In a week with two podcasts I covered extensively, I was happy that there was little other news.

That is, until right before press time, when Google rebranded Bard to Gemini, released an app for that, and offered a premium subscription ($20/month) for Gemini Ultra.

Gemini Ultra is Here

I have had the honor and opportunity to check out Gemini Advanced before its release.

The base model seems to be better than GPT-4. It seems excellent for code, for explanations and answering questions about facts or how things work, for generic displays of intelligence, for telling you how to do something. Hitting the Google icon to have it look for sources is great.

In general, if you want to be a power user, if you want to push the envelope in various ways, Gemini is not going to make it easy on you. However [...]

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Outline:

(00:21) Gemini Ultra is Here

(03:16) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(05:38) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(07:12) GPT-4 Real This Time

(09:03) Fun with Image Generation

(09:20) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(14:09) They Took Our Jobs

(15:16) Get Involved

(16:00) Introducing

(16:12) In Other AI News

(20:42) Quiet Speculations

(24:44) Vitalik on the Intersection AI and Crypto

(30:10) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(30:23) The Week in Audio

(34:25) Rhetorical Innovation

(35:23) Aligning a Dumber Than Human Intelligence is Still Difficult

(35:54) People Are Worried About AI, Many People

(38:04) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(39:54) The Lighter Side

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.