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> Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned! Sigh. Google never learns. By the time they add support for using this in my country, there's no
by tauntz 4y ago
> Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!
Sigh. Google never learns.
By the time they add support for using this in my country, there's no reason for me to use it anymore as competitors have already swept in.
It's the same playbook with every US-only launch:
1. get everybody hyped up
2. make it accessible to only a minor subset of people but advertise it as a "launch" or "open beta" or whatever
3. tell the rest of the world that "lol, by "avialable" we mean US-only" or "Open means "open for people with US IP addresses only"" etc.
4. Wait till competitors have launched global-from-the-start alternatives
5. Open up the service globally
6. ...
7. Shut down the service because there's no uptake
(surprised_pikachu.jpg)
Rinse and repeat.
Self inflicted wounds and all that..
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoSame for Pixel devices. They don't officially exist in several EU countries on Google's store. Google tries hard to make their paying consumers hate them.
- tmikaeld 4y agoWord, it took several years before Google Domains became available in Sweden. And not to mention Pixel devices, which you can't even order.
- visarga 4y agoGood thing they didn't open the Google Store for Europe, now they can close it for all I care, I had to jump through hoops to get my Pixel. The Pixel battery was much worse than the battery of my wife's iPhone. Now I am sporting her old phone because I don't give a shit about the latest and greatest anymore.
- amrb 4y agoCan anyone confirm VPN's works for signup?
- sho_hn 4y agoThe sign-up itself worked. I've not gotten access yet.
- sho_hn 4y agoGot access.
- dizhn 4y agoYes. I used one from Italy to get in the waitlist. Don't know how the rest will unfold.
- tpmx 4y agoI signed up via Mullvad VPN (picked a UK location) about an hour after this story was posted. Just got access 10 minutes ago (3 hours later). After getting access: You do need to have a US/UK IP to use it but they don't seem to use any VPN detection heuristics - which would be trivial for them since I'm signed in to them using multiple private/work accounts on multiple machines without VPN.
- iqandjoke 4y agoVPN to USA can help.
- pwb25 4y agoIt never cease to amaze me how a software that is just inputs and outputs, can not be "available" in some country if you sell something, then sure goods might have laws. but just text ? lol
- rospaya 4y agoMight be localization, PR, scaling, not enough capacity for the new users. I hate it but I can imagine it.
- caddemon 4y agoThere also could be legal reasons, I have no idea if it's the case here but theoretically I could imagine something like "right to be forgotten" interacting oddly with LLMs.
- jonas21 4y agoAlso libel (if the LLM makes up facts about someone), copyright (if it reproduces content), privacy (if some of the data it trained on wasn't intended to be public), etc. And on top of that, there are plenty of novel things that may or may not be illegal. If it can be tricked into making a pro-Nazi statement, is it violating German law? What if it offers medical or legal advice without a license? It's a pretty big legal minefield, and different jurisdictions have different laws and standards, so it makes sense to limit your exposure.
- Bjartr 4y agoThat's the cost of being first to market on something like this. You can't both play it safe and lead the pack.
- jamiek88 4y agoYeah let’s move fast and break stuff! Forget those inconvenient local laws and culture! This attitude is what is leading to the regulation and probable over regulation due to backlash of ‘big tech’. Those days are over. Just like any other sector doesn’t get to ignore laws. Unregulated US social media hit our democracies like a hurricane. The body politik doesn’t seem to be of a mind to let them do the same with AI.
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago:)) why so salty? I am salty too, ngl but it is: their product, their choice. There could be a hundred reasons why they released it like this. ChatGPT was also not available world wide when it launched.
- metafates 4y agoChatgpt is still unavailable worldwide. And will never be, I guess
- tedivm 4y agoThis idea that corporate criticism is off limits simply because the corporation has the legal right to make product decisions is one of the weirdest things I regularly see. No one is claiming that they don't have a legal right to do this. Yeah, it's their product and their choice. But you're on a website with founders and tech workers. Part of what we do here is talk about why things work, why they don't, and ways to improve. There's nothing wrong with criticizing our industry or pointing out when one of the big companies regularly shoots itself in the foot.
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago> There's nothing wrong with criticizing our industry or pointing out when one of the big companies regularly shoots itself in the foot Actually, in some cases, there is: exposing your endpoints to nefarious actors from countries where there is no jurisdiction, functioning tech laws, etcetera. It is better & safer to launch small with a somewhat "trusted crowd" first. You live in a dream world or have not launched anything really on your own before. It is wrong & dangerous to follow your advice or criticism because you don't know what you don't know.
- drawfloat 4y agoIf someone from Netherlands accessing your website puts your data at risk, someone accessing your site from the US puts your data at risk.
- endtime 4y ago> This Google Account isn’t supported > Bard does not currently support Google Workspace accounts or when our systems indicate you may be under 18. Learn more Google: 15 years of punishment for being a loyal Dasher/ Google Apps/GSuite/Google Workspace user.
- EToS 4y agoIts like paying to be a second class citizen! :)
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoEvery once in a while I think of paying the Workspace ransom, hoping it would keep Google from potentially locking me out of my account for nebulously defined reasons. Then I come across stories like these how Workspace gives you an interior product (and likely no account protection).
- mclightning 4y agoSame here, and the account switcher doesn't work.
- jmkni 4y agoI had to go back to Google's homepage and switch accounts there Agree, very frustrating.
- lxgr 4y agoReminds me of when the Google Voice iOS account switcher would "trap" you in an account of an unsupported country, with the only recourse being re-installing the app and taking care to never accidentally switch to that account again (which can easily happen with the "swipe to fast switch" gesture on the account icons).
- AnnikaL 4y agoYou can add /u/1 or /u/2 to the end of the URL to use another Google Account.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y agoNon-US countries like to fine US tech companies and create regulations ect. which we are already seeing in the EU wrt AI. So it makes sense why they don't want to be involved in that kind of thing before there is even a real product. That is, there is no upside for them aside from market share, which I agree is important but does not alone explain Google's product failures, about which much has already been written.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoSure. Meanwhile ChatGPT is used everywhere in France, and it's now synonymous with AI for most people in Europe. Game over.
- verdverm 4y agoOpenAI has had significant up time issues. They don't seem to know how to run production services. Business cannot rely on them as a foundation to build upon. Their moat is quite thin and dry
- belter 4y agoWell they are on Azure so....
- kjreact 4y agoJust like Netscape is synonymous with browser? Just 5 years ago DeepMind was at the forefront. AI tech is changing so fast who knows who will be ahead in the next 5 years?
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoIf Google product was ahead of the competition I would agree with you. But GPT is just miles away better than everything else, and it keeps getting better at a scary rate, especially because the feedback loop from so many users is making it better.
- 4y ago
- realPubkey 4y agoClubhouse was even more stupid by launching iOS only which killed themself.
- rileyphone 4y agoIt worked for Instagram - Clubhouse's failure was far more spectacular.
- tiborsaas 4y agoSharing pretty pics is easy to get and easy to do. Listening into a random conference calls is much harder to sell and even harder to scale.
- layer8 4y agoClubhouse was funny. By the time I finally got access and off the waitlist it was already pretty much dead.
- riffraff 4y agoInstagram came out at a time (2010) when android phones were crap, and iphones owned the smartphone space everywhere, I don't think it is a valid comparison.
- zippergz 4y agoThis is not what killed clubhouse. In fact, clubhouse instantly got worse when they launched the android app...
- kernal 4y agoAre you implying that the Clubhouse got worse because they brought in Android users? Because, if you are, that's pretty ......
- tiborsaas 4y agoI think that's what happened regardless of how it sounds. Until it was an elitist iPhone only app, it had a cool vibe around it, but I suspected once they open the floodgates most people will realize how little value it has. Then they probably couldn't handle the traffic and new issues. I'm not saying there's any problem with Android users, but building a community on a single mobile platform for a long time then mixing it with another was probably a bad move.
- swe_dima 4y agosame story with Google One, they say "this feature is now available worldwide", but somehow worldwide doesn't include my country.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoNot trying to be rude, but when you're a company the size of Google - that's had MASSIVE lawsuits - you can't just willy-nilly release products globally.
- t0mas88 4y agoYou mean like a company the size of Microsoft? Bing chat was earlier and global.
- xdavidliu 4y agoMS only dared to put it in Bing after OpenAI's dogfood succeeded. If it had started spouting troublesome stuff, MS wouldn't have touched ChatGPT.
- afro88 4y agoWhat's that got to do with the price of avocados in San Jose?
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoBing is 3.5% of market share in Europe, and Edge is even less. You're talking about maybe ~1% of search that Bing Chat is practically available to (in Europe). It's a lot less risky for Microsoft to do what they did than for Google to just open the floodgates in Europe.
- delecti 4y agoBoth companies are big enough that the laws in Europe are the same whether there are a hundred or hundred million local users.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoNo. If Google does something on Chrome OS - the EU isn't going to scrutinize it the same way if MS does something on Windows. Same, but opposite for Bing vs Google Search.
- kick_in_the_dor 4y agoChatGPT wasn't available to everyone initially (huge waitlist).
- TheAceOfHearts 4y agoIt's even more frustrating to get this message from Puerto Rico, which is a US territory. Feels like being treated as second-class citizens. We're subject to the same federal laws.
- giancarlostoro 4y agoReally weird to restrict Puerto Rico. I'm assuming someone goofed up a setting somewhere. Its like not including Hawaii basically, everyone in Puerto Rico is a US citizen.
- 908B64B197 4y agoAI queries are way more computationally intensive than traditional searches. Bard is probably not optimized and would completely overload the hardware Google has available for it should it be released worldwide. That just shows how far ahead Microsoft is on that one.
- Loveaway 4y agoJust give it a few weeks. They probably have good reasons why they can't do instant global roll out for everyone. Pretty sure it'll be available soon.
- osigurdson 4y agoTo be fair, OpenAI did the same thing with ChatGPT. It wasn't available in Canada at launch. Fortunately, it was not significantly delayed however (2 weeks perhaps).
- brookmg 4y agoYou're not missing anything. The thing is crap and they know it.
- quitit 4y agoJoin our social media platform where none of your friends are! (and can't join even if they want to!) - Google+
- enlyth 4y agoDon't worry, you're not missing out, it's terrible. It didn't know the difference between a month and a week, and when I asked it a coding question, it said "I'm just a language model, so I can't help you with that.". Lol, lmao even.
- darreninthenet 4y agoIt quite confidently told me that Michael Caine played Patrick Bateman's butler Alfred in American Psycho... Bard is like your 80 year old confused grandmother at the moment
- jupp0r 4y agoThis is what you get when you enact monstrosities like GDPR.
- zeruch 4y agoThe most likely reason (maybe ironically) is one of regulatory overhead I suspect. They stick to jurisdictions where the "law of unintended consequences" and "punitive damages" don't commingle strongly.
- Blahah 4y agoFYI mullvad vpn works for sign up. I'm from the UK but currently travelling and it allowed me to join.
- 0349085714 4y ago[flagged]
- jfoster 4y ago> By the time they add support for using this in my country, there's no reason for me to use it anymore as competitors have already swept in. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't ChatGPT and Bing Chat already worldwide releases? So it's not as though anyone is sweeping in after Bard. They were out before Bard and global from Day 1. Besides that, you're absolutely right, of course.