Comment by PittleyDunkin
3 days ago
Forcing you to pay for features you never asked for and won't use. I'm sure this will work out great for google in the long term.
3 days ago
Forcing you to pay for features you never asked for and won't use. I'm sure this will work out great for google in the long term.
There's a weird attitude on this site towards AI: if it's for coding or science, people generally recognize AI tooling as effective, although imperfect, and rapidly improving.
But any suggestion of using AI for business and it seems like disdain and dismissal is the majority response.
Don't you think many areas of business - maybe not all areas, but a significant amount - will just as much benefit from AI tooling as software developers and scientists?
I dont see it like that.
Its more like:
If its for things where I find AI useful I want the tool interoperable with my chosen AI.
If its for things where I dont find AI useful, please dont force it in anyway.
I use some gen-AI, but not Google's. This is very clearly a case of them not getting the gen-AI sales they want, so they are now simply forcing you to pay for it even if you won't use it. It's gross, and precisely the problem with "bundling."
Well I'm not "this site" I'm just some guy but I've been absolutely consistent in my belief that not only are these LLMs not "AI" but they're nowhere near useful enough to justify the absolutely stupid amounts of money being burned for them.
> There's a weird attitude on this site towards AI: if it's for coding or science, people generally recognize AI tooling as effective, although imperfect, and rapidly improving.
I suspect that this is more of a selection bias thing. AI is garbage everywhere, but "AI in tech" posts tend to be hopeless abysses that are not even worth engaging with at this point. Hence, only the hucksters and grifters remain in there.
This is the camp I'm in. I've given AI the "college try", I've tried using in my workflows, and I've found that there are some cases where it genuinely has helped. But there is far too much drivel and hype.
I want to hear more from the people who've embraced it for a year, found it's pitfalls and perks, and reflect on it. I'm tired of the treadmill of content from someone who signed up for OpenAI on a Monday, used it for a JIRA ticket on Tuesday, then rushed to belt out a blogpost about how their career is forever changed on Wednesday.
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Here are a list of AI use cases that I guess are "garbage" to you.
Detecting diseases. Creating drugs to cure or help with disease. Aiding astronomy. Understanding the genome. Scanning documents into text (OCR). Translation. Voice recognition. Detecting fraud. Spam filtering.
Are you willing to give up all of these? Given your attitude you probably should.
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There are two aspects you should consider: 1) Google's AI isn't as good. 2) people don't want an AI middleman for person-to-person communication.
People may dislike AI written code or AI "art", but using AI to talk to other people is just seen as dishonest. It's even worse when it's not all that good.
They kinda already do it with YT Premium/YT Music. I don't have anything against YT Music, it's a perfectly fine music service from the amount I've used it. But I already have a Spotify with my preferred playlists, and I don't really have incentive to swap it over aside from maybe saving a handful of dollars a month.
Yet if you want ad-free YouTube the proper way, you can't just have Music as an option, it's rolled into your cost regardless of if you actually plan to use it or not.
Isn't that always the case with bundles and suites? Google Workspace has always been a bundle of products, and few actually used every product in the bundle.
Yes, google workspace has never been worth it. The difference is that people can easily understand the value of the products they aren't using.
They have managed to vendor lock me. The price just keeps going up and I can't get out.
The beauty of having a monopoly or oligopoly in a dozen major markets is that you don't have to care about customers. As much as I hate this move and don't think it will help the company, I think Google is powerful and entrenched enough that it will make out just fine. Their users will bear most of the costs.