Tales from the jar side: Gemini + OpenAI, The o1 models, Hail Flutie!, Airplane! jokes, and the usual toots and skeets
Let dogs choose their own names, like I did with Bark and BarkBark (from @etbeeegood.bsky.social) (rimshot)
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of November 17 - 24, 2024. This week I taught my regular courses at Trinity College.
Gemini 💘 OpenAI?
Earlier this month Google announced that you can access their Gemini AI tool using the OpenAI API. I saw that in this article on InfoQ, which led me to this article on the Google Developer blog.
Here’s their Python example:
They use the OpenAI class, but set the API key, the model, and the base URL for Google’s Gemini. I recently made a video where I showed how Perplexity did the same thing, but I never expected Google to do the same. Gemini is a direct competitor to OpenAI, and the already have a full API of their own.
Why would Google do this? I don’t know, but I suspect it has something to do with this figure, which comes from this report:
That shows the change in the market share of the various AI models over the past year. OpenAI had the so-called “first mover advantage,” in that they got there first with ChatGPT, bu their market share has dropped from 50% to 34%. Most of that went to Anthropic, whose Claude AI tool has gone from 12% to 24% in the same period. I must admit, I find Claude to be the best of the bunch, but I’m mostly doing code generation with it. Then comes Meta (i.e., Facebook), with their open source Llama 3 tool.
Coming in a distant fourth (!) is Google, where Gemini improved from 7% to 12%, but that’s still very low. This move appears to be an attempt by Google to steal customers from OpenAI, with the argument that developers are already using the OpenAI programming model, why not switch the AI implementation to Gemini?
I recorded a video where I talk about this, and run through examples with both LangChain4j and Spring AI to see what works and what doesn’t. Expect that video to be released this week.
OpenAI o1 Models
Back in September, to great fanfare, OpenAI announced its “reasoning” models, which they called o1-preview and o1-mini, again reminding us all that AI companies should never be allowed to name anything ever. Since I have a paid account, I was able to access those models through their app, but I couldn’t get at them through the API.
That changed this week. I received the following email:
I’m Nikunj, PM for the OpenAI API. We’ve been working on expanding access to the OpenAI o1 beta and I’m excited to provide API access to you today. We’ve developed these models to spend more time thinking before they respond. They can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math.
You can get started with the o1 beta now:
You have access to two models:
Our larger model, o1-preview, which has strong reasoning capabilities and broad world knowledge.
Our smaller model, o1-mini, which is 80% cheaper than o1-preview.
Try both models! You may find one better than the other for your specific use case. But keep in mind o1-mini is faster, cheaper, and competitive with o1-preview at coding tasks (you can see how it performs here). We’ve also written up more about these models in our blog post.
Yes, they now work for me. I must admit I’m still a bit underwhelmed by them. For what I do, they’re slower and more expensive, and the answers aren’t any better than GPT-4o. Maybe I just haven’t found the right use case yet. We’ll see.
The 40th Anniversary of the “Hail Flutie”
So this happened.
The anniversary date is November 23. On that dates in 1984, Doug Flutie, senior QB for Boston College, threw this pass against the Miami Hurricanes, quarterbacked by Bernie Kosar:
Doug Flutie and I are about the same age. I have about six months on him, since I was born in March and he was born in October. Still, because of school year cut-off requirements, that meant I graduated from MIT in June of 1984, while he entered his senior season at BC that Fall. As it happens, Thanksgiving that year was on November 22, so like pretty much everyone else in the country, I was watching this game at home for the holiday.
In case you’re too young to remember, Doug Flutie was a can’t miss prospect from Natick High, right outside of Boston, who turned BC from basically an also-ran into a contender the four years he was there. He was also generously described as 5’ 9” and 175 pounds, meaning he was way too short and small to be the magician he actually was on the football field.
Wikipedia has a whole page on this game, which they call the Hail Flutie. As the page says:
Miami was the defending national champion and entered the game with an 8–3 record, ranked twelfth in the nation. Boston College was ranked tenth with a record of 7–2 and had already accepted an invitation to the Cotton Bowl on New Year's Day. The game was played at the Orange Bowl in Miami, and televised nationally by CBS, with Brent Musburger, Ara Parseghian, and Pat Haden commentating.
Records and achievements of the game included:
The Hurricanes' quarterback Bernie Kosar passed for a school-record 447 yards, with two touchdowns.
Miami running back Melvin Bratton ran for four touchdowns.
Flutie passed for 472 yards and three touchdowns to become the first major college quarterback to surpass 10,000 yards passing in a career.[6]
Phelan caught 11 passes for 226 yards and two touchdowns.
The video starts with 6 seconds left in game, BC down 45 - 41 after Miami led yet another scoring drive to take the lead with half a minute to go. Flutie takes the snap, scrambles to his right, and launches the ball literally 65 yards in the air as time expired into the end zone where it was caught by his roommate, Gerard Phelan. BC won 47 - 41, and even now Flutie says it’s a rare day that someone doesn’t talk to him about it.
One of the commentators (I think it was Haden) kept saying Phelan got behind the defense and “that can never happen” (ugh, I hate that construction — after all, it just happened), but didn’t go into why. It probably happened because they didn’t think Flutie could throw the ball that far. I mean, look at him and the video. Everybody’s reaction was, Whoa, did the ball really fly like that? Wow.
(Speaking of the announcers, the only downside to this little nostalgia trip was having to listen to Brent Musburger again. I couldn’t stand him. To me he represented everything bad about NFL broadcasts on TV. He was a hype machine — everything was always “the greatest player” or “the most amazing play that ever happened” — and a total front runner who I got sick of it very quickly. The fact he was great at hype only made things worse.)
Flutie’s professional career was decidedly mixed. He started out in the USFL with the New Jersey Generals, owned by some billionaire blowhard from New York in one of his earliest bankruptcies. (You may have heard of him. Unfortunately.) Then he went to the NFL for a few years and was mediocre to bad, left for the Canadian league where we won multiple titles and multiple MVP awards, came back to the NFL where he was a lot better but still not great, and eventually retired.
In his last season, at age 43, as a backup QB for Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots, he did this:
That is the first successful drop-kick extra point in the NFL since 1941. Apparently Belichick saw Flutie practicing them and was sufficiently amused that he gave him a chance to do it in his last game, to everyone’s delight.
I lived in Boston for three of Flutie’s four years there, and he was in the news constantly. I always rooted for him. After all, I too was judged too small and too short to play football, with the difference being that in my case it was true. (Old joke: I was small and made up for it by being slow.) The truth is that Flutie was a great CFL quarterback but a mediocre NFL one, because in the NFL the defenders are that much bigger and faster so he could no longer run away from them. Flutie was the greatest college quarterback I ever saw, and that one pass made him a legend.
Toots and Skeets
The Xodus continues
Here’s a direct link to that article. Bluesky is now over 21 million users, and even though Threads claims it has ten times that, the place doesn’t feel like a community to me. On Threads it’s all about following celebrities and influencers, and they do a lot of content moderation in their algorithm, which frustrates many journalists. Bluesky is like old-school twitter, but better and friendlier. I’m really enjoying it.
Oh, and Mark Hamill is there now:
Many people recall that Bluesky was created by Jack Dorsey, the very strange person who (co-)created Twitter, but he’s not there any more.
You can find me on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/kousenit.com.
Word of the day
And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Airplane!
An Airplane! joke is definitely an age check. Did you realize that movie came out in 1980? The sick girl was played by Jill Whelan, who was born on Sept 29, 1966, meaning she’s now 58 years old. They never actually said what her illness in the movie was, but apparently it came out okay because she went on to play Vicki Stubing on The Love Boat.
This week we’ve also got Gladiator II out, so I suppose this other clip from Airplane! is relevant again:
I must admit I’m disappointed I haven’t heard any Wicked Gladiator gags this week (you know, because the Wicked movie is here, too), so I guess I picked the wrong week to stop wallowing in nostalgia as an escape from what’s going on in the real world.
Can you be more specific?
In case those other references weren’t old enough, I can go back another generation to the Beatles.
No, he doesn’t bite
Doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.
Have a great week, everybody!
Last week:
My regular Trinity College schedule.
This week:
My regular Trinity College schedule.
Thanksgiving!