so neon caused a bit of a ruckus when they started teasing their artificial
humans before ces like first of all what
does that even mean and second of all why though the hype built up to the
point where some redditors felt the need to scrape the company's website and they
ended up finding out that what neon was working on was not blade runner style
replicants but something more like ais with realistic looking avatars it was a
slightly disappointing revelation to anyone who somehow thought we had
reached blade runner levels of tech already but after seeing for myself what
neons actually are i think there's some interesting potential here
so i'm gonna talk about it but first i'm gonna talk about our sponsor our ces
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so when neon actually pulled back the curtain themselves it turned out that
the leaks were pretty accurate these neons were definitely not
artificial humans but they're also not quite digital assistants in the same
vein as google assistant siri or alexa neon says that they're not an interface
to the internet so if you try asking them what the weather will be like tomorrow they may just tell you to
google it yourself like your buddy would because neons will supposedly have
personality and even names like frank
hana natasha i'm assuming there's got to be a ronald
in there so personally the main thing that drew me to this and the largest bit
of click bait neon is actually guilty of is the visual component here neon's
teasers made it seem like what we were looking at were ai generated images of
people not just videos of actors but
that's what they are that's that's not an ai that's just a guy the people i
talk to here at neon didn't want to say that they refer to them as the raw
visual data the ai is trained on but
yeah they're videos of actors i don't know why they seemed hesitant to say
that though because even with that knowledge the concept here is still
pretty interesting i mean sure yeah neons are
essentially just chat bots given a virtual physical manifestation but
they're not just updated versions of smarterchild to entertain bored
teenagers on msn messenger and i'm sure i just aged myself with that reference
neon sees their constructs eventually being deployed in customer service roles
like hotel desks and airport kiosks instead of checking into your flight
using that ancient looking touch screen you could talk to angela
she's great down the line neons could also be used in more casual scenarios
like as a combination digital assistant and talking companion for seniors now if
you think the idea of interacting with ais in service environments is weird
sorry to tell you it's already happening there are a growing number of hotels and
airports especially in asia that are starting to use robots to check people
in and even provide room service neon would simply be putting a human face on
these surfaces so that interactions can be more natural sure it'll look like a
horrifying black mirror-esque nightmare at first but soon we won't even realize
that they've started to consume our body parts to construct cyborg bodies for
themselves i gotta say though in the demo they put
on for us what i saw of the neon's capabilities was
less than reassuring what they're doing is essentially real-time customizable
deep fakery taking the likenesses of paid actors and manipulating it with
software we saw a technician move a neon's head from side to side make
various facial expressions and even tweak tiny details like moving their
eyebrows up and down now this scenario involves a human manipulating a neon but
when they're not being actively controlled ai allows the neon to move
between thousands of recorded states resulting in something that sometimes
does and most of the time doesn't right
now look natural when the neon speaks its mouth forms the
words it's saying although it definitely looked better speaking english than
mandarin their capabilities are pretty rudimentary right now but neon says that
over time they'll get smarter but riley i hear you
ask remember microsoft's chat bot that learned how to talk by interacting with
randos on twitter it got racist real fast how do we know
that these neons won't join the kkk first chance they get i was wondering
the same thing so i asked neon about it and they said that once they're deployed
neons will essentially forget every interaction they have as soon as it's
over so when you go to speak to one it won't call you a racial slur because the
guy in front of you fancied himself king of all the edgelords
now the other problem here is that airport kiosks can basically run on a
potato and neons need powerful hardware
i was told that each of these demos is running on a pc tower with multiple gpus
although they wouldn't specify the exact specs well don't worry neon sees their
ais running in the cloud where they can deploy their futuristic spectra
technology and core r3 which stands for
reality real-time responsive
yeah clearly those are just mysterious buzzwords meant to make it sound like
neon isn't just vaporware but i still
think there's some potential here for sure this seems like basically just a
concept right now and they definitely over hyped the crap out of this but
it's got me interested enough to want to see what they come back with next year
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take the video back over again i'm done now thanks
well that was it guys thanks for watching see you next time i think this
might be the last ces video so stay tuned for your regularly
scheduled lioness tech tips content love you