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Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

Kinda feels like the main thing google launches is waiting lists.

Yep, launching things slowly and testing them before releasing wide. Seems like a good practice when you're introducing a new technology to the world.

I get it, but the launches are always about what you can now do then slowly followed with "some partners can register interest".

For example for palm/bard this was my experience:

"Hey we have this amazing LLM!"

"Great, given you are a company can I pay you money above your costs for this service?"

"No but you can register for updates about when the wait-list will open"

They announced cool features for Google docs as well that I can't use.

Some of the things I've seen announced were maybe a year ago and still nothing. Just a wait-list or less.

Looking back at the promises made at I/O 2022, most of the products were released timely (for instance, Docs auto-summary, an AI feature, came out in March for Workspace), although some could be in a better spot:

- Immersive mode in Maps (also AI, using NeRF) has only recently added just 5 cities,

- The screenshot-then-Multisearch Near Me is technically shipped, but it seems super-rough; I screenshot my keyboard and it suggested a specific brand of pasta across nearby supermarkets,

- I am still waitlisted for access to LaMDA through the AI test kitchen (and given this year’s I/O, things seem to take a different direction).

There is no question that ChatGPT’s release in particular went by a more successful playbook comparatively.

Sure, but look at Bard it was on wait-list for what 3 months? Now it's available in 180 countries... for free.

Not everything gets launched because sometimes they find out in that testing period that they got it wrong.

After the big hype of it yes. And the models are not really available, they've got a little playground for some unspecified model.

And when it underperforms relative to expectations, they claim it's not running the best model they have.

There are models available in GCP under Vertex AI category, I'm using the API to access them.

Oh that's great. Curious what the model sizes are but then to be fair gpt4 isn't publicly saying that either.

Side smaller complaint - whats the point in these wait-lists if they never tell me when stuff actually launched.

These were available right at announcement time and not wait listed, I was using them while the keynote was still going on. The lists are for other products & wrappers around the foundational models.

I haven't seen otter or unicorn models, nor can I find tune them yet.

Palm 2 is available?

yes, it's powering Bard and available as chat-bison@001 in GCP

It comes in 4 sizes, I've only seen two so far

https://console.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/model-garden

It also traps them in a continual cycle of missing the hype wave, and then shutting down the unpopular product a few years later.

I think in this case they just know the demand is RED HOT and they don't have nearly the supply to go around. I don't think it's really the typical new product concerns on this one (product-market fit, are we covering use cases, are there technical problems, etc.). They know people want this and would rather have it right this second, problems and all, than wait for a slow rollout; Google just doesn't have the supply to go around.

Then sell it for more.

Just give me a price. Or let me bid on it.

Or, don't announce it like it's launched until it's usable.

If your demand for this is so urgent, it sounds like you want your own hardware. Here you go, that’ll be 38k for just the H100:

https://serverevolution.com/nvidia-900-21010-0000-000.html

Does that come with the model weights?

Not really relevant then to their announced products is it?

What model weights is the Google's A3 supercomputer supposed to come with? It's an announcement of new hardware available in GCP.

Sorry got mixed up with a conversation in a different thread more specifically about the wait-lists around palm.

Imagine if Apple when launching a new iPhone would first launch to a small country for testing, like Philippines or something, and then slowly expand worldwide. That would drive consumers nuts.

And once you finish opening up the service kill it very quickly because it doesn't make as much money as search and start working on the next thing.

The Gmail waiting list was one of the most legendary waiting lists. Anyone else remember inviting people to Google Docs?

i sold quite a few gmail invites for 99c each on ebay. it was fun.

And my main worry is: are they just going to cancel the new thing that my company invested six months and $250,000 of engineering time integrating with…

Probably doesn't matter that much because it's just hardware. Presumably not that hard to run your software on another intel box with nvidia GPUs. There's also plenty of demand for nvidia GPUs right now, still no guarantee given it's Google, but it would be hard not to make money with this.

No, not for GCP stuff.

I don't know of a single GCP product that's been shut down, although I could be missing something. But their track record for GCP is, I think, what you would want a cloud provider's record to be.

(I should mention that I work for GCP. But this is just based on my own memory.)

This is the way.

Gmail was a waitlist or invite only for many years. And that must’ve been their most successful product launch since search

That was nearly 20 years ago though. That's an eternity in tech years. Google and the industry have changed since then.

Wait lists and shut downs

Quote of the year

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