>Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant, and writing tools across apps.
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."
There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
My email is disliked due to its brevity, turning the single clear and concise sentence of into a multi paragraph treatise might just lead to promotions, raises and bonuses which I can trickle down through the economy.
I think this underrates how many emails are literally just replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in gmail
They specifically allow you a grammar/spell check and also change tone (formal/informal) and length. Length one I have never used but the grammar spell check is a godsend that I use almost always.
Maybe you aren't in a space where it would be useful, but not everyone who has to write an email is a great and concise writer.
I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy and they had to write emails and some of them were very poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great deal in providing information but also being able to understand what was coming back to them.
It almost can't be a good thing. LLMs are only useful when given all the relevant context. When you write an email, the context is mostly in your head.
My experience with LLMs expanding on bullet points is that they often enough misrepresent my intentions as a writer. Often in infuriatingly subtle ways.
Same when summarizing, just less frequently.
As someone who cares about precision and clarity in my writing, I do not use LLMs in the context of communication.
Both frames of the cartoon represent a real perceived need: for the sender, the need to inflate the message to "look nice" because "people expect it", and then for the recipient, the need to summarize the nice-looking message to get the actual point they care about.
Hopefully the use of AI in email will make that cartoon (and the underlying message) widespread, and lead to people finally realizing what they failed to realize all these decades: just send the goddamn bullet point. We don't need AI in e-mails. We just need to stop wasting each other's time.
EDIT: and riffing off rpigab's comment downthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 -- I wish for the future people will feel comfortable, instead of sending AI-generated e-mails, to send the goddamn prompt instead. It carries all the information and much less noise.
I mean, using LLMs makes sense if you actually need to communicate in prose - for many, myself included, it's much easier to evaluate whether some text sounds right, than to write it that way in the first place, so LLMs are useful in evolving and refactoring your own writing (and learning how to write better from it, over time). But that is rarely the case in transactional or business communication - for that, just send the prompt.
Google seems to have an advantage here; as the client on both ends in many emails, they could just check if this ai expand/summary process is occurring and if so just send the bullet point (or if they want to be really clever just pass the bullet point through a thesaurus, so nobody will notice even if the sender happens to see what the recipient got).
what are people even worried about here? they're just trying things to see whether they're useful. don't expand your emails into long prose if it adds no value for you and they will focus on other things.
Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.
I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.
Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you need to generate to deal with this silliness.
> people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
It's more complicated than this.
The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete. The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but it can be part of an effective workflow to write good feedback.
Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.
I just exited the toilet following 2.5 hours of back-to-back meetings, and was looking forward to actually getting some work done when the product owner grabbed me for a conversation about priorities for the sprint planning session that's scheduled in a couple of hours.
In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work.
There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently.
/rant
I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.
The secret is to add every meeting into your Jira as a task, and then close it once the meeting is done.
Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from your work, start talking about them as the work.
When your manager asks about your milestones, or accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance front and center.
When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the meetings, point out that you won't actually do any of it. Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10 hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours of testing etc.
"This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'
Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes. Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your ticket increase.)
Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings, you can relax in your own productivity.
Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your manager, you place the burden for action on him.
If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it off your plate.
Have you considered setting more meetings with various stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2 weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to change direction in an agile way?
How big's the org? This setup feels unavoidable past a certain company size as growth attracts grifters who then call meetings atop meetings to appear useful.
Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
I had a few use cases with searching and organizing emails I would have used. For example, I wanted a table of all my Lyft rides from a certain year with distances driven, start/end locations, cost, etc. All that info is available in the email you get after riding, so I figured Gemini could read my emails and organize the info.
Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If it can't be trusted to produce something that is both accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it to every process it gets shoved into.
I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people aren’t all that great at taking and sharing notes.
I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters.
A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?
That does sound generally useful. Out of interest: Do you ever see a one hour meeting being summed up so brief that the participants question why they spend an hour on the meeting (or more realistically, question if the LLM understood the meeting at all).
Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should be, you frequently see that no real progress was made, someone did all the work before the meeting started and this is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply pushed to the next meeting.
These LLMs are excel at making more. More emails with more words. More blog posts with more fluff. Making it open to more people means more usage means more numbers being more which means more money for the people building these systems.
I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just more noise.
I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2 weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the person in question would make such an irresponsible promise (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he was talking completely hypothetically and not promising anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next sprint. Glad I verified it.
> For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
I think this really encapsulates something that I hadn't been able to put my finger on in regards to LLM summarization. What it seems to indicate is that, if you need a computer to summarize a large amount of text that someone has sent to you, there are two likely possibilities:
1) The information is incredibly dense/important/technical/complex. This necessitates the extreme length of the message - (think: technical documents, research papers, a rough draft of a legal notice, or your will.) For these sorts of things, you should not rely on an LLM to summarize it, because it may miss key details of the message.
2) The person sending it to you is bad at communicating, in which case the solution is help them learn better communication, rather than "de-noising" their clumsy wording into something comprehensible.
"But what if its number 2, but it's coming from your boss?"
Then I see two obvious points to consider:
First, you should absolutely be telling them about the problem, regardless of the position that they hold. You can phrase it in a way that isn't rude. "Hey boss, I saw (message) but I'm not 100% the intent. I've actually noticed that with (other time)...I usually try to front-load the action items up front, and put the specifics lower down. Anyway, to make sure I'm tracking, you're talking about (action) on (thing), right?"
Second, until (or unless) their communication style is de-noised, then part of your job is being able to "translate" their instructions. Using an AI to do that for you is a bad idea because, at some point or another they're going to be trying to speak to you in-person, or by phone.
Not having dealt with their mannerisms in an unfiltered way might lead to you being "out of practice" and struggling much harder to figure out what they're trying to convey.
Well, that’s because you’re thinking as someone who likely has a stake in quality/specific outcomes actually happening. Or was raised/grew up in an environment where that was important.
Notably, in my experience there is a high correlation with that background and being curmudgeonly. Mainly because that means someone has been responsible for outcomes, regardless of feelings. And something often has to give, and it’s usually feelings. It’s also hard to not be cranky or even angry if someone has to constantly be the one ‘not having fun’ or cleaning up messes so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart.
There is huge market demand exactly for what you’re complaining about, which is faking things happening as convincingly as possible, precisely because being clear/concise, etc. helps with seeing the root cause of problems, and if someone is worried (or is legitimately) a root cause of the problem, of course they’ll consider that bad.
For example, a good sign of a badly led organization is that it’s always busy, but never seems to get anything done. Everything is an emergency, so nothing really gets fixed, etc.
Or there are constant meetings and emails, but nothing gets decided.
People will pay good money for the right kind of wallpaper that makes that ugly wall look pretty again.
> I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work.
If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any better.
I don’t use it often either, but sometimes it is very useful. When I caught Covid last fall my wife incorrectly thought I had it three times. I was using a beta Google Gemini, and paying for it, and I asked “read my @gmail and tell me the date ranges when I have had Covid.”
That worked, but to be honest I have tried similar things more recently that didn’t work. Perhaps there is a routing model up front that decides whether or not to use a lot of compute for any given query?
Google also plans on charging more money for APIs for code completion plugins for IntelliJ IDs, etc. this year.
I would like to see AI pricing models be sustainable, not give things away for free, and have lots of control over when I use a lot of compute. I actually have this right now because I usually use LLM APIs and write my own agents for specific tasks.
I'm kind of a cynic, so I'd say that the Workspace customer isn't you, the person who's using Workspace. It's your big company's SVP of IT or whoever who wants to spend money to adopt cool AI stuff so that he can say that he did AI stuff.
> it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
I tend to agree, except these two things are kind of the same thing. It can make going through the noise easier by intelligently filtering out the noise or finding you the signal. Search. It doesn't necessarily need to eliminate the noise.
Maybe AI would be better if it prevented the noise, and its definitely going to add noise (expanding a few basic thoughts into an email with lots of fluff), but it can also solve it.
I’m getting a lot of value out of NotebookLM drafting documents. If I’ve got a bunch of notes that need to be in a coherent design doc, it can give me a good enough first draft for me to edit into shape. Alternatively when I’ve got a design doc for something, but need to submit, say, a work request to another org, NotebookLM can take my doc and turn it into another format based on a doc template pretty nicely.
These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can easily save me half the time to write these things.
I only use NotebookLM a couple times a month, but when I use it I get value from it. I wanted to put out a new edition of a book I wrote last year so I ingested the PDF for the previous version of my book and some notes on what I was thinking of adding. Then in Chat mode I asked for suggestions of interesting topics that I didn’t think of and a few other questions, then got a short summary that I used as a checklist for things that I might add.
I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my 20 minutes.
I agree. I don't want all my existing work apps to take on LLM features I don't need.
At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed. From a vague description, it can find the open source project I was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good summary of the project.
I really want to like Gemini Deep Research but I have had a pretty low ROI with it. It fails because it has no ability to evaluate the quality of sources, so some SEOd to hell page has equal weight as the deep dive blog post of a highly invested individual. Its also very hard to steer unless you provide paragraphs of context, if you provide too little it might hyper focus on something you said and go into some random rabbit hole of research.
I totally agree. I upgraded to the AI-enabled version of Google One because they gave a couple week free trial. I found it totally useless, and it reeked of "Some PM said we had to stuff AI in everywhere".
Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.
I’m not a native english speaker, but working at US subsidiary I must produces reports in english etc - and having an LLM proofread my texts for me is great.
LLM:s are new modality to computing. If you need it, they are great. But just like excel/sheet have limited applications a LLM with data has limiited use as well.
I also find that summarising content helps me digest it better. I have to fully understand the source in order to write the summary. The process of writing a summary is of immense value. Sometimes the summary itself is of minimal value.
What if there was something that communicated the company’s top priorities and helped everyone align and stay organized without so many meetings, and give concise drafts for your to-dos? Would that be something you’d try?
Yeah I’m tired of workspace getting more expensive and me getting zero additional value from it. I don’t want this, didn’t ask for it, and it actively annoys me.
2. Email gets summarized at the receiver end in the daily AI email "summary" which might be something like
You have a scheduled cake tasting this weekend. Did you know there's a bakery near your office that makes wedding cakes too. By the way your friend Joe can't make it to the wedding, do you want me to send a reply?
3. Reply email gets summarized by AI.
"Your friend acknowledges that you cannot rsvp. Do you want to schedule a wedding gift delivery on their wedding day ? XYZ neighborhood/online store has a sale next week".
If you really care about this issue, I think we've brought it on ourselves.
Regarding teaching kids, we've set messaging templates for occasions that are at the center of our lives. We have Hallmark greeting cards to express feelings to people close to our hearts. If there's a template for expressing someone you're sorry their mother died, or happy they have a baby, I'm not sure throwing the stone at AI use is warranted.
In a way, I wonder if it will be the wake up call that will make simple and genuine communication acceptable again, without all the boilerplate we've built to feign care and emotions.
People always criticize Hallmark but it was never my understanding that the pre-written sentiment in those cards in any way obviated the need to write your own message. In fact, apart from generic Christmas cards you might get from insurers, and "thank you" cards from charities, I can't think of a time I've gotten such a card without a personal message written in it.
Are people really buying the "sorry for your loss" cards, just signing under the prewritten text, and sending them to someone?
This is such a perfect analogy and I never put it together before.
I cannot stand those cards but to a greater extent receiving them. It really does feel worse than not getting anything. It's actually a slap in the face to me that someone would go out of their way to say nothing like this. It's proof that the relationship is fake.
I feel the same disgust when people throw inauthentic AI bullshit to me. How little do you have to care about someone to delegate a robot or a template to mediate your interactions because you can't be bothered?
Gemini's marketing is so bad. This isn't the first time they ran an ad that makes you wonder what's going on there. It really says a lot that an advertising company understands what makes for good advertising so poorly these days.
> A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
I’m not going to defend AI here because I seldom use it myself. But it should be noted that the way we learn has already undergone multiple different shifts due to changes in technology.
Search engine were a big one. No longer did we have to learn to memorise stuff nor learn how to research properly. Now we could just type a phrase into Google / whatever and get results. So people learned how to search rather than learning the facts itself.
"students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills."
Second law of thermodynamics says these models will all eventually collapse (due to overtraining on their own output) to yelling gibberish at us, and biology will continue to remain the only force in the universe capable of maintaining order despite increasing entropy. I think we'll be OK.
I pay for 3 Workspace orgs, and I have Gemini disabled (or still not enabled) on all 3 of them. I'm angry that I'll have to pay more for features I don't use. Gemini should be an add-on cost, not included in the base cost
If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.
It’s an anti competitive strategy, which in an ideal world would see them facing a crushing antitrust lawsuit from the FTC and DOJ. What they’re doing is forcing everyone to pay for their AI product. This makes it so that no other company can charge for their alternative AI products. After all, if your company’s spending goes up because of this Google price increase, your executives will not want to see double spending on AI products. So all those deserving smaller companies will miss out on these customers. Google is essentially using this forced price increase to kill their AI competitors by stealing their revenue, through illegal bundling. Just like Microsoft did with Teams to attack Slack illegally.
With Amazon as an example for CxOs of the world, sadly, this likely won't happen.
Look at Prime. So much crap involved, and quite literally all I use it for is lower cost shipping. It's almost on the edge of not worth it for me. But I bet from Amazon's perspective, they make more with the higher price, even if they lose the bottom 10% not willing to spend.
Huh.
Just made me realise, a startup that subscribes to Prime as a virtual being, and then splits off each sub-thing for full use by separate individuals would be incredibly profitable.
If any form of AI is eventually granted legal personhood, Prime's model will collapse.
I was on Prime for years until it lapsed because of a card change, and I realized most of my shipping would still be free:
- my orders are usually above the generic free shipping threshold
- most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or three days to get above the threshold
- if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for instance.
- Prime day sales aren't great
Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both for different reasons)
Right now looking for an alternative for the same reason. Even if it cost me more on labor short term. They have been increasing prices regularly and I’m sure it will continue.
If your mail is extremely low volume, you might like Migadu's low cost plans. They charge by number of messages in/out rather than per domain or something. It's been handy for me for a few lightly used domains including resurrecting one that the previous owner had let expire and then suddenly needed.
I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.
I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.
I'm considering moving to Fastmail for email and calendar, Sync.com for cloud files. It would be annoying to have separate logins for each though. One nice thing about GWS was a single login for all the apps.
We are doing a Gemini POC and this nugget dropped in my lap today. We were not entirely unprepared as a result. The default level of access is just the interactive chatbot thing. However if you enable the Google Workspace extension it will be able to search and process all the information stored in your workspace account and also any Google Drive files that are shared with you. This includes stuff you didn't know you had access to in Shared Drives so folks better make sure their permissions are locked down. Workspace admins might be advised to turn it off at the org level until they understand the ramifications.
Reminds me of an entertaining story about Microsoft Copilot last year, where companies were turning it off because it turned out it was TOO good at its job - if any accountant anywhere in the company had messed up their SharePoint permissions asking "what does everyone at this company earn?" would spit out all of the salaries: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/23/microsoft-copilot-data...
That of course allows for a new internal seditious attack vector. Generate a handful of spreadsheets in your own folder, name it something like "executive payroll data" or "sales revenue by org," put whatever you want in there, mark it visible by all, and wait.
Maybe make an "Interesting Facts About Products" table and put things like "Management plans to terminate this product in Q3" or "this group will be outsourced next year."
It wouldn't need to be a permissions error on the file caused by the accountant, it could be an authorisation error on behalf of <whoever gives the LLM access to the various systems> providing too high a level of access (in their enthusiasm for the biggest possible set of training data).
This was just posed as a hypothetical, not something that actually happened. It would also require that the person asking about salary information already have access to said data.
Full quote:
> "Particularly around bigger companies that have complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically aggressively summarizing information that maybe people technically have access to but shouldn't have access to," he explained.
Berkowitz said salary information, for example, might be picked up by a Copilot service.
"Now, maybe if you set up a totally clean Microsoft environment from day one, that would be alleviated," he told us. "But nobody has that. People have implemented these systems over time, particularly really big companies. And you get these conflicting authorizations or conflicting access to data."
I am surprised the Workspace extension isn’t controlled by the same setting that limits general workspace search results, where you can set things up so only documents you’ve seen or are linked to from documents you have explicit access to are returned in results: https://support.google.com/a/answer/12732365?hl=en
My company is doing some similar crap. Half a year wasted on some bullshit AI thing that half the engineers were questioning from the start. Usage numbers are in the low 10%-20% range and are dropping despite massive push from marketing and onboarding teams.
The solution is to of course push even more AI stuff. The actual quote one of the C-level used was "Users don't understand the power of AI yet!" and I could barely hold in my laugh when I heard it.
I've been feeling like the world has lost their fucking minds with the AI push. I know that VC/investors play a big role in it, but I've never seen anything quite like it. The AI toothbrush [1] really took the cake for me for peak of absurdity, I wonder what these geniuses will come up with next...
Shid. I made the mistake of getting my entire family onto my google apps 15+ years ago. Now I am paying for about 8 people every month and this will just make it worse.
It was selling well enough. It just was not getting enough traction. By bundling AI, they are giving exposure to everyone who didn’t want to use it or didn’t see the need for it. If they pulled it away in 2 years, and then lowered the price and charged separately for AI, I think more people would see it as necessary.
AI is a better search engine. And a better grammar check for your emails. And a better writer for your reporting.
I expect take up was in the low single-digit percentage points. So charging every single subscriber $2/user (even if they don't want it) probably yields significantly more revenue.
Pretty sure that's not how the maths worked out, but rather $2 is the amount that would cover the cost of running the service based on data of existing customer usage levels.
Cool, great, fun. I have all of the “generative AI” features disabled in Workspace, and now I get to pay more for the privilege of keeping them disabled. Thanks, Google!
Do you know how to actually disable these new features (i.e. the elements that were added within Gmail, Docs, etc.)? I'm not seeing where they can be disabled and Google Workspace support was not able to point me in the right direction either...
I recently got Gemini Advanced as an additional benefit by virtue of having Google One paid storage. I'm shocked this is being given away for free, because it is now a seriously major part of my work. I literally have an Open window all day long interacting with it. It does make me wonder how much they are losing (investing) on giving all this inference away for free. Also makes me wonder what they are getting back aside from loyalty/data/?
I've been using it for setting up infra and projects on GCP and its been great. I use cursor for coding, but that isnt as helpful responding outside the IDE on cloud config. I have no GCP experience and I was able to get to a working application very quickly with Gemini. The GCP docs are outdated, often conflicting, but the Gemini experience was excellent.
Give it a quarter and we’ll see breathless articles about how Google saw “AI adoption increase 150%” and “Google workspace users say they can’t go without AI” (because they physically can’t remove it from their workspace).
This in turn, will be used as post-hoc justification of the value of AI and why ever more power, water and data should be funnelled into it.
Readit News
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."
There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
They specifically allow you a grammar/spell check and also change tone (formal/informal) and length. Length one I have never used but the grammar spell check is a godsend that I use almost always.
I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy and they had to write emails and some of them were very poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great deal in providing information but also being able to understand what was coming back to them.
Alice: Hey, Bob, I finished the job, pay me
Letter: Blah blah blah, Bob, blah blah blah, $$$, blah blah blah
Bob: Oh, Alice is done, hey Charlie, pay her
Letter: Blah blah blah, Charlie, blah blah blah, Alice, blah, $$$, blah blah
Charlie: Ok, Alice is paid
Letter: Blah blah, Alice, blah blah, $$$, blah blah, bank account, blah
Alice: kthx
Letter: Blah blah blah...
Same when summarizing, just less frequently.
As someone who cares about precision and clarity in my writing, I do not use LLMs in the context of communication.
> There's a cartoon going around (...)
Both frames of the cartoon represent a real perceived need: for the sender, the need to inflate the message to "look nice" because "people expect it", and then for the recipient, the need to summarize the nice-looking message to get the actual point they care about.
Hopefully the use of AI in email will make that cartoon (and the underlying message) widespread, and lead to people finally realizing what they failed to realize all these decades: just send the goddamn bullet point. We don't need AI in e-mails. We just need to stop wasting each other's time.
EDIT: and riffing off rpigab's comment downthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 -- I wish for the future people will feel comfortable, instead of sending AI-generated e-mails, to send the goddamn prompt instead. It carries all the information and much less noise.
I mean, using LLMs makes sense if you actually need to communicate in prose - for many, myself included, it's much easier to evaluate whether some text sounds right, than to write it that way in the first place, so LLMs are useful in evolving and refactoring your own writing (and learning how to write better from it, over time). But that is rarely the case in transactional or business communication - for that, just send the prompt.
Sometimes I would spend 15 minutes writing a 3 or 4-line email of this kind. Not anymore.
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I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
It's more complicated than this.
The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete. The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but it can be part of an effective workflow to write good feedback.
Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.
In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work.
There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently.
/rant
I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.
Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from your work, start talking about them as the work.
When your manager asks about your milestones, or accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance front and center.
When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the meetings, point out that you won't actually do any of it. Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10 hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours of testing etc.
"This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'
Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes. Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your ticket increase.)
Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings, you can relax in your own productivity.
Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your manager, you place the burden for action on him.
If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it off your plate.
Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should be, you frequently see that no real progress was made, someone did all the work before the meeting started and this is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply pushed to the next meeting.
I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just more noise.
These features are just so rudimentary you just know a bunch of MBAs from McKinsey came up with them over a 7 month and $25m
I think this really encapsulates something that I hadn't been able to put my finger on in regards to LLM summarization. What it seems to indicate is that, if you need a computer to summarize a large amount of text that someone has sent to you, there are two likely possibilities:
1) The information is incredibly dense/important/technical/complex. This necessitates the extreme length of the message - (think: technical documents, research papers, a rough draft of a legal notice, or your will.) For these sorts of things, you should not rely on an LLM to summarize it, because it may miss key details of the message.
2) The person sending it to you is bad at communicating, in which case the solution is help them learn better communication, rather than "de-noising" their clumsy wording into something comprehensible.
"But what if its number 2, but it's coming from your boss?"
Then I see two obvious points to consider:
First, you should absolutely be telling them about the problem, regardless of the position that they hold. You can phrase it in a way that isn't rude. "Hey boss, I saw (message) but I'm not 100% the intent. I've actually noticed that with (other time)...I usually try to front-load the action items up front, and put the specifics lower down. Anyway, to make sure I'm tracking, you're talking about (action) on (thing), right?"
Second, until (or unless) their communication style is de-noised, then part of your job is being able to "translate" their instructions. Using an AI to do that for you is a bad idea because, at some point or another they're going to be trying to speak to you in-person, or by phone.
Not having dealt with their mannerisms in an unfiltered way might lead to you being "out of practice" and struggling much harder to figure out what they're trying to convey.
Notably, in my experience there is a high correlation with that background and being curmudgeonly. Mainly because that means someone has been responsible for outcomes, regardless of feelings. And something often has to give, and it’s usually feelings. It’s also hard to not be cranky or even angry if someone has to constantly be the one ‘not having fun’ or cleaning up messes so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart.
There is huge market demand exactly for what you’re complaining about, which is faking things happening as convincingly as possible, precisely because being clear/concise, etc. helps with seeing the root cause of problems, and if someone is worried (or is legitimately) a root cause of the problem, of course they’ll consider that bad.
For example, a good sign of a badly led organization is that it’s always busy, but never seems to get anything done. Everything is an emergency, so nothing really gets fixed, etc.
Or there are constant meetings and emails, but nothing gets decided.
People will pay good money for the right kind of wallpaper that makes that ugly wall look pretty again.
Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the actions of everyone else who emails you.
If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any better.
That worked, but to be honest I have tried similar things more recently that didn’t work. Perhaps there is a routing model up front that decides whether or not to use a lot of compute for any given query?
Google also plans on charging more money for APIs for code completion plugins for IntelliJ IDs, etc. this year.
I would like to see AI pricing models be sustainable, not give things away for free, and have lots of control over when I use a lot of compute. I actually have this right now because I usually use LLM APIs and write my own agents for specific tasks.
There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool.
There is value for concise drafts.
I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of cut their sinews.
I tend to agree, except these two things are kind of the same thing. It can make going through the noise easier by intelligently filtering out the noise or finding you the signal. Search. It doesn't necessarily need to eliminate the noise.
Maybe AI would be better if it prevented the noise, and its definitely going to add noise (expanding a few basic thoughts into an email with lots of fluff), but it can also solve it.
These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can easily save me half the time to write these things.
I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my 20 minutes.
At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed. From a vague description, it can find the open source project I was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good summary of the project.
deets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706997
Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.
I’m not a native english speaker, but working at US subsidiary I must produces reports in english etc - and having an LLM proofread my texts for me is great.
LLM:s are new modality to computing. If you need it, they are great. But just like excel/sheet have limited applications a LLM with data has limiited use as well.
"Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can't make their wedding."
That's not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines work for me.
Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.
A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
What happens when social skills are delegated too?
1. Friend sends an apology email drafted by LLM.
2. Email gets summarized at the receiver end in the daily AI email "summary" which might be something like
You have a scheduled cake tasting this weekend. Did you know there's a bakery near your office that makes wedding cakes too. By the way your friend Joe can't make it to the wedding, do you want me to send a reply?
3. Reply email gets summarized by AI.
"Your friend acknowledges that you cannot rsvp. Do you want to schedule a wedding gift delivery on their wedding day ? XYZ neighborhood/online store has a sale next week".
Regarding teaching kids, we've set messaging templates for occasions that are at the center of our lives. We have Hallmark greeting cards to express feelings to people close to our hearts. If there's a template for expressing someone you're sorry their mother died, or happy they have a baby, I'm not sure throwing the stone at AI use is warranted.
In a way, I wonder if it will be the wake up call that will make simple and genuine communication acceptable again, without all the boilerplate we've built to feign care and emotions.
Are people really buying the "sorry for your loss" cards, just signing under the prewritten text, and sending them to someone?
I cannot stand those cards but to a greater extent receiving them. It really does feel worse than not getting anything. It's actually a slap in the face to me that someone would go out of their way to say nothing like this. It's proof that the relationship is fake.
I feel the same disgust when people throw inauthentic AI bullshit to me. How little do you have to care about someone to delegate a robot or a template to mediate your interactions because you can't be bothered?
I’m not going to defend AI here because I seldom use it myself. But it should be noted that the way we learn has already undergone multiple different shifts due to changes in technology.
Search engine were a big one. No longer did we have to learn to memorise stuff nor learn how to research properly. Now we could just type a phrase into Google / whatever and get results. So people learned how to search rather than learning the facts itself.
... back to Fortnite / Minecraft / pr0n / alcohol / drugs ...
"My AI has more friends than your AI!"
What about this:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to...
So... not a biased assessment, or anything.
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If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.
Look at Prime. So much crap involved, and quite literally all I use it for is lower cost shipping. It's almost on the edge of not worth it for me. But I bet from Amazon's perspective, they make more with the higher price, even if they lose the bottom 10% not willing to spend.
Huh.
Just made me realise, a startup that subscribes to Prime as a virtual being, and then splits off each sub-thing for full use by separate individuals would be incredibly profitable.
If any form of AI is eventually granted legal personhood, Prime's model will collapse.
You're not paying for lower cost shipping, you're paying to turn regular purchases you could wait a few extra days for into impulse buys.
- my orders are usually above the generic free shipping threshold
- most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or three days to get above the threshold
- if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for instance.
- Prime day sales aren't great
Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both for different reasons)
It feels like Google are shoving AI down our throats and making Workspace customers pay for it's development.
I don't want your half-baked LLM features.
I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.
I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.
Maybe make an "Interesting Facts About Products" table and put things like "Management plans to terminate this product in Q3" or "this group will be outsourced next year."
Full quote: > "Particularly around bigger companies that have complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically aggressively summarizing information that maybe people technically have access to but shouldn't have access to," he explained.
Berkowitz said salary information, for example, might be picked up by a Copilot service.
"Now, maybe if you set up a totally clean Microsoft environment from day one, that would be alleviated," he told us. "But nobody has that. People have implemented these systems over time, particularly really big companies. And you get these conflicting authorizations or conflicting access to data."
Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.
The solution is to of course push even more AI stuff. The actual quote one of the C-level used was "Users don't understand the power of AI yet!" and I could barely hold in my laugh when I heard it.
I've been feeling like the world has lost their fucking minds with the AI push. I know that VC/investors play a big role in it, but I've never seen anything quite like it. The AI toothbrush [1] really took the cake for me for peak of absurdity, I wonder what these geniuses will come up with next...
[1] https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/product-collections/genius-x
an ignorable monthly credit card charge, to one that has to go
AI is a better search engine. And a better grammar check for your emails. And a better writer for your reporting.
This is a strategic play, not a revenue play.
Nobody on my team uses these features. They're actually quite distracting.
Google gets to raise prices under the guise that these are improving productivity.
I wish there was a fast and easy alternative. Google has its claws in deep.
I don't have a good way to verify that though.
I always felt ripped off by the 5TB/10TB plans (https://one.google.com/about/plans?hl=en&g1_landing_page=0) but now I find it to be a bargain with Gemini bundled in.
It's so bad at understanding your intentions.
- "Standard 200 GB" ($30/year)
- "Premium 2 TB" ($100/year)
- "AI Premium 2 TB" (free first month + $20/month, so $220–$240/year)
- "Premium 5 TB" ($250/year)
and only the last two come with Gemini Advanced.
Give it a quarter and we’ll see breathless articles about how Google saw “AI adoption increase 150%” and “Google workspace users say they can’t go without AI” (because they physically can’t remove it from their workspace).
This in turn, will be used as post-hoc justification of the value of AI and why ever more power, water and data should be funnelled into it.