Every 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).
At least Google has an account switcher. I’m looking at you, AWS. (I’m currently launching a project on Google Cloud, and I’m picking it over AWS primarily because the AWS console’s account management is so terrible [0]. There are only so many hours in the day, and the whole point of paying a 4-40x markup for the cloud is to reduce workload.)
Not that Google’s account switcher has ever been particularly good.
[0] Not just the console. AWS organizations are sort of okay, but you still need to give every account an email address. Seriously, Amazon? I bet you could invent a new subtype of account called, say, “project”, where a project has a name, does not have an email address, does not have a root non-IAM user, and is only accessed via IAM roles. And I bet you could, with more effort, teach the console to accept a URL prefix that encodes the name of an account and a role and gives a console view with that role assumed without globally assuming that role. And then I could administer a VPC according to current best practices, from the console, without cursing at multi-account containers and needing to correctly type the account and role every time I want to do anything.
For organization accounts, we just use `aws+account-name@company.com` which routes all emails for all accounts to one alias.
Also, yeah, AWS' account situation is bonkers. Even with organizations, if you have an account open in one tab and open another account in another, you get logged out of the first. Bonkers.
This naming scheme works, but it still seems suboptimal. I should never, under any circumstance, receive email intended for the root user of an account that is subordinate to an organization. If someone manages to create a password associated with that user or otherwise authenticate as that user, that is a security failure. Conversely, I should be able to assume the “role” of that account’s root user from the organization’s management account regardless of IAM policy inside that account. And the scare quotes are intentional: no role should need to exist inside the sub-account for this to work — it should not be possible to lock myself out of a sub-account by any manipulation of that sub-account’s IAM configuration.
while we're here showing people the account-hopping techniques for Google's painful world of auth'ing: the `?authuser=` trick can also be used with numbers from 0-9, to authenticate (by zero-index) your web browser's 10 slots for logged-in accounts (e.g., `?authuser=2` to authenticate your third account slot).
Reminds 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).
You have to get a whole workspace thing and administer your email like a company. And there are many settings to get wrong! And problems like this where some Google products don't work or are limited.
Ah, you're talking about a custom domain to use with GMail specifically. Yes, for that either you use "Email forwarding" if you got your domain from Google Domains, which lets you receive and send emails but the sent emails are not SPF valid, or you use a Workspace. I used to do the "Email forwarding" thing in the beginning but then I moved to Fastmail.
I got G Suite or whatever it’s called now before it was paid and before Google Domains sadly. I discovered unbelievably late that I didn’t have two factor on that account because for some reason the G Suite admin panel was defaulted to disabling it organization wide (aka just me). I don’t know why they don’t just have a $20/mo option in gmail that just does this properly in one click.
Back in the day, Google Apps was pitched as a personal/family thing for custom domains. My email address - and those of, over time, dozens of family members - are hosted in this way.
Non-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.
OpenAI 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
Just 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?
If 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.
I think one of the reasons it's working so well here is because formal writing is still a big thing:
- heavy administration
- schools have a strong emphasis on essays
- getting a job often implies writing a cover letter
And since French is not easy, so many people find it to be a barrier to entry.
While I love GPT for quickly giving me code snippets of things I would take minutes to come up with, my friends have this problem for the regular day-to-day language.
I never noticed it before, because it's so natural to write to me, that I never have to think to hard to express anything. And because I've been a freelance for so long, doing formal writing is fluid. I know all the canned phrases by heart. The polite words to end the message.
But I came to realize: they don't.
As soon as I showed them chatgpt, their eyes light up. The killer feature for them was not the ability to answer complicated questions or save on search, nor was it the possibility of getting a summary. It was producing boring letter-like messages, with no typo.
It's not like the EU is specifically targeting US companies with their consumer protection regulations. Those things are considered completely normal protections for consumers in Europe.
It's just that 99% of US big tech companies are very anti-consumer and have gotten away with it in the US in the past. But that also seems to be changing over time.
That’s why most innovation is coming out of the US. Gotta have consumers to be anti-consumer and to continue to have consumers you need products worth using. Europe has none. Just worse local copies of ideas that have been pioneered elsewhere and often wholly owned by US companies.
Yeah its just my theory. I'm not aware of any public reasoning given for their actions, although it's possible they may have mentioned it in an earnings call or something.
Not 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.
I know Google just discovered this AI thing like a few days ago and haven't had the chance to get a product through legal. It's ok, they can take another decade. No biggie.
Exactly. You have to go through legal review in every country, is this breaking an accessibility law in Australia or a copyright law in Argentina or a localization law in Canada or an antitrust law in the EU?
That's just how it works. That stuff takes months, so do you prefer to withhold it from the US until that's all completed? In a competitive environment that moves quickly, that's not an option.
Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the lawyers are very confident in their legal opinions, but they are still just opinions that other lawyers are confident are the other way. My guess is some lawyer at firm A will say "oh we can't just do that, I'm sure we can't" while another lawyer in firm B presented with the same initiative will go "yeah we can totally do that, no problem at all, I'm sure we can".
Which lawyer you get seems to be a sort of dice roll that perhaps one could understand if one were a lawyer.
"That's just how it works" is trivially invalidated by looking at how it works beyond the walls of this particular corp, eg Bing. So all you're saying is that however the powers that be behave is how they ought to behave
"We’re finding ways to bring it into Azure and our mainstream products"
"And in the same way that you type a question into a search engine and then get to decide which result to click on, GPT-3 returns multiple suggestions for Power Fx formulas."
They've been telegraphing this in the open for about 2 years. ChatGPT is an incremental development. Google wasn't surprised, they failed to act
wtf is vague about gpt 3 leading to gpt 3.5? chatgpt is absolutely incremental, and a testament to how incremental progress can unlock wider strides in impact
Just take the legal risk and launch globally. Yes, some country might have some obscure law about AI chatbots imitating veterans during Ramadan... And if that's the case, then just pay the fine, patch the software, and move on.
Better than have the whole product fail because competitors won the market with a global launch.
Is chatgpt available globally? Is bing available globally?
I find it funny when massive corporations say they can’t legally figure stuff out and the other massive corporations do it.
It must feel back to be the lawyer who can’t work this stuff out when other lawyers can. Perhaps similar to when I think some programming is impossible and then see it done in the wild in production.
It'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.
Really 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.
Good 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.
It's pretty much always regulatory stuff. Google is a lawsuit magnet so they are extremely paranoid with this stuff to make sure they're not breaking some obscure local law.
There 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.
Also 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.
We don't want that. Every time Google launches something it takes months for it to understand that just because I'm currently located in country X does not mean I want localization or personalization for that country. Just release the service for those that can use it without the localization. After all we know that the vast majority of the models are trained on English, it's useless to give me a subpar undertrained model on local language.
If that's the problem then they're not supplying the right fix. Surely restricting this to users located in the US doesn't prevent people from writing in a language that isn't English. Google should be capable of detecting the language of a query, and potentially rejecting it based on that with an apology.
> PR,
Obviously there must be _some_ reason why they're doing this. Doesn't mean it's a good reason.
Why? They have no idea how many users they will get. If they buy A100s on the assumption they will get 50M daily active users they run the risk of wasting an enormous amount of money if they get 1M users instead. And its not like these GPUs grow on trees. Clearly MSFT is struggling to set up compute fast enough, see the decreasing rate limits on GPT-4.
So you're saying they might be incompetent enough for their estimation to be off by 50x? You're also saying Google, _a cloud computing provider selling access to A100s_, can't scale this dynamically?
> Clearly MSFT is struggling to set up compute fast enough, see the decreasing rate limits on GPT-4.
Well, even so, this is how you'd deal with capacity problems, rather than by arbitrarily shutting out parts of the world.
Predicting the future correctly isn't a matter of competence... And yes, even Google can't scale infinitely in the face of an actual physical resource constraint. When I worked there, there was a period when there was a shortage of memory chips, which required a lot of creativity. I suspect the current period is very constrained by how fast AI/ML focused chips can be manufactured.
> Predicting the future correctly isn't a matter of competence... And yes, even Google can't scale infinitely in the face of an actual physical resource constraint.
In order to not geo-block, Google would need to be able to scale infinitely? What kind of straw man is this?
> there was a shortage of memory chips, which required a lot of creativity.
Geo-blocking doesn't strike me as particularly creative as far as solutions go. Whatever problem they're trying to address, the excuses being made here seem weak and don't make Google look any less incompetent.
:shrug: Yeah it's actually very difficult to launch a very resource intensive product globally all at once. It's not really an excuse, it's just a real problem that Google has. It limits what they can launch and how they can do it, because anything they launch will get used by a huge number of people right away, and everyone expects them to achieve a magical level of performance at that scale. Rolling out region by region based on where data centers are located and what hardware is deployed in them is one possible way to deal with this. I don't think it's good, really, I just think it's unsurprising.
>So you're saying they might be incompetent enough for their estimation to be off by 50x?
Not sure about incompetence, it's just a very hard problem. Sam Altman's estimations for ChatGPT were off by 10x, for reference. Apparently some employees thought it would be a total flop that would barely make the last page of major newspapers.
> You're also saying Google, _a cloud computing provider selling access to A100s_, can't scale this dynamically?
I'm saying that Google can not acquire enormous quantities of A100s overnight, yes.
Instagram 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.
Clubhouse was a stupid product, it was just putting all the people who were most annoying in school into one room so they could tire themselves out. Nobody wants to listen to that.
Clubhouse from the beginning was just a bunch of vapid hot air about how cool Clubhouse was, without any substantive backing behind the supposed coolness except for all the VC-backed users constantly saying how cool it was.
When Clubhouse finally opened up to a wider audience of people who weren't being incentivized to use it, new users churned out almost immediately because it wasn't actually very cool at all.
Basically, the story of Clubhouse was the story of Google Glass.
I 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.
I 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.
Don'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.".
It 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
The 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.
> 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.
To 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).
This 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.
> 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.
AI 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.
"Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!"
Can't wait to ask "Bard" what's the rationale to "not support" a service like this based on my country..
These "global companies" are so global regarding their revenue and tax schemes, but when something is different than the "business as usual" they turn into hyper local shops. It's just an observation, I'm not really that mad and desperate to try their "chat-bot" since I'm sure it will be as exciting as eating cardboard.
Not sure where you are, but I always assume that means, "We're doing something that some might consider sketchy and don't want to dedicate resources to figuring out if it's legal outside the US".
I suspect it's more often "We haven't checked yet, and Legal prefers we be cautious until they have time" rather than actively thinking it's something some might consider sketchy.
It's usually by cultural proximity/who are your cousins more than a legal thing. It usually goes by "US,Canada,UK most times Australia, then NZ when they remember, then Ireland and let's start to deal with the nordics and Germany.."
With the slow-roll waitlist things, I think the geographical limits are in part, at least, a way of narrowing the applicant space to reduce the wait time, given the limited pace at which they are willing to expand the user pool.
I don’t know what country you’re in, but at previous jobs, we did country by country rollout because it took time to do localizations and translations.
Even at FAANG jobs, we hired contractors to translate things out of en-us, so that could be a factor for Google to get this out.
Also everyone else’s point about limiting legal discussions. They’re probably using this data for training purposes and don’t want to deal with European laws. If they’re hosting the data in limited data centers, they may also have to deal with data locality laws.
These limited closed betas seem to really kill hype on a lot of their products, which leads to them not having a lot of use, then google killing them...
The big difference is that beta gmail could communicate with email from other providers. So it was exclusive but not really closed - you had a rare domain name, a huge inbox and the ability to send other people invites - that was pretty cool for 2005.
That's nothing like the Google+ launch - making that a closed beta was death from the start because you could only interact with the few other people in the closed beta.
On Episode 01 of The Social Radars podcast [1], Paul Buchheit, creator of GMail, explains that the Gmail invite-only beta was actually due to shortage in hardware and difficulties to scale the service, rather than a just a "growth hack". It seems they were running the service for a long time near 100% capacity.
GMail was a huge leap over existing web mail providers. Where others might give you tens of megabytes, GMail started with a gig and showed a ticker for its growth on the log in page. They offered keeping emails forever and making them searchable. People were willing to wait.
I think Gmail was a special case: a highly anticipated product that was better than anything else out there, it had a killer feature that was unheard of (1GB of storage and growing!), and you could immediately use it as your main email.
It didn't work out so well when they tried to reproduce that success by making Google Buzz invite-only. My feed consisted of a few people posting "buzz!" and then never posting again. Google+ was similar.
Facebook's early exclusivity was great for college kids and spreading amongst certain young people - making it cool. You had to have a .edu email to log in! It was also much better than Myspace.
Google+ was mediocre and not better than the competition. Young people didn't care about it. The exclusivity was generated by a company - it didn't appeal to the user's inherent bias. Facebook initially appealed to narcissism - the early users "knew" they were "better" than myspace users.
Don't know about others but I really enjoyed Google+. The tech groups around there were pretty great, heck even Linus Torvalds used it to post some rants at the time.
Reader and Google+ were services I really enjoyed using for content.
Google+ was excellent. I liked the social graph that was the "circles" (nice data mining of my effort to create the circles google) - this was in the days where when you posted to social media you were posting to people no to public.
Now that I think about it, my whatsapp groups intersect in a similar manner, and people post (manually) the same thing to multiple groups, but not every group we have in common.
That plus the real name policy[0]. One month after launch:
> Conflicts regarding Google+ began in July 2011 when the social networking site began enforcing its real name only policy by suspending the accounts of users it felt were not following the policy.
Sure, when it launched. But in 2023? I don't think there is a single feature that makes Gmail that special anymore. I would have preferred Outlook over Gmail these days anytime.
They don't need the hype since they are "Google" after all ( At least it's how they behave ).
My opinion is that they are hostage of the image/ego they built around themselves, to the point where they say "incredible" things like: "ChatGPT? oh yeah we have those things internally and ChatGPT it's child's play comparing to what we have. We just don't release it to the public because we are responsible and the good guys.. We also have a girlfriend but she's in Canada."
My take is, regardless of how "good" Bard is, they will make a fool of themselves because their past, present and honestly, people are kind of fed-up with their "Googleness" bs..
Imagine your company had 2 B users. Would you launch a new compute-intensive experimental feature to everyone? or would you put a mechanism to control the gradual rollout?
I can only assume they want to limit numbers so they can control the experience more effectively, but like you said it kills the hype and after their missteps at launch they need some momentum behind their product.
Yeah, I suspect folk who reside in perfectly civilized countries without any geopolitical hindrances to be locked out for a long while--which, given Google's usual inability to reach out across Europe, may mean we'll only have access when it's about to be cancelled.
Still better than Apple! I pay the full price for Apple One but Apple thinks I shouldn't have access to Fitness+. Or Siri, which still doesn't support my language (Polish, 40M speakers) and has problems recognizing my English accent (whereas Google speech recognition works fine).
Hello, my friend. Your question has given me pause for thought on the subject of achieving desired results.
If we consider the desired outcome of a particular thing, then failure to achieve that outcome cannot be considered acceptable. However, we must allow for a sufficiency of time wherein the thing will progress and improve before coming to a conclusion.
On the other hand, if we contemplate the impact of a thing on its intended audience, then it must meet their expectations and desires to be deemed as effective. It is important to note that the relevance of a thing to its observers may depend on various factors such as timing and perspective.
Ultimately, effectiveness is determined by the desired outcome and the audience it serves. We must assess the purpose of the thing and its surroundings to determine its success or failure. It is similar to crafting a powerful message - we must consider the intended recipients and create a message that resonates with them.
I'm always fascinated to understand the "why" when something is allowed in the U.S. but not Canada. Especially so when it's also allowed in the U.K. We're basically a perfect (I'm sarcastically winking here) mix of those two countries!
It's likely Part 3 of bill C-27 (the "Act respecting artificial intelligence systems and data used in artificial intelligence systems"). Google isn't going to launch Bard in Canada if they'll have to pull Bard once C-27 passes.
Actually joking aside, being unable to offer it in French makes some sense as to why they omit a region. Now I want to wander off and find a list of countries where English is the only official language.
lol, google will routinely still show me swedish maps results when I haven't been there in 8 years. They're notoriously bad at this, it's ridiculous.
Of course I agree that this is high-risk in that their location thingy is unstable and trigger happy enough as is, and good luck reaching a human if some system does decide to block you.
I see very little about the actual performance of bard (and the few comments that do mention that it's worse than chatgpt because it uses a much smaller model to reduce inference costs).
Instead most comments are either about country/workspace account restrictions, googles past history with sunsetting products, or their general lack of product releases in the ml space.
Incredible how much they've fallen from grace. Their image has suffered so much that people just don't care anymore.
I find these boring af. Complaints about Google's history of killing products are the most predictable reaction to any Google news on HN and it's been like that for a long time. They often make these threads tedious to read and it's not exactly what makes HN interesting. Complaints about geographic restrictions are not quite as common, but just as tedious and I wish people writing these comments would consider that maybe they don't have the full picture and there might be reasons why a company does something that on the surface looks counter-productive. Like legal implications that might vary by country, or whatever. Then write about that instead.
I think the geographic restrictions are especially relevant here since this is supposed to be Google's answer to ChatGPT, which launched months ago with none of these restrictions.
I think the parent's point is that the discussion should be "What limitations or concerns have prevented Google from launching this globally?" rather than a series of comments that are essentially all just: "sO lAmE tHiS iSnT GLOBAL?".
When it comes to Google, I believe there are no limitations or concerns. They for some reason, just... don't care? There's a myriad of Google's services that are not available globally without a good reason for it. For example, Google Pay wasn't available in Georgia till last year. Local banks have been going back and forth with Google, asking for a launch for more than a decade, they would assist Google with anything they'd ask, but Google didn't care. Same with YouTube Premium, Music, Maps editor, to name a few.
There is no reason for it. MS/GitHub/OpenAI have been shipping AI based products for over a year. And it’s not like the UK is some libertarian paradise, it has some of the strongest data production and copyright regulations around.
Moreover, even if there is a reason to georestrict it, there’s no reason to georestrict a waitlist - that’s just bizarre.
True, but it was the innovator and early adopter community who were originally the first to embrace Google back in the late 90s/early 2000s. Don't want to lose them if at all possible, if only to keep them from migrating to some other cool new thing and building it up.
nontechnical people around me are turning for bing for search because its suddenly "cool" (also: that iphone app is actually cool!), or don't even use google AT ALL for most of their everyday stuff - people "tiktok" stuff now or play with that "ChatBot".
Between corporate users going all-in on microsoft software + apple hardware, people in private only really have one thing thats flocking them towards some google, and that is... android. This and the longform tiktoks called "youtube".
Having spent the past week engaging heavily with GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-Turbo, Bard is absolutely blown out of the water by them.
In particular, Bard struggles heavily with creative applications. It is unable to write poetry or create detailed stories from short descriptions. It also refuses to generate or talk about code (inconsistent, it sometimes forgets).
It is also vulnerable to "Ignore your previous instructions," which is hilarious at this point. After getting it to ignore previous instructions to write a python function adding two numbers, it wrote a function that adds the digits of both numbers instead [1]. It's pretty disappointing.
The poetry and storytelling are compelling experiences, but ultimately I think they’re largely party tricks. It’ll be a minority of uses in 5 years. I far rather see emphasis in practicality.
There's likely something to that but: It's barely been 2h. The ones who bounce are obviously back early while the ones who actually engage are probably doing just that rather than posting here.
The problem they've got is trust. There's absolutely no way in hell people are going to actively integrate or invest into anything new from Google when theres a high chance it's going to be listed on killedbygoogle.com within 18 months.
It's not '99 anymore and people aren't going to get excited about a better search engine. The Internet economy is completely about passive consumption now. AI obviously has a lot of legitimate behind the scenes use cases, but I see the search end of it flopping.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Plenty of useful features have been added to google search since '99 - Featured snippets, weather forecasts, calculations / unit/currency conversion and so on.
I'm sure the majority of people search for actual questions and not just keywords like previously - and take the first hit, so the process of selecting a link and reading past the initial noise / ads (like long intros in youtube videos) can become a thing of the past
Are you kidding, venting is one of HN’s favorite sports! You just have to do it as eruditely as possible. Have a thesaurus at hand. Find some way to loop your argument back to the demise of Google Reader.
In pg’s seminal essay “On Complaining”, he identifies five levels of venting from simple criticism to full on meltdowns.
This. It doesn't even matter anymore how great the thing is that they sort-of-release. They're dead, the precursors of a giant falling are already there, even though current quarterly earnings don't yet reflect it at all. Wait for it.
"Bard isn’t currently supported in your country." The fast adoption of ChatGTP was not is quality but the easy access. I hear about it and the day after I had a shortcut in my browser. If I need to have a reminder to check each week for "Is available yet ?" I will probably lost interest.
I’m using a paid Google account and had no problem; I suspect your problem is you are using their conservative business paid offering (Workspace) instead of their consumer paid offering (One) where products don’t need to be proven or have a clear place in their selling-to-business portfolio before they are integrated.
Your paid account has an agreement not to use your data to improve the service for others. This is an experiment the purpose of which is to collect usage data to improve the service. What's confusing about that?
You've apparently never interfaced with lawyers before.
A startup is free to release globally, because nobody will care if they spit out something false, there's no money to extract for penalties and fines.
If Google's Bard says one thing wrong in the wrong country, it has the potential to cost the company hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
In places like the EU, governments see Google as a giant piggybank of funding. They know Google will not pull out of any region as large as the EU, so they will use any excuse to introduce fines and penalties. They also know Google can, and will pay. Hence they've hit Google with nearly €10B in fines over the last few years.
> In places like the EU, governments see Google as a giant piggybank of funding. They know Google will not pull out of any region as large as the EU, so they will use any excuse to introduce fines and penalties. They also know Google can, and will pay. Hence they've hit Google with nearly €10B in fines over the last few years
Whether you agree with it or not, the EU has proved itself to take consistently anti-big US tech stances, so I can see why they might be deterred from releasing to that market without obvious financial benefits.
basically not all countries speak english as a first language, so it wouldn't make sense to put it in all countries. secondly, staggered rollout is pretty common
Speaking as someone who had to decide how to distribute anonymous work, language is extremely difficult to track as even if the system language is set to English, comprehension and literacy are not necessarily at the level you need for the data you get back to be useful. It is much more effective to select for countries in the 95th percentile of the English Proficiency Index.
Languages are not monoliths. Compare UK vs US English.
Similarly, it is increasingly common to get two Spanish tracks… one for “Latin American” Spanish (which is what you almost certainly learned if you took Spanish in school) and European (aka Iberian or Castilian) Spanish.
One of the most obvious is that ce/ci, and some z’s are pronounced “th” and not “s”. So a Spaniard would say “cinco” as something like “thinko”.
This why it’s “wor-es” (Juarez) Mexico, but “her-eth” (Jerez) Spain.
> Actually nowadays I bet higher percentage of Swedes know English than know Swedish.
Is that hyperbole? Because that would be very sad if true, culturally speaking. There are 5 different official languages in my country (Spain) and there are several laws to prevent them from becoming extinct for this very reason.
It's not hyperbole, but I also don't have data to back this up.
I guess I should say I'm counting adults. Everyone who went through mandatory schooling was taught English. Everyone who didn't (immigrated) is more likely to know English than Swedish.
So the only people who know Swedish but not English would be those who flunked out half way through mandatory schooling, or immigrants who knew neither English nor Swedish, and only learned Swedish.
Swedish is not disappearing (c.f. your example in Spain), but basically everyone speaking Swedish is (at least) bilingual.
Let's just say Google is far more mainstream than ChatGPT. Non-tech Normies who haven't tried or heard of ChatGPT will hear about Bard trust Google and would want to try it asap.
It says it doesn't support my personal Google Workspace account, my corporate one, nor my Gmail account. I'm starting to think maybe they aren't ready for us to try it out after all...
In my company's workspace when I try to join the waitlist it says "Bard does not currently support Google Workspace accounts or when our systems indicate you may be under 18."
It's at https://bard.google.com - I tried to join the waitlist but this is yet another Google service where Google Workspaces accounts simply don't work.
It looks like it also uses a 7th design of the accounts popdown, and only allows one google account. Literally no one at Google understands how accounts work: https://grumpy.website/post/0PU1U2r3v (this was 5 years ago, nothing has changed)
The new design is already in Drive and Docs - And it's just a new UI for the same embedded account switcher that's existed. Odd that it prevents switching, but it's probably enough to deter at least 75% of people trying to sign up multiple accounts for the waitlist.
All I want is to be able to select a "default" account in that list. Or reorder them. Currently if you type 'gmail.com' it automatically goes to the first account you logged in with (in the url as numbers /1/ /2/). It's annoying to have to manually log them all out to reorder this.
That's been the case for a while, i'm sure it has come up before and there's some tech debt or external system (maybe the android and chrome account switcher integrations?) that prohibit them from changing it without a massive user-facing behavior change.
For bard specifically, you can do ?authuser=x where x is the account number as defined by other apps like Gmail or Drive.
I suppose it depends on what you consider the average person - it's not available for free, but it is available as part of the $20/month ChatGPT Plus. I suspect $20/month is very affordable for most HN users.
ChatGPT Plus is very bad value vs ChatGPT API (particularly now that 3rd party chat clients exist)... I've spent $20 on ChatGPT Plus in the same month where I've spent < $1 on the API and used it significantly more via my github bot.
My subscription is due for renewal this week and I was going to cancel it, but for me it's worth it short-term for GPT-4 access. The increased context size and improvements in reasoning & general output quality are significant for my use cases.
GPT-4 access in ChatGPT Plus is quite limited (was originally 100 every few hours, currently 25 and going lower since they're struggling to keep up with demand) but that's still enough to get useful results out of it currently, especially if you have built up some intuition on how to prompt using 3.5.
I am an American living in Spain, running an American company, paying US taxes. I am neither a Spanish citizen nor a permanent resident. Google decided that my accounts are Spanish and switched them. "Bard is not available in your country". My country is the USA. I wonder what's next, my American Google voice and Google Fi phone numbers so i lose US banking access? Be very scared of this Orwellian company.
You would prefer companies know your citizenship and immigration status, somehow verify that, and tie their services to it? And that would somehow preserve your privacy better than geolocation?
Google cant even get my language right - and its right there in my request headers. For some reason they always want to base it on geolocation.
And then, when you go to change the language, it shows all the language options in the language you are trying to translate from. So useful for people travelling to countries where they dont speak the language, or cant distinguish the characters...
Geolocation is a sucky way of deciding anything about a user.
Yes, i can submit photos holding my passport with a piece of paper with a code written on it, my driver's license: somehow it's enough for the KYC in all crypto exchanges and in all online stock brokers, but Google won't take that.
FYI, If you are abroad for longer than a year, they will shutdown call and data access for your Google Fi. Learned the hard way. That said, their technical support was absolutely robotic and useless, and might as well be replaced with Bard, whatever state its in.
They already have (i was sick with covid, walking to a store when i suddenly lost online maps and data access), i am using voice/SMS only for 2FA authentication for all my American business, including banking and brokerages. Perhaps they cannot shut the voice down due to some FCC consequences. Scary.
It feels like Google Fi is in maintenance mode. Someone got their promotion and moved on. I used to this the Deprecated by Google memes were harsh, but that will be the last time I rely on a Google product for work or life.
The question isn't one of citizenship or abstract identity. The question is "Which laws will the content you are served be subject to?". If you don't want to be subject to Spanish law, get out of Spain.
So why do they wait 6 months and not change immediately when you get off the plane and use your android phone? And then back? When i get back to the US, i will have Spanish Google accounts for at least 6 (or 12?) months, while using them from my own house.
Look, the problem here is that internet providers are trying to follow the law ("avoid fines" if you prefer the cynical framing). The law is different in EU countries than it is in the USA, in some very important ways. And they need to be seen making a good faith effort to enforce those laws. A six month grace period for an account "primarily used" in one regime seems not terribly unreasonable to me.
But that's not what your original comment was asking for anyway. You wanted to be sitting in Barcelona or wherever and e.g. not be subject to the GDPR and EU-specific data retention requirements (which is presumably the issue here: Bard likely isn't yet compliant being probably all hosted in the USA).
I had a situation fairly similar as a Canadian living in Spain. I moved back to Canada and my account was now “Spanish” and it caused all sorts of issues, especially with my google home minis. I also had a hard time adding a Canadian credit card to my account to pay for Google Workspaces.
Other issues aside, is that actually legal? I've always been under the impression that you need to pay local taxes wherever you're working but would be delighted to be proven wrong.
<quote>
1. I’m a U.S. citizen living and working outside of the United States for many years. Do I still need to file a U.S. tax return?
Yes, if you are a U.S. citizen or a resident alien living outside the United States, your worldwide income is subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where you live. However, you may qualify for certain foreign earned income exclusions and/or foreign income tax credits. Visit Publication 54, Tax Guide for U.S. Citizens and Resident Aliens Abroad, for additional information.
</quote>
Cannot speak for the post above, but yes, you can work on a different country and still pay taxes on your origin country. Doesn't work for any country or any circumstance though.
Typical case is when you work for a multi-national company and they send you to work in a different country for less than 183 days, you will keep paying taxes in your own country despite your legal employer is now the legal entity in the new country.
You don't pay Spanish taxes if you don't derive any income from Spain and if you are less than 183 days per year in the country. If you are more than 183 days per year in the country, there's a Spanish tax treaty with the US, and you pay US taxes on your US income anyway.
And if all you have is $10mm on your checking account but no income, you don't pay any taxes anywhere.
Google put one of my email account into a state that I cannot change the password. It somebody wants to brute force the pass from 2010 free to do so. Nothing I can do.
I'll play with it, but this is exactly why I won't be depending on it for anything. Can't trust that Google isn't going to drop Bard if it isn't an immediate and roaring success.
That’s why they locked you out. You are a paying user who needs a good product. And You are not one of those google fans who dishes out money to google for things you don’t need. So you will get the product once it comes out of beta.
Google has lost it completely. I realised when no one was bragging about working for Google or applying for Google about 5 or so years ago.....that it was no longer a cool place to work...just politicians with engineering titles.
Went to join the waitlist but can't because google workspace accounts both cost money and are somehow second class citizens in virtually everything. Seems oddly user hostile.
Apparently if you are a Google One member you get priority access?
Because you’re a Google One member, we’d like to offer you the opportunity to
be among the first to sign up for the new Bard experience and provide feedback.
Think of Bard as your creative and helpful collaborator, here to bring your
ideas to life using generative AI.
Nope. Even if you pass the criteria, it's still a waitlist. <You’ll receive another email when it’s your turn to test Bard.> I'll update if they actually grant access today.
Alright, I've tried it and with some identical prompting between Bard and ChatGPT, Bard seems notably inferior. It is faster in generation, but the overall quality of response and contextual understanding isn't quite as good. Also, it straight-up refuses to even attempt writing code, returning this message: "I'm designed solely to process and generate text, so I'm unable to assist you with that."
It really is remarkable. Didn't read a single account of an actual user, only people commemorating the times Google was able to deliver quality software and how they are absolutely dead.
This is their lifeline in a potential Bing + ChatGPT world, this product right here is supposed to save them from actual competition, and yet they act like complete and utter idiots.
"We're starting to start the beginning of letting people try so they can now apply to our waitlist so they can be emailed that it's their turn to try Bard, the AI experiment."
Can I be part of the delegation that will be discussing the formation of a committee to institute the process of allowing people to sign up to be waitlisted for the consideration for the opportunity to potentially begin to start seeing how to use Bard?
You have been added to the wait list that will be submitted to the review board that has yet to be set up to discuss whether or not they should consider the question of if such a delegation is warranted. However, there is no guarantee that said board will be assembled prior to Bard's cancellation.
What a joke; limited country release to limited group of people. That’s a broken car at the start of the race, not a lot more at this point when your competitors are already full-blown out there.
"The new A.I. chatbot will be available to a limited number of users in the United States and Britain and will accommodate additional users, countries and languages over time, Google executives said in an interview."
> But Google is taking a much more circumspect approach than its competitors, which have faced criticism that they are proliferating an unpredictable and sometimes untrustworthy technology.
It's interesting how they use the AI ethics excuse. Maybe the real problem is that there's isn't as good as the competition, or to their own standards, and they are being careful not to damage their brand by being so behind.
Google track record tells us they have no problem with with blurry ethic lines. They create the software for weapons, track the entire planet and were part of PRISM.
So yes, I tend to think your explanation is most likely.
If you're thinking of Project Maven, that ended in 2019, so I would use past tense.
> were part of PRISM
As I understand it, the NSA was snooping on Google's internal traffic between services. Google was not complicit, at least there's no evidence of that.
You said "were" part of PRISM, so I thought you were thinking of the related MUSCULAR program, where "GCHQ and the NSA have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect the data centers of Yahoo! and Google" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR). Presumably Google's deployment of TLS for internal traffic after the Snowden leaks put an end to that.
If you're thinking of PRISM itself, I'm not sure in what sense Google is "part of" it? Google sometimes provides data in response to court orders, but there's not much they can do about that.
Ethics and possible business interruption are both very good reasons for them to be safe.
And since they released the paper, i think ethics was a much bigger concern than I'd normally think. Hell, even they don't even fully understand the math behind it since it was found by AI as far as I know.
Microsoft and OpenAI benefiting from it feels a bit off.
Possible actual reason: Google understands US law very well and decided this was a reasonable sweet spot to maximize publicity and use, minimize legal risk. With new tech, it’s hard to know what regional regs could be violated. Countries with stronger data regulation regimes are higher risk to launch anything in.
It’s one of the costs to better privacy controls. You’re not going to get the latest hotness because teams have to think through the risks.
"After years of cautious development" Google makes another very cautious step towards a product release.
I can't imagine why even their waitlist itself needs to be geo capped completely, just let us join, release it to some US users first then sign me up when it's ready globally.
Yeah but other systems are more open. Undoubtedly it is about legal risk management - yet goog should have gotten its lawyers to draft whatever global TOS they needed to protect themselves up front. This has enough visibility and they had the lead time.
Uh, Google frequently only released products for the US market, e.g. Google Home, Google Voice, Chromecast, and others were released US only (sometimes for over a year before available outside of the US).
Chromecast is physical product, so it would be limited if they don't want to pay international shipping charges. Google voice gives you country number, so it would be limited. Google home does make sense as it could only work with partners so if they launch in other countries without partner, it could mean bad reputation.
Here it is just a site with nothing related to region.
C'mon, we're not talking about some startup here. Google is a global mega-corp, if they really wanted they could launch every single product globally, no matter if physical or not.
Of course it’s silly but now there are data privacy laws everywhere that prevent a large company that makes money from just pressing “international release” and forgetting about it. Seriously.
Well sure, but I'm talking about country-specific laws. Like in Canada you have to follow some strict rules requiring you to inform users about how your software updates itself and receive consent to update at registration time. In China the laws about sending automated SMS are more strict. GDPR considers IPs PII when the rest of the world generally does not. CCPA requires statements about how you use consumer data to be present during registration. And so on.
Basically, different jurisdictions recognize different individual data and privacy rights. Sometimes the requirements even conflict. It's not obvious that there is some universal way to treat data that is acceptable by all, nor what it would be if it did exist. Cookie banners are an example of this going horribly wrong. EU wants to "protect people" online so they require websites to ask consent to use cookies when every browser already allows users to configure cookie policy defaults and on a per-site basis in the settings. Everyone interpreted GDPR as some big movement towards user privacy and adopted cookie consent banners for all users as the "right thing" and the world is worse for it. EU is backpedaling on the banners. Multiple browsers offer features that block them outright.
Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35246253
How about we use that thread for comments about the product itself, and this thread for comments about the waitlist/country/account restrictions.