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Comment by bbotond | Hacker News Reader

“Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!”

The Bard model (Bison) is available without region lock as part of Google Cloud Platform. In addition to being able to call it via an API, they have a similar developer UI to the OpenAI playground to interactively experiment with it.

https://console.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative/langua...

Thank you!

Is that free or do you have to pay?

Also do you need to change the options like Token Limit etc?

It's completely free. No tokens nothing.

But it can't be used unless I enable billing, which I am not willing to do after reading all the horror stories about people getting billed thousands overnight. I'm not willing to take the risk that I forget some script and it keeps creating charges.

Use a CC or debit that can limit charges. Privacy.com is a generic one. There’s others. Also Capital One, Bank of America, Apple Card and maybe some others have some semblance of control over temporary CCs.

Ideally one would want to be able to have a cap on the amount that can be spent in a given period.

Thanks for this! I had a temporary Cap One card on my cloud accounts. I’m going to switch them to Privacy.com ones to limit amount if I can’t find another solution.

Did they release the Codey or Unicorn models publicly yet? Or say when they might do that?

it's also really, really bad and fails compared to even open source models right now.

God, what happened to Google. What a fall from grace.

Alpaca is pretty good though.

They have 100,000 employees pretending to work on the past.

They have no leadership at the top. Nobody that can steer the ship to the next land (or even anybody that has a map). Who is actively working at Alphabet that has the authority to kill Google search through self-cannibalization? Absolutely nobody. They're screwed accordingly. It takes an enormous level of authority (think: Steve Jobs) and leadership to even considering intentionally putting at risk a $200 billion sales product. The trick of course is that it's already at great risk.

They don't know what to do, so they're particularly reactive. It has been that way for a long time though, it's just that Google search was never under serious threat previously, so it didn't really matter as a terminal risk if they failed (eg with their social network efforts; their social networks were reactive).

It's somewhat similar to watching Microsoft under Ballmer and how they lacked direction, didn't know what to do, and were too reactive. You can tell when a giant entity like Google is wandering aimlessly.

Google's passion for region locking is insane to me

Its a legal thing, not something they want to do

What law prohibits Google from making Bard available outside the USA?

It's blocked in the EU because they don't want to/can't comply with GDPR.

It is not GDPR, it is available in some countries outside the EU with GDPR-like privacy regimes.

This is naïve though. Regulation — especially such as this — has to be enforced and there is obviously room to over and under interpret the text of the law on a whim, or varying fines. OAI knows this and looking at the EU lately, what they’re doing is wise.

Which is interesting, because if they can't comply within the EU, then how do they comply outside of the EU. With that I mean, if they have concerns that there is private data of EU citizens somewhere in that, then that is also in there for users outside of the EU. That said, they do not comply with GDPR anyway. If that its not the case, then they could also enable it for users within the EU.

Simple: GDPR (or any EU law) is not enforceable outside EU

Some nuance:

If Google gobble up data about EU citizens then they fall under GDPR.

It doesn't matter that they don't allow EU citizens to use the result.

If our personal data is in there and they are don't protect it properly they are violating EU law. And protecting it properly means from everyone, not just EU citizens.

The gobbling happens in realtime as you use it

Actually, in case of Google it is, because they still do business within the EU.

That’s a common belief, but it’s wrong. In principle an EU court could decide to apply the GDPR to conduct outside the EU; and in the right circumstances, a non-EU court might rule that the GDPR applies.

Choice of law is anything but simple. Think of geographic scoping of laws as a rough rule of thumb sovereign states use to avoid annoying each other, rather than as a law of nature.

GDPR is likely not enforceable if you have no presence in EU whatsoever, if you have no assets in EU and no money coming in from EU.

Anything Google does with data of EU residents is subject to GDPR even if that particular service is not offered within EU, and it is definitely enforceable because Google has a presence in EU, which can be (and has been) subjected to fines, seizures of assets, etc.

It's a risk mitigation strategy, these things are not black and white.

Making it unavailable in the EU decreases the likelihood and severity of a potential fine.

They clearly can with all their other products, as can OpenAI since they've been unblocked. They're just being assholes because they can.

Do you have a source on this? Given that the UK has retained the EU GDPR as law[1] - I don't really understand why they would make it available in the UK and not the EU, seeing as they would have to comply with the same law.

[1] - https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-and-the...

What's the excuse for Canada being omitted

We're small and no one cares about us...

It's available here in the UK, so it's not USA exclusive.

I was just on a cruise around the UK and I couldn't access Bard from the ship's wi-fi. That surprised me for some reason. Should've checked where it thought I was ...

Eh, more like limiting rollout because they can't/don't want to handle the scale.

Same for me, I’m in Estonia :(

You can use a VPN to use an American connection, it doesn't matter where your Google account is registered.

Thanks, I’ll try it! (I’m in Hungary)

Not necessarily American, you just have to avoid EU and, I believe, Russia/China/Cuba etc.

I'm in Switzerland and Bard is locked out, we do not go by EU laws because we are not part of the EU. We have plenty of bilateral deals but still.

But don't you sill have privacy laws very similar to the GDPR?

In practice Switzerland adopts EU law with minor revisions because doing otherwise would lock Swiss businesses out of the EU internal market.

The Swiss version of GDPR is coming in September:

https://www.ey.com/en_ch/law/a-new-era-for-data-protection-i...

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