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When was that? (I expect whatever year you give other people will say it was already just corporate talk before then)
by jefftk 3y ago
When was that?
(I expect whatever year you give other people will say it was already just corporate talk before then)
- tjpnz 3y agoThe Android presentations in the early 2010s were something to get excited about.
- packetlost 3y agoI would say roughly around when they killed their Nexus line.
- jefftk 3y agoOoh, I thought we were going to be arguing about an earlier time. The last Nexus (pretty sure) was the 6P, released 2015-10 and discontinued 2016-10. I remember this complaint from the IO 2013, when I was there representing mod_pagespeed.
- packetlost 3y agoI mean, you could argue that it was earlier, but I think that's the point where most people would agree the magic was dead.
- gjvc 3y agoYes. This is when I felt they had veered from the path I was following and supporting. Nexus 5 was a great phone!
- clnq 3y agoAround 2013 is when I/Os became less about showing technological progress and more about corporate talk. Examples of I/O topics before 2013: Android, Maps API, App Engine (cloud), Chrome, AJAX for their APIs, real-time collaboration/Wave, Google TV (early predecessor to Android TV), Chromebooks, Chrome Web Store, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Glass, Gmail updates, Google+, YouTube updates. Most I/O topics after 2013 revolved around marginal improvements on a lot of things, like individual Android features and apps. And naturally, when there is so little to talk about, corporate speak fills the void. There were still some interesting topics after 2013, especially if you follow some specific developments in the Android ecosystem. But there were very few groundbreaking topics. Google will probably talk about Bard this year, which has not been a huge success, but at least it's something bigger that harkens back to pre-2013 days.
- kordlessagain 3y agoBard needs API access.
- verdverm 3y agoThere is Vertex AI, which some people are getting early access to (what i hope is) PaLM2 | ULM. The GCP offering only contains tools for your own models, what everyone wants is an alternative to ChatGPT, a pre-trained LLM from Google accessible via API and fine tune-able in Vertex. There is this in the meantime: https://github.com/acheong08/Bard https://github.com/acheong08/Bard
- verdverm 3y agoThis aged well :] APIs are available since the middle of the presentation!
- dragonwriter 3y agoThey are providing API access to at least some models in the same family underlying Bard, but explicitly (while its in preview) prohibiting production/commercial use — not disclaiming liability and advising against it as is common for pre-release products, but actually prohibiting in the ToS. Google is taking an hypercautious approach around “AI safety” issues that amounts to “we should not release products and if we do they are just demos that no one should be permitted to use for any serious purpose” which is going to hurt them in the marketplace but also does nothing meaningful to deal with either the real and immediate issues with AI or the mixture of other (some real but less immediate but largely science fantasy) issues that typically are referred to under the “AI safety” umbrella (and that’s even more true if you consider from the pov of assuming that the more science-fantasy-ish of those risks are real and serious.)
- vesinisa 3y agoAlmost all of the topics you listed have sessions in this year's Google I/O. There are 35 different sessions tagged "Android" alone: https://io.google/2023/program/?q=android https://io.google/2023/program/?q=android There might be no sessions for stuff like how to use web APIs because these are already mature and well-documented technologies. I/O is about showcasing new stuff after all.