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>Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful N

>Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant, and writing tools across apps. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise. The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."

verdverm 2y ago
I agree. I don't want all my existing work apps to take on LLM features I don't need. At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed. From a vague description, it can find the open source project I was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good summary of the project. deets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706997
- dimitri-vs 2y ago
  I really want to like Gemini Deep Research but I have had a pretty low ROI with it. It fails because it has no ability to evaluate the quality of sources, so some SEOd to hell page has equal weight as the deep dive blog post of a highly invested individual. Its also very hard to steer unless you provide paragraphs of context, if you provide too little it might hyper focus on something you said and go into some random rabbit hole of research.
  - vrosas 2y ago
    Man if only there was a company out there specializing in the ranking page quality on the web…
ape4 2y ago
I can hardly wait to use it as an excuse. "Oh sorry I didn't do that because it wasn't in the AI summary" ;)
- radarsat1 2y ago
  I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2 weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the person in question would make such an irresponsible promise (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he was talking completely hypothetically and not promising anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next sprint. Glad I verified it.
  - herewulf 2y ago
    So, instead of the people in the meeting spending a few minutes writing up a few notes to send to you about actionable next steps, you got to waste your time on the artificially intelligent fuck up. These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do less work.
macNchz 2y ago
I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people aren’t all that great at taking and sharing notes.
- shinycode 2y ago
  I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?
  - tomrod 2y ago
    Indeed.
  - macNchz 2y ago
    It's nice if you're the one presenting or leading the meeting, and/or if the person you've asked to take notes is not especially diligent. I've also been sent a photograph of someone's handwritten notes after a meeting and found it...not terribly useful.
    - shinycode 2y ago
      Yes you’re right. The handwritten notes I take I always keep them for myself. If I have to share something I clean it and summarize and type it by hand. I find useful to do it manually to make sure intent and comprehension are well transcribed from the meeting. If a person is not focused on the meeting then it could be worse. I’d rather not give this to an AI, again often context is key and unless you have access of month or years of cross history it might be difficult for an IA not to miss something. But it’s just a tool, everyone sees what tool fits nicely
- 2y ago
bambax 2y ago
How is AI in email a good thing?! There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote". And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
- hoyd 2y ago
  Do you happen to have a link for that comic?
  - ASalazarMX 2y ago
    Not the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics. https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
    - bambax 2y ago
      Yes, that's the one.
    - monophonica 2y ago
      hah that is wonderful. thank you.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  This was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :D
  - bambax 2y ago
    Really? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?
- 2y ago
n144q 2y ago
> I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any better.
nharada 2y ago
I had a few use cases with searching and organizing emails I would have used. For example, I wanted a table of all my Lyft rides from a certain year with distances driven, start/end locations, cost, etc. All that info is available in the email you get after riding, so I figured Gemini could read my emails and organize the info. Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
- rurp 2y ago
  That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If it can't be trusted to produce something that is both accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it to every process it gets shoved into.
  - jjnoakes 2y ago
    I take a slightly different approach - I usually have AI assist in writing a script that does the task I want to do, instead of AI doing the task directly. I find it is much easier for me to verify the script does what I want and then run it myself to get guaranteed good output, vs verifying the AI output if it did the task directly. I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-reading a script is much quicker and easier.
- sagarkamat 2y ago
  I used Gemini to do a similar task and for whatever reason, i found it performed better when i broke down the task into individual steps.
belval 2y ago
Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those. I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone. My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
- xnx 2y ago
  > we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback. This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
- anon84873628 2y ago
  This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.
  - sensanaty 2y ago
    > that aren't just BS Having been on the receiving end of many of these, it absolutely is pure BS and I lose all respect for anyone who themselves have so little respect for their colleague's time as to subject them to the AI-written slop instead of actual genuine feedback. The whole fucking point is to give them actionable feedback, both good and bad, for them to work on themselves, not some generic hallucinated summary of some bullet points you haphazardly threw together. I can copy/paste the review prompt into ChatGPT myself, thank you very much, I don't need you to do it for me and to pass it off as your own genuine thoughts.
    - nonethewiser 2y ago
      I'll take your word on the reviews you actually received. As for the commenter you are replying to, you dont have any specific information on the review. Yet you declared its hallucinated, generic, haphazardly thrown together, simply copy pasted, etc. Consider that your conclusions are based off an idea in your head and not his actual review.
cyanydeez 2y ago
Enshittification #353: solving cuStomers problems has poor ROI
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
I'm kind of a cynic, so I'd say that the Workspace customer isn't you, the person who's using Workspace. It's your big company's SVP of IT or whoever who wants to spend money to adopt cool AI stuff so that he can say that he did AI stuff.
- tomrod 2y ago
  I'm in this role for my company. There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool. There is value for concise drafts. I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of cut their sinews.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I totally agree. I upgraded to the AI-enabled version of Google One because they gave a couple week free trial. I found it totally useless, and it reeked of "Some PM said we had to stuff AI in everywhere". Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.
verelo 2y ago
Yeah I’m tired of workspace getting more expensive and me getting zero additional value from it. I don’t want this, didn’t ask for it, and it actively annoys me.
thumbnailsketch 2y ago
What if there was something that communicated the company’s top priorities and helped everyone align and stay organized without so many meetings, and give concise drafts for your to-dos? Would that be something you’d try?
- treyfitty 2y ago
  I for one would love to try.
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
I just exited the toilet following 2.5 hours of back-to-back meetings, and was looking forward to actually getting some work done when the product owner grabbed me for a conversation about priorities for the sprint planning session that's scheduled in a couple of hours. In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work. There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently. /rant I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  Have you considered setting more meetings with various stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2 weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to change direction in an agile way?
  - Clubber 2y ago
    You really have to schedule a meeting to discuss an upcoming meeting, so the upcoming meeting can be more efficient. (yes this happened to me before)
    - be_erik 2y ago
      I too ran a pre-IPM for years. I still would. Why would I waste an entire team’s time when I can just collaborate with 2 people first?
      - BLKNSLVR 2y ago
        Something I heard that stuck with me was that, for important business decisions, the "meeting" is almost ceremonial-only: to make the decision offical. Such meetings should essentially be fast, no digressions, just 'the biz'. All the work to actually reach requisite agreement for the decision is done in the days / weeks leading up to the meeting via ad-hoc-ish one-on-one or one-on-very-few meetings (possibly including graft and corruption). The "decision" meeting isn't organised until the result is known and guaranteed. This maybe doesn't apply to Agile / Development-related meetings, but I'll keep trying to determine how to make it apply, such is my disdain for this (seemingly) waste of the team's time (he said, whilst posting on HN).
dragonwriter 2y ago
> The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the actions of everyone else who emails you.
lazide 2y ago
Well, that’s because you’re thinking as someone who likely has a stake in quality/specific outcomes actually happening. Or was raised/grew up in an environment where that was important. Notably, in my experience there is a high correlation with that background and being curmudgeonly. Mainly because that means someone has been responsible for outcomes, regardless of feelings. And something often has to give, and it’s usually feelings. It’s also hard to not be cranky or even angry if someone has to constantly be the one ‘not having fun’ or cleaning up messes so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart. There is huge market demand exactly for what you’re complaining about, which is faking things happening as convincingly as possible, precisely because being clear/concise, etc. helps with seeing the root cause of problems, and if someone is worried (or is legitimately) a root cause of the problem, of course they’ll consider that bad. For example, a good sign of a badly led organization is that it’s always busy, but never seems to get anything done. Everything is an emergency, so nothing really gets fixed, etc. Or there are constant meetings and emails, but nothing gets decided. People will pay good money for the right kind of wallpaper that makes that ugly wall look pretty again.
danpalmer 2y ago
I’m getting a lot of value out of NotebookLM drafting documents. If I’ve got a bunch of notes that need to be in a coherent design doc, it can give me a good enough first draft for me to edit into shape. Alternatively when I’ve got a design doc for something, but need to submit, say, a work request to another org, NotebookLM can take my doc and turn it into another format based on a doc template pretty nicely. These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can easily save me half the time to write these things.
- mark_l_watson 2y ago
  I only use NotebookLM a couple times a month, but when I use it I get value from it. I wanted to put out a new edition of a book I wrote last year so I ingested the PDF for the previous version of my book and some notes on what I was thinking of adding. Then in Chat mode I asked for suggestions of interesting topics that I didn’t think of and a few other questions, then got a short summary that I used as a checklist for things that I might add. I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my 20 minutes.
gherkinnn 2y ago
These LLMs are excel at making more. More emails with more words. More blog posts with more fluff. Making it open to more people means more usage means more numbers being more which means more money for the people building these systems. I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just more noise.
- bobxmax 2y ago
  Google's implementation of AI really shows the innovators dilemma in action These features are just so rudimentary you just know a bunch of MBAs from McKinsey came up with them over a 7 month and $25m
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
FergusArgyll 2y ago
It's decent at search
exe34 2y ago
management uses them to fluff up their emails and I use them to boil the emails down to actionable bullet points.
fsloth 2y ago
I feel quite the opposite. I’m not a native english speaker, but working at US subsidiary I must produces reports in english etc - and having an LLM proofread my texts for me is great. LLM:s are new modality to computing. If you need it, they are great. But just like excel/sheet have limited applications a LLM with data has limiited use as well.
mark_l_watson 2y ago
I don’t use it often either, but sometimes it is very useful. When I caught Covid last fall my wife incorrectly thought I had it three times. I was using a beta Google Gemini, and paying for it, and I asked “read my @gmail and tell me the date ranges when I have had Covid.” That worked, but to be honest I have tried similar things more recently that didn’t work. Perhaps there is a routing model up front that decides whether or not to use a lot of compute for any given query? Google also plans on charging more money for APIs for code completion plugins for IntelliJ IDs, etc. this year. I would like to see AI pricing models be sustainable, not give things away for free, and have lots of control over when I use a lot of compute. I actually have this right now because I usually use LLM APIs and write my own agents for specific tasks.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  Congrats on winning an argument against your wife. Billions well spent.
nonethewiser 2y ago
> it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise. I tend to agree, except these two things are kind of the same thing. It can make going through the noise easier by intelligently filtering out the noise or finding you the signal. Search. It doesn't necessarily need to eliminate the noise. Maybe AI would be better if it prevented the noise, and its definitely going to add noise (expanding a few basic thoughts into an email with lots of fluff), but it can also solve it.
registeredcorn 2y ago
> For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise. I think this really encapsulates something that I hadn't been able to put my finger on in regards to LLM summarization. What it seems to indicate is that, if you need a computer to summarize a large amount of text that someone has sent to you, there are two likely possibilities: 1) The information is incredibly dense/important/technical/complex. This necessitates the extreme length of the message - (think: technical documents, research papers, a rough draft of a legal notice, or your will.) For these sorts of things, you should not rely on an LLM to summarize it, because it may miss key details of the message. 2) The person sending it to you is bad at communicating, in which case the solution is help them learn better communication, rather than "de-noising" their clumsy wording into something comprehensible. "But what if its number 2, but it's coming from your boss?" Then I see two obvious points to consider: First, you should absolutely be telling them about the problem, regardless of the position that they hold. You can phrase it in a way that isn't rude. "Hey boss, I saw (message) but I'm not 100% the intent. I've actually noticed that with (other time)...I usually try to front-load the action items up front, and put the specifics lower down. Anyway, to make sure I'm tracking, you're talking about (action) on (thing), right?" Second, until (or unless) their communication style is de-noised, then part of your job is being able to "translate" their instructions. Using an AI to do that for you is a bad idea because, at some point or another they're going to be trying to speak to you in-person, or by phone. Not having dealt with their mannerisms in an unfiltered way might lead to you being "out of practice" and struggling much harder to figure out what they're trying to convey.
WhyNotHugo 2y ago
I also find that summarising content helps me digest it better. I have to fully understand the source in order to write the summary. The process of writing a summary is of immense value. Sometimes the summary itself is of minimal value.

verdverm 2y ago

I agree. I don't want all my existing work apps to take on LLM features I don't need. At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed. From a vague description, it can find the open source project I was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good summary of the project. deets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706997

dimitri-vs 2y ago
I really want to like Gemini Deep Research but I have had a pretty low ROI with it. It fails because it has no ability to evaluate the quality of sources, so some SEOd to hell page has equal weight as the deep dive blog post of a highly invested individual. Its also very hard to steer unless you provide paragraphs of context, if you provide too little it might hyper focus on something you said and go into some random rabbit hole of research.
- vrosas 2y ago
  Man if only there was a company out there specializing in the ranking page quality on the web…

ape4 2y ago

I can hardly wait to use it as an excuse. "Oh sorry I didn't do that because it wasn't in the AI summary" ;)

radarsat1 2y ago
I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2 weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the person in question would make such an irresponsible promise (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he was talking completely hypothetically and not promising anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next sprint. Glad I verified it.
- herewulf 2y ago
  So, instead of the people in the meeting spending a few minutes writing up a few notes to send to you about actionable next steps, you got to waste your time on the artificially intelligent fuck up. These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do less work.

macNchz 2y ago

I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people aren’t all that great at taking and sharing notes.

shinycode 2y ago
I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?
- tomrod 2y ago
  Indeed.
- macNchz 2y ago
  It's nice if you're the one presenting or leading the meeting, and/or if the person you've asked to take notes is not especially diligent. I've also been sent a photograph of someone's handwritten notes after a meeting and found it...not terribly useful.
  - shinycode 2y ago
    Yes you’re right. The handwritten notes I take I always keep them for myself. If I have to share something I clean it and summarize and type it by hand. I find useful to do it manually to make sure intent and comprehension are well transcribed from the meeting. If a person is not focused on the meeting then it could be worse. I’d rather not give this to an AI, again often context is key and unless you have access of month or years of cross history it might be difficult for an IA not to miss something. But it’s just a tool, everyone sees what tool fits nicely
2y ago

bambax 2y ago

How is AI in email a good thing?! There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote". And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".

hoyd 2y ago
Do you happen to have a link for that comic?
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  Not the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics. https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
  - bambax 2y ago
    Yes, that's the one.
  - monophonica 2y ago
    hah that is wonderful. thank you.
LtWorf 2y ago
This was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :D
- bambax 2y ago
  Really? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?
2y ago

n144q 2y ago

> I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any better.

nharada 2y ago

I had a few use cases with searching and organizing emails I would have used. For example, I wanted a table of all my Lyft rides from a certain year with distances driven, start/end locations, cost, etc. All that info is available in the email you get after riding, so I figured Gemini could read my emails and organize the info. Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.

rurp 2y ago
That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If it can't be trusted to produce something that is both accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it to every process it gets shoved into.
- jjnoakes 2y ago
  I take a slightly different approach - I usually have AI assist in writing a script that does the task I want to do, instead of AI doing the task directly. I find it is much easier for me to verify the script does what I want and then run it myself to get guaranteed good output, vs verifying the AI output if it did the task directly. I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-reading a script is much quicker and easier.
sagarkamat 2y ago
I used Gemini to do a similar task and for whatever reason, i found it performed better when i broke down the task into individual steps.

belval 2y ago

Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those. I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone. My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.

xnx 2y ago
> we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback. This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
anon84873628 2y ago
This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.
- sensanaty 2y ago
  > that aren't just BS Having been on the receiving end of many of these, it absolutely is pure BS and I lose all respect for anyone who themselves have so little respect for their colleague's time as to subject them to the AI-written slop instead of actual genuine feedback. The whole fucking point is to give them actionable feedback, both good and bad, for them to work on themselves, not some generic hallucinated summary of some bullet points you haphazardly threw together. I can copy/paste the review prompt into ChatGPT myself, thank you very much, I don't need you to do it for me and to pass it off as your own genuine thoughts.
  - nonethewiser 2y ago
    I'll take your word on the reviews you actually received. As for the commenter you are replying to, you dont have any specific information on the review. Yet you declared its hallucinated, generic, haphazardly thrown together, simply copy pasted, etc. Consider that your conclusions are based off an idea in your head and not his actual review.

cyanydeez 2y ago

Enshittification #353: solving cuStomers problems has poor ROI

CobrastanJorji 2y ago

I'm kind of a cynic, so I'd say that the Workspace customer isn't you, the person who's using Workspace. It's your big company's SVP of IT or whoever who wants to spend money to adopt cool AI stuff so that he can say that he did AI stuff.

tomrod 2y ago
I'm in this role for my company. There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool. There is value for concise drafts. I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of cut their sinews.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

I totally agree. I upgraded to the AI-enabled version of Google One because they gave a couple week free trial. I found it totally useless, and it reeked of "Some PM said we had to stuff AI in everywhere". Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.

verelo 2y ago

Yeah I’m tired of workspace getting more expensive and me getting zero additional value from it. I don’t want this, didn’t ask for it, and it actively annoys me.

thumbnailsketch 2y ago

What if there was something that communicated the company’s top priorities and helped everyone align and stay organized without so many meetings, and give concise drafts for your to-dos? Would that be something you’d try?

treyfitty 2y ago
I for one would love to try.

BLKNSLVR 2y ago

I just exited the toilet following 2.5 hours of back-to-back meetings, and was looking forward to actually getting some work done when the product owner grabbed me for a conversation about priorities for the sprint planning session that's scheduled in a couple of hours. In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work. There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently. /rant I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.

nine_zeros 2y ago
Have you considered setting more meetings with various stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2 weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to change direction in an agile way?
- Clubber 2y ago
  You really have to schedule a meeting to discuss an upcoming meeting, so the upcoming meeting can be more efficient. (yes this happened to me before)
  - be_erik 2y ago
    I too ran a pre-IPM for years. I still would. Why would I waste an entire team’s time when I can just collaborate with 2 people first?
    - BLKNSLVR 2y ago
      Something I heard that stuck with me was that, for important business decisions, the "meeting" is almost ceremonial-only: to make the decision offical. Such meetings should essentially be fast, no digressions, just 'the biz'. All the work to actually reach requisite agreement for the decision is done in the days / weeks leading up to the meeting via ad-hoc-ish one-on-one or one-on-very-few meetings (possibly including graft and corruption). The "decision" meeting isn't organised until the result is known and guaranteed. This maybe doesn't apply to Agile / Development-related meetings, but I'll keep trying to determine how to make it apply, such is my disdain for this (seemingly) waste of the team's time (he said, whilst posting on HN).

dragonwriter 2y ago

> The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the actions of everyone else who emails you.

lazide 2y ago

Well, that’s because you’re thinking as someone who likely has a stake in quality/specific outcomes actually happening. Or was raised/grew up in an environment where that was important. Notably, in my experience there is a high correlation with that background and being curmudgeonly. Mainly because that means someone has been responsible for outcomes, regardless of feelings. And something often has to give, and it’s usually feelings. It’s also hard to not be cranky or even angry if someone has to constantly be the one ‘not having fun’ or cleaning up messes so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart. There is huge market demand exactly for what you’re complaining about, which is faking things happening as convincingly as possible, precisely because being clear/concise, etc. helps with seeing the root cause of problems, and if someone is worried (or is legitimately) a root cause of the problem, of course they’ll consider that bad. For example, a good sign of a badly led organization is that it’s always busy, but never seems to get anything done. Everything is an emergency, so nothing really gets fixed, etc. Or there are constant meetings and emails, but nothing gets decided. People will pay good money for the right kind of wallpaper that makes that ugly wall look pretty again.

danpalmer 2y ago

I’m getting a lot of value out of NotebookLM drafting documents. If I’ve got a bunch of notes that need to be in a coherent design doc, it can give me a good enough first draft for me to edit into shape. Alternatively when I’ve got a design doc for something, but need to submit, say, a work request to another org, NotebookLM can take my doc and turn it into another format based on a doc template pretty nicely. These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can easily save me half the time to write these things.

mark_l_watson 2y ago
I only use NotebookLM a couple times a month, but when I use it I get value from it. I wanted to put out a new edition of a book I wrote last year so I ingested the PDF for the previous version of my book and some notes on what I was thinking of adding. Then in Chat mode I asked for suggestions of interesting topics that I didn’t think of and a few other questions, then got a short summary that I used as a checklist for things that I might add. I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my 20 minutes.

gherkinnn 2y ago

These LLMs are excel at making more. More emails with more words. More blog posts with more fluff. Making it open to more people means more usage means more numbers being more which means more money for the people building these systems. I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just more noise.

bobxmax 2y ago
Google's implementation of AI really shows the innovators dilemma in action These features are just so rudimentary you just know a bunch of MBAs from McKinsey came up with them over a 7 month and $25m
- deleted 2y ago
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FergusArgyll 2y ago

It's decent at search

exe34 2y ago

management uses them to fluff up their emails and I use them to boil the emails down to actionable bullet points.

fsloth 2y ago

I feel quite the opposite. I’m not a native english speaker, but working at US subsidiary I must produces reports in english etc - and having an LLM proofread my texts for me is great. LLM:s are new modality to computing. If you need it, they are great. But just like excel/sheet have limited applications a LLM with data has limiited use as well.

mark_l_watson 2y ago

I don’t use it often either, but sometimes it is very useful. When I caught Covid last fall my wife incorrectly thought I had it three times. I was using a beta Google Gemini, and paying for it, and I asked “read my @gmail and tell me the date ranges when I have had Covid.” That worked, but to be honest I have tried similar things more recently that didn’t work. Perhaps there is a routing model up front that decides whether or not to use a lot of compute for any given query? Google also plans on charging more money for APIs for code completion plugins for IntelliJ IDs, etc. this year. I would like to see AI pricing models be sustainable, not give things away for free, and have lots of control over when I use a lot of compute. I actually have this right now because I usually use LLM APIs and write my own agents for specific tasks.

mvdtnz 2y ago
Congrats on winning an argument against your wife. Billions well spent.

nonethewiser 2y ago

> it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise. I tend to agree, except these two things are kind of the same thing. It can make going through the noise easier by intelligently filtering out the noise or finding you the signal. Search. It doesn't necessarily need to eliminate the noise. Maybe AI would be better if it prevented the noise, and its definitely going to add noise (expanding a few basic thoughts into an email with lots of fluff), but it can also solve it.

registeredcorn 2y ago

> For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise. I think this really encapsulates something that I hadn't been able to put my finger on in regards to LLM summarization. What it seems to indicate is that, if you need a computer to summarize a large amount of text that someone has sent to you, there are two likely possibilities: 1) The information is incredibly dense/important/technical/complex. This necessitates the extreme length of the message - (think: technical documents, research papers, a rough draft of a legal notice, or your will.) For these sorts of things, you should not rely on an LLM to summarize it, because it may miss key details of the message. 2) The person sending it to you is bad at communicating, in which case the solution is help them learn better communication, rather than "de-noising" their clumsy wording into something comprehensible. "But what if its number 2, but it's coming from your boss?" Then I see two obvious points to consider: First, you should absolutely be telling them about the problem, regardless of the position that they hold. You can phrase it in a way that isn't rude. "Hey boss, I saw (message) but I'm not 100% the intent. I've actually noticed that with (other time)...I usually try to front-load the action items up front, and put the specifics lower down. Anyway, to make sure I'm tracking, you're talking about (action) on (thing), right?" Second, until (or unless) their communication style is de-noised, then part of your job is being able to "translate" their instructions. Using an AI to do that for you is a bad idea because, at some point or another they're going to be trying to speak to you in-person, or by phone. Not having dealt with their mannerisms in an unfiltered way might lead to you being "out of practice" and struggling much harder to figure out what they're trying to convey.

WhyNotHugo 2y ago

I also find that summarising content helps me digest it better. I have to fully understand the source in order to write the summary. The process of writing a summary is of immense value. Sometimes the summary itself is of minimal value.