Google's Latest Experiments in Labs | Hacker News Reader

Google's Latest Experiments in Labs

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70 pointstpmx33 comments

> To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your AI Test Kitchen conversations, interactions and demo outputs. Please do not include information that can be used to identify you or others in your AI Test Kitchen conversations or interactions. You will be able to delete your data while using a particular demo, *but once you close out of the demo, your data will be stored in a way where Google cannot tell who provided it and can no longer fulfill any deletion requests*. Your interactions are retained for up to four years.

Some fun facts from MusicLM privacy policy.

Also, Tailwind's "Join waitlist" link (https://thoughtful.sandbox.google.com/signup) leads me to a 404 page (maybe be region specific as I'm not based in N. America).

Just launched in the Google I/O keynote.

Seems like most of the waitlist signups are US only. Mullvad VPN worked for me.

They only allow you to signup for the search AI waiting list if you are using chrome.

on desktop maybe, on mobile even chrome does not work for me

It's pretty common for alpha-version or experimental software to be for a single browser only.

Then once you've locked down all the features for release, you go back and handle shims and multi-browser support, accessibility, and so forth.

I don't think Labs experiments being Chrome-only is something to complain about, even more so waitlist-only ones.

That makes sense. I just edited the comment so that it is (hopefully) less complaining and more factual.

I thought Google was as proponent of standards so things like shims and multi-browser support weren't really a concern /s

I can't even tell what you're being sarcastic about. What's sarcastic about Safari or Firefox not having implemented a standard yet?

> What's sarcastic about Safari or Firefox not having implemented a standard yet?

Is it really a standard if there's only one implementation?

Clicking on "Supercharge learning & ideation with AI" waitlist gives me: "404. That’s an error. The requested URL was not found on this server. That’s all we know."

Well done Google, well done :P

>"Workspace Labs is not accepting signups in your country at this time."

No idea if it's new or old one, but I got access to MusicLM almost immediately. What the point of having waitlist then?

Is MusicLM any good?

For once it's nothing like LLMs and image diffusion models we already have. It doesn't let you generate for any keywords that represent names, bands, brands, etc. So there no let's say easy way to compare what it generated with something that already exist. Not even Beethoven.

And while it can generate something when you ask for national anthem result is quite underwhelming. It can't generate music for specific musical instrument either.

What it good at is at somewhat following instructions: pacing, trying to fit specific mood. I managed to make it generate some Synth-pop as this subgenre less affected by ambient noise.

Interesting. I've been waiting for hours.

Waiting lists are terrible. I loose interest by the time I get let in.

Might be it have something to do with my Google account being from UK rather than US.

Yes - mullvad worked me to get on the waitlist

I used to be an active user of all the old Google Labs tools but now my personal Workspace account locks me out of everything, so meh.

Just use a free personal account?

Labs stuff isn't fully supported, by definition, so IT admins generally don't want to deal with it. Experimental stuff isn't intended for paid business use which is meant to have higher standards of reliability.

They said they were using a personal Workspace account, not a paid business account. They're likely on a legacy Google Apps account, as am I, for having signed up using a custom domain name 15 years ago.

Just making a new account isn't a realistic option when you can't move over purchases, YouTube uploads, and the millions of other pieces of data tied to that account.

I'm not saying to migrate entire accounts, just to use a free personal account if you want to try these new Labs products or features. Nobody's stopping you from doing that, and it's really easy to handle multiple Google accounts in Chrome or Firefox.

And if experimental things take off they can get integrated into the Workspace versions intended for business.

> Tailwind is your AI-first notebook

Can't wait to put my data into a new Google Product that will totally not get cancelled in 3 months.

Tailwind is a CSS framework, and some soon-to-be cancelled product from Google that shares (stole) its name isn't going to change that in my mind. Honestly, that name collision seems in poor taste. They couldn't come up with a name that's not already used by a popular open source project?

You think the VPs and marketing people who name this shit ever ask an engineer for their opinion? Lol

I have no idea what VPs and marketing people at Google do, but whatever it is, they don't appear to be very good at it.

Tailwind is a word in the English language, first mentioned in 1897: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tailwind

People always complain when companies trademark actual words as product names, can't have it both ways.

It's pretty obvious that when you prefix a product name with "Project" that's its not necessarily final. If the experiment is a success, it will indubitably be shipped under a less verbose name that doesn't collide.

It's called "Tailwind CSS".

I know that nothing will stop HN readers from rewarding yet another repetition of this shallow and repetitive joke. But it seems particulary mis-applied in this instance. This is labs, these are not billed as products in the first place! The headline is "help test early-stage experiments".

>> shallow and repetitive joke

Not a joke.

I get a 404 when I click "join waitlist".

Google IO has been a disappointing affair for the last 10 years, from only releasing on waitlists to never actually shipping to production. I sign up for their waitlists, but rarely actually hear back. I'm more than convinced today that Google's good days are long over.

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