Comment by jug
2 years ago
I think it’s so strange how Pro wasn’t launched for Bard in Europe yet. I thought Bard was already cleared for EU use following their lengthy delay, and that this clearance wouldn’t be a recurring issue to overcome for each new underlying language model. Unless it’s technically hard to NOT train it on your data or whatever. Weird.
I suspect this is because inference is very expensive (much like GPT-4) and their expected ARPU (average revenue per user) in Europe is just not high enough to be worth the cost.
See disposable income per capita (in PPP dollars): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
They are releasing Bard with Gemini in many countries with a much lower income per capita than the average European country: https://support.google.com/bard/answer/14294096
My guess is the delay is due to GDPR or other regulatory challenges.
Revenue-per-user might be much lower in EU if they can't use targeted advertising
Facebook was claiming recently they'd charge a fee to users in EU for this reason: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/30/meta-face...
> My guess is the delay is due to GDPR
Bard is explicit "humans will have access to your data and use it to improve our service", without even the opt-out that ChatGPT has, so, yeah, given their desire to catch up, not spending money to deploy it places where there is any kind of meaningful protection of personal data that might conflict with that makes sense.