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so neon caused a bit of a ruckus when they started teasing their artificial

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humans before ces like first of all what

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does that even mean and second of all why though the hype built up to the

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point where some redditors felt the need to scrape the company's website and they

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ended up finding out that what neon was working on was not blade runner style

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replicants but something more like ais with realistic looking avatars it was a

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slightly disappointing revelation to anyone who somehow thought we had

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reached blade runner levels of tech already but after seeing for myself what

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neons actually are i think there's some interesting potential here

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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

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the leaks were pretty accurate these neons were definitely not

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artificial humans but they're also not quite digital assistants in the same

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vein as google assistant siri or alexa neon says that they're not an interface

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to the internet so if you try asking them what the weather will be like tomorrow they may just tell you to

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google it yourself like your buddy would because neons will supposedly have

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personality and even names like frank

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hana natasha i'm assuming there's got to be a ronald

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in there so personally the main thing that drew me to this and the largest bit

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of click bait neon is actually guilty of is the visual component here neon's

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teasers made it seem like what we were looking at were ai generated images of

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people not just videos of actors but

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that's what they are that's that's not an ai that's just a guy the people i

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talk to here at neon didn't want to say that they refer to them as the raw

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visual data the ai is trained on but

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yeah they're videos of actors i don't know why they seemed hesitant to say

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that though because even with that knowledge the concept here is still

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pretty interesting i mean sure yeah neons are

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essentially just chat bots given a virtual physical manifestation but

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they're not just updated versions of smarterchild to entertain bored

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teenagers on msn messenger and i'm sure i just aged myself with that reference

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neon sees their constructs eventually being deployed in customer service roles

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like hotel desks and airport kiosks instead of checking into your flight

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using that ancient looking touch screen you could talk to angela

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she's great down the line neons could also be used in more casual scenarios

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like as a combination digital assistant and talking companion for seniors now if

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you think the idea of interacting with ais in service environments is weird

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sorry to tell you it's already happening there are a growing number of hotels and

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airports especially in asia that are starting to use robots to check people

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in and even provide room service neon would simply be putting a human face on

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these surfaces so that interactions can be more natural sure it'll look like a

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horrifying black mirror-esque nightmare at first but soon we won't even realize

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that they've started to consume our body parts to construct cyborg bodies for

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themselves i gotta say though in the demo they put

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on for us what i saw of the neon's capabilities was

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less than reassuring what they're doing is essentially real-time customizable

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deep fakery taking the likenesses of paid actors and manipulating it with

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software we saw a technician move a neon's head from side to side make

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various facial expressions and even tweak tiny details like moving their

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eyebrows up and down now this scenario involves a human manipulating a neon but

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when they're not being actively controlled ai allows the neon to move

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between thousands of recorded states resulting in something that sometimes

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does and most of the time doesn't right

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now look natural when the neon speaks its mouth forms the

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words it's saying although it definitely looked better speaking english than

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mandarin their capabilities are pretty rudimentary right now but neon says that

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over time they'll get smarter but riley i hear you

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ask remember microsoft's chat bot that learned how to talk by interacting with

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randos on twitter it got racist real fast how do we know

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that these neons won't join the kkk first chance they get i was wondering

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the same thing so i asked neon about it and they said that once they're deployed

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neons will essentially forget every interaction they have as soon as it's

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over so when you go to speak to one it won't call you a racial slur because the

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guy in front of you fancied himself king of all the edgelords

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now the other problem here is that airport kiosks can basically run on a

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potato and neons need powerful hardware

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i was told that each of these demos is running on a pc tower with multiple gpus

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although they wouldn't specify the exact specs well don't worry neon sees their

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ais running in the cloud where they can deploy their futuristic spectra

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technology and core r3 which stands for

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reality real-time responsive

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yeah clearly those are just mysterious buzzwords meant to make it sound like

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neon isn't just vaporware but i still

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think there's some potential here for sure this seems like basically just a

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concept right now and they definitely over hyped the crap out of this but

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it's got me interested enough to want to see what they come back with next year

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speaking of hold on i'm being remote controlled by Linus

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okay now go left straight yep

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get me in order from in and out actually scratch that it'll probably be

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disgusting by the time you get back that's right friends pulseway is the

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at the link in the video description

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take the video back over again i'm done now thanks

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well that was it guys thanks for watching see you next time i think this

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might be the last ces video so stay tuned for your regularly

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scheduled lioness tech tips content love you