because it's literally how LLMs work lol.

though to be fair i would indeed love for them to solve the LLMs-outputting-text problem.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. We need another program to control the LLM tbh.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Sed Quis custodiet ipsos custodes = But who will control the controllers?

Which in a beautiful twist of irony is thought to be an interpolation in the texts of Juvenal (in manuscript speak, an insert added by later scribes)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Lol I like how they put the author's note at the beginning of the article, "this was a very special interview" as if it's special because of the unique insights instead of special because it sounds coked up.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Haha at the chip level? What’s he smoking?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What’s he smoking?

Whatever he's smoking, it's strength rating is at least: "make it seem like a good idea to call employees back from remote work despite that being the one thing we sell".

So that's gotta be some strong stuff.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

the important thing about Zoom is that it was the lucky winner of the pandemic. Could have been Google Meet, could have been any of their other competitors, but somehow everyone just converged on Zoom.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Having worked in an IT department in 2020, it wasn't just random. Zoom was stable for large meetings and scaled pretty smoothly up to a thousand participants. And it's a standalone product and it had better moderator tools.

MS Teams often got problems over around 50 to 80 participants. Google Meet worked better but its max was way lower than Zoom (250?). I tried a couple of other competitors, but none that matched up (including Jitsi, unfortunately).

So if you were at an IT department in an organization that needed to have large meetings and were looking for a quick solution that also worked for your large meetings , Zoom was in 2020 the best choice. And big organisations choices means everyone has to learn that software, so soon enough everyone knows how to use Zoom.

They were at the right place, had the better product, gained a dominant position. And now they are tossing all that away. C'est la late stage capitalism!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

MS Teams often got problems over around 50 to 80 participants

As honourable mention, MS Teams is also uncontrollable, overblown jank that

  • doesn't work in a browser despite being built in Electron
  • is complete shite on Android, despite bring built in Electron
  • barely works on Windows, thanks to being built in Electron but despite the fact that it's built by the Windows people

And even at its best behaviour it randomly loses messages while eating up way more CPU and RAM than possibly justifiable for a glorified IRC UI.

No wonder Zoom won out over that one, if you tried to use Teams in 2020 you barely could.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Also according to my freelance interpreter parents:

Compared to other major tools, was also one of the few not too janky solutions for setting up simultaneous interpreting with a separate audio track for the interpreters output.

Other tools would require big kludges (separate meeting rooms, etc…), unlikely in to be working for all participants across organizations, or require clunky consecutive translation.

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