19 ms·

Gemini Ultra isn't released yet and is months away still. Bard w/ Gemini Pro isn't available in Europe and isn't multi-modal, https://support.google.com/bard/a

Gemini Ultra isn't released yet and is months away still. Bard w/ Gemini Pro isn't available in Europe and isn't multi-modal, https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 No public stats on Gemini Pro. (I'm wrong. Pro stats not on website, but tucked in a paper - https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_1_report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...) I feel this is overstated hype. There is no competitor to GPT-4 being released today. It would've been a much better look to release something available to most countries and with the advertised stats.

skilled 3y ago
Yup. My guess is they only released it to get usage data over the holiday season.
- ferdinandis 3y ago
  And give a heads up for those that were about to purchase a ChatGPT Pro subscription as Xmas present, to wait one more month.
EZ-E 3y ago
Investors are getting impatient! ChatGPT has already replaced Google for me and I wonder if Google starts to feel the pressure.
- ametrau 3y ago
  I wonder what advertising will look like with this. Will they suggest products in the response? Like “Top ideas:…” and the LLM’s response.
  - Arson9416 3y ago
    Embedding search of the nearest products most applicable to the LLM response. Prompt augmentation: "Rewrite your response to include promotions of the following products without being obvious that you are promoting them."
    - emporas 3y ago
      That's smart, but very insidious as well. Following in the footsteps of dark UI patterns designed for users to misclick on ads, now dark suggestions on conversations with an LLM will be the next big thing. Like a conservative talking with an LLM which inserts liberal propaganda into it's responses and after an hour he turns into a liberal voter. The next day he talks with a conservative LLM which inserts propaganda into his conversations and he turns back to a conservative voter. Pretty dystopic. On a more serious note, imho advertisers are on their's last legs, and google loses a lot of revenue already. We are going fast into a new internet, web3, which will enable direct monetization of information from users, instead of the publishers relying on ads. Not to wander a lot off topic here, but synthetic datasets created by paid humans workers to train machines is going to be a humongous industry.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    People will have problems they want to solve, and GPT can provide solutions that may or may not have a price tag. In this case, it's just directing to the service you would have best fit with. This can be highly profitable, because you are solving the problem for the customer with the products you are suggesting based on what they are looking to solve.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    The bing version of ChatGPT already does this. It might be specific to USA, but try asking it for a recommendation of a 1500w space heater for a small room. Every suggestion will have a link to an affiliate page that says [Ad] next to it.
- alberth 3y ago
  > "ChatGPT has already replaced Google for me" Would you mind elaborating more on this. Like how are you "searching" with ChatGPT?
  - vnchr 3y ago
    Searching is frequently a means to the end of answering some question. I find myself more often asking the question directly with both Google and chat, GPT. ChatGPT comes to mind sooner for a question that requires two or more searches.
  - c-hendricks 3y ago
    Some of my searches aren't really searches, they're questions which Google has the information to be able to sum it up. A few weeks ago I was trying to remember the name of a site that put up two movie posters and you pick which one you liked more. Googled "What was the website that showed two movie posters and you picked the one you liked more?" and I got links to reddit, lots to letterboxd, some quora, and a lot more, all irrelevant to my question. Asked ChatGPT that same question verbatim and > The website you're referring to is probably "Flickchart." It's a platform where users can compare and rank movies by choosing which one they like more between two movie posters or movie titles. Please note that my knowledge is up to date as of January 2022, and the availability and popularity of such websites may change over time. Another time I was looking for the release dates of 8 and 16-bit consoles. With Google I had to search for each console individually, sometimes offered a card with the release date, sometimes didn't and I'd have to go do more digging. So I asked ChatGPT and got a nice formatted list with dates
    - LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
      The first is maybe a good example of where an LLM integrated search engine makes sense. Because "compare two movies" has flickchart as the third option for me. But it is nowhere to be seen for "compare two movie posters" which is how I read your search originally (and indeed flickchart is about ranking movies not the posters themselves ... Obviously). Anyways an LLM clearly teased that out whereas if you misremember or misread something a straight search is going to be bad. Most of my searches are the opposite. I was to know about an obscure movie from the 80s with a toy helicopter. Google very neatly suggests Defense Play (correct) but most LLMs I've tried end up just suggesting very popular films with a helicopter and it ends up being quite difficult to get it to give me information about obscure stuff. Also with that same search the LLM suggests a bunch of incorrect films since (and I figured this out later) it turns out that it was all sourced from a single forum thread from the 90s where a bunch of the posts suggested movies that don't have toy helicopters in them. Go figure.
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  For you, maybe, for absolute most of the ppl - not really, you can compare both nr of users and nr of searches
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  probably not. their "free" search don't make money
rvnx 3y ago
Not just Europe: also no Canada, China, Russia, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Norway, Iceland, etc.
- dbrgn 3y ago
  United Kingdom, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Norway and Iceland are all part of Europe.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - n8cpdx 3y ago
    United Kingdom voted to leave Europe and there was a years long ugly divorce. UK is a North Atlantic state alongside the US.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - kreddor 3y ago
      EU =/= Europe
    - ChrisClark 3y ago
      How is it possible to actually move the entire landmass? I didn't know we had the technology!
      - n8cpdx 3y ago
        The definition of Europe is not a fixed historical constant. Including various islands in particular continents is an essentially arbitrary choice. Europe as a geographic feature is a distinct concept from Europe as a sociopolitical entity. It is clear that Europe and the UK have been diverging culturally, socially, and politically for some time now. UK does not have the political connections, open borders, collectivization of resources, harmonized regulations, shared currency, or really any other connection to the rest of the Europeans beyond memory.
Arson9416 3y ago
Google is playing catchup while pretending that they've been at the forefront of this latest AI wave. This translates to a lot of talk and not a lot of action. OpenAI knew that just putting ChatGPT in peoples hands would ignite the internet more than a couple of over-produced marketing videos. Google needs to take a page from OpenAI's playbook.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  Google has lawyers.
foobar_______ 3y ago
Agreed. The whole things reeks of being desperate. Half the video is jerking themselves off that they've done AI longer than anyone and they "release" (not actually available in most countries) a model that is only marginally better than the current GPT4 in cherry-picked metrics after nearly a year of lead-time?!?! That's your response? Ouch.
- belter 3y ago
  The Greybeards Of AI...
- confused_boner 3y ago
  maybe they are trying to project stability (no pun intended)
- refulgentis 3y ago
  I worked at Google up through 8 weeks ago and knew there _had_ to be a trick -- You know those stats they're quoting for beating GPT-4 and humans? (both are barely beaten) They're doing K = 32 chain of thought. That means running an _entire self-talk conversation 32 times_. Source: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_1_report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_..., section 5.1.1 paragraph 2
  - kkkkkkk 3y ago
    where are you seeing that 32-shot vs 1-shot comparison drawn? in the pdf you linked it seems like they run it various times using the same technique on both models and just pick the technique which gemini most wins using.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    How do you know GPT-4 is 1 shot? The details about it aren't released, it is entirely possible it does stuff in multiple stages. Why wouldn't OpenAI use their most powerful version to get better stats, especially when they don't say how they got it? Google being more open here about what they do is in their favor.
jug 3y ago
I think it’s so strange how Pro wasn’t launched for Bard in Europe yet. I thought Bard was already cleared for EU use following their lengthy delay, and that this clearance wouldn’t be a recurring issue to overcome for each new underlying language model. Unless it’s technically hard to NOT train it on your data or whatever. Weird.
- NavinF 3y ago
  I suspect this is because inference is very expensive (much like GPT-4) and their expected ARPU (average revenue per user) in Europe is just not high enough to be worth the cost. See disposable income per capita (in PPP dollars): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_equivalent_adult_income https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - varenc 3y ago
    They are releasing Bard with Gemini in many countries with a much lower income per capita than the average European country: https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 My guess is the delay is due to GDPR or other regulatory challenges.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > My guess is the delay is due to GDPR Bard is explicit "humans will have access to your data and use it to improve our service", without even the opt-out that ChatGPT has, so, yeah, given their desire to catch up, not spending money to deploy it places where there is any kind of meaningful protection of personal data that might conflict with that makes sense.
    - usef- 3y ago
      Revenue-per-user might be much lower in EU if they can't use targeted advertising Facebook was claiming recently they'd charge a fee to users in EU for this reason: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/30/meta-facebook-instagram-europe-pay-ad-free https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/30/meta-face...
ithkuil 3y ago
Why do they gate access at country level if it's about language. I live in Europe and speak English just fine. Can't they just offer it in English only until the multi-language support is ready?
- throwaway09223 3y ago
  There must be mountains of legal concerns which vary by jurisdiction. Both in terms of copyright / right of authorship as well as GDPR/data protection. Litigation is probably inescapable. I'm sure they want to be on solid footing.
- FartyMcFarter 3y ago
  Could be a legal issue, privacy or whatnot.
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    Shouldn't be hard to just say so instead of claiming it's multilingual readiness?
    - throwaway09223 3y ago
      Quite the opposite - it's not only hard it's also unwise. Admitting that you know that your product may create legal liabilities is not a very smart thing to do.
      - paulryanrogers 3y ago
        Did OpenAI ask for permission or forgiveness in that regard?
        leptons 3y ago
        Did OpenAI board ask for permission or forgiveness? Seems like it was forgiveness and they lost.
Varqu 3y ago
I bet that it will land on Google's graveyard before it gets released worldwide.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
From a quick test, it is not as good as GPT4-turbo at this leetcode problem: https://leetcode.com/problems/calculate-money-in-leetcode-bank https://leetcode.com/problems/calculate-money-in-leetcode-ba... Of the three answers Bard (Gemini Pro) gave, none worked, and the last two did not compile. GPT4-turbo gave the correct answer the first time. I agree that it is overstated. Gemini Ultra is supposed to be better than GPT4, and Pro is supposed to be Google's equivalent of GPT4-turbo, but it clearly isn't.
- Davidzheng 3y ago
  GPT-3.5 is similar to Pro
hot_gril 3y ago
This is something that always bugs me about Google, bragging about something you can't even use. Waymo was like this for a while, then it actually came into existence but only in two cities as a beta run.
- rvnx 3y ago
  It's like the supposed amazing Stable Diffusion killers that nobody can use, or the music generation platform.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
TillE 3y ago
Fortunately Google isn't very strict about geofencing Bard. I can get Gemini Pro by just using a common VPN.
AlchemistCamp 3y ago
> Bard w/ Gemini Pro isn't available in Europe and isn't multi-modal, https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 It's available in 174 countries. Europe has gone to great lengths to make itself an incredibly hostile environment for online businesses to operate in. That's a fair choice, but don't blame Google for spending some extra time on compliance before launching there.
- Method-X 3y ago
  Gemini Ultra is the model claimed to be superior to GPT-4. I'd put Gemini Pro on par with GPT-3.5 or maybe slightly better.
- Teever 3y ago
  Excuses. ChatGPT available in Europe.
  - runako 3y ago
    When the EU wrote the law targeting American Big Tech companies for compliance, OpenAI wasn't on their radar. Google was. So Google has to comply with a more onerous regime than OpenAI (for now).
    - Ringz 3y ago
      No. It’s not only bound to specific companies.
      - runako 3y ago
        The law was written to be objective, but it was written with a set of companies in mind. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38553635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38553635 No judgement, this may be good for Europe in the long term.
  - rishav_sharan 3y ago
    OpenAI before ChatGPT (or even now) isn't even in the same ballpark with Google, MS etc as far as regulatory oversight goes. Google has far too many services and products which are always touching the boundaries defined by the EU privacy laws. they trip the line with anything and the regulators can make it much harder/costlier for Google to do business in EU.

skilled 3y ago

Yup. My guess is they only released it to get usage data over the holiday season.

ferdinandis 3y ago
And give a heads up for those that were about to purchase a ChatGPT Pro subscription as Xmas present, to wait one more month.

EZ-E 3y ago

Investors are getting impatient! ChatGPT has already replaced Google for me and I wonder if Google starts to feel the pressure.

ametrau 3y ago
I wonder what advertising will look like with this. Will they suggest products in the response? Like “Top ideas:…” and the LLM’s response.
- Arson9416 3y ago
  Embedding search of the nearest products most applicable to the LLM response. Prompt augmentation: "Rewrite your response to include promotions of the following products without being obvious that you are promoting them."
  - emporas 3y ago
    That's smart, but very insidious as well. Following in the footsteps of dark UI patterns designed for users to misclick on ads, now dark suggestions on conversations with an LLM will be the next big thing. Like a conservative talking with an LLM which inserts liberal propaganda into it's responses and after an hour he turns into a liberal voter. The next day he talks with a conservative LLM which inserts propaganda into his conversations and he turns back to a conservative voter. Pretty dystopic. On a more serious note, imho advertisers are on their's last legs, and google loses a lot of revenue already. We are going fast into a new internet, web3, which will enable direct monetization of information from users, instead of the publishers relying on ads. Not to wander a lot off topic here, but synthetic datasets created by paid humans workers to train machines is going to be a humongous industry.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  People will have problems they want to solve, and GPT can provide solutions that may or may not have a price tag. In this case, it's just directing to the service you would have best fit with. This can be highly profitable, because you are solving the problem for the customer with the products you are suggesting based on what they are looking to solve.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  The bing version of ChatGPT already does this. It might be specific to USA, but try asking it for a recommendation of a 1500w space heater for a small room. Every suggestion will have a link to an affiliate page that says [Ad] next to it.
alberth 3y ago
> "ChatGPT has already replaced Google for me" Would you mind elaborating more on this. Like how are you "searching" with ChatGPT?
- vnchr 3y ago
  Searching is frequently a means to the end of answering some question. I find myself more often asking the question directly with both Google and chat, GPT. ChatGPT comes to mind sooner for a question that requires two or more searches.
- c-hendricks 3y ago
  Some of my searches aren't really searches, they're questions which Google has the information to be able to sum it up. A few weeks ago I was trying to remember the name of a site that put up two movie posters and you pick which one you liked more. Googled "What was the website that showed two movie posters and you picked the one you liked more?" and I got links to reddit, lots to letterboxd, some quora, and a lot more, all irrelevant to my question. Asked ChatGPT that same question verbatim and > The website you're referring to is probably "Flickchart." It's a platform where users can compare and rank movies by choosing which one they like more between two movie posters or movie titles. Please note that my knowledge is up to date as of January 2022, and the availability and popularity of such websites may change over time. Another time I was looking for the release dates of 8 and 16-bit consoles. With Google I had to search for each console individually, sometimes offered a card with the release date, sometimes didn't and I'd have to go do more digging. So I asked ChatGPT and got a nice formatted list with dates
  - LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
    The first is maybe a good example of where an LLM integrated search engine makes sense. Because "compare two movies" has flickchart as the third option for me. But it is nowhere to be seen for "compare two movie posters" which is how I read your search originally (and indeed flickchart is about ranking movies not the posters themselves ... Obviously). Anyways an LLM clearly teased that out whereas if you misremember or misread something a straight search is going to be bad. Most of my searches are the opposite. I was to know about an obscure movie from the 80s with a toy helicopter. Google very neatly suggests Defense Play (correct) but most LLMs I've tried end up just suggesting very popular films with a helicopter and it ends up being quite difficult to get it to give me information about obscure stuff. Also with that same search the LLM suggests a bunch of incorrect films since (and I figured this out later) it turns out that it was all sourced from a single forum thread from the 90s where a bunch of the posts suggested movies that don't have toy helicopters in them. Go figure.
Moldoteck 3y ago
For you, maybe, for absolute most of the ppl - not really, you can compare both nr of users and nr of searches
cyanydeez 3y ago
probably not. their "free" search don't make money

rvnx 3y ago

Not just Europe: also no Canada, China, Russia, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Norway, Iceland, etc.

dbrgn 3y ago
United Kingdom, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Norway and Iceland are all part of Europe.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- n8cpdx 3y ago
  United Kingdom voted to leave Europe and there was a years long ugly divorce. UK is a North Atlantic state alongside the US.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kreddor 3y ago
    EU =/= Europe
  - ChrisClark 3y ago
    How is it possible to actually move the entire landmass? I didn't know we had the technology!
    - n8cpdx 3y ago
      The definition of Europe is not a fixed historical constant. Including various islands in particular continents is an essentially arbitrary choice. Europe as a geographic feature is a distinct concept from Europe as a sociopolitical entity. It is clear that Europe and the UK have been diverging culturally, socially, and politically for some time now. UK does not have the political connections, open borders, collectivization of resources, harmonized regulations, shared currency, or really any other connection to the rest of the Europeans beyond memory.

Arson9416 3y ago

Google is playing catchup while pretending that they've been at the forefront of this latest AI wave. This translates to a lot of talk and not a lot of action. OpenAI knew that just putting ChatGPT in peoples hands would ignite the internet more than a couple of over-produced marketing videos. Google needs to take a page from OpenAI's playbook.

cyanydeez 3y ago
Google has lawyers.

foobar_______ 3y ago

Agreed. The whole things reeks of being desperate. Half the video is jerking themselves off that they've done AI longer than anyone and they "release" (not actually available in most countries) a model that is only marginally better than the current GPT4 in cherry-picked metrics after nearly a year of lead-time?!?! That's your response? Ouch.

belter 3y ago
The Greybeards Of AI...
confused_boner 3y ago
maybe they are trying to project stability (no pun intended)
refulgentis 3y ago
I worked at Google up through 8 weeks ago and knew there _had_ to be a trick -- You know those stats they're quoting for beating GPT-4 and humans? (both are barely beaten) They're doing K = 32 chain of thought. That means running an _entire self-talk conversation 32 times_. Source: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_1_report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_..., section 5.1.1 paragraph 2
- kkkkkkk 3y ago
  where are you seeing that 32-shot vs 1-shot comparison drawn? in the pdf you linked it seems like they run it various times using the same technique on both models and just pick the technique which gemini most wins using.
- Jensson 3y ago
  How do you know GPT-4 is 1 shot? The details about it aren't released, it is entirely possible it does stuff in multiple stages. Why wouldn't OpenAI use their most powerful version to get better stats, especially when they don't say how they got it? Google being more open here about what they do is in their favor.

jug 3y ago

I think it’s so strange how Pro wasn’t launched for Bard in Europe yet. I thought Bard was already cleared for EU use following their lengthy delay, and that this clearance wouldn’t be a recurring issue to overcome for each new underlying language model. Unless it’s technically hard to NOT train it on your data or whatever. Weird.

NavinF 3y ago
I suspect this is because inference is very expensive (much like GPT-4) and their expected ARPU (average revenue per user) in Europe is just not high enough to be worth the cost. See disposable income per capita (in PPP dollars): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_equivalent_adult_income https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- varenc 3y ago
  They are releasing Bard with Gemini in many countries with a much lower income per capita than the average European country: https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 My guess is the delay is due to GDPR or other regulatory challenges.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > My guess is the delay is due to GDPR Bard is explicit "humans will have access to your data and use it to improve our service", without even the opt-out that ChatGPT has, so, yeah, given their desire to catch up, not spending money to deploy it places where there is any kind of meaningful protection of personal data that might conflict with that makes sense.
  - usef- 3y ago
    Revenue-per-user might be much lower in EU if they can't use targeted advertising Facebook was claiming recently they'd charge a fee to users in EU for this reason: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/30/meta-facebook-instagram-europe-pay-ad-free https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/30/meta-face...

ithkuil 3y ago

Why do they gate access at country level if it's about language. I live in Europe and speak English just fine. Can't they just offer it in English only until the multi-language support is ready?

throwaway09223 3y ago
There must be mountains of legal concerns which vary by jurisdiction. Both in terms of copyright / right of authorship as well as GDPR/data protection. Litigation is probably inescapable. I'm sure they want to be on solid footing.
FartyMcFarter 3y ago
Could be a legal issue, privacy or whatnot.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  Shouldn't be hard to just say so instead of claiming it's multilingual readiness?
  - throwaway09223 3y ago
    Quite the opposite - it's not only hard it's also unwise. Admitting that you know that your product may create legal liabilities is not a very smart thing to do.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Did OpenAI ask for permission or forgiveness in that regard?
      - leptons 3y ago
        Did OpenAI board ask for permission or forgiveness? Seems like it was forgiveness and they lost.

Varqu 3y ago

I bet that it will land on Google's graveyard before it gets released worldwide.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ZoomerCretin 3y ago

From a quick test, it is not as good as GPT4-turbo at this leetcode problem: https://leetcode.com/problems/calculate-money-in-leetcode-bank https://leetcode.com/problems/calculate-money-in-leetcode-ba... Of the three answers Bard (Gemini Pro) gave, none worked, and the last two did not compile. GPT4-turbo gave the correct answer the first time. I agree that it is overstated. Gemini Ultra is supposed to be better than GPT4, and Pro is supposed to be Google's equivalent of GPT4-turbo, but it clearly isn't.

Davidzheng 3y ago
GPT-3.5 is similar to Pro

hot_gril 3y ago

This is something that always bugs me about Google, bragging about something you can't even use. Waymo was like this for a while, then it actually came into existence but only in two cities as a beta run.

rvnx 3y ago
It's like the supposed amazing Stable Diffusion killers that nobody can use, or the music generation platform.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

TillE 3y ago

Fortunately Google isn't very strict about geofencing Bard. I can get Gemini Pro by just using a common VPN.

AlchemistCamp 3y ago

> Bard w/ Gemini Pro isn't available in Europe and isn't multi-modal, https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096 It's available in 174 countries. Europe has gone to great lengths to make itself an incredibly hostile environment for online businesses to operate in. That's a fair choice, but don't blame Google for spending some extra time on compliance before launching there.

Method-X 3y ago
Gemini Ultra is the model claimed to be superior to GPT-4. I'd put Gemini Pro on par with GPT-3.5 or maybe slightly better.
Teever 3y ago
Excuses. ChatGPT available in Europe.
- runako 3y ago
  When the EU wrote the law targeting American Big Tech companies for compliance, OpenAI wasn't on their radar. Google was. So Google has to comply with a more onerous regime than OpenAI (for now).
  - Ringz 3y ago
    No. It’s not only bound to specific companies.
    - runako 3y ago
      The law was written to be objective, but it was written with a set of companies in mind. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38553635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38553635 No judgement, this may be good for Europe in the long term.
- rishav_sharan 3y ago
  OpenAI before ChatGPT (or even now) isn't even in the same ballpark with Google, MS etc as far as regulatory oversight goes. Google has far too many services and products which are always touching the boundaries defined by the EU privacy laws. they trip the line with anything and the regulators can make it much harder/costlier for Google to do business in EU.