Labs.Google
labs.google
labs.google
I hope it happens to them all. Companies shouldn't last forever.
Meaning stuff that floats, epilepsy-inducing strong color contrasts, "brutalist" fonts, big photos of people's faces instead of text that should explain what the "labs" part is all about. I closed the tab after a quick scroll-down, hoping that at some point some fixed and detailed text section would show up, it didn't.
Most probably is pure SEO ;-)
The "Experiments" and "Labs" stuff at Google always feels like it exists because the bigger org can't be convinced to do something fast, but in getting it out this way they also cause it to never be integrated into the main money making piplines of google either thus dooming whatever tech they wanted to get out there.
Looks like we're starting to see the fruits of Google's labor since turning the dial to eleven after OpenAI stole the show. I have no horse in this race but I'm guessing within a year Google has market share (mind share?) parity with OpenAI.
Did that happen to anyone else here?
We should encourage any and all endeavors to build new useful tools. I agree that Google hasn’t been on par with other big players out there, but at least they’re trying. It’s so “trendy” to hate on Google, meanwhile everyone’s using at least one of their products every single day
Like we saw you doing Magenta 5 years ago and early image gen almost a decade ago, culturally Google needs to get away from this academic brainworm that the research is the work and the citations the payoff not the actual productization and the users+revenue. Because every company making big moves in this space and eating their lunch certainly has, and in a 2-3 years the biggest movers wont even have come from academia at all.
Does canada (or any other GDPR adjacent country) love google?
iPhone, lockdown mode
But I almost have no idea what it is.
I say almost, because I guess it's something to do with AI.
I'm at that life stage where I do not want to discuss on Discord how AI can become a creative thought partner.
Honestly Google, just get over yourself already! ;-)
Best I can tell, it's now meant to be a page where people can go to see AI projects (not necessarily by Google) that are being hosted using Google's infrastructure.
But where else would you discuss it, on Twitter or H.N.? Clearly not in the elevator.
Sigh, Google, you never fail to disappoint :(
"Invites are currently paused for this server. Please try again later."
- textfx.withgoogle.com
- notebooklm.google
- artsandculture.google.com/experiment/poem-postcards
Why would they perform geo-locking on their products?
It's as if Google are trying to work out what worked well with their Beta programme (which I used to enjoy and get excited about) and replicating it as a finished product in the 2020's with 'modern' design.
The way they communicated beta projects a decade ago was 100 times better. Just raw, simple, unfinished, and clearly things to play with.
This site just looks like marketing garbage. Sorry. Just annoyed at it.
It’s similarity and lack of structural UX makes it so that besides loudly being AI, AI, AI!!! it is confusingly similar to https://x.company/
Google needs to establish a leadership position in the AI market and make it clear that they are deeply focused and executing better than competitors. This isn’t helping.
Why is this needed?
Google, on the other hand, was late to introduce a product competitive to ChatGPT and mostly fumbled the announcement when it did.
Google is coming from behind in their execution after being outmaneuvered by OpenAI and a very weak early showing with Bard.
Google didn’t deliver a chat-powered generative A.I. product despite working on one for years. They just didn’t have the risk taking culture where releasing it into the wild imperfectly was something Google was willing to do. This was a profound misstep, and dethroned them. At one point they had the largest and most talented assembly of AI researchers in the world and virtually unlimited research budgets, but they didn’t ship.
This puts them in a position where they have something to prove. To investors. To developers. To cloud customers. And to themselves.
Their entire business is about being a trusted place for people to find information, and they didn’t feel they were ready, and then they missed the boat.
It's the reason, when it finally rushed a product out the door, *they called it Bard.* They didn't call it Google AI.
They talked AI up to the point of ridiculousness at I/O. Two words they drove home in every talk: responsible and helpful.
This is why they need to establish a position of leadership and avoid weak delivery like this labs launch (maybe it’s not a launch, maybe it just needs to be relaunched — I’m making an assumption). Because it’s not super on point in delivering their brand promise for AI or even explaining what it is in a clear way.
People can’t even tell what it is, not a gigantic corporate delivering early stage experiments at the cutting edge of helpful and responsible AI.
I’m open to being wrong about any of this, but this is how I generally see it.
Maybe a lesson for google to learn.
Don’t forget that Google translate has been out for years and used the GPT structure they invented.
Also I think Google missing the ball on the GenAI chat will go down as one of the biggest AI and tech fumbles, even if the fads around LLMs fade. They beat OpenAI to creating a chat interface- but they had all that drama last summer of some crazy religious employee getting spooked at it being sentient, so they locked it down. That’s probably what gave OpenAI the idea to ship ChatGPT honestly.
Also this labs page clearly looks like a vanity marketing site to remind people (?) that Google Does AI (tm).
It sounds absolutely hilarious, and highlights everything that's wrong about this bubble. Do you have a source on this?
Summary: one of their engineers started to think they had achieved AGI and went to the media to save the “life” of the chat bot.
https://twitter.com/OmarKamali/status/1726431417163206900
(take the answers with a grain of salt, some people I know at Google had very different assessments of LaMDA)
Maybe it’s time to up their game.
(This is also my personal nomination for the oft-asked "when did Google stop being unique and cool?").
A long time ago they even started a trend - 20% time for personal projects, that was an act of exploration, but now they lost their curiosity and playfulness.
Okay, sure, it made sense to shut it down, but to me it would make sense to do a new one today for the aforementioned reasons (use cases).
(But of course somehow most of Alphabet is still tragicomically bad at B2C, and now YT also seems to be going down the drain with the overemphasis on shorts.)
Why don't they just to an old style university website, pure-HTML with a clear list of their published work, etc.
Why does everything from Google these days need to be a childish design, crazy stuff moving around and unclear objective?
I kept it open for a minute or so, and that's it for me.
There's the WWW serving information to people to use and then there's the parasitic Marketing Miasma and Self-flagulators setting up camp on top trying to manipulate and steal energy from the system and its participants.
I'd actually like to see some kind of uncoupling of these two worlds. The commercial web and the web I go to for exploring knowledge shouldn't be the same.
It's to showcase the various ways in which you can reliably be informed that an experiment or feature is not available in your country.
The only successful product developed internally at Google is the search engine.
- Why is Bard failing? - It's a chat app from Google.