“AI #107: The Misplaced Hype Machine” by Zvi

The most hyped event of the week, by far, was the Manus Marketing Madness. Manus wasn’t entirely hype, but there was very little there there in that Claude wrapper.

Whereas here in America, OpenAI dropped an entire suite of tools for making AI agents, and previewed a new internal model making advances in creative writing. Also they offered us a very good paper warning about The Most Forbidden Technique.

Google dropped what is likely the best open non-reasoning model, Gemma 3 (reasoning model presumably to be created shortly, even if Google doesn’t do it themselves), put by all accounts quite good native image generation inside Flash 2.0, and added functionality to its AMIE doctor, and Gemini Robotics.

It's only going to get harder from here to track which things actually matter.

Table of Contents

1. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. How much utility are [...]

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Outline:

(00:55) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(05:51) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(08:09) We're In Deep Research

(09:37) More Manus Marketing Madness

(13:27) Diffusion Difficulties

(16:32) OpenAI Tools for Agents

(17:14) Huh, Upgrades

(19:14) Fun With Media Generation

(21:45) Choose Your Fighter

(25:02) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(25:45) They Took Our Jobs

(26:49) The Art of the Jailbreak

(27:46) Get Involved

(30:05) Introducing

(32:04) In Other AI News

(33:14) Show Me the Money

(34:07) Quiet Speculations

(37:50) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(42:14) Anthropic Anemically Advises America's AI Action Plan

(51:44) New York State Bill A06453

(53:39) The Mask Comes Off

(53:56) Stop Taking Obvious Nonsense Hyperbole Seriously

(55:38) The Week in Audio

(01:04:34) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:13:10) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:17:14) The Lighter Side

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First published:
March 13th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XFGTJz9vGwjJADeFB/ai-107-the-misplaced-hype-machine

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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