Huawei's Not Hot Dog is possibly the Worst Tech Promo Ever Never base a promotional campaign around a satire of the thing you're trying to promote. You'd think that's an easy rule to follow, but Huawei seems to have forgotten. In what may be the most excruciating promotional stunt we've ever seen from a technology company in many years, Huawei based a promo for its AI on a satire of …
Last year Mike Judge's HBO sitcom Silicon Valley satirised the hunger for, and the limitations of, machine learning. Jian Yang's Hot Dog identifying app (from "See Food Technologies") appeared to perform wonders – but the only thing it could identify was a hot dog.
Isn't this just a blatant ripoff of Mitchell & Webb's Cheesoid?
https://youtu.be/FWP52PcdpAw
It wasn't Silicon Valley but New Girl that had a scene in which a hopeless idea is pitched at a venture capitalist. "Your phone has an app for many things, but it it doesn't open your beer or light your stove... what we're pitching is a phone case that has these everyday essentials built in. Like apps but for real life. Today we proudly present RealApps"
"You're calling it Relapse? Seriously? Go away!"
Actually for a while I had a Victorinox Swiss Card stuck to the back of my phone case, but these days I just keep a Victorinox Manager on my keychain and a Victorinox Spartan in my pocket.
> Implication... that cats are fair game to run over?
Under UK traffic law, yes: cats aren't listed as animals. The Road Traffic Act 1988 only gives rules around certain types of animals: dogs, goats, horses, cattle, donkeys, mules, sheep and pigs.
You have to report it if you run over a dog, but not if you run over a cat.
This promo isn't a real anyway, just cheap camera tricks. It's possible to use a timer to change a picture in the phone, and thus you get nice camera shots where phone supposedly does amazing decisions, when in reality they're just showing images on the phone screen via timer. We used these same tricks in high school videos already in 1993 when video equipment become available. But it's cheap trick.
But at least huawei has accurately described the delays that happen in such regognition app. If it takes 5 seconds to detect a hotdog, it's completely useless for driving a car..
"We'll know how good AI is the day a tech exec puts a person in front of the car, and sets the car off to drive at them without a human operator to override the AI."
That sounds about like how a tech exec would downsize a workforce. Congrats Bob, you've been transferred to the AI Car Test Program! Don't worry, it's a short term assignment. Seriously, he never specified that the AI car should stop at that point, did he?
"We'll know how good AI is the day a tech exec puts a person in front of the car, and sets the car off to drive at them without a human operator to override the AI."
Surely you mean "the day a tech exec stands in the way of a car driven towards them by an AI with no human operator to override the AI"?
A friend of mine was working on object recognition like this 15 years ago. Unsurprisingly it had lots of military uses but he was trying to get it to read road signs and then tell the driver what signs he was going past; warnings, speed limits etc. It could recognise tanks, but only if they had a big white cross painted on them to help them stand out from the background.
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