It would do Google a lot of service if every such announcement is not met with 'join the waitlist' and 'talk to your vertex ai team'.
The issues arise with the subsequent stagegate graduation processes, requirements and launches to less restricted markets. It's inconsistent, the QoS pre-GA customers receive is often spotty and the products come with no SLAs, and -- just like Gmail on the consumer side -- things frequently stay in EAP/Beta phase for years with no reliable timeline for launch. ... and then often they're killed before they get to GA, even though they may have been being used by EAP customers for upwards of 1-2 years.
I drafted a new EAP model a few years ago when Google's Cloud AI & Industry Solutions org was in the process of productizing things like the retail recommendation engine and Manufacturing Data Engine, and had all the buy-ins from stakeholders on the GTM side ... but the CAIIS GM never signed off. Subsequently, both the GM & VP Product of that org have been forced out.
In my opinion, this is something Microsoft does very well and Google desperately needs to learn. If they pick up anything from their hyperscaler competitors it should be 1) how to successfully become a market driven engineering company from MSFT and 2) how to never kill products (and not punish employees for only doing KTLO work) from AMZN.
Look, it now has totally useless suggestions like it was trained on burned out woke IT workers. I asked it about the weather, sea temperature and wave height and period in Malaga, which is much less boring than the choices it came up with. First it tried to talk me out of it waving away responsibility, then it provided useful climate data, which I would have wasted too much time doing a Google search on. I guess it's good for checking on the weather if you can put up with the waivers. Also it knows fishing for garfish in Denmark in May is not a total waste of your time, a great way to experience local culture and a sustainable activity.
I also asked it about the version: "I am currently running on the Gemini Pro 1.01.5 model".
What’s the goal? Maybe, being able to work with partners without it being a secret project that will inevitably leak, resulting in inaccurate stories in the press. What are non-goals? Driving sales or creating anticipation with a mass audience, like a movie trailer or an Apple product launch.
So they have to announce something, but most people don’t read Hacker News and won’t even hear about it until later, and that’s fine with them.
It's interesting that it's the opposite of the gaming industry. There, because the reviewers dictate the narrative, the industry is better at ferreting out bogus claims. On the flip side, loud voices sometimes steamroll over decent products because of some ideological vendetta.
The envelope made it to the recipient, but the coin fell out in transit because I was young and had no idea how to mail coinage. They graciously gave me the invite anyway.
But still, compared to Hotmail etc the free storage space (something like 1GB vs 10MB) was well worth $6
Like it's shocking to me, are management really so clueless they don't realize how far behind they are? This isn't 2010 Google, your not the company that made your success anymore and in a decade the only two sure fire things that will still exist are android and chrome. Search, Maps, Youtube are all in precarious positions that the right team could dethrone.
They’re an enterprise software company doing an enterprise sales motion.
Anthropic's Claude targets mostly business use cases and you don't see them write self-congratulating articles about Claude v2.1, they just pushed the product.
I work at a very large company and everyone knows about ChatGPT and Gemini (in part because we for our sins have a good chunk of GCP stuff), but I doubt anyone here not doing some LLM-flavored development has ever even heard of Anthropic, let alone Claude.
Why would anyone look to form a contract with Anthropic right now? I'd say they're in danger here, because their models and offerings don't have clear value propositions to customers.
Seems reasonably similar in tone to the Google post.
Really? Someone ought to tell them.
I'm more than happy to transfer my monthly $20 to google from OpenAI, on top of my youtube and google one subscription. It's up to Google to take it.
I guess I let my original impression anchor my long-term feelings about the product. Oh well.
I get that it's frustrating not to be able to play with it immediately, but that's just life. Announcing things in advance is still a valuable service for a lot of people.
Plus tons of people have been claiming that Google has somehow fallen behind in the AI race, so it's important for them to counteract that narrative. Making their roadmap more visible is a legitimate strategy for that.
The first of it's type AR/VR hardware has, understandably, a longer release cycle. Also, Apple announced early to drive up developer interest.
Apple aggressively keeps products under wraps before launch fires employees and vendors for leaking any sort of news to the press .
Also an hardware product that is miles ahead of competition in terms of components and also needs complex setup workflow (for head and eyes) something apple has not done before being 7-8 months after announcing is not really comparable with a SaaS API in terms of delays
Apple at least lets me change this by moving my iTunes/App Store account, which is its own ordeal and far from ideal, but at least there's a defined process: Tell us where you think you live, provide a form of payment from that place, maybe we'll believe you.
I'm really frustrated by Google's attitude of "we know better where you are than you do". People travel sometimes and that's not the same thing as moving!
But once I'm a paying customer, I want to use the thing I'm paying for from where I am without jumping through ridiculous hoops!
The worst variant of this I've seen is when you can neither use nor cancel the subscription from outside a supported market.
Once I got accepted, some of them work outside of the US and some don't