This week YouTube hosted Brandcast 2025 in which it revealed how marketers could make better use of the platform to connect with customers.
A few new so-called innovations were announced at the event but one has caught the attention of the internet – Peak Points. This new product makes use of Gemini to detect “the most meaningful, or ‘peak’, moments within YouTube’s popular content to place your brand where audiences are the most engaged”.
Essentially, YouTube will use Gemini and probably the heatmap generated on YouTube videos by people skipping to popular points, to determine where to place advertising. Anybody who has grown up watching terrestrial television where adverts arrive as a way to build suspense will understand how annoying Peak Points could become.
I don’t understand why this needs AI. I’m guessing this is just more marketing nonsense. You can already see the “most engaged moments” by simply hovering over the timeline.
That’s because it doesn’t. Just don’t tell the investors.
At some point you would think the investors would get upset about all the lying…
Too greedy. They want all the money so bad they will believe any conman.
You know. I feel like its a bit obvious to say but a system where corporations are operated top-down by a group of individuals whose only interest is the profitability of said corporation with little to no consideration in other aspects of the corporation (the employees for one) is a pretty bad system. I remember reading that Henry Ford wanted to drop the price of the Model T to make it even more of an everyman car. Two of his top investors took him to court over it. This isn’t to say Ford was some sort of paragon; but it strikes me sometime, the degree to which the naked greed of some people pierces the capitalist veil of competitive innovation for social betterment.
It’s worth noting that Dodge (yes, that Dodge) were the ones who took Ford to court over it. If you want the reason why shareholders come first, blame Dodge.
It’s a funny story because Ford was suspecting them of building a rival car company so he wasn’t doing it entirely out of altruistic pursuits. He wanted to them to get lower profits from their Ford investments. Whenever you think capitalists have reached the peak of greed, they truly innovate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Riiight. Id like to learn more about Dodge; I’m gomna check if there’s a Ken Bursesque History of Dodge documentary.
Edit: there is no such documentary.
We need more comments with endnotes
This only strikes us plebes when we find out about it. It is common knowledge in economist circles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
This has only been recently challenged as a PR attempt to rebrand it into “stakeholder capitalism”
Also, not related but equally horrifying: in macroeconomics there is a target of unemployment of around 5%, aka full employment is to be avoided: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAIRU
Doesn’t matter because they get a cut every time they let their friends lie to the board. Executives get a cut every time they seem like they’re approving something. No one is personally liable for the lie. And those selling the lie get bonuses on every contract until they can sell the company to the next bag holder. It’s all imaginary power plays to funnel money.
That only works after the video is out and has usage statistics.
This could theoretically start to identify those moments before the video is public.
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…no? It doesn’t.
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If the analytics cross over a certain threshold, trigger an ad.
This is extremely simple and does not require an LLM.
LOL what? No, you just program the software to place it. No AI required.
They already do it in Podcasts and it is usually extremely ham-fisted. The presenter will be mid sentence talking about something and suddenly IMPROVE YOUR DIET WITH FACTOR
Or stand up specials. So much comedy on YouTube and they just drop Dick Pills TM commercials in the middle of punchlines.
Google’s been deploying engagement models before anyone even knew the name OpenAI.
This is oldschool machine learning, driven by viewing metrics from users. Gemini is just a brand.
I mean… an “if” statement is technically AI, so investors can see the buzz word and all Google has to code is “if most engaged moment, then play ad” lol
That’s not AI.
It’s a computer (Artificial) making a choice that is better than random (Intelligence)
What it is not is a LLM (aka chatbot). It isn’t even any type of neural network. Does not make it any less AI though
That’s not what AI is, that’s just programming. AI implies the software was trained on a dataset in order to make pseudo-decisions on its own about the best way to do things.
That’s machine learning, AI just means artificial intelligence.
Machine learning is artificial intelligence…
Its a subset of artificial intelligence, not the only type.
Right, but basic automation is not artificial intelligence.
And artificial intelligence is still not basic programming.
No, it’s a computer making a computation. The programmer is the one using intelligence by choosing the appropriate computation for the situation at hand.
conditional and logical expressions have been the foundation of computing since the very beginning. you are using a definition of “AI” that is completely divorced from that history.