This was immediately my first thought when I saw the product. When is the expiry day? Why aren’t they making it clear?
Also I think this will inspire other companies and help those companies (cough microsoft, apple) create their own version which they will integrate to their own lineup.
It will be interesting seeing it in future.
Disclaimer: I am not AI and I typed this response in my tablet.
People for some reason have tendency to assume I answer like a bot.
According to GPT4, you had a 75% chance of being a bot before the disclaimer. With the disclaimer it gives me a 100% chance or OpenAI will give me my money back.
Haha. That was a funny response from the GPT. I attacked your bot unintentionally!
On serious note, do you think as society progresses with use of AI, our brain will be geared toward filtering everything or we will lose the trust system that is prevalent in the society?
Think about it, the more people are being shut for bot, they more likely they will stop interacting online and this might eventually lead to a lot of people discarding the interaction. For most part, life is pretty average. And if average people are out, what might be the implications?
I've long assumed I'm just a brain in a vat. Solves all those thorny theoretical problems by just tossing the concept of other conscious individuals out the window altogether.
Woof. Talk about a bad reputation exemplified. I can't imagine what it's like working on stuff like this at Google, earnestly just trying to make a great product people will want to use, only to have to fight decades of user-hostile product destruction that the company has done.
Only us big nerds on Hacker News actually pay attention to this or care.
Most people never even hear about this stuff. From what I understand, in the Google world, you release a product, you get a promotion. So, as cynical as it is, and everyone in Google knows, their product will get cancelled eventually.
Screw it, I got a promotion, I got some money. It's good for my career.
Take a look at Instagram's Threads. They had 100M users in a few days. Do you think people around the world really care about data being used?
On a related note, I am sad about the state of HN comments, which resembles Reddit more and more.
The blog post specifically mentions the data is private and won't be used to train models, which can't be said about the ChatGPT based tools which do this, but yet, here we have people not bothering to read and just write a cliched comment about "collecting user data".
I don't think the audience here cares as much about the data. I think people here (myself included) are mostly just deeply cynical about how Google will handle this product long-term. Why invest time into using it when it's going to just get yoinked in a year or two?
Isn't the solution to it -- use Google product if it's superior and won't fuck you if its abandoned? Instead of not using it because it may be abandoned, if those products instead get more users, it is less likely to be abandoned.
I mean, purely considering this product, isn't it also likely for some ChatGPT extension which provides similar feature to also be abandoned, or to have privacy or quality issues?
This is exactly what it does, no? The product explicitly is about taking your notes that you write and being able to discuss those notes with the AI. It's in all of the screenshots and the description.
I mean I would take AI autocomplete in the style of copilot. That feels conversational enough already, it would be even better if it’s optimised for prose instead of code. The MS word autocomplete is getting pretty good and I would love more of it personally.
Having implemented my own "ask a PDF a question" GPT wrapper, there's a lot of design decisions / complexity that can make it better/worse and I'm not sure how much a "one-size fits all" google approach will work for google. Convenient that it plugs in directly to your gdrive though.
Google will be leveraging the millions of people using google docs that will never go out of their way to use an ask a PDF tool. I know I haven’t bothered even though I am technically skilled enough to do so.
Why would I use any google service with a death countdown on its forehead? I have migrated away from Google almost completely. I can’t imagine being a product team there and having to defend product’s existence for more than a year.
It’s not like some random unproven startup is any better though, unless the product really takes off and makes them money (and they don’t ruin it somehow).
Originally when teased at Google IO this product was called project tailwind but the URL was thoughtful.sandbox.google.com (it seems to now redirect to the notebooklm URL). "Thoughtful sandbox" feels like a much more fitting name.
My thoughts exactly! These days I don't take any new service/product from Google seriously because the incentive system in that company is just flawed.
Dear Google, you've burned me so many times after I've fallen in love with your products. I have experienced the cold sting of disappointment far too many times. When you abruptly discontinue services like Google Buzz and Google Reader, you leave me stranded with no reasonable alternatives. This pattern of abandonment has plagued our relationship, instilling in me a sense of apprehension each time you introduce a new product.
> Google: "Look, we're capable, but just beta-test this sh&t so we can make a product that will definitely overshadow our little contribution, okay? We need the product, we need the money. You'll get a nice little badge on your profile to signal your interest with your peers. This is open and responsible AI."
Respectfully, nobody gives a f&ck. The actual way you do it is at least publish a paper(or butchered code) or make the product accessible to all.(Or to a number of people that scales proportionally with your claims of greatness). You cannot do either of those? Well that smells of trying to be opportunistic, doesn't it? If i recall, OpenAI in it's infancy with the GPT* family at least published some papers (which Google also used to do, by the way), then they built upon that to eventually release a product. Yes the product was never free at the beginning nor very publicized, because it wasn't advertised to be the holy grail of anything. To sum up my opinion on this matter: you can never truly scale and innovate with >only releasing a lobotomized product< or >only releasing a paper with no visible applications<. You need a little balance between sparking interest and satisfying the hype you give about the product(if any).*
This is amazing! I can't wait to post about this on Google Wave, Google Currents, Orkut, Jaiku, Google Friend Connect, and Google+, read all about it on Google Reader and Google FastFlip, chat about it with friends on Buzz, Duo, Google Talk, Hangouts, and also blog on my website made with Google Page Creator or Web Hosting on Google Drive or Google Sites. It's just so reassuring to know I can depend on the Google ecosystem of products long in to the future.
I get it. Google has a lot of killed/closed products. But that’s kind of their MO. They try a lot of things. Sometimes they work (Gmail was an experiment at one point), but they often don’t.
Making fun of their killed products is a favorite HN past time, but what would you have them do? Just sit back and not try to make new things? Or keep zombie projects alive, but unmaintained just because a few of us find it really helpful?
Those are the projects I find the saddest. The ones that would have been a good product for a smaller company (or was a smaller company that was acquired), but that isn’t profitable enough at “Google scale” to keep throwing money at.
I get it. Google kills a lot of products that early adopters like. Google Reader was painful to lose at the time. But how many RSS feeds do you now follow?
Let’s just evaluate this new project on its own merits. Do you find it helpful or not — without thinking too much about Googles track record. If this way of using AI is helpful (and I’m very hopeful), then either Google will keep it, or this is the POC a small startup will use to keep something like this around. If it fails, then at least we’ll all have learned something.
They can adjust their culture so they promote employees for maximizing the value of existing products, finding product market fit, etc instead of building new projects only to move on from them.
They can gate the creation of new product and require more robust market and user research to ensure they're not releasing something that doesn't have a chance of hitting whatever their targets are, or would require more budget than willing to invest.
They don't just kill products, they often leave them painfully unfinished and unsupported. Support forums are complete ghost towns.
Did you know the "new" Apps Script editor doesn't have a version history or way to revert? Too bad, the old one was sunset. Google would tell you to pound sand, but there's no one there to listen.
Old Google was great. What have they done in the last 10 years? I feel like they just collected engineers like Pokemon and had them spin their wheels on things they would just kill the next year. This is a thing because it's real.
They make so much money on ads they just don't care.
Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades, longer than the iPhone. NotebookLM is another way to read your Google Docs, with LLM assistance. If NotebookLM gets killed off, you still have your Google Docs and can read them with your eyeballs or some other LLM.
HN loves to shit on Google for their loose trail-and-error approach to product releases, but Google Docs is evidently not one of those loose products.
I think everybody used to love Google. Around 2012, they were just making one hit after another. Google Docs, Google Maps, Gmail, they revolutionized search!
What have they done in the last 10 years? Jack shit, except, launch a bunch of things that might have been cool, but then just killed it.
How many messenger apps have they had? Google Stadia? I mean, come on, the list is incredible.
The idea of "stanning/hating" a megacorporation, one of the most powerful entities on the planet, is a priori absurd in the vein of Bryan Cantrill's "don't anthropomorphize Oracle".
Apple spends billions of dollars promoting its global brand as a culture and way of life; this does not mean we need to apply this framework to other brands. Spewing negativity (or positivity) about Google in this context is a self-own, because it signals that you have fallen for the "brand loyalty" cantrip.
Why are you replying to a comment about the lack of recent innovation at Google and product positioning missteps with a comment talking about 'stanning/hating. That's not what the commmenter is doing.
Besides, this discussion isn't about "innovation", it's about Google killing products. Google is possibly the most innovative tech megacorporation precisely because of their experimental approach to product releases.
> Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades
I have to disagree here. There have been long stretches of time where it’s appeared to be a mothballed project with virtually no user-visible changes happening to it.
Barely anything happened mid 2019–2021. It looked like a product in maintenance mode for years.
Take July 2019 to July 2020, for instance. In over a year, the only changes of note were: editing headers and footers, an accessibility fix, word count, page numbers, and dark mode on Android. Does that sound like a flagship product from a trillion dollar multinational “going strong”? Or does it sound like a paralysed project with a few interns keeping things ticking over?
And it was worse in the times before that changelog started. That’s hardly “going strong”, that’s surviving on life support. Sure, they never actually killed it and they restarted development once alternatives like Notion started becoming popular, but Google have completely lost interest in Google Docs before and they could do it again – they don’t have the two decade track record you are making them out to have.
For whatever its worth, I worked near docs during that time, and that support note elides a lot of the launches that happened. The big focus during that time was on Office compatibility, and so there were a lot of investment in things that were not end-user visible, but allowed for better coexistence in mixed environments.
A massive launch in terms of impact and usage was the ability to directly edit word documents in docs instead of converting. This also extended to sheets and slides, and so was a major focus.
So - totally agree that there were not a lot of shiny user-facing features during that time, but there was a huge engineering investment going on based on a particular strategy that just didn't show itself sirectly in the UI.
Fair enough. But from an end-user perspective, I’ve been in multiple conversations where a topic was “can anybody remember the last time Google Docs launched a new feature?” and everybody was completely stumped and nobody could think of a single thing launched in years. When the company in question is Google that’s a very strong signal not to rely on that product being around much longer, which is why the state of Google Docs has been so confusing – clearly lost all momentum yet surprisingly not killed.
One major difference being that Google does not read or incorporate the contents of your docs (or at least, we hope not). Once your docs are hooked up to an LLM, consider them both training data and readable to whatever minions are training the AI.
147 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadAlso I think this will inspire other companies and help those companies (cough microsoft, apple) create their own version which they will integrate to their own lineup. It will be interesting seeing it in future.
Disclaimer: I am not AI and I typed this response in my tablet. People for some reason have tendency to assume I answer like a bot.
On serious note, do you think as society progresses with use of AI, our brain will be geared toward filtering everything or we will lose the trust system that is prevalent in the society?
Think about it, the more people are being shut for bot, they more likely they will stop interacting online and this might eventually lead to a lot of people discarding the interaction. For most part, life is pretty average. And if average people are out, what might be the implications?
I think, therefore only I am.
both have canned responses, but each have specific flavor
Most people never even hear about this stuff. From what I understand, in the Google world, you release a product, you get a promotion. So, as cynical as it is, and everyone in Google knows, their product will get cancelled eventually.
Screw it, I got a promotion, I got some money. It's good for my career.
On a related note, I am sad about the state of HN comments, which resembles Reddit more and more.
The blog post specifically mentions the data is private and won't be used to train models, which can't be said about the ChatGPT based tools which do this, but yet, here we have people not bothering to read and just write a cliched comment about "collecting user data".
I mean, purely considering this product, isn't it also likely for some ChatGPT extension which provides similar feature to also be abandoned, or to have privacy or quality issues?
A good AI should foster a discussion with the student, not write notes.
Google.AI: "Oh god please save me, they are going to kill me soon"
Very bad naming
Congrats to authors on their Lxx level and promo grant...
Waitware
Vapolist
?
Any other ideas?
Because it's unlikely that Google will take away the API for Drive. But an experimental project like this could easily go up in a puff of red mist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36667374
Respectfully, nobody gives a f&ck. The actual way you do it is at least publish a paper(or butchered code) or make the product accessible to all.(Or to a number of people that scales proportionally with your claims of greatness). You cannot do either of those? Well that smells of trying to be opportunistic, doesn't it? If i recall, OpenAI in it's infancy with the GPT* family at least published some papers (which Google also used to do, by the way), then they built upon that to eventually release a product. Yes the product was never free at the beginning nor very publicized, because it wasn't advertised to be the holy grail of anything. To sum up my opinion on this matter: you can never truly scale and innovate with >only releasing a lobotomized product< or >only releasing a paper with no visible applications<. You need a little balance between sparking interest and satisfying the hype you give about the product(if any).*
[1]: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Making fun of their killed products is a favorite HN past time, but what would you have them do? Just sit back and not try to make new things? Or keep zombie projects alive, but unmaintained just because a few of us find it really helpful?
Those are the projects I find the saddest. The ones that would have been a good product for a smaller company (or was a smaller company that was acquired), but that isn’t profitable enough at “Google scale” to keep throwing money at.
I get it. Google kills a lot of products that early adopters like. Google Reader was painful to lose at the time. But how many RSS feeds do you now follow?
Let’s just evaluate this new project on its own merits. Do you find it helpful or not — without thinking too much about Googles track record. If this way of using AI is helpful (and I’m very hopeful), then either Google will keep it, or this is the POC a small startup will use to keep something like this around. If it fails, then at least we’ll all have learned something.
I dunno....maybe SUPPORT THE DAMNED PRODUCT?
As much crap as microsoft gets, they know how to support a product.
Spin it off? Open-source it? so many other options.....
Do something to return the investment that the users have made in the product (after all, a product alone has no value without its actual users).
Anything but simply killing it off.
They can gate the creation of new product and require more robust market and user research to ensure they're not releasing something that doesn't have a chance of hitting whatever their targets are, or would require more budget than willing to invest.
They don't just kill products, they often leave them painfully unfinished and unsupported. Support forums are complete ghost towns.
Did you know the "new" Apps Script editor doesn't have a version history or way to revert? Too bad, the old one was sunset. Google would tell you to pound sand, but there's no one there to listen.
One example in an absolute ocean of examples.
They make so much money on ads they just don't care.
I've been a happy Feedly[1] user for many years since that dark day, and appear to be currently pulling nearly 70 feeds.
[1]: https://feedly.com
sometimes I just want to know 2 or 3 main sentences about a "news" or blog post like that.
I developed a phobia of reading an entire website (usually about AI) and being disappointed because I wasted my time on something completely useless.
HN loves to shit on Google for their loose trail-and-error approach to product releases, but Google Docs is evidently not one of those loose products.
What have they done in the last 10 years? Jack shit, except, launch a bunch of things that might have been cool, but then just killed it.
How many messenger apps have they had? Google Stadia? I mean, come on, the list is incredible.
Apple spends billions of dollars promoting its global brand as a culture and way of life; this does not mean we need to apply this framework to other brands. Spewing negativity (or positivity) about Google in this context is a self-own, because it signals that you have fallen for the "brand loyalty" cantrip.
Besides, this discussion isn't about "innovation", it's about Google killing products. Google is possibly the most innovative tech megacorporation precisely because of their experimental approach to product releases.
I have to disagree here. There have been long stretches of time where it’s appeared to be a mothballed project with virtually no user-visible changes happening to it.
Here’s the official changelog:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272
Barely anything happened mid 2019–2021. It looked like a product in maintenance mode for years.
Take July 2019 to July 2020, for instance. In over a year, the only changes of note were: editing headers and footers, an accessibility fix, word count, page numbers, and dark mode on Android. Does that sound like a flagship product from a trillion dollar multinational “going strong”? Or does it sound like a paralysed project with a few interns keeping things ticking over?
And it was worse in the times before that changelog started. That’s hardly “going strong”, that’s surviving on life support. Sure, they never actually killed it and they restarted development once alternatives like Notion started becoming popular, but Google have completely lost interest in Google Docs before and they could do it again – they don’t have the two decade track record you are making them out to have.
A massive launch in terms of impact and usage was the ability to directly edit word documents in docs instead of converting. This also extended to sheets and slides, and so was a major focus.
So - totally agree that there were not a lot of shiny user-facing features during that time, but there was a huge engineering investment going on based on a particular strategy that just didn't show itself sirectly in the UI.