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Comment by xwowsersx | Hacker News Reader

Google's edge obvious here is the deep integration it already has with calendar, apps, and chats and what not that lets them surface context-rich updates naturally. OpenAI doesn't have that same ecosystem lock-in yet, so to really compete they'll need to get more into those integrations. I think what it comes down to ultimately is that being "just a model" company isn't going to work. Intelligence itself will go to zero and it's a race to the bottom. OpenAI seemingly has no choice but to try to create higher-level experiences on top of their platform. TBD whether they'll succeed.

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I have Gmail and Google calendar etc but haven’t seen any AI features pop up that would be useful to me, am I living under a rock or is Google not capitalising on this advantage properly?

There's decent integration with GSuite (Docs, Sheets, Slides) for Pro users (at least).

There are plenty of features if you are on the Pro plan, but it's still all the predictable stuff - summarize emails, sort/clean up your inbox, draft a doc, search through docs & drive, schedule appointments. Still pretty useful, but nothing that makes you go "holy shit" just yet.

ah, that would explain it. nothing other companies aren’t also doing though. I more long for the day when I can just ask my voice assistant stuff and it knows context from an ancient email of mine or something

I've recently used the AI integration for Google Drive. Was really quite handy to get eg my passport number as a copy-and-paste-able string directly instead of having to find my scan of the document and then typing it by hand.

OpenAI should just straight up release an integrated calendar app. Mobile app. The frameworks are already there and the ics or caldav formats just work well. They could have an email program too and just access any other imap mail. And simple docs eventually. I think you’re right that they need to compete with google on the ecosystem front.

They do have tasks. And problem is if they do calendars/tasks, they might cannibalize their own customers who might be building stuff on their wrappers, and then the point of the API business will seem tougher to sell to other customers.

Yeah, they even don't need devs to release it, Altman can just ask ChatGpt to write it for him. lol.

>Google's edge obvious here is the deep integration it already has with calendar, apps, and chats

They did handle the growth from search to email to integrated suite fantastically. And the lack of a broadly adopted ecoystem to integrate into seems to be the major stopping point for emergent challengers, e.g. Zoom.

Maybe the new paradigm is that you have your flashy product, and it goes without saying that it's stapled on to a tightly integrated suite of email, calendar, drive, chat etc. It may be more plausible for OpenAI to do its version of that than to integrate into other ecosystems on terms set by their counterparts.

If the model companies are serious about demonstrating the models' coding chops, slopping out a gmail competitor would be a pretty compelling proof of concept.

It would be better if you did that. That way you would not accuse them of faking it.

Well, I'm not the one who owns the data center(s) full of all the GPUs it would presumably take to produce a gmail's worth of tokens.

However, I take your point - OpenAI has an interest in some other party paying them a fuckton of money for those tokens and then publicly crediting OpenAI and asserting the tokens would have been worth it at ten fucktons of money. And also, of course, in having that other party take on the risk that infinity fucktons of money worth of OpenAI tokens is not enough to make a gmail.

So they would really need to believe in the strategic necessity (and feasibility) of making their own gmail to go ahead with it.

Code is probably just 20% effort. There is so much more after that. Like manage the infra around it and the reliability when it scales, and even things like managing SPAM and preventing abuse. And the effort required to market it and make it something people want to adopt.

Sure, but the premise here is that making a gmail clone is strategically necessary for OpenAI to compete with Google in the long term.

In that case, there's some ancillary value in being able to claim "look, we needed a gmail and ChatGPT made one for us - what do YOU need that ChatGPT can make for YOU?"

Those are still largely code-able. You can write Ansible files, deploy AWS (mostly) via the shell, write rules for spam filtering and administration... Google has had all of that largely automated for a long time now.

We haven't written rules for spam filtering in a while now: it's been a successful machine learning problem for ages.

Email is one of the most disruptive systems to switch.

Even at our small scale I wouldn’t want to be locked out of something.

Then again there’s also the sign in with google type stuff that keeps us further locked in.

if email is hard to switch, imagine how hard would it be for your memories to migrate to new platform

Infinitely easier?

The challenge in migrating email isn't that you have to move the existing email messages; any standard email client will download them all for you. The challenge is that there are thousands of external people and systems pointing to your email address.

Your LLMs memory is roughly analogous to the existing email messages. It's not stored in the contacts of hundreds of friends and acquaintances, or used to log in to each of a thousand different services. It's all contained in a single system, just like your email messages are.

The very models they pioneered are far better at writing code for web than they are at any other domain, leveling the very playing field they're now finding they must compete on. Ironic.

That is pretty funny

I agree - I'm not sure why Google doesn't just send me a morning email to tell me what's on my calendar for the day, remind me to follow up on some emails I didn't get to yesterday or where I promised a follow up etc. They can just turn it on for everyone all at once.

None of those require AI though.

It requires "AI" in the sense of how we all wave our hands and call everything AI nowadays. But a daily digest of the past day, upcoming day and future events/tasks would be a good "AI" feature that might actually be useful.

Because it would just get lost in the noise of all the million other apps trying to grab your attention. Rather than sending yet another email, they should start filtering out the noise from everyone else to highlight the stuff that actually matters.

Hide the notifications from uber which are just adverts and leave the one from your friend sending you a message on the lock screen.

I meant in your inbox, not notifications on the phone.

Gmail already does filter the noise through "Categories" (Social, Updates, Forums, Promotions). I've turned them off as I'm pretty good about unsubscribing from junk and don't get a ton of email. However, they could place an alert at the top of your inbox to your "daily report" or whatever. Just as they have started to put an alert on incoming deliveries (ex. Amazon orders). You can then just dismiss it, so perhaps it's not an email so much as a "message" or something.

Google had to make google assistant less useful because of concerns around antitrust and data integration. It's a competitive advantage so they can't use it without opening up their products for more integrations...

Is that why it's basically useless now? We're actively looking for a replacement. All it's good for now is setting kitchen timers and turning on the lights. I go out of my way to avoid using it now.

Isolation might also prove to have some staying power.

How can you have an "edge" if you're shipping behind your competitors all the time? Lol.

Google is the leader in vertical AI integration right now.

Being late to ship doesn't erase a structural edge. Google is sitting on everyone's email, calendar, docs, and search history. Like, yeah they might be a lap or two behind but they're in a car with a freaking turbo engine. They have the AI talent, infra, data, etc. You can laugh at the delay, but I would not underestimate Google. I think catching up is less "if" and more "when"

Google has discover, which is used by like a 800M people/month, which already proactively delivers content to users.

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