|
If you're launching some fragile and finicky AI thing before a crowd like you're Steve Jobs, but you're not Steve Jobs, then, sure, pre-record it. But when the standards are lower, people appreciate the live demo. Videos are much less compelling, and they could've watched that at home in a few minutes, rather than fly out to you. In grad school -- in a lab where, instead of "publish or perish", our mantra was "demo or die" -- we were giving demos most weekdays, usually to only a few people at a time. Always live. I think once I had to play a video of someone else's stuff, and it fell flat. My best demo story is when I was showing a new thing (just a class project), to a few people crowded around a computer in my lab area at an open house event, typing into my software agent in a chat window (pre-LLMs), ad-libbing and speaking aloud what I was typing, "I'm interested in... thinks Microsoft and... thinks Oracle..." Then I turned my head around to look at the people behind me, to see that they were following, and I swear to gosh, Larry Ellison himself was standing in the doorway of my lab area, giving me this fiercely aggressive stare. Whether he was glaring because I said Oracle or Microsoft, I do not know. My worst demo story was at the very start of my demo career. I had just arrived on campus, and I was borrowing a computer in an open area. A research scientist comes up, and sees on my screen this Web-scraping personalized newspaper thing I had made. So I'm showing it to them, and they're interested, then all of a sudden they say, sadly, "Mother Theresa died..." Which was what my "demo" was showing. So maybe don't include an uncontrolled live data feed of depressing or distracting news in your demo. Also, implementing early software agents in Java apparently summons Larry Ellison. |