Backend Meta servers go brrrrrr
Removes™ … the user’s UI part of face recognition?
if the feature was “exploratory” why are they mad? you explored what the reaction would be by having the code behind a feature flag in prod and the response wasn’t good so you scrapped it? seems like you should be glad wired did you a solid by not having you waste engineering hours developing a feature nobody wanted.
Oh, no. They didn’t scrap the code. It’s there, waiting to be deployed again with an obscured name once the dust settles a bit.
Mostly just mad they got caught.
Smart Glasses: looks at Zuck “That’s him! That’s the criminal.”
When you see someone wearing those glasses, get your phone out and keep filming their face and what they do all the time. When they ask you what you do say you just keep it to yourself they can trust you.
Only fair to put a mirror on themselves.
Why can’t a company do smart glasses with self-hostable or fully local processing?
I’d love a pair but fuck streaming everything I see to a random dude in Nigeria
Well for one thing, it’s creepy and the people around you don’t want to be passively recorded 24/7.
Remember Google Glass? Its users were called “glassholes” for a reason.
Sadly, Meta’s glasses is less obvious, so that term is harder to use accurately.
Because recording people without their consent is creepy AF.
There are different types of face recognition in smartphones today. One kind is the biometric recognition used for unlocking phones, and can tell people apart. The second is just the recognition that a face exists in a certain location, often used by filters. It seems like they wanted to mix these two kinds, but one is very simplistic and the other is very difficult.
Distinguishing among different people is a much harder problem, and can have a bunch of false positives. The facial recognition systems used by police seem to make the news frequently saying that they mistook one person for another. Those systems will have more processing power than a pair of smart glasses.
That’s assuming that they’re doing the processing locally. If they’re uploading data to AI datacenters for processing, then it’s really hard to justify calling them “smart glasses”. In the computer field, it used to be common for them to use terminals that sent all processing to a large server, and the terminal itself did no processing. They were called “dumb terminals.” It would be weird for smart glasses to actually be dumb terminals.
But anyways, if the processing is done locally, the error rate is going to be high. The glasses would tell you that Steve is over there, but it’s actually Doug. And worst of all, the mistakes it would make, just like the police’s facial recognition system, will inevitably come off as extremely racist.
So, it doesn’t surprise me that they cancelled the feature that would make all of their users be called racists. I’m not sure why they’d be mad about it. It seems like a doomed feature to me.
They were called “dumb terminals.” It would be weird for smart glasses to actually be dumb terminals.
Smart when compared to glasses, dumb when compared to terminals. It’s not that nonsensical.
They’re already calling LLMs “AI”, calling dumb terminals “smart glasses” doesn’t seem that much of a stretch. And I think they only scrapped it after unfavourable reporting, not because they couldn’t make it work. Not saying they could make it work well and not be racist in the first place, but when did that ever stop them?
Edit: they only scrapped the code from the consumer product, I’m sure they’ll keep developing it. Another report mentions an internal memo about releasing it during turmoil to minimise backlash. They’re going to push it sooner or later unless law is passed to prevent them.
