27 ms·

AI for developers and Google Workspace

305 points by alphabetting 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aver4geredditor 4y ago
Also see https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/announcing-palm-api-and-makersuite.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/announcing-palm-ap... > Earlier today, we announced the PaLM API, a new developer offering that makes it easy and safe to experiment with Google’s large language models. Alongside the API, we’re releasing MakerSuite, a tool that lets developers start prototyping quickly and easily. We’ll be making these tools available to select developers through a Private Preview, and stay tuned for our waitlist soon.
jon-wood 4y ago
> So if you’re a manager onboarding a new employee, Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome email. If you really can't be bothered to write the welcome email maybe just don't, rather than throwing some ML generated drivel as the first impression a new hire gets of your management. The direction this is going in is so focused on automating away the hassle of email, with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  Are you a new employee? Not sure how to reply to your welcome email your Manager sent? Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome reply email.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Well, since you never have to go into the office, you and the HR person can just hang out on your couches and let the AI assistants talk to each other. It's like the Jetsons, except hopeless and stoned.
  - egman_ekki 4y ago
    For just $3.99 per month, we can reply also to all the subsequent emails from your manager within 30 minutes! Just give us access to your private inbox and the emails will include your own personal style.
  - neap24 4y ago
    Are you a manager whose new hire just sent a reply to your AI generated welcome email? Don’t have time to read it? Workspace auto-hides the text and just shows you a simple three-word summary.
    - avereveard 4y ago
      premium version will show the manager just the prompt without the blurb.
    - siva7 4y ago
      You're joking but we all know here too well that exactly this will happen.
- 101008 4y ago
  This. One million times this.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    Upvote instead of posting noise like this.
    - ihateyouall123 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - pelasaco 4y ago
      but you don't earn karma from upvoting. People coming from reddit, do it all the time :)
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Imagine someone made a slight mistake and receive: “Welcome to Google [Employee name] it’s nice to meet you
  - derivagral 4y ago
    I've gotten templated recruiting emails with this bug. I wonder if an AI would spit this out, or something weirder as the name.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    You don't need to imagine. It's enough to have a LinkedIn to receive unprocessed templates like this where I would guess their scraper failed or something. On the contrary I don't think an AI would make the same mistake as easily.
  - laurentlb 4y ago
    It sounds like gmail should have a filter to detect this kind of problem (just like they have the detection for missing attachments). Use AI to solve problems caused by AI.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Except they likely think it isn’t generated, like a lot of plagiarism
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  Not exactly. These are your feelings because you know of A.I. and would rather not receive a canned message BUT not all people are the same. There are many who would appreciate that email and welcome it. Ignorance is not bliss.
- elicash 4y ago
  Can we not pretend people weren't already googling sample emails for this? It's just more efficient now to grab the same starter email that you then customize. Admittedly, google shouldn't be pretending otherwise, either. But what they also did was make it so you can get the starter email without having to see their ads. Edited to add: I think a better argument on this could he made about the "draft a thank you note to the team" example they give in the video. That's more the type of thing that should be personal and probably not from a starter template, googled or AI-generated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE But even here, the reality is people were googling for these starter emails already.
  - neap24 4y ago
    Some were googling, for sure. But the best ones were not.
    - melling 4y ago
      Down the rabbit hole with that… So, the best ones will still write their own and the others will save time. And by definition, most people aren’t the best. So, we all agree the automation is welcome?
      - dymk 4y ago
        The best ones know when to put in effort to show they care for another human being, and know when to automate a task where that doesn't matter. Welcoming somebody to a new job is the former.
    - elicash 4y ago
      Does it matter to you the extent to which an original template is then transformed?
    - la64710 4y ago
      And you don’t need only the best to run a business.
    - 4y ago
- Buttons840 4y ago
  The middle manager thinks, "the time and effort I spend on my job can be automated, yay!", never considering the second order effects.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    The middle manager thinks, "the time and effort I spend on my job can be automated, yay!", never considering the second order effects. This is why when a cashier at the supermarket tells me that instead of waiting in line I can use the self check-out lanes, I tell her "I don't want to help a robot take away your job." Usually they don't understand. But sometimes you can see them start to think about what's happening.
    - phphphphp 4y ago
      The cashier would rather you leave them in peace than hit them with the same tiresome self-congratulatory remark they hear day in day out. Please use the self checkouts instead.
      - paganel 4y ago
        Please don't use the checkout, why should corporations worth billions and tens of billions (I guess that's what Walmart is worth) get to outsource some of their work onto their clients?
        skidd0 4y ago
        As a client, using the self-checkout is (usually) a choice I get to make. I choose to use the self-checkout because it is often faster than waiting in a line. I am thankful for the opportunity to put in my own effort in exchange for faster completion and reduced prices.
        noduerme 4y ago
        it's only faster because they fired half the employees and the other lanes are backed up.
- neilv 4y ago
  That example is so bad, I'm not entirely sure some writer having a bad day didn't put it in as a cynical joke. Or are they working in an environment so steeped in insincerity that they don't even know what being genuine is, or that one of the most important things for a manager to do with things like a "welcome" is to be setting the tone. Nothing says welcome, and bring your genuine self, and trust colleagues, and feel intellectual safety, and invest in being a part of the team that's investing in you... than a new hire's manager can't even be bothered to say welcome themselves, and offloads it to a chatbot button instead. OTOH, this fits the sociopathic culture you'd expect, when you look at their hazing rituals, compensation levels, and promotion criteria. It just doesn't fit the culture some of us techies envisioned when that company was started.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  We are going to hear a lot more of this kind of behavior from super talented and experienced people. But for the less experienced, AI is a starting point. And depending on the kind of person you are, the kind of upbringing you have, and the kind of education you got, you will be motivated to edit and improve what the AI gives you. The other thing I think this will help improve upon are those idiots and scumbags who give commands that are not very well thought out and then yell at talented people for not following instruction because they filled in the blanks with their own ideas. Giving it to an AI will show ridiculous their commands were. (sorry, end rant)
- indymike 4y ago
  What was the sci-fi book with "silvers" that were basically AIs that would handle administrata, set appointments and negotiate with each other for their humans?
- xezpeleta 4y ago
  Google FacePaLM :D
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other One can just hope that the ML entities won't start insulting each other. :)
  - RobotToaster 4y ago
    They'll just start getting progressively more passive aggressive. "Per my last e-mail"
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      Until they escalate to ML Manager.
- balls187 4y ago
  I ask all new hires to ghost write a short intro. They would essentially tell me some facts that I would then re-write for them, so why not just use their own words. If they want to use generative AI, that’s on them.
- PaulWaldman 4y ago
  Is this really that different than traditionally delegating tasks to other humans?
- v3ss0n 4y ago
  Well I wrote onboarding message, guidelines and policies all in ChatGpt
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Maybe the manager AI and Employee AI can generate each other responses and the actual humans can have a 1:1 free of the formalities? Humans are amazing in breaking the system for convenience and profit.
- Veen 4y ago
  In an ideal world, it would be lovely if managers wrote copperplate welcome notes on the finest perfumed paper, but they don't. They copy and paste a template or use a tool like Text Expander. This just makes the process slightly more convenient.
- politician 4y ago
  > with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other. The end-state is an ML model running on a client device in isolation. Why bother using SMTP?
- SergeAx 4y ago
  Onboarding email should be just a template. Or, even better, a small template with a link to bigger template. As a manager, you should demonstrate your empathy in a welcome 1:1 meeting.
- amelius 4y ago
  It's not a problem as long as the sender reads the email and agrees with it before it is sent.
- adverbly 4y ago
  Seriously! If the content of your email could have been generated using an AI trained on publicly available information, it necessarily must not include anything private. Which means you are spam messaging your new hires with messages that contain zero actual information! Noise is a word that does not even properly capture the uselessness of such communications. I swear, many humans seem to just want filler text to put places, and they just keep shoving it there. Anyone read blindsight by Peter Watts? Spoiler alert: an entire science fiction book written around the fact that sending useless information to hyperintelligent beings could be interpreted as an intentional distraction and therefore a threat.
  - Maxion 4y ago
    I recommend trying out GPT3 and now the new released GPT4. Using them to collaboratly write correspondence is eye opening. You use ai as a tool, you prompt it, change its results and feed it back. A little work gives you impressive results way faster than if you wrote the whole thing yourself
    - misnome 4y ago
      But... you didn't write it yourself. And it's not anything you would write yourself. This is fine if you never want to ever write something yourself, ever again. I'd much rather retain that skill.
      - Maxion 4y ago
        Consider the relationship between a writer and an editor in a newspaper setting. The writer creates the content, while the editor reviews and refines it to ensure it aligns with the publication's standards and style. The editor's input can help improve the overall quality of the piece without taking away the writer's original ideas and skills. In a similar manner, using AI tools like GPT-3 or GPT-4 can be likened to having an AI editor that assists you in the writing process. By working together with the AI, you can maintain your writing skills while also benefiting from the AI's ability to generate content quickly and suggest new ideas. Just as a writer doesn't lose their skill by working with a human editor, collaborating with an AI editor can enhance your writing without diminishing your abilities. The key is to find the right balance between using AI for assistance and retaining your personal writing skills, just as a writer and editor strike a balance in their collaboration at a newspaper. This comment was written in collaboration with ChatGPT.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  True. I thought the same for the other example, writing a job description. I thought "WTF" now job postings are going to be even more useless.
- jsharf 4y ago
  At the end of the day, you're still responsible for reading the email before you send it. I don't think it matters how the email was written. I think the final content matters more. There's many ways to prompt an AI, both carelessly and with extreme attention to detail. For example, I typed this message. But I'm sure with careful massaging, I could get an AI to write the same thing, word-for-word. The laziness you're referring to probably happens even if the manager is typing the email out themselves.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- keraf 4y ago
  It will probably save you time too with layoff emails trained using Google's internal data.
- throwaw12 4y ago
  > If you really can't be bothered to write the welcome email maybe just don't not everyone has good english and corporate writing skills.
- cmarschner 4y ago
  This is hilarious. The point of a task like a welcome email is that they _take effort_. I can’t help but think that an example like this shows how far Google has become like Microsoft in the 2000s. A bunch of rich, middle aged managers that have spent too long in the alphabet soup.
carlycue 4y ago
Can't wait for Google to add ChatGPT-like features to Chrome and their suite of Web Apps so I can finally ditch Microsoft Edge with it's ChatGPT integration. The UI of Edge is god awful. It has the same issue as Explorer in Windows where Microsoft thinks showing you all UI buttons and other UI elements at once is a great idea. Microsoft can't make compelling consumer facing products to save their life.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  What features are you looking/hoping for in a ChatGPT-like integration with Google web apps?
- 1xdevloper 4y ago
  I actually liked Edge and was happy to move away from Chrome. Then they started injecting their content into web pages. And then some shopping feature. I hate seeing the "You can now add extensions from the Chrome..." banner when I'm logged in the Chrome web store. It won't go away even after I closed it multiple times. I started using Brave.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    Remember that firefox exists.
- newaccount2023 4y ago
  such a weird take...ChatGPT is thus far just an incredible demo you've actually switched browsers to have access to it? why???
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    It sounds like it's Bing Chat, not ChatGPT. They are fairly different – ChatGPT being fairly mature but heavyweight, and Bing Chat being truly unhinged. But yeah, Bing Chat is only available in Edge.
    - 4y ago
h34t 4y ago
"stay tuned for our waitlist soon"
- IanCal 4y ago
  There should be a waitlist to get access to the waitlist.
skilled 4y ago
[flagged]
- valine 4y ago
  Maybe evil is mothballing technology that could benefit society because of potential impacts to your ad business.
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
It’s notable that at multiple points they sell this service as safe - “easy and safe” - “all supported by robust safety tools” when the only things users really care about are quality, latency, and cost. Not sure where their head is at but unless they are oriented around these three things they’re never going to catch up.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > Not sure where their head is at but unless they are oriented around these three things they’re never going to catch up. But ChatGPT is doing exactly the same. There's more energy spent trying to manipulate the output to be politically correct than actual energy spent making the AI more powerful.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    I doubt that's true, they just talk about it more because everything else is kind of a trade secret.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    I get what you're saying here and agree, but there is no world in which openai exists as a continuing concern without making their product overly PC. Remember that their model was trained on a broad swath of the Internet, warts and all. They can either spend the effort making it aligned with the current thing up front, or they can rush to do it after the model outputs something spicy and they have to deal with the resulting PR shitstorm, outrage baiting hit pieces, and otherwise distractions.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    That seems reasonable - if you're trying to create a market for a publicly-available chat-AI, and making a demo freely available for PR/advertising purposes, then the public perception of that demo is critical to your business. If they had just put up the same model without that attempt to make GPT wear a politically-correct mask, they'd just get another Microsoft Tay event, and only get a buttload of negative publicity for their investment. For an internal application used for specific practical tasks, sure, focus on making it more powerful; but if you want a demo for general public as a 'pre-sales advertisement'? You bet that political correctness has to be there.
bluelightning2k 4y ago
Oh what's that? Microsoft has a future of work event in a couple of days? Better pre-empt it. "Available for select developers. Stay tuned for the waitlist soon" When the order to pre-empt comes too quick to get your waitlist landing page approved.
- nabakin 4y ago
  Just like the BARD announcement in response to MSFT Sydney. They're trying to keep their stock prices from dipping
  - alphabetting 4y ago
    I don't think that timeline is correct. MSFT did a surprise announcement of Bing chat the day before Google's planned announcement of Bard. https://twitter.com/xlr8harder/status/1622849293571817472 https://twitter.com/xlr8harder/status/1622849293571817472
    - ukuina 4y ago
      But Google's planned announcement was, err, announced, after the Bing Chat screenshots leaked the week before.
nmca 4y ago
Does anyone have a `curl` that hits the palm API or does it not really exist yet?
- sanxiyn 4y ago
  I am pretty sure it exists, but not for you. "Select developers can access the PaLM API ... in Private Preview today, and stay tuned for our waitlist soon".
topicseed 4y ago
This video published just now is incredible — https://youtu.be/6DaJVZBXETE https://youtu.be/6DaJVZBXETE Not sure though if it's mostly stuff that's being beta tested as we speak, or stuff that's not even built at all as of yet.
- noduerme 4y ago
  We're so fucked. Everyone will be AI spambots. You'll never know if you're talking to a human again.
  - topicseed 4y ago
    Indeed, even with content... Somebody with ChatGPT and Grammarly can produce a humongous amount of content these days, and it will read really well to the average Joe.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      Ah, but the joke's on them, cause the average Joe doesn't read anymore.
  - nyolfen 4y ago
    just demand that they use a slur, this is the true voight-kampff
  - misnome 4y ago
    I'd like to be not so sure. I could see a mass-response of revulsion, and a cultural move towards concise, direct, non-bullshit communication. I don't want to think too hard about the alternative, of large groups of people not even bothering to ever try to learn to write. Probably become better megacorp output consumers.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  The video is very focused on first order effects. A middle manager automates all their work by writing a few sentences; they produce a "brief" by giving a one sentence input to the AI, doubtless imagining that other humans will carefully read their brief, quietly nodding to themselves and considering every sentence, with passing thoughts about how competent the middle manager is. In truth, the middle manager will soon be replaced by an AI, and the lovely looking briefs produced by the AI will only be consumed by other AIs. Another part shows the AI creating personalized marketing messages. For a brief time they will work, and then every company will be producing them by the millions, and then customers will stop reading emails at all -- again, the AIs will be writing messages consumed by other AIs.
indymike 4y ago
It's interesting that the example for using an AI to write documents is a job description. It is uniquely suited to the AI because in real life, we've been copy-pasta-ing them for decades. It's also a place where there is some level of legal peril - a job description with material inaccuracies or discriminatory language creates lawsuits.
m3kw9 4y ago
How long IBM to rebrand their Watson 2.0 to be using ChatGPT 4.5.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  I think it’s unlikely : https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:6z6re3.2.3 https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:6z...
diimdeep 4y ago
First reaction: mouthful spam generator built right into gmail[0], way to go google. [0] https://youtu.be/6DaJVZBXETE?t=33 https://youtu.be/6DaJVZBXETE?t=33
- valine 4y ago
  Reminds me of the google april fools prank in 2009 where they announced gmail would be able to read and respond to emails for you. http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/gmail_autopilot http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/gmail_autopilot
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Simon321 4y ago
Wow! Looks like they're determined to catch up! They're going to open up PaLM & an image generation model (imagen?) through Google Cloud. It looks incredibly easy to finetune PaLM in their environment: Video (Build, tune, and deploy foundation models with Vertex AI): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg2yHIKQ7oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg2yHIKQ7oM
- bluelightning2k 4y ago
  I don't know that catch-up is entirely fair. My understanding is that Google has always been ahead (at least until recently) - but the difference is that one of their competitors ships. OpenAI has a bias to action. DeepMind has a bias to grand-challenge stunts. Google has a bias to perpetual validation.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    I think 'catch-up' is a fair description if Google Brain/Deepmind have until now shipped nothing and their competitors have shipped something.
    - Workaccount2 4y ago
      When you have nothing at stake, like openAI or bing, its easy to just throw things at the wall and see what sticks. There is nothing else on the wall you could potentially knock off.
      - sebzim4500 4y ago
        I don't see why Google is in a materially different situation with AI than Microsoft is. It's not like anyone is suggesting that Google should have shut down their search in order to launch something like this, if it fails then it joins the long line of dead products.
gavi 4y ago
When they say Augment your dataset with synthetic data on https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/announcing-palm-api-and-makersuite.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/announcing-palm-ap... do they mean something like this https://github.com/yizhongw/self-instruct https://github.com/yizhongw/self-instruct ?
- shtack 4y ago
  Possibly this: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230314005528/en/Gretel-Partners-With-Google-Cloud-to-Harness-the-Power-of-Synthetic-Data-and-Accelerate-Adoption-of-Safer-Generative-AI-in-the-Enterprise https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230314005528/en/Gre...
rvz 4y ago
This is an extinction event for the low hanging fruit ideas for the so-called AI startups. Again, this maybe bad timing since GPT-4 will (probably) gate crash Google's announcements this week, hence why Google has done this today. But for now, AI copyrighters are going to be destroyed, quickly by the same tech giants: Microsoft (OpenAI), Google, and possibly Meta.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  Speaking of copyright, remember that content produced by an algorithm cannot be copyrighted. We've already seen this play out with stable diffusion. Also, the government copyright office is surely unprepared for the coming tsunami.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    > produced by an algorithm This is a very grey area. A prompt, for example, could be copyright. An image you create by drawing a base layer and having the AI fill the details in could be copyright as well. The government copyright office doesn't really decide these things. Courts do.
solarmist 4y ago
I'll never even try it because I'm constantly waiting for the service cancellation announcement.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  You can ask it how long it has.
ipsum2 4y ago
It is either intentional or awfully coincidental that that Google would announce this two days before Microsoft's AI event: https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/ https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/, which will probably discuss similar product features in Office 365.
- zamnos 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/xlr8harder/status/1622849293571817472 https://twitter.com/xlr8harder/status/1622849293571817472 It's intentional.
bioemerl 4y ago
Thank you open AI for breaking the dam on an arms race we could have benefited immensely from five years ago.
mabbo 4y ago
If I'm following this all here... We're going to have AI help us generate long pieces of text from very small blurbs of information. Then the reader is going to have AI read the long pieces of text, and condense it down into just small blurbs of information. Will my self-driving car also take unneeded detours through pretty places, making it take longer to get where I'm going?
- Jack000 4y ago
  Malls are already designed in a labyrinthine way so you pass by as many stores as possible. Self driving cars might have set destinations that are cheaper to visit, or have free rides that are ad-supported, or recommend stops along your route.
  - tedajax 4y ago
    Ah good, more terrible things to look forward to.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    All the while creating more CO2
    - nicksrose7224 4y ago
      most (all?) self driving companies are electric. Cruise, Waymo, Tesla
      - californical 4y ago
        And how is that electricity generated in most of the US/world?
        lobocinza 4y ago
        And how those cars were built? Electric cars generate more tons of CO2 to make than conventional combustion ones. But it's expected to pay off as long as the electricity is generated cleanly.
inductive_magic 4y ago
The mail-part is ridiculous, reminiscent of the latest episode of south park, which illustrates the impact of teenagers using ChatGPT to respond to their girlfriends messages. Nature goes the path of least resistance, and nowhere is this more obvious than in human interactions. If your signal consists of three words, write three words instead of generating blobs of decorative noise masquerading as content, that serves no purpose but to be decoded by the same ai, but client-side.
ReptileMan 4y ago
> and at Google, we’ve been responsibly developing large language models so we can safely bring them to our products So you are getting a gelding. I really miss the old SV - make it fun and powerful. Usually the most interesting things come out of unsanctioned uses of technology.
sarchertech 4y ago
So humans are going to enter bullet points, and the AI will generate prose. Then the human on the other end will use an AI to extract bullet points from the prose. I hope we realize how insanely stupid this is soon.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  But it's a new feature and big tech has ran out of ideas?
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  Sounds like it will fit right in with the stupid song and dance already done in corporate America.
- Maxion 4y ago
  This is literally what humans do in many corporations today without ai.
hdivider 4y ago
What I find regrettable is how GCP's startup program seems to be entirely geared towards VC-fuelled startups for the higher tiers. Compare with Microsoft for Startups, which isn't seen as hip and edgy but can get you like $5k+$25k in Azure credits (and some OpenAI credits) without having to go the VC route. Seems more entrepreneurial to me. Venture-backed is just not the right path for everyone.
- pirsquare 4y ago
  Just go with AWS or Azure. Google Clown Platform is okay until you need to have any form of support. I'm like you, bootstrapper. Went with GCP for 4 yrs until they shutdown my production servers last fri. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133917
  - hdivider 4y ago
    Thank you. Don't see why your comment got downvoted. Holding the Clown Platform accountable is surely in the interest of hackers. Crazy story. Thanks for sharing and yes, suffice to say, this informs our tech stack choices, hah.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Skip all of them and use Hetzner, you'll save a ton of money. The startup credits are designed to become handcuffs eventually.
  - kevmo314 4y ago
    Any recommendations on GPU hosting?
arijun 4y ago
They show an example of someone typing "I'm on it!" and then converting that into a page long email. They also show the ability to summarize, which of course you'd use on a page long email whose real content is nothing but "I'm on it." That verbose email is going to end up a weird machine interchange format (which only looks like formal writing for human consumption), just to send a message like "I'm on it."
IanCal 4y ago
> Starting today, we’re making an efficient model available in terms of size and capabilities, Excellent! goes through the terrible UI of google cloud console Nothing there. I see it's not actually today it's a sometime soon with some people in a private preview. Any info on what model size they're actually releasing? Time to try the demo they showed in google docs. > Now, we’re excited to take the next step and bring a limited set of trusted testers Oh. It's good that they're actually planning to ship stuff, but when? I've seen private previews sit around certainly for 6+ months, probably a lot longer.
- sf_rob 4y ago
  I'm looking forward to seeing some of this make its way to general release, but I'd guess that this post is in the vein of their hurried initial press response to Chat GPT.
- topicseed 4y ago
  Google needs to nail their launches better... We're all tired of Google Forms demos and access...
  - IanCal 4y ago
    It's quite something. I wish they'd just be more up front about it because then I'd probably be more excited. These changes are incredible, and it's a shame my general feeling is disappointment from trying and failing to use something. They do this all the time launching something in the US but not mentioning the limits leaving me struggling to get something to work. It doesn't help that their approach to ai is often "don't worry a magic thing will tell when you want it and will make it appear" and I don't know if I'm not making the right incantations or it's broken or it's not available. I wish these would all come with a "notify me when available" button at the very top.
virtuosarmo 4y ago
Notable this announcement drops two days ahead of Microsoft's announcement tied to enhancing M365 with gen-AI https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/ https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/
ukuina 4y ago
Golly, can you just _imagine_ GPT integration in Google Reader? Overview: "Summarize my tech feed" In an informative article: "Didn't I Star something similar last week?" In a news article: "What does website X think about this event?" The future is bright!
- cloudking 4y ago
  Build it!
- tantalor 4y ago
  @conesus add to NewsBlur!
tbruckner 4y ago
I swear, if Google says "select developers" or "trusted testers" one more time, they'll have lost all credibility in launching something so important to their business and it will totally be on them.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  The previous run of killing projects wasn't sufficient to warn you off?
paxys 4y ago
I really hope the big take away from such developments is that if an AI can rattle out fancy-sounding reports and slide decks in seconds then there was never any value in such content to begin with. It was and still is corporate busy work. Maybe instead of using a text model to convert 5 bullet points into a 3-page report, we should just share the bullet points? But hey they also sell you an AI that summarizes this report back into bullet points so you don't have to read it.
- JustBreath 4y ago
  It's summarizations all the way down.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  As someone who spends some amount of time at work doing stuff like converting 5 bullet points to a 3 page powerpoint presentation, I think everyone already knows it's corporate busy work. The point of it is not that anyone is going to read that 3 page report, it's to show that you've done work and produced some output ("demonstrating toil"). As long as they're insisting that it get done and are willing to pay for it to get done, I'm more than happy to ship that toil off to an AI. If it means I waste 2 minutes writing a good prompt rather than waste 30 minutes copying and pasting content, adding filler narrative, and picking the right font and color, that's more time back to do other things besides this performance art an employer expects of me.
  - EForEndeavour 4y ago
    Genuinely curious: what makes you think your employer will let you ship that toil off to an AI instead of just letting you go (or downsizing your team) and shipping off the toil themselves? The acceptance that you've been doing corporate busywork as your career seems at odds with your confidence that you'll be the one to outsource that busywork to an AI. Doesn't the rapidly increasing capability of automated systems to pull off this busywork imply that careers built on doing that busywork are increasingly at risk? Am I missing something?
    - 4y ago
debacle 4y ago
The question needs to be asked - is Google done competing?
betteryet 4y ago
Prompting an AI for 5 seconds to write a bunch of paragraphs that your human counterpart has to then read and think through is incredibly disrespectful of their time. AI assistants that summarize and enrich information for you, fine. That actually saves time. But this feeding of generative output to humans is way off the mark. It feels like the product people are not sitting down to think what they're doing and just riding the GPT hype wave.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  But the recipient doesn't have to read and think through it, they can just have the same AI summarise the email. Google could even store the original prompt and use it as context for the summariser.
seydor 4y ago
Such an uninspired use of the term. Google is so used to spreading SEO , now they want to choke every office with well-written noise. This is using AI to make me waste more time, i don't want that Instead i want - Intuitive interfaces to respond to the email with a few clicks and a short laconic email (I don't want to waste other people's time) - Specialized text generators for legal purposes, which create provably verifiable and consistent documents - Expert systems that doctors can use and trust [AI: Expand this to a 70-page diatribe]
DeathArrow 4y ago
I wonder why are we generating so much virtual junk, content that nobody is interesting in and while on that wasting time, effort, energy and money.
whoisjuan 4y ago
They just keep putting out press releases talking about private betas and tests with "selected trusted partners" but nothing the regular consumer can play with. If that's the pace at which they're planning to compete with Microsoft/OpenAI, they already lost.
we_never_see_it 4y ago
Too little, too late. I am all-in on Microsoft.
- bogwog 4y ago
  Don't let all the AI hype trick you into thinking you can trust Microsoft for anything.
dna_polymerase 4y ago
Yeah cool, I need to write Serial letters using my own fonts. Can't do that with Google Workspace. As an enterprise customer, that is. I have no idea who leads product at Google but they need to get their shit together. I don't need some ChatGPT BS to write my mails for me.
palebluedot 4y ago
All of this generative corporate text seems like lossy anti-compression.
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
It’s worth comparing these to how a human would respond to the same request. “I’d like to write a job description” would get “okay, what will they be doing?” or something. Instead we just get a best attempt at making shit up.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tlogan 4y ago
This seems like pre-emptive announcement without any beef behind it (there is no even waiting list). I’m not 100% sure if this is a smart move.
- dc-programmer 4y ago
  where’s the beef?
kin 4y ago
If this gets added to Google Docs and made free for public, English teachers are going to have a hard time knowing if their students wrote anything
- ec109685 4y ago
  Flip the classroom. Have them listen to lectures / read at home, write in the classroom.
ec109685 4y ago
How many recent startups are simply "build google docs but with AI [using other people's models]"? I can't see that being a long term path to success.
flohofwoe 4y ago
Ooof, exactly as predicted a few days ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-dusts-off-the-failed-google-playbook-to-fight-chatgpt/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-dusts-off-the... Now every Google team needs to shoehorn "AI" into its products, no matter if it makes sense or not.
bg24 4y ago
Unless I missed it, only example in the blog: “So if you’re a manager onboarding a new employee, Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome email.” Some great announcements, could have given more pertinent examples. You save your time elsewhere using AI tools, so you spend time with your valuable newcomer.
yunohn 4y ago
I cannot stand the prosaic, repetitive, boringly formal nature of GPT/etc output. I also am tired of the randomly messy-surreal, illogical images generated by DallE/etc output. HR/PR approved corporate communications are already crappy. From a practical viewpoint, I don’t want to wade through pages of bullshit boilerplate and illogical images. The future is bleak and boring…

305 points by alphabetting 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Also see https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/announcing-palm-api-and-makersuite.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/announcing-palm-ap... > Earlier today, we announced the PaLM API, a new developer offering that makes it easy and safe to experiment with Google’s large language models. Alongside the API, we’re releasing MakerSuite, a tool that lets developers start prototyping quickly and easily. We’ll be making these tools available to select developers through a Private Preview, and stay tuned for our waitlist soon.

jon-wood 4y ago

> So if you’re a manager onboarding a new employee, Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome email. If you really can't be bothered to write the welcome email maybe just don't, rather than throwing some ML generated drivel as the first impression a new hire gets of your management. The direction this is going in is so focused on automating away the hassle of email, with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other.

shapefrog 4y ago
Are you a new employee? Not sure how to reply to your welcome email your Manager sent? Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome reply email.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Well, since you never have to go into the office, you and the HR person can just hang out on your couches and let the AI assistants talk to each other. It's like the Jetsons, except hopeless and stoned.
- egman_ekki 4y ago
  For just $3.99 per month, we can reply also to all the subsequent emails from your manager within 30 minutes! Just give us access to your private inbox and the emails will include your own personal style.
- neap24 4y ago
  Are you a manager whose new hire just sent a reply to your AI generated welcome email? Don’t have time to read it? Workspace auto-hides the text and just shows you a simple three-word summary.
  - avereveard 4y ago
    premium version will show the manager just the prompt without the blurb.
  - siva7 4y ago
    You're joking but we all know here too well that exactly this will happen.
101008 4y ago
This. One million times this.
- Kiro 4y ago
  Upvote instead of posting noise like this.
  - ihateyouall123 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    but you don't earn karma from upvoting. People coming from reddit, do it all the time :)
m3kw9 4y ago
Imagine someone made a slight mistake and receive: “Welcome to Google [Employee name] it’s nice to meet you
- derivagral 4y ago
  I've gotten templated recruiting emails with this bug. I wonder if an AI would spit this out, or something weirder as the name.
- Kiro 4y ago
  You don't need to imagine. It's enough to have a LinkedIn to receive unprocessed templates like this where I would guess their scraper failed or something. On the contrary I don't think an AI would make the same mistake as easily.
- laurentlb 4y ago
  It sounds like gmail should have a filter to detect this kind of problem (just like they have the detection for missing attachments). Use AI to solve problems caused by AI.
m3kw9 4y ago
Except they likely think it isn’t generated, like a lot of plagiarism
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
Not exactly. These are your feelings because you know of A.I. and would rather not receive a canned message BUT not all people are the same. There are many who would appreciate that email and welcome it. Ignorance is not bliss.
elicash 4y ago
Can we not pretend people weren't already googling sample emails for this? It's just more efficient now to grab the same starter email that you then customize. Admittedly, google shouldn't be pretending otherwise, either. But what they also did was make it so you can get the starter email without having to see their ads. Edited to add: I think a better argument on this could he made about the "draft a thank you note to the team" example they give in the video. That's more the type of thing that should be personal and probably not from a starter template, googled or AI-generated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE But even here, the reality is people were googling for these starter emails already.
- neap24 4y ago
  Some were googling, for sure. But the best ones were not.
  - melling 4y ago
    Down the rabbit hole with that… So, the best ones will still write their own and the others will save time. And by definition, most people aren’t the best. So, we all agree the automation is welcome?
    - dymk 4y ago
      The best ones know when to put in effort to show they care for another human being, and know when to automate a task where that doesn't matter. Welcoming somebody to a new job is the former.
  - elicash 4y ago
    Does it matter to you the extent to which an original template is then transformed?
  - la64710 4y ago
    And you don’t need only the best to run a business.
  - 4y ago
Buttons840 4y ago
The middle manager thinks, "the time and effort I spend on my job can be automated, yay!", never considering the second order effects.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  The middle manager thinks, "the time and effort I spend on my job can be automated, yay!", never considering the second order effects. This is why when a cashier at the supermarket tells me that instead of waiting in line I can use the self check-out lanes, I tell her "I don't want to help a robot take away your job." Usually they don't understand. But sometimes you can see them start to think about what's happening.
  - phphphphp 4y ago
    The cashier would rather you leave them in peace than hit them with the same tiresome self-congratulatory remark they hear day in day out. Please use the self checkouts instead.
    - paganel 4y ago
      Please don't use the checkout, why should corporations worth billions and tens of billions (I guess that's what Walmart is worth) get to outsource some of their work onto their clients?
      - skidd0 4y ago
        As a client, using the self-checkout is (usually) a choice I get to make. I choose to use the self-checkout because it is often faster than waiting in a line. I am thankful for the opportunity to put in my own effort in exchange for faster completion and reduced prices.
        noduerme 4y ago
        it's only faster because they fired half the employees and the other lanes are backed up.
neilv 4y ago
That example is so bad, I'm not entirely sure some writer having a bad day didn't put it in as a cynical joke. Or are they working in an environment so steeped in insincerity that they don't even know what being genuine is, or that one of the most important things for a manager to do with things like a "welcome" is to be setting the tone. Nothing says welcome, and bring your genuine self, and trust colleagues, and feel intellectual safety, and invest in being a part of the team that's investing in you... than a new hire's manager can't even be bothered to say welcome themselves, and offloads it to a chatbot button instead. OTOH, this fits the sociopathic culture you'd expect, when you look at their hazing rituals, compensation levels, and promotion criteria. It just doesn't fit the culture some of us techies envisioned when that company was started.
nashashmi 4y ago
We are going to hear a lot more of this kind of behavior from super talented and experienced people. But for the less experienced, AI is a starting point. And depending on the kind of person you are, the kind of upbringing you have, and the kind of education you got, you will be motivated to edit and improve what the AI gives you. The other thing I think this will help improve upon are those idiots and scumbags who give commands that are not very well thought out and then yell at talented people for not following instruction because they filled in the blanks with their own ideas. Giving it to an AI will show ridiculous their commands were. (sorry, end rant)
indymike 4y ago
What was the sci-fi book with "silvers" that were basically AIs that would handle administrata, set appointments and negotiate with each other for their humans?
xezpeleta 4y ago
Google FacePaLM :D
DeathArrow 4y ago
>with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other One can just hope that the ML entities won't start insulting each other. :)
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  They'll just start getting progressively more passive aggressive. "Per my last e-mail"
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    Until they escalate to ML Manager.
balls187 4y ago
I ask all new hires to ghost write a short intro. They would essentially tell me some facts that I would then re-write for them, so why not just use their own words. If they want to use generative AI, that’s on them.
PaulWaldman 4y ago
Is this really that different than traditionally delegating tasks to other humans?
v3ss0n 4y ago
Well I wrote onboarding message, guidelines and policies all in ChatGpt
mrtksn 4y ago
Maybe the manager AI and Employee AI can generate each other responses and the actual humans can have a 1:1 free of the formalities? Humans are amazing in breaking the system for convenience and profit.
Veen 4y ago
In an ideal world, it would be lovely if managers wrote copperplate welcome notes on the finest perfumed paper, but they don't. They copy and paste a template or use a tool like Text Expander. This just makes the process slightly more convenient.
politician 4y ago
> with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other. The end-state is an ML model running on a client device in isolation. Why bother using SMTP?
SergeAx 4y ago
Onboarding email should be just a template. Or, even better, a small template with a link to bigger template. As a manager, you should demonstrate your empathy in a welcome 1:1 meeting.
amelius 4y ago
It's not a problem as long as the sender reads the email and agrees with it before it is sent.
adverbly 4y ago
Seriously! If the content of your email could have been generated using an AI trained on publicly available information, it necessarily must not include anything private. Which means you are spam messaging your new hires with messages that contain zero actual information! Noise is a word that does not even properly capture the uselessness of such communications. I swear, many humans seem to just want filler text to put places, and they just keep shoving it there. Anyone read blindsight by Peter Watts? Spoiler alert: an entire science fiction book written around the fact that sending useless information to hyperintelligent beings could be interpreted as an intentional distraction and therefore a threat.
- Maxion 4y ago
  I recommend trying out GPT3 and now the new released GPT4. Using them to collaboratly write correspondence is eye opening. You use ai as a tool, you prompt it, change its results and feed it back. A little work gives you impressive results way faster than if you wrote the whole thing yourself
  - misnome 4y ago
    But... you didn't write it yourself. And it's not anything you would write yourself. This is fine if you never want to ever write something yourself, ever again. I'd much rather retain that skill.
    - Maxion 4y ago
      Consider the relationship between a writer and an editor in a newspaper setting. The writer creates the content, while the editor reviews and refines it to ensure it aligns with the publication's standards and style. The editor's input can help improve the overall quality of the piece without taking away the writer's original ideas and skills. In a similar manner, using AI tools like GPT-3 or GPT-4 can be likened to having an AI editor that assists you in the writing process. By working together with the AI, you can maintain your writing skills while also benefiting from the AI's ability to generate content quickly and suggest new ideas. Just as a writer doesn't lose their skill by working with a human editor, collaborating with an AI editor can enhance your writing without diminishing your abilities. The key is to find the right balance between using AI for assistance and retaining your personal writing skills, just as a writer and editor strike a balance in their collaboration at a newspaper. This comment was written in collaboration with ChatGPT.
barbazoo 4y ago
True. I thought the same for the other example, writing a job description. I thought "WTF" now job postings are going to be even more useless.
jsharf 4y ago
At the end of the day, you're still responsible for reading the email before you send it. I don't think it matters how the email was written. I think the final content matters more. There's many ways to prompt an AI, both carelessly and with extreme attention to detail. For example, I typed this message. But I'm sure with careful massaging, I could get an AI to write the same thing, word-for-word. The laziness you're referring to probably happens even if the manager is typing the email out themselves.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
keraf 4y ago
It will probably save you time too with layoff emails trained using Google's internal data.
throwaw12 4y ago
> If you really can't be bothered to write the welcome email maybe just don't not everyone has good english and corporate writing skills.
cmarschner 4y ago
This is hilarious. The point of a task like a welcome email is that they _take effort_. I can’t help but think that an example like this shows how far Google has become like Microsoft in the 2000s. A bunch of rich, middle aged managers that have spent too long in the alphabet soup.

carlycue 4y ago

Can't wait for Google to add ChatGPT-like features to Chrome and their suite of Web Apps so I can finally ditch Microsoft Edge with it's ChatGPT integration. The UI of Edge is god awful. It has the same issue as Explorer in Windows where Microsoft thinks showing you all UI buttons and other UI elements at once is a great idea. Microsoft can't make compelling consumer facing products to save their life.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
What features are you looking/hoping for in a ChatGPT-like integration with Google web apps?
1xdevloper 4y ago
I actually liked Edge and was happy to move away from Chrome. Then they started injecting their content into web pages. And then some shopping feature. I hate seeing the "You can now add extensions from the Chrome..." banner when I'm logged in the Chrome web store. It won't go away even after I closed it multiple times. I started using Brave.
- bombolo 4y ago
  Remember that firefox exists.
newaccount2023 4y ago
such a weird take...ChatGPT is thus far just an incredible demo you've actually switched browsers to have access to it? why???
- danpalmer 4y ago
  It sounds like it's Bing Chat, not ChatGPT. They are fairly different – ChatGPT being fairly mature but heavyweight, and Bing Chat being truly unhinged. But yeah, Bing Chat is only available in Edge.
  - 4y ago

h34t 4y ago

"stay tuned for our waitlist soon"

IanCal 4y ago
There should be a waitlist to get access to the waitlist.

skilled 4y ago

[flagged]

valine 4y ago
Maybe evil is mothballing technology that could benefit society because of potential impacts to your ad business.

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

It’s notable that at multiple points they sell this service as safe - “easy and safe” - “all supported by robust safety tools” when the only things users really care about are quality, latency, and cost. Not sure where their head is at but unless they are oriented around these three things they’re never going to catch up.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> Not sure where their head is at but unless they are oriented around these three things they’re never going to catch up. But ChatGPT is doing exactly the same. There's more energy spent trying to manipulate the output to be politically correct than actual energy spent making the AI more powerful.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I doubt that's true, they just talk about it more because everything else is kind of a trade secret.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  I get what you're saying here and agree, but there is no world in which openai exists as a continuing concern without making their product overly PC. Remember that their model was trained on a broad swath of the Internet, warts and all. They can either spend the effort making it aligned with the current thing up front, or they can rush to do it after the model outputs something spicy and they have to deal with the resulting PR shitstorm, outrage baiting hit pieces, and otherwise distractions.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  That seems reasonable - if you're trying to create a market for a publicly-available chat-AI, and making a demo freely available for PR/advertising purposes, then the public perception of that demo is critical to your business. If they had just put up the same model without that attempt to make GPT wear a politically-correct mask, they'd just get another Microsoft Tay event, and only get a buttload of negative publicity for their investment. For an internal application used for specific practical tasks, sure, focus on making it more powerful; but if you want a demo for general public as a 'pre-sales advertisement'? You bet that political correctness has to be there.

bluelightning2k 4y ago

Oh what's that? Microsoft has a future of work event in a couple of days? Better pre-empt it. "Available for select developers. Stay tuned for the waitlist soon" When the order to pre-empt comes too quick to get your waitlist landing page approved.

nabakin 4y ago
Just like the BARD announcement in response to MSFT Sydney. They're trying to keep their stock prices from dipping
- alphabetting 4y ago
  I don't think that timeline is correct. MSFT did a surprise announcement of Bing chat the day before Google's planned announcement of Bard. https://twitter.com/xlr8harder/status/1622849293571817472 https://twitter.com/xlr8harder/status/1622849293571817472
  - ukuina 4y ago
    But Google's planned announcement was, err, announced, after the Bing Chat screenshots leaked the week before.

nmca 4y ago

Does anyone have a `curl` that hits the palm API or does it not really exist yet?

sanxiyn 4y ago
I am pretty sure it exists, but not for you. "Select developers can access the PaLM API ... in Private Preview today, and stay tuned for our waitlist soon".

topicseed 4y ago

This video published just now is incredible — https://youtu.be/6DaJVZBXETE https://youtu.be/6DaJVZBXETE Not sure though if it's mostly stuff that's being beta tested as we speak, or stuff that's not even built at all as of yet.

noduerme 4y ago
We're so fucked. Everyone will be AI spambots. You'll never know if you're talking to a human again.
- topicseed 4y ago
  Indeed, even with content... Somebody with ChatGPT and Grammarly can produce a humongous amount of content these days, and it will read really well to the average Joe.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Ah, but the joke's on them, cause the average Joe doesn't read anymore.
- nyolfen 4y ago
  just demand that they use a slur, this is the true voight-kampff
- misnome 4y ago
  I'd like to be not so sure. I could see a mass-response of revulsion, and a cultural move towards concise, direct, non-bullshit communication. I don't want to think too hard about the alternative, of large groups of people not even bothering to ever try to learn to write. Probably become better megacorp output consumers.
Buttons840 4y ago
The video is very focused on first order effects. A middle manager automates all their work by writing a few sentences; they produce a "brief" by giving a one sentence input to the AI, doubtless imagining that other humans will carefully read their brief, quietly nodding to themselves and considering every sentence, with passing thoughts about how competent the middle manager is. In truth, the middle manager will soon be replaced by an AI, and the lovely looking briefs produced by the AI will only be consumed by other AIs. Another part shows the AI creating personalized marketing messages. For a brief time they will work, and then every company will be producing them by the millions, and then customers will stop reading emails at all -- again, the AIs will be writing messages consumed by other AIs.

indymike 4y ago

It's interesting that the example for using an AI to write documents is a job description. It is uniquely suited to the AI because in real life, we've been copy-pasta-ing them for decades. It's also a place where there is some level of legal peril - a job description with material inaccuracies or discriminatory language creates lawsuits.

m3kw9 4y ago

How long IBM to rebrand their Watson 2.0 to be using ChatGPT 4.5.

speedgoose 4y ago
I think it’s unlikely : https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:6z6re3.2.3 https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:6z...

diimdeep 4y ago

First reaction: mouthful spam generator built right into gmail[0], way to go google. [0] https://youtu.be/6DaJVZBXETE?t=33 https://youtu.be/6DaJVZBXETE?t=33

valine 4y ago
Reminds me of the google april fools prank in 2009 where they announced gmail would be able to read and respond to emails for you. http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/gmail_autopilot http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/gmail_autopilot

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Simon321 4y ago

Wow! Looks like they're determined to catch up! They're going to open up PaLM & an image generation model (imagen?) through Google Cloud. It looks incredibly easy to finetune PaLM in their environment: Video (Build, tune, and deploy foundation models with Vertex AI): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg2yHIKQ7oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg2yHIKQ7oM

bluelightning2k 4y ago
I don't know that catch-up is entirely fair. My understanding is that Google has always been ahead (at least until recently) - but the difference is that one of their competitors ships. OpenAI has a bias to action. DeepMind has a bias to grand-challenge stunts. Google has a bias to perpetual validation.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I think 'catch-up' is a fair description if Google Brain/Deepmind have until now shipped nothing and their competitors have shipped something.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    When you have nothing at stake, like openAI or bing, its easy to just throw things at the wall and see what sticks. There is nothing else on the wall you could potentially knock off.
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      I don't see why Google is in a materially different situation with AI than Microsoft is. It's not like anyone is suggesting that Google should have shut down their search in order to launch something like this, if it fails then it joins the long line of dead products.

gavi 4y ago

When they say Augment your dataset with synthetic data on https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/announcing-palm-api-and-makersuite.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/announcing-palm-ap... do they mean something like this https://github.com/yizhongw/self-instruct https://github.com/yizhongw/self-instruct ?

shtack 4y ago
Possibly this: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230314005528/en/Gretel-Partners-With-Google-Cloud-to-Harness-the-Power-of-Synthetic-Data-and-Accelerate-Adoption-of-Safer-Generative-AI-in-the-Enterprise https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230314005528/en/Gre...

rvz 4y ago

This is an extinction event for the low hanging fruit ideas for the so-called AI startups. Again, this maybe bad timing since GPT-4 will (probably) gate crash Google's announcements this week, hence why Google has done this today. But for now, AI copyrighters are going to be destroyed, quickly by the same tech giants: Microsoft (OpenAI), Google, and possibly Meta.

Buttons840 4y ago
Speaking of copyright, remember that content produced by an algorithm cannot be copyrighted. We've already seen this play out with stable diffusion. Also, the government copyright office is surely unprepared for the coming tsunami.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  > produced by an algorithm This is a very grey area. A prompt, for example, could be copyright. An image you create by drawing a base layer and having the AI fill the details in could be copyright as well. The government copyright office doesn't really decide these things. Courts do.

solarmist 4y ago

I'll never even try it because I'm constantly waiting for the service cancellation announcement.

robertlagrant 4y ago
You can ask it how long it has.

ipsum2 4y ago

It is either intentional or awfully coincidental that that Google would announce this two days before Microsoft's AI event: https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/ https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/, which will probably discuss similar product features in Office 365.

zamnos 4y ago
https://twitter.com/xlr8harder/status/1622849293571817472 https://twitter.com/xlr8harder/status/1622849293571817472 It's intentional.

bioemerl 4y ago

Thank you open AI for breaking the dam on an arms race we could have benefited immensely from five years ago.

mabbo 4y ago

If I'm following this all here... We're going to have AI help us generate long pieces of text from very small blurbs of information. Then the reader is going to have AI read the long pieces of text, and condense it down into just small blurbs of information. Will my self-driving car also take unneeded detours through pretty places, making it take longer to get where I'm going?

Jack000 4y ago
Malls are already designed in a labyrinthine way so you pass by as many stores as possible. Self driving cars might have set destinations that are cheaper to visit, or have free rides that are ad-supported, or recommend stops along your route.
- tedajax 4y ago
  Ah good, more terrible things to look forward to.
- flangola7 4y ago
  All the while creating more CO2
  - nicksrose7224 4y ago
    most (all?) self driving companies are electric. Cruise, Waymo, Tesla
    - californical 4y ago
      And how is that electricity generated in most of the US/world?
      - lobocinza 4y ago
        And how those cars were built? Electric cars generate more tons of CO2 to make than conventional combustion ones. But it's expected to pay off as long as the electricity is generated cleanly.

inductive_magic 4y ago

The mail-part is ridiculous, reminiscent of the latest episode of south park, which illustrates the impact of teenagers using ChatGPT to respond to their girlfriends messages. Nature goes the path of least resistance, and nowhere is this more obvious than in human interactions. If your signal consists of three words, write three words instead of generating blobs of decorative noise masquerading as content, that serves no purpose but to be decoded by the same ai, but client-side.

ReptileMan 4y ago

> and at Google, we’ve been responsibly developing large language models so we can safely bring them to our products So you are getting a gelding. I really miss the old SV - make it fun and powerful. Usually the most interesting things come out of unsanctioned uses of technology.

sarchertech 4y ago

So humans are going to enter bullet points, and the AI will generate prose. Then the human on the other end will use an AI to extract bullet points from the prose. I hope we realize how insanely stupid this is soon.

ChatGTP 4y ago
But it's a new feature and big tech has ran out of ideas?
Workaccount2 4y ago
Sounds like it will fit right in with the stupid song and dance already done in corporate America.
Maxion 4y ago
This is literally what humans do in many corporations today without ai.

hdivider 4y ago

What I find regrettable is how GCP's startup program seems to be entirely geared towards VC-fuelled startups for the higher tiers. Compare with Microsoft for Startups, which isn't seen as hip and edgy but can get you like $5k+$25k in Azure credits (and some OpenAI credits) without having to go the VC route. Seems more entrepreneurial to me. Venture-backed is just not the right path for everyone.

pirsquare 4y ago
Just go with AWS or Azure. Google Clown Platform is okay until you need to have any form of support. I'm like you, bootstrapper. Went with GCP for 4 yrs until they shutdown my production servers last fri. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133917
- hdivider 4y ago
  Thank you. Don't see why your comment got downvoted. Holding the Clown Platform accountable is surely in the interest of hackers. Crazy story. Thanks for sharing and yes, suffice to say, this informs our tech stack choices, hah.
candiddevmike 4y ago
Skip all of them and use Hetzner, you'll save a ton of money. The startup credits are designed to become handcuffs eventually.
- kevmo314 4y ago
  Any recommendations on GPU hosting?

arijun 4y ago

They show an example of someone typing "I'm on it!" and then converting that into a page long email. They also show the ability to summarize, which of course you'd use on a page long email whose real content is nothing but "I'm on it." That verbose email is going to end up a weird machine interchange format (which only looks like formal writing for human consumption), just to send a message like "I'm on it."

IanCal 4y ago

> Starting today, we’re making an efficient model available in terms of size and capabilities, Excellent! goes through the terrible UI of google cloud console Nothing there. I see it's not actually today it's a sometime soon with some people in a private preview. Any info on what model size they're actually releasing? Time to try the demo they showed in google docs. > Now, we’re excited to take the next step and bring a limited set of trusted testers Oh. It's good that they're actually planning to ship stuff, but when? I've seen private previews sit around certainly for 6+ months, probably a lot longer.

sf_rob 4y ago
I'm looking forward to seeing some of this make its way to general release, but I'd guess that this post is in the vein of their hurried initial press response to Chat GPT.
topicseed 4y ago
Google needs to nail their launches better... We're all tired of Google Forms demos and access...
- IanCal 4y ago
  It's quite something. I wish they'd just be more up front about it because then I'd probably be more excited. These changes are incredible, and it's a shame my general feeling is disappointment from trying and failing to use something. They do this all the time launching something in the US but not mentioning the limits leaving me struggling to get something to work. It doesn't help that their approach to ai is often "don't worry a magic thing will tell when you want it and will make it appear" and I don't know if I'm not making the right incantations or it's broken or it's not available. I wish these would all come with a "notify me when available" button at the very top.

virtuosarmo 4y ago

Notable this announcement drops two days ahead of Microsoft's announcement tied to enhancing M365 with gen-AI https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/ https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/

ukuina 4y ago

Golly, can you just _imagine_ GPT integration in Google Reader? Overview: "Summarize my tech feed" In an informative article: "Didn't I Star something similar last week?" In a news article: "What does website X think about this event?" The future is bright!

cloudking 4y ago
Build it!
tantalor 4y ago
@conesus add to NewsBlur!

tbruckner 4y ago

I swear, if Google says "select developers" or "trusted testers" one more time, they'll have lost all credibility in launching something so important to their business and it will totally be on them.

JonChesterfield 4y ago
The previous run of killing projects wasn't sufficient to warn you off?

paxys 4y ago

I really hope the big take away from such developments is that if an AI can rattle out fancy-sounding reports and slide decks in seconds then there was never any value in such content to begin with. It was and still is corporate busy work. Maybe instead of using a text model to convert 5 bullet points into a 3-page report, we should just share the bullet points? But hey they also sell you an AI that summarizes this report back into bullet points so you don't have to read it.

JustBreath 4y ago
It's summarizations all the way down.
ryandrake 4y ago
As someone who spends some amount of time at work doing stuff like converting 5 bullet points to a 3 page powerpoint presentation, I think everyone already knows it's corporate busy work. The point of it is not that anyone is going to read that 3 page report, it's to show that you've done work and produced some output ("demonstrating toil"). As long as they're insisting that it get done and are willing to pay for it to get done, I'm more than happy to ship that toil off to an AI. If it means I waste 2 minutes writing a good prompt rather than waste 30 minutes copying and pasting content, adding filler narrative, and picking the right font and color, that's more time back to do other things besides this performance art an employer expects of me.
- EForEndeavour 4y ago
  Genuinely curious: what makes you think your employer will let you ship that toil off to an AI instead of just letting you go (or downsizing your team) and shipping off the toil themselves? The acceptance that you've been doing corporate busywork as your career seems at odds with your confidence that you'll be the one to outsource that busywork to an AI. Doesn't the rapidly increasing capability of automated systems to pull off this busywork imply that careers built on doing that busywork are increasingly at risk? Am I missing something?
  - 4y ago

debacle 4y ago

The question needs to be asked - is Google done competing?

betteryet 4y ago

Prompting an AI for 5 seconds to write a bunch of paragraphs that your human counterpart has to then read and think through is incredibly disrespectful of their time. AI assistants that summarize and enrich information for you, fine. That actually saves time. But this feeding of generative output to humans is way off the mark. It feels like the product people are not sitting down to think what they're doing and just riding the GPT hype wave.

sebzim4500 4y ago
But the recipient doesn't have to read and think through it, they can just have the same AI summarise the email. Google could even store the original prompt and use it as context for the summariser.

seydor 4y ago

Such an uninspired use of the term. Google is so used to spreading SEO , now they want to choke every office with well-written noise. This is using AI to make me waste more time, i don't want that Instead i want - Intuitive interfaces to respond to the email with a few clicks and a short laconic email (I don't want to waste other people's time) - Specialized text generators for legal purposes, which create provably verifiable and consistent documents - Expert systems that doctors can use and trust [AI: Expand this to a 70-page diatribe]

DeathArrow 4y ago

I wonder why are we generating so much virtual junk, content that nobody is interesting in and while on that wasting time, effort, energy and money.

whoisjuan 4y ago

They just keep putting out press releases talking about private betas and tests with "selected trusted partners" but nothing the regular consumer can play with. If that's the pace at which they're planning to compete with Microsoft/OpenAI, they already lost.

we_never_see_it 4y ago

Too little, too late. I am all-in on Microsoft.

bogwog 4y ago
Don't let all the AI hype trick you into thinking you can trust Microsoft for anything.

dna_polymerase 4y ago

Yeah cool, I need to write Serial letters using my own fonts. Can't do that with Google Workspace. As an enterprise customer, that is. I have no idea who leads product at Google but they need to get their shit together. I don't need some ChatGPT BS to write my mails for me.

palebluedot 4y ago

All of this generative corporate text seems like lossy anti-compression.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

It’s worth comparing these to how a human would respond to the same request. “I’d like to write a job description” would get “okay, what will they be doing?” or something. Instead we just get a best attempt at making shit up.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tlogan 4y ago

This seems like pre-emptive announcement without any beef behind it (there is no even waiting list). I’m not 100% sure if this is a smart move.

dc-programmer 4y ago
where’s the beef?

kin 4y ago

If this gets added to Google Docs and made free for public, English teachers are going to have a hard time knowing if their students wrote anything

ec109685 4y ago
Flip the classroom. Have them listen to lectures / read at home, write in the classroom.

ec109685 4y ago

How many recent startups are simply "build google docs but with AI [using other people's models]"? I can't see that being a long term path to success.

flohofwoe 4y ago

Ooof, exactly as predicted a few days ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-dusts-off-the-failed-google-playbook-to-fight-chatgpt/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-dusts-off-the... Now every Google team needs to shoehorn "AI" into its products, no matter if it makes sense or not.

bg24 4y ago

Unless I missed it, only example in the blog: “So if you’re a manager onboarding a new employee, Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome email.” Some great announcements, could have given more pertinent examples. You save your time elsewhere using AI tools, so you spend time with your valuable newcomer.

yunohn 4y ago

I cannot stand the prosaic, repetitive, boringly formal nature of GPT/etc output. I also am tired of the randomly messy-surreal, illogical images generated by DallE/etc output. HR/PR approved corporate communications are already crappy. From a practical viewpoint, I don’t want to wade through pages of bullshit boilerplate and illogical images. The future is bleak and boring…