3/24/2026 at 5:56:59 PM
This is a really cool implementation—embeddings still often feel like magic to me. That said, this exact use case is sort of also my biggest point of concern with where AI takes us, much more so than most of the common AI risks you hear lots of chatter about. We live in a world absolutely loaded with cameras now but ultimately retain some semblance of semi-anonymity/privacy in public by virtue of the fact that nobody can actually watch or review all of the video from those cameras except when there is a compelling reason to do so, but these technologies are making that a much more realistic proposition.The presence of cameras everywhere is considerably more concerning than the status quo, to me at least, when there is an AI watching and indexing every second of every feed—where camera owners or manufacturers or governments could set simple natural language parameters for highly specific people or activities notify about. There are obviously compelling and easy-to-sell cases here that will surely drive adoption as it becomes cost effective: get an alert to crime in progress, get an alert when a neighbor who doesn't clean up after his dog, get an alert when someone has fallen...but the potential implications of living in a panopticon like this if not well regulated are pretty ugly.
by macNchz
3/24/2026 at 7:07:52 PM
It's being built as we speak. I attended at a city council meeting yesterday, discussing approving a contract for ALPR cameras. I learned about a product from the camera vendor called Fusus[0], a dashboard that integrates various camera systems, ALPRs, alerts, etc. Two things stood out to me: natural-language querying of video feeds, and future planned integration with civilian-deployed cameras. The city only had budget for 50 ALPRs, and they stressed how they're only deploying them on main streets, but it seems like only a matter of time before your neighbor is able to install a camera that feeds right into the local PD's AI-enabled systems. One council member raised concerns about integrations with the citizen app[1] specifically (and a few others I didn't catch the names of). I'm very worried about where all this is heading.[0]: https://www.axon.com/products/axon-fusus [1]: https://citizen.com/
by citruscomputing
3/24/2026 at 6:33:59 PM
Totally valid concern. Right now the cost ($2.50/hr) and latency make continuous real-time indexing impractical, but that won't always be the case. This is one of the reasons I'd want to see open-weight local models for this, keeps the indexing on your own hardware with no footage leaving your machine. But you're right that the broader trajectory here is worth thinking carefully about.by sohamrj
3/24/2026 at 10:28:41 PM
How are you getting to $2.50/hr ? The price sheet says its 0.00079 per frame.https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-embeddi...
by jimmySixDOF
3/24/2026 at 11:46:43 PM
From what I see the code downsamples video to 5 fps, so 1 hour of video is 3600 seconds * 5 fps = 18,000 frames. 18,000 frames * $0.00079/frame = $14.22. A couple dollars more with the overlap.(The code also tries to skip "still" frames, but if your video is dynamic you're looking at the cost above.)
by jjwiseman
3/25/2026 at 1:35:00 AM
you're right that the code uses ffmpeg to downsample the chunks to 5fps before sending them, but that's only a local/bandwidth optimization, not what the api actually processes.regardless of the file's frame rate, the gemini api natively extracts and tokenizes exactly 1 fps. the 5 fps downscaling just keeps the payload sizes small so the api requests are fast and don't timeout.
i'll update the readme to make this more clear. thanks for bringing this up.
by sohamrj
3/25/2026 at 4:35:34 AM
Thanks for the details and correction.by jjwiseman
3/24/2026 at 7:06:42 PM
It's 2.50 an hour because Google has margins. A nation state could do it at cost, and even if it's not a huge difference, the price of a year's worth of embeddings is just $21,900. That's a rounding error, especially considering it's a one time cost for footage.by mpalmer
3/24/2026 at 7:12:01 PM
Right? $2.50 an hour is trivial to a Government that can vote to invent a trillion dollars. Even just 1 million dollars is the cost of monitoring 45 real time feeds for a year. I'm sure just many very rich people would pay that for the safety of their compound.by wholinator2
3/24/2026 at 11:57:45 PM
Once the hardware to run inference for something like the vision understanding module of this can be run on a low / medium power asic drones are going to be absolutely horrifying weapons.by FuckButtons
3/25/2026 at 9:28:29 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmUby mbokinala
3/24/2026 at 7:19:30 PM
Yeah, the panopticon is now technically very feasible it's just expensive to implement (for now).by cake_robot
3/24/2026 at 11:48:42 PM
Its very cheap to target an individual though so they dont need to look everywhereby whattheheckheck
3/24/2026 at 7:27:45 PM
Most cameras are also not queryable by any one person or organization. They are owned by different companies and if the government wants access they have to subpoena them after the fact.The problems start cropping up when you get things like Flock where governments start deploying cameras on a massive scale, or Ring where a single company has unrestricted access to everyone's private cameras.
by Ajedi32
3/24/2026 at 7:56:22 PM
I think Flock is just a symptom of the underlying tech becoming so cheap that "just blanket the city in cameras" starts to sound like a viable solution when police rely so heavily on camera footage.I don't think it's a good thing but it seems the limiting factor has been technological feasibility instead of any kind of principle against it.
by Spivak
3/25/2026 at 12:42:59 AM
> this exact use case is sort of also my biggest point of concern with where AI takes us, much more so than most of the common AI risks you hear lots of chatter about.I've been hearing warnings that AI would be used for this since well before it seemed feasible.
by zahlman
3/25/2026 at 2:24:24 AM
Not claiming to have hit on something unique here, but I think it’s realistic and often drowned out in favor of sci-fi nonsense.by macNchz
3/24/2026 at 7:44:39 PM
For specific people they probably wouldn’t use general embeddings. These embeddings can let you search for “tall man in a trenchcoat” but if you want a specific person you would use facial recognition.by janalsncm
3/24/2026 at 8:01:38 PM
I think a general description is better for surveillance/tracking like this, no? If they're at a weird angle or intentionally concealing their face then facial recognition falls apart but being able to describe them naturally would result in better tracking IMO.by hypeatei
3/24/2026 at 10:22:01 PM
Presumably the ideal is some kind of a fusion. Upload or tag some images/videos and link someone's social profiles and the system can look out for them based on facial recognition, gait recognition, vehicle/pets/common wardrobe items in combination.by macNchz
3/24/2026 at 8:42:57 PM
All the major cloud providers offer some form of face detection and numberplate reading, with many supporting object detection (ie package, vehicle, person) out of the camera itself.by greggsy
3/24/2026 at 10:26:09 PM
It's definitely creeping into things, though most of the features I've seen are fairly simplistic compared to what would be possible if the video was being reviewed + indexed by current SoTA multimodal LLMs.by macNchz