upvote
I think we’re going to see a lot more “product“ focus in the future with deliberate attention paid to these kind of properties. Historically though there are some obvious differences, the focus has been on benchmark maximizing. As that saturates, I expect more interesting choices about writing and thinking style designed to be differentiators instead of a side effect. Kudos to the PM here for taking it in a different directions, there’s obviously been thought put into it.
reply
I ran a 9B over my like 100k photo library — it was very good at it. And extracting any text. All local.
reply
It might be an indication that analysis of photography is something of an ideal discipline for an LLM since so much content online involves discussion of pictures.

A lot of what I am trying to do with my photography is sort of meta-photography. I am really interested in early photographic history, pictorialism and its opponents etc., but I try to avoid reproduction, so I try not to simulate processes too closely or to use vintage tropes in props and settings, but I use simple, undercorrected lenses and some vintage lenses, to gain some of the visual language.

Finding out that LLMs (including Gemma-4 12B with its built-in image encoder) understands a lot of my references and influences, could recommend me my (still semi-obscure) favourite historical photographer and other photographers who clearly engage in the same work, is amazing. And sometimes it says stuff I had not thought of, which is what I am looking for, since my photographic journey is somewhat lonely.

And that is just sort of brushing past the fact that these things can describe the contents of photographs with an accuracy that you can almost take for granted.

reply