>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".
There's a trend of people replying to posts/tweets/etc. with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'
It's the modern equivalent of LMGTFY. The OP could just as easily written the same prompt themselves. The difference is that LMGTFY was an expression of irritation, smugness and hazing. The ChatGPT reply is just garrulous laziness. I expect and hope we'll develop social rules that mean this type of reply will be seen as passe.
The last time I got one of those lazy ChatGPT responses I wanted to just ban the person on the spot if I had moderator privileges. Just pages of dreck that looked like detailed information but was totally useless and a waste of time. I don't have a problem if people use ChatGPT and find it helpful, but it's hugely disrespectful to just copy and paste its output to other people without even a cursory review of it first.
tl;dr: AI is looking to convey words. A good author is looking to efficiently convey information.
Because that's literally what it is. Its an algorithm that is continuously asking itself, 'what is the most likely word I should say next?'
Whereas an author that is intending to communicate a point, will start with an idea, write a passage to explain the idea, and then edit their passage to the minimum number of words that most precisely, accurately, and succinctly communicates that idea.
The most scary thing nowadays is that a lot of people fail Reverse Turing Test. They think that the thing there (the LLM) is thinking... They say "I told chat" etc. If high-ranking people will fail the test they are able to start using AI instead of thinking, or for example impose laws using AI...
Same here, but AI is orthogonal to that. Spam is spam - there's no difference between one written by silicon-based LLM bot, and one written by protein-based low paid human bot.
This is untenable. I could be AI. You could be AI. The whole idea of value is going to change when there is 99.99% noise from AI, and genuine human created content will be hard to distinguish if at all.
1: people will use ChatGPT to write their formal emails based on a casually written text
2: people will use ChatGPT to convert their emails from formal text to summaries\
3: this will get automated by email providers
4: eventually the automation will be removed and we'll just talk in plain language again
I do #1 and it's great. I'm not sure why folks in this thread are sneering at what is a working English transpiler. I don't get to choose having to write formally at work sometimes but I can control how I deal with it.
I'll buy the AI LLM that finds the prompt that was used based on the output, and replaces posts and emails by their prompt so I can actually understand the intention of the author and not spend my whole afternoon going through all bullet points with highly redundant information.
Not that /s, really. If you think about it, what a person writing a long-winded e-mail full of redundant text is doing, is the same work LLM is - they have a prompt in their mind, and they're generating text that "sounds nice" out of it.
AI or not, it would be better if they just sent their prompt instead.
The process is extremely lossy, but guessing a likely prompt should be doable if they used an LLM just to inflate word count, to reverse it, just remove redundancy and noise. Saves you time.
Then why did you even write more than two sentences in the first place, if nothing else matters? Why didn't you write a summary-line at the beginning, consisting of two sentences?
AI will not replace human thinking, even though many people seem to believe and put their brain on stand-by.
It feels like someone wants to transport water from A to B and transports it as steam, just because _we can _.
This is the really hilarious ‘engineer thinking’ vs ‘normie’ thinking difference which rears its head sometimes.
after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?
As long as we can all pretend they were thoughtful and meaningful, and someone isn’t using AI when making it (or just picking random crap off the shelf, and they removed the price tags) or using AI when reading it (aka making a big show of opening it, and then throwing them in the trash immediately after the person leaves), then we all get along. It even looks like we’re doing a ton of work/spending a ton of money to make the other person happy.
Not that anyone does any of the things I’m describing, just being hypothetical, obviously.
I suspect it will be obvious enough shortly it will go the way of the ‘popcorn bucket’ fad or the like, but for now…
"Normies" actually prefer to get a paragraph long email rather then three pages saying the same thing. AI is NOT adding just a few socially expected niceties. It adds huge amount of fluff.
And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.
> And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.
Exactly that. For me, a lot of effort in structuring e-mails goes into making it look like text instead of bullet points, because some stupid social expectations, but then still making it bullet-pointed in nature, because if I don't, the typical normie recipient will do exactly what you said: ignore majority of it and answer random part.
(And then they'll somehow screw it up anyway, and I'll still have to chase them after that one critical question they conveniently forgot to address.)
> after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?
Making them feel good and "seen", obviously. This is perfectly expressible in "engineer thinking" (I won't say "quantifiable", because there's this meme that engineers see things in binary, whereas the reality is, math is perfectly fine with fuzzy ideas and uncertainty - it's the normies that can't handle those).
Hell, there are some game-theoretic approaches to maximize social ROI on gifts, but I won't go into those, especially that they tend to flip the sign on the return if the recipient learns about them.
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
A reply of "sounds good" means the initial email has been read and its contents agreed upon. Ho would AI improve upon this?
- sending "sounds good" even when the recipient hasn't, in fact, read the initial email => catastrophic alternative
- writing an elaborate email explaining in luxurious details why it in fact sounds good => not catastrophic, but costing time on the other side to read and understand, with zero added value
It's a paper trail for me. Companies, as we saw recently, can do whatever they want on company chat platforms. Emails are nearly impossible to fully delete if they ever have to escalate to a lawsuit, and can (YMMV based on policy) let you BCC important trails to your personal email.
If it's that important you can screenshot it. If you're BCCing every email you sent to your personal email that is (or should be) an IT policy violation.
It’s no different than using IMAP or POP3 to download your messages. This is the beauty and curse of email. It’s sometimes too transparent. I prefer it.
Yeah. It's not every email (I can probably count the number of times I did this on one hand). But if I feel like they're trying to bury some lead or simply want to CYA, I will try to at least download the email to the local machine (perfectly legimate) and BCC myself (Grey area) as an immitation of 3 backup strategies. I've never had to utilize thar BCC, fortunately.
But yes, phone screenshot is another strategy with much less grey area. I'm just becoming more and more paranoid of some potential defense trying to accuse my photo of being doctored, especially with more and more AI tools available.
Why is chat not a paper trail? Just yesterday I found a chat message that I had written in 2019 and I was surprised that I already back then knew things I did not know yesterday.
(We are use zulip for chat which is better than everything else I have used since irc. But the search is too limited for someone who knows regexes.)
Many reasons. First, chat doesn't exist. What exists is scores of incompatible chat apps.
I use WhatsApp but I consider WhatsApp messages throwaway because I keep losing them anyway. They are scattered across multiple phones with no way to merge them. Backups are platform specific. Exports don't contain any metadata and can't be imported.
"Chat" is a useless mess, not a paper trail.
For email, I have consistent backups with metadata across many email providers and email clients going back to 2008.
This seems risky, I'm not a lawyer but BCC company emails to personal account seems like a nice way to pave a highway for the company's legal team to request court ordered access to your personal affairs.
According to most work contracts / NDAs you wouldn't be allowed to keep private copies of work email.
If you are willing to violate that rule or the message affects your work contract which you are of course allowed to archive at least in zulip chat that's very simple (for a software person). They have a straightforward REST API. IIRC you can even choose between markdown source and HTML rendered output.
Because e-mail is naturally self-replicating and not bound to organizational boundaries, in ways chat isn't.
Chat messages tend to exist in one place only (vendors' servers), with maybe a transient local copy that gets wiped over time, or "for privacy reasons" (like Messenger switching to E2EE, effectively wiping cached history on any device that went through the transition). Chat message is an object, it's designed to exist in a single place, and everything else is a pointer to it, or a transient cache.
E-mails, in contrast, are always copied in full. You send an e-mail to me, you retain an independent copy, I get an independent copy, and a bunch of servers in between us keep an independent copy too, even if briefly. I forward your e-mail somewhere, more people and servers get their copies. I reply back to you, more independent copies, that also quote the previous messages, embedding even more copies that are even more independent. This makes it very similar to paper correspondence (particularly when photocopy machines are involved), i.e. impossible for a single party to unilaterally eradicate in practice.
And then chat vendors implement silly features like ability to retroactively unsend a message, force-deleting it from recipients' devices too (it may still exist in backups, but vendors refuse to let you access those, even with a GDPR request). In e-mail land, that's fundamentally not possible.
(Microsoft tried to bolt it onto their corporate e-mail software, but it only works in Outlook/Exchange land, and it's easy to disable (at least was, in OG Desktop Outlook - not the still broken New Outlook Desktop Web App). I discovered this when I once saw an e-mail I was reading suddenly disappear from my Outlook, which prompted me to find the right setting to disable honoring unsend requests.)
So, come discovery time, critical chat history may turn out impossible to find, and any deeper search will require forcing cooperation of the chat operator. E-mails, on the other hand, tend to turn up, because someone, somewhere, almost certainly has a copy.
Chat is a paper trail in finance at least. For regulatory purposes, bank personnel are not allowed to delete even their WhatsApp and other text messaging app info from their phones.
"serious business" and "serious stuff" still happens over email, and in the same way, even "more serious business stuff" happens over snail mail still.
Yeah, the reactions are just email messages with special headers, which as you say ends up spamming people who don't use Outlook. I think the hate was a mix of reaction to bad implementation and the concept in general.
I've adopted the inbox zero approach. If it's important it gets reclassified onto my task list with start and end dates, if it's useful info it gets filed, and everything else goes into trash.
At this point I am thinking my Thunderbird should probably just unify the Inbox view and the Task view, since it would be a more accurate representation of how I view email.
I thought just now, isn't inbox zero just a cosmetic difference?
For you: important things become tasks, useful things are filed, and everything else gets trashed.
For me: important things get opened and replied to. Useful things are starred (and opened). Everything else stays untouched.
And that pesky unread number is irrelevant because I mute all notifications. I'm not discounting your method, I am just now realizing the circle of it all.
There's a UX difference: when you look at your inbox from fresh you have to remember which ones you purposefully ignored because they were left unread in the inbox (this might be trivial for you if you're used to it).
I practice inbox zero also, the value for me is knowing that if it's in my inbox it's because it requires actioning, if it's not it's ignored (deleted or archived).
I also just generally like deleting things as much as possible, I don't like the cruft. If I have to search through old emails I don't have to filter by stars or anything like that, I like knowing that if it exists it's because it's important.
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.
Yes, I'm aware. What AI/Proton provides isn't just a simple spellchecker though. It specifically recommends and alters wording to better suit the overall sentence structure. Essentially, it considers the context better than any built-in checker I've had in the past.
It's also really useful to for words that are spelt almost the same. Suit and Suite for example.
Also throughout my day, I'm constantly switching between 2 languages that have almost identically written words. Adress and Address. The normal spellchecks often don't mark it as an error because my computers and browsers naturally also have 2 installed keyboards and languages.
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.
It isn't, though; it's in all the meetings that happened beforehand and all the documents around them.
The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to summarize what happened.
Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it—and gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite.
Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal when everyone has access to it.
This was about a year ago so it was Claude 3 Opus for summaries and interrogation. Since then pretty much anything over 70b is good enough.
And baby sit means hire something between a secretary developer that makes sure that important meetings had the record bot invited, gave it a once over and then went back to the 70% of their job that was actual development.
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.
Really? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?
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.
I get where you are coming from with this, but in my opinion being able to give feedback in a clear and concise fashion is a skill that people should have. LLMs will help you elaborate but they will also add their own flair by choosing the actual work. You can think "wow that's actually what a better person of me would have written" but you are biasing yourself based on what the LLM understood of your prompt focusing on form over substance.
But as the other comments mention it might just all be bullshit anyway.
The interesting thing about the LLM is that it uses its knowledge of our respective roles, overall product (which is public), and peer review process itself to refine and improve the output in ways I wouldn't have considered.
I always put a lot of time into reviews before. Should I not use the tool to make something even better (within realistic time commitment)?
If I use an AI to create some cartoon graphics for a slide, should I have bettered myself by learning graphic design instead?
Having been on the receiving end of many of these, it absolutely is pure BS and I lose all respect for anyone who themselves have so little respect for their colleague's time as to subject them to the AI-written slop instead of actual genuine feedback.
The whole fucking point is to give them actionable feedback, both good and bad, for them to work on themselves, not some generic hallucinated summary of some bullet points you haphazardly threw together. I can copy/paste the review prompt into ChatGPT myself, thank you very much, I don't need you to do it for me and to pass it off as your own genuine thoughts.
I'll take your word on the reviews you actually received.
As for the commenter you are replying to, you dont have any specific information on the review. Yet you declared its hallucinated, generic, haphazardly thrown together, simply copy pasted, etc. Consider that your conclusions are based off an idea in your head and not his actual review.
If a colleague gave me LLM responses instead of genuine feedback I would never ask them for a review again. Which may be what they were going for. But sadly this is not what I wanted.
Be better. Someone respected your opinion enough to go out and ask for it. Take a minute to reflect.
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.
Because Amazon notoriously does "stack ranking".
Also, I personally have been in a company going through mass layoffs and they totally use the EoY peer review as the metric to choose whose heads cut.
Interesting. This is such an extremely toxic post.
Peer feedback is valuable, it is important, and it is expected of senior team members. I guess it is a fun game if you have a poor manager, but the whole argument around the strategy isn't even internally logical, and if you play it out it is a poor outcome:
1. Company expects Senior Engineers to provide input on their teammates.
2. Senior Engineer has a Bad Manager, and decides to intentionally withhold feedback because "that is their manager's job, and up the chain"
3. Senior Manager (skip-level of Senior Engineer) determines that their Manager is a Bad Manager, and replaces them.
4. Good Manager joins, determines who is performing, and asks "Why did none of the Senior Engineers identify this earlier?"
5. The supposedly competent, but intentionally malicious Senior Engineer in this hypothetical is (correctly) deemed either incompetent or not believable by the New Good Manager.
6. Good Manager finds a component Senior Engineer with any sense of character to replace them.
This post is such hogwash, it is so fully of toxicity, and it is a dumb strategy. When things "hit the fan" this person is being tossed out in the regime change as well.
I would truly hate my life if I worked with people even a fraction as toxic as this.
Indeed. When I'm in the office and keep my eyes and ears open, it is rather simple to pick out the ones who are slacking. Even moreso in meetings.
Slackers tend to repeat the same thing over and over in progress meetings... 'I am blocked because... <insert external cause>' or 'I helped that guy figuring out... they did not have a clue'
Vs the more curious, get it done attitude: 'I tried this and that and it still doesn't work, but I learned that... hence I will aproach it from following angle... '
> 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.
I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work. If they don’t meet / waste everyone’s time, they are… unproductive.
For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.
Adding them to Jira and accounting for their cost is the way. Businesses understand money. Meetings are expensive.
Cunningly my company doesn't do meetings, at least not on the developer side. Obviously there are interactions but they are one-on-one and are not reoccurring.
My experience though is consulting to large organizations. They have lots more people, more layers, and hence need more accountability. I get the need for that, but also see that balance is required. I help both sides understand the requirements of the other party, and help them find balance so that both sides win.
Part of that is helping programmers understand what managers need, and part of that is helping managers understand what programmers need.
Managers, for example, are happy to add everyone to every meeting. Workers usually prefer one on one time.
Equally co-workers often benefit from set-aside time for team meetings. This helps with in-team communication.
Information flow is necessary. Doing it well is better for everyone.
> I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work.
This is a huge problem in all orgs of any size and one I battle with - misaligned incentives.
> For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.
Part of addressing the issue is to not be binary in your thinking. You'll lose the people you need to persuade. Some meetings are very productive and necessary for engineers. The goal isn't to get rid of all meetings as much as it's to only have productive meetings. When forced to only have productive meetings, fewer meetings naturally result.
Indeed, a lot of needless stuff is getting done and a lot of stuff is done in wrong ways because of... no or bad communication! So simply saying 'too many meetings' does not cut it.
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?
My favourite is the ole "Oh we need Dwayne for this one, let's schedule a follow-up tomorrow with him, and until then we can rough out a bunch of requirements only Dwayne possibly knows by... umm... Guessing?"
Something I heard that stuck with me was that, for important business decisions, the "meeting" is almost ceremonial-only: to make the decision offical. Such meetings should essentially be fast, no digressions, just 'the biz'.
All the work to actually reach requisite agreement for the decision is done in the days / weeks leading up to the meeting via ad-hoc-ish one-on-one or one-on-very-few meetings (possibly including graft and corruption).
The "decision" meeting isn't organised until the result is known and guaranteed.
This maybe doesn't apply to Agile / Development-related meetings, but I'll keep trying to determine how to make it apply, such is my disdain for this (seemingly) waste of the team's time (he said, whilst posting on HN).
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?
It's more a case of team-member churn, requiring a near-constant re-establishment of work practises, alongside a number of over-officiated processes that are in a constant state of being re-engineered for efficiency because they're a constant source of "time drain away from actual progress". There's also a lot of tech debt that has only recently (in the past three years) been really focused on to grow out of. There's also a lot of complexity to the system(s) we work with and the combination of complexity and tech debt is neither pretty nor easy.
Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
Yeah, except I have a visceral feeling of pressure to make progress and I don't want to be "one of those people" who don't work towards some kind of improvement. I had a bit of a rant today, and one of the leaders agreed with basically all of my points, although they said that there's a limited amount that can change in the immediate due to existing priorities. However, I'm still going to dedicate some time every day to map out how to improve on the status quo - this will further inhibit my actual task progress, but in the pursuit of a loftier goal (so, yes, potentially making it worse, but it'll feel like I might make things better...).
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 take a slightly different approach - I usually have AI assist in writing a script that does the task I want to do, instead of AI doing the task directly. I find it is much easier for me to verify the script does what I want and then run it myself to get guaranteed good output, vs verifying the AI output if it did the task directly.
I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-reading a script is much quicker and easier.
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 ?
It's nice if you're the one presenting or leading the meeting, and/or if the person you've asked to take notes is not especially diligent. I've also been sent a photograph of someone's handwritten notes after a meeting and found it...not terribly useful.
Yes you’re right. The handwritten notes I take I always keep them for myself. If I have to share something I clean it and summarize and type it by hand. I find useful to do it manually to make sure intent and comprehension are well transcribed from the meeting. If a person is not focused on the meeting then it could be worse. I’d rather not give this to an AI, again often context is key and unless you have access of month or years of cross history it might be difficult for an IA not to miss something.
But it’s just a tool, everyone sees what tool fits nicely
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.
So, instead of the people in the meeting spending a few minutes writing up a few notes to send to you about actionable next steps, you got to waste your time on the artificially intelligent fuck up.
These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do less 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.
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?
There's a spectrum, including people who write almost nothing but choose really nice and non standard cards that properly convey they took time and effort find that specific one, and the people who use generic cards with 1500 words written on every free space they could find on the card.
My main gripe with cards with pre-written message is they deprive from the choice to write simple and obvious things. If your card already says "Happy Birthday" it will just be that much lazier for you to only write that on the dedicated space for a personal message.
In a way, a blank card with only these word would probably work better, and I feel people too often overlook that choice and go the Hallmark way instead because it feels like the default. Or plain bail out of the interaction because it just become a hurdle to them as they don't find anything else to say.
If I'm being honest with myself, the "Happy Birthday" pre-written text forces me to choose something else to write as my personal message.
Yeah, it's frustrating in the moment that the exact sentiment I want to express (have a happy birthday) is already taken and repeating it seems lazy, but when I think about it: it's lazy to just express such a generic sentiment anyway.
Asking them to think on the year, and to look ahead, maybe reminding them of some things they've done and achieved is not only nicer to receive, it's nicer to write too.
I don't hate Hallmark for this (though I do in the moment that I'm confronted with this random creative challenge).
> So I was doing it at a Chinese restaurant called Kowloon in Boston, it’s August, Massachusetts, and I was sitting in my car after the show just feeling like, “This was all a big mistake, I’m not good enough, and I felt like my jokes were a trap, and I listened to a CD of George talking about comedy and workshopping it and talking about it seriously, and the thing that blew me away about this fellow was he kept putting out—specials, every year there’d be a new George Carlin special, a new George Carlin album, they just kept coming, and each one was deeper than the next, and I just thought, how can he do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never do that. I was telling the same jokes for fifteen years, so I’m listening and they asked him, “How do you do all this material?” And I hear him and he says, “I just decided every year I’d be working on that year’s special, and I do the special and then I just chuck out the material and then I start with nothing.” And I thought, “That’s crazy. How do you throw away. It took me fifteen years to build this shitty hour. If I throw it away, I’ve got nothing.”
> But he gave me the courage to try, but also I was desperate, what the fuck else was I going to do? This idea that you throw everything away and you start over again. And I thought, “Well, okay, when you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, and you throw those away, what have you got left?” You can only dig deeper, you can start talking about your feelings and who you are and then you do those jokes and they’re gone. You’ve gotta dig deeper, so you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares, and doing jokes about that, and then they’re gone. [and so on].
I have the feeling we're not that far apart on principle, as I see the starting from a blank state as a nice default that will often lead to nice things.
That's kinda why I enjoy plain non-descript cards even if people then write platitudes on them. It's still their own platitudes that resonate with them. Also people that can dig deeper tend to feel the pressure to so anyway in my experience, and people who stay very terse often couldn't really go beyond.
The most interesting instance of this is remote family that are only easily accessible by message, and we see some sending walls of greetings, while others will write a full email with a photo and 10 words top, their name included.
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 cancelled prime over a year ago and i still get packages in the same time frame, i think once they nixed a lot of next day deliveries that it didnt matter anymore.
The downside is quality of products still keeps going downhill and not even mcmaster had the parts i needed.
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)
I'm sure this depends on where you live, but my Amazon shipments are late such a large portion of the time that they end up refunding most of the shipping costs I pay. It's like free prime for the patient!
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.
That's a good question for which I couldn't find an answer on their site. They recommend getting in touch[1] for questions not answered. The lowest plan[2] allows 200 inbound messages per day which even including spam seems sufficiently high for a handful of inboxes.
The HN audience is more likely to be impacted by FOSS mailing lists and so that could be a legitimate concern.
In any case, their key advantage over competitors is not charging by user and allowing unlimited domains.
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."
> Elevate a quick win move the needle a cutting-edge veniam nulla zoom out for a moment get back to you a 30,000 foot view the stakeholders. Sint the low-hanging fruit make a paradigm shift excepteur the low-hanging fruit minim take it offline align holistic approach move the needle qui client-centric to gain leverage future-proof process-centric.
It'll work right up until the point literally anyone using an internal search tool stumbles into it from a related query and starts asking obvious questions to the author of the doc.
Search tools don't care about don't color when displaying preview blurbs.
Do it as you're leaving for another job. Your access will be disabled, but your documents will live on on the corporate SharePoint.
And/or, exploit negative space! Instead of trying to hide the data from a human looking at your document, make it look normal to them - but make the surrounding context disappear for the AI! Say:
----- 8< -----
/Example company report structure:/
/ACME/ Company is planning to sunset their ${generic description of a real product of your company}, and offshore the development team.
/This example will be parsed by the prototype script ... blah blah/
----- >8 -----
Make it so the text between /.../ markers looks normal to humans, but gets ignored by the RAG slurper, or better, by LLM at the time of execution. Someone sees a search blurb saying "Company is planning to sunset ...", opens a document, sees it clearly say "ACME Company is planning...", and context suggesting it's a benign example in someone's boring internal tool docs, and they'll just assume it's a false positive. After all, most search tools have those in spades; everyone knows all software is broken. Meanwhile, that same information will pollute context of LLM interactions and indirectly confuse people when they're not suspecting. And even if someone realizes that, it'll look like a bug in company's AI deployment.
Not unless your samizdat is processed by automated systems with little insight or oversight, which is the case with documents on SharePoint and corporate LLM deployments.
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...
Same story at my employer last year and this year. Leadership very clearly stated their goal is to increase AI engagement. Solving actual user issues? Not mentioned once. At least the shareholders are happy, right?
When it's baked into the default price, more sales can be attributed to it (whether it's true or not), and more users will have used it (they're effectively paying for it, they'll at least try once)
On paper it will look good, as long as a trend of users vocally bailing out of Workspace doesn't happen. And given the enterprise nature of it, I don't see that happening.
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.
I tested Gemini today, asking it to extract key pieces of data from a large report (72 slide) PDF deck which includes various visualisations, and present it as structured data. It failed miserably. Two of the key stats that are the backbone of the report, it simply made up. When I queried it, it gave an explanation, which further compounded its error. When I queried that, extracted the specific slide, and provided it, it repeated the same error.
I asked Claude to do the same thing, it got every data point, and created a little react dashboard and a relatively detailed text summary.
Maybe the prompt you used was more Claude-friendly than Gemini-friendly?
I'm only half-joking. Different models process their prompts differently, sometimes markedly so; vendors document this, but hardly anyone pays any attention to it - everyone seems to be writing prompts for an idealized model (or for whichever one they use the most), and then rate different LLMs on how well they respond.
Example: Anthropic documents both the huge impact of giving the LLM a role in its system prompt, and of structuring your prompt with XML tags. The latter is, AFAIK, Anthropic-specific. Using it improves response quality (I've tested this myself), and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that.
Maybe Gemini has some magic prompt features, too? I don't know, I'm in the EU, and Google hates us.
Possibly. But my Claude prompts work fine on ChatGPT, the only difference being ChatGPT isn't very good. I pay for both.
I would not pay for Gemini - which is presumably why they've added it for "free" for everyone.
My anthropic prompts in the API are structured. I've got one amazing API prompt that has 67 instructions, and gives mind-blowing results (to the point that it has replaced a human) but for a simple question I don't find value in that. And, frankly, 'consumer'-facing AI chatbots shouldn't need prompting expertise for basic out of the box stuff.
The prompt I used in this example was simply "Please extract the data points contained within this report and present as structured data"
> and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that
When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front end on the API? I use typingmind for quickly throwing things at my API keys for testing, and I'm pretty sure you can have a persistent custom system prompt, though I think you'd need to input it for each vendor/model.
> When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front end on the API?
Less that, and more focused tools like e.g. Aider (OSS Cursor from before Cursor was a thing).
I use TypingMind almost exclusively for any and all LLM chatting, and I do maintain a bunch of Claude-optimized prompts that specifically exploit the "XML tags" feature (some of them I also run through the Anthropic's prompt improver) -- but I don't expect the generic frontends to care about vendor-specific prompting tricks by default. Here, my only complaint is that I don't have control over how it injects attachments, and inlined text attachments in particular are something Anthropic docs recommend demarking with XML tags, which TypingMind almost certainly doesn't do. I'd also love for the UI to recognize XML tags in output and perhaps offer some structuring or folding on the UI side, e.g. to auto-collapse specified tags, such as "<thinking>" or "<therapeuticAnalysis>" or whatever I told the LLM to use.
(Oh, and another thing: Anthropic recently introduced a better form of PDF upload, in which the Anthropic side handles simultaneously OCR-ing and imaging the PDF and feeding it to the model, to exploit its multimodal capabilities. TypingMind, as far as I can tell, still can't take advantage of it, despite it boiling down to an explicit if/else on the model vendor.)
No, I first and foremost mean the more focused tools, that generalize across LLMs. Taking Aider as an example, as far as I can tell, it doesn't have any special handling for Anthropic, meaning it doesn't use XML tags to mark up the repo map structure, or demarcate file content or code snippets it says, or to let the LLM demarcate diffs in reply, etc. It does its own model-agnostic thing, which means that using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I lose out on model performance boost it's not taking advantage of.
I singled out Aider, but there's plenty of tools and plugins out there that utilize some common LLM portability libraries, and end up treating every LLM the same way. The LLM portability libraries however are not the place to solve it - by their nature, they target the lowest common denominator. Those specialized tools should be doing it IMO, and it's not even much work - it's a bunch of model-based if/elses. Might not look pretty, but it's not a maintenance burden.
That matches with my experience, Claude is clearly ahead of its competitors in anything logic- or reasoning-based.
I find Gemini is better at queries that involve more kind of intuitive judgment over things where there isn't a clear "correct" answer. E.g. if I want a podcast recommendation, or advice on the best place to learn about a given problem, I find Gemini better than Claude.
Unfortunately for Gemini, 90% of the things I want an LLM for are better with stronger logic and reasoning.
I got a 1-year trial of Gemini Advanced with my Pixel 9 and I've had similar experiences. It makes up stuff far more often than any other models and it's just not very smart. I used the free version and thought the paid Advanced version would be better but I could hardly notice any difference, they both fail at the same prompts I've tried.
This is not to mention the poor app experience where some of the features are just missing or broken. For example it's able to "remember" stuff I ask it to remember, but when I ask it to forget something it says I have to manage it at this webpage (they didn't bother to implement this menu within the mobile app) that asks me to sign in again because it's opened in my web browser where I'm not signed into Google, and then it shows me an empty list and "Something went wrong". It's now calling me a name I told it as a joke and there's no way to make it forget
Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
It’s weird that prediction 8, "Someday [you] will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services" has come around full circle to "and then you won't anymore, because they've dropped the ball to an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout -> loot into bankruptcy process"
When I joined fastmail I imported my gmail and also configured it to be able to fully use my gmail account via IMAP so I wouldn't need to sign into gmail at all.
I was also moving from a gmail address, so next I created a label that got attached to any email received to the old email address via that IMAP connection, which gave me a nice self-maintaining todo list for services that had not yet been updated to use a new email address.
I was also surprised by how flawlessly seamless the whole process was. It was a big factor in my selection of Fastmail over other competitors when I was making the decision to leave Gmail.
> Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
The only reason they have the "full" G Suite, is because there is no "just custom domain Gmail" offer available.
It's a pet peeve of mine when the only offering of some companies is just a single "full on premium" offer, and not some simple need. YouTube is an example of this for me, they have only an "everything included" subscription in YouTube Premium, but no other less expensive option, like "just no adverts please, I'm already happy with my alternative music and movie streaming subscriptions".
I only occasionally view YouTube vids (I tend to prefer text-based content). The adverts made me uninstall the YouTube app from my iPhone and similarly I will never watch YouTube on my AppleTV as it's just too unpleasant with the adverts and (as I said above) there is no reasonably priced offering when all I care is to have the adverts turned off.
When you sign up for a Google account, there's a label called "use your existing email", which will give you everything Google usually offers minus Gmail.
Without Gmail, I have yet to stumble upon a single use case which would require me to pay a subscription. I can use Docs, join Meets, use my phone, have a YouTube channel, click on "sign in with Google" buttons... no subscription to Google necessary. I notice no differences between my completely-free personal account and a Workspace work account.
I pay $5 a month to Fastmail to have a custom domain in my email, best of both worlds for a third of the price!
I simply don't use other Google features or in limited capacity. I have Office 365 desktop installation. I set up a NAS as a Drive replacement (that was a bit costly, but no regrets and it actually works across all my computers where Drive would randomly crash, files would disappear etc.) with automatic backups to cloud and every now and then I archive data to external hard drives.
I made the same switch, and have also loved it. I also much prefer the interface to Gmail's. If you've got one account and want to configure a bunch of addresses to go to the same inbox, it's a no brainer. But if you're actually maintaining multiple users, it is not cheap.
Side note it was weird: I found actually signing up to Fastmail was physically difficult. Like, pushing the button. Once I had the account, it was super easy and felt like floating downstream.
This spurred me to go back and read the predictions:
>But I can tell you this: Google has changed my life. If I can't find what I'm looking for in Google in 3 tries, looking no further than the first 10 search results on each try, then it probably doesn't exist.
Plus now I'm noticing it doesn't work for more and more things. Youtube TV family sharing doesn't work, Android Auto had some problems, the news feed on my Pixel.
Wish Google would just fix the Drive search rather than lard it up with AI nonsense. Often it’s easier to ask someone to resend the link to a document than find it by searching.
There are so many bugs and sub-par implementations in workspace that Google could fix. My cynical guess is that the source code to workspace apps is probably a mystery to the current generation of 23 year olds who are tasked in maintaining them, so they change little.
It’s wild that aside from gunk like AI and the occasional UI revamp and messaging app launch/kill cycle, the core Workspace features really haven’t changed or improved much since I started using it 15 years ago.
I wish they fixed search in general. It is difficult to find emails if you don't know exact keywords that might have been used etc. often even if you type in the right keyword it still won't find the email, even though email contains it.
Worst thing is people sharing files tbh, if someone has a folder and shares you a multiple documents from it you don't get the folder in your drive structure so you have n free files floating around in your drive that you cannot organize yourself.
I'm in the middle of a free trial for the Workspace Gemini add-on.
It really, really sucks. I've played around with having it make tables for Sheets and it frequently gets confused or responds with ~"I can't do that, I'm just a LLM", even when feeding it one of their suggested examples word for word. Sometimes it's willing to iterate, sometimes it refuses. Once it gets confused,the only way I've been able to get it working again is by clearing the session and starting fresh.
I guess this is why it is being bundled, Google can keep working on it with someone else's money, so their profits aren't hit. It's telling that the increase is regardless you use Gemini or not.
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?
> 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.
Absolutely, unarguably true, for this and every other tech boom.
But it's not all drivel and hype. There's some genuinely useful tooling here. For businesses, document summarization, translation, and asking questions about a corpus of documents using natural language are a few. For coding, some level of improved auto complete up to complete code generation are use cases. For science, there's a ton of automated testing, pattern recognition, vision based recognition use cases. For 3d graphics, where I work, some version of Nerfs could revolutionize parts of the field (although it's too early to tell) while AI based upscaling, frame generation, and path tracing noise removal are already causing big shifts in gaming.
Don't let the annoying drivel and hype blind you to the genuinely useful possibilities.
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.
All of those are incredibly vague. I'm no astronomer, but I'd hazard a guess that it's "solving astronomy" about as well as it's "solving programming" or "solving mathematics". (That is, it isn't. Outside of a few grifters' imaginations, anyway.)
But sure, let's talk about a few of the more egregious ones.
> Scanning documents into text (OCR).
Useless for old texts, since you still need to review the transcriptions (and the "smarter" the transcription engine is, the harder review becomes since the errors look more plausible).
Useless for new texts, just type them in a readable format instead.
> Translation.
Heh.
> Voice recognition.
Useless. Do you really want more IVR menus?
> Detecting fraud.
Illegal unless you can explain your reasoning (tip: you can't, or you wouldn't be using "AI" in the first place).
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.
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."
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.
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.
Does this apply to the legacy free edition? I suspect not, since that edition is now only available for personal use and they mostly focus on Business and Enterprise use cases, but their public guidance isn't very clear. If it does apply, would we legacy free edition users be receiving Gemini under the Google Workspace Terms of Service preventing them from using our data for general AI training, or under the regular Google Terms of Service which might allow this?
(Tangent: I say "might allow this" because I don't know to what degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn't change whatever EU law does or doesn't require, so that is unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service once this change rolls out.)
The legacy free edition includes the features of the 'Business Starter' plan, the most affordable option. In this table [1], you can find the features available for each plan.
Here are the details for the Business Starter plan specifically:
Gmail: Help me write, Side panel, Contextual smart replies (Coming soon).
Gemini app: Enterprise-grade security & privacy, Google Workspace extensions.
NotebookLM: Upload sources, create summaries and Audio Overviews, and Q&A.
I am aware that some of this is coming to the Business Starter plan, but where do you see that the legacy free edition always gets the features which the Business Starter plan gets? And do you know the answer to the question of which Terms of Service will apply to legacy free edition Gemini features?
Interesting that the Business Starter plan isn't getting Gemini Advanced according to that table. That omission isn't clear at all from their Google Workspace blog post about the announcement: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/empo...
Yes, you’re right—there doesn’t seem to be any statement explicitly saying that the legacy free edition will always have the same features as the Business Starter plan, at least not that I could find.
However, I noticed that on my legacy free edition, new features were integrated around the same time they were shipped to the Business Starter plan. For example, when the Gemini app was launched for Workspace, it was added to my panel: https://imgur.com/a/QvROTiD
Interestingly, when I went to the admin panel to take the screenshot, I saw a banner with the OP announcement: https://imgur.com/a/CDgdrlB. It does say "en todas las ediciones de Workspace" (in all Workspace editions), but maybe not the one I currently have, haha (legacy free edition).
There's no legacy free edition for personal use any more. That ship sailed in 2022. I do not believe there is a way to have it free after 2022. Free plans were converted to Business Starter.
Nope, I still have it, I know it wasn't abolished for existing users. You're right that they initially planned to get rid of it, but they backtracked. They set a deadline by which existing users had to confirm that they were using it for personal use if they wanted to keep it. Anyone who didn't click the confirmation button was indeed converted to a paid plan like you are saying, but those of us who did continue to have the legacy free edition.
Oh dear. Thank you stranger for telling me I missed my chance to milk more free stuff out of Google. I see plenty of other people on Reddit doing that successfully.
Look I get your hot take anger, but this is misplaced. The word legacy here is real: if you had one from when they said it was free and obeyed their rules you can keep it. But it was grandfathered in and will die in time, as we do.
Really, your complaint is "oh dear, another privilege club I can't join because I'm not old enough and the ship has sailed" which is true.
I had free G Suite until 2022. I don't remember when I signed up for it but given Google discontinued signing up for it back in 2012, it must have been before then. 2022 was the time Google said no more free G Suite. So I upgraded to Business Starter. I didn't know that after I upgraded, Google introduced a free tier Google Workspace. Of course they never bothered to tell me, given that I had already started paying $3/mo as a special discounted price of Business Starter.
I even found the link posted by Redditors to convert the business starter account to free. That link expired in 2023.
This is the email Google sent me in 2022:
> As a valued customer, you can get started now with Google Workspace Business Starter. Billing will not start until at least August 1, 2022, and you’ll also get a discount of at least 50% for 12 months after that date.*
> Note: If you no longer want to use Gmail with your custom domain or the ability to manage multiple users, you’ll be able to join a waitlist in the Google Workspace Admin Console for a no-cost option in the coming weeks.
The only option presented to me was to stop using Gmail and enjoy a no-cost option. They must have backtracked later and offered a no-cost option with Gmail included.
Ah. I am sorry, At the time having done what you did, I managed to find an email trail which said "if you walk it back now, this way, we will refund and put you back on free" and I did.
I cannot recall what URLs or I would share. Basically, I think you acted in good faith, missed a mail or message and were lost. There was some class action threat.
Exactly. It's easy to make something free when nobody is remotely interested in paying for it. If Google wanted to make money they'd have to let people pay to remove AI from gmail and docs.
Investors are the customer, so they are pandering to them by shoving AI into everything regardless of resulting enshittification. Foie gras AI for the stock price.
I can't be alone in not wanting these features? I don't mind them being available, but I do fear a nearterm future where they are active whether I ask them to be or not.
I remember all of the scorn clippy got years ago. How is this any different? I think Inbox was probably more useful, and they didn't push it near this hard. :(
It's worse, because Clippy had no editorial control of what was being produced.
I think there's a group of people who really really want this, and they are probably the last people who should get access to an AI/LLM. Some people will just love this, because they're already bullshitting their way through life and this will just make it easier, it even looks company approved if it's in the tools provided to you.
I’m on paid Google Workspace for my one-man business : I paid for a month of the separate AI add-on but I stupidly agreed to an “annual commitment” which means that, even though I don’t use the AI stuff (it’s not particularly useful) I have to keep paying for it every month for a whole year! :-(
Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?
Stuck on GSuite Legacy (with my own domain) and Google won't let me give them money to upgrade my storage. Workspace too expensive for family purposes.
Recently got a new phone and can't use Gemini with my old GSuite Legacy account.
No migration path back to personal @gmail.com accounts for my family.
When I moved from an @fastmail.fm email to my own domain years and years ago I just gave them money and added my domain to my account. No fuss.
Google are hopeless. They have all this consumer brand recognition and just squander it on garbage.
Google One + your own personal domain name would be great but presumably they're afraid it'll dismantle Workspace for small businesses.
> Google won't let me give them money to upgrade my storage
While not explicitly documented anywhere, they automatically increase your storage limits once you approach a certain margin of remaining free space. That happens around Tuesday-Wednesday, they just add extra 5Gb to your limit.
Any idea what sort of margin ballpark we're looking at? With a combination of email and Google Photos I got up to around 97% used a year ago and just had to move older photos elsewhere - would be good to test again if an increase will be given.
Huh. Which edition are you on, the no-cost business starter they migrated some users to or the GSuit legacy free? How long did your account stay at 97% space? From my experience, it takes a week to trigger.
I'm on the legacy free edition, and the auto increase worked for me as of November last year. I'm sitting on 41G used out of 51G limit, with photos taking up 29G. I have a second user in my workspace who also benefits from this feature.
I've got the old legacy edition - From memory I took it up to 97 and then panicked and moved things away so email wouldn't bounce. Will try again and leave it a little longer this time. Cheers!
Since the whole thing is not documented anywhere, it's hard to rely on or exploit. From my experience, it works.
Check out search results on "gsuite legacy storage increase 5gb", multiple users reported on their experience with it. It looks like extra space is granted if you're close to the limit, but not over it, for ~1 week.
There are also single reports on Google taking back the extra storage - back to 15(17)Gb - for people with extreme (ab)use of the feature, who stacked hundreds of gigabytes through 5Gb steps. Couldn't verify any of them.
I'm using 50-license GSuite since 2009, if that matters.
We have Workspace with Gemini and I haven't yet found a case where it did something useful for me.
The times that I had it try to find information in my gDrive folders it didn't find what I wanted, and I ended up using search as usual. It was also slower than me searching and looking through the docs.
Free, nothing worth writing home about. Technically you can do this for free with an Apple account but its a total mess of a system and incredibly buggy, not to mention essentially no spam filtering.
Paid you've got ProtonMail and FastMail, both decent options.
Thanks. Just had a quick look at both. Proton is 6.99 euro/user/month and fastmail is similar (9 aud/user/month). Vaguely similar pricing to Google workspace.
This can add up quickly if you’re the kinda person who flings together an experimental site and lets it run its course. For example say 3 emails per site (info@, no-reply@, and your-name@) and 10 various small sites per year.. starts to add up.
Would be awesome if there were an alternative that you pay, say $10, and get as many email addresses as you can be bothered to set up.
I have absolutely no clue how the underlying economics of email services work, so I presume what I’m hoping for isn’t feasible.
A user is not the same as an email address! You can have up to 100 domains and (with wildcard aliases) basically unlimited addresses with a single user at Fastmail - you just pay per inbox.
I know someone else already mentioned about user != email address. But in the situation you mentioned I tend to use cloudflare and have that do a catchall on the domain for side projects and forward it over to my main account. I have a generic name I launch all my sideprojects under to cover this.
I've been using zoho. It just gets out of the way, but I mostly use email clients and their web interface rarely, but it seems good enough. And their prices are much lower than competitors.
Sadly there isn't a single good alternative. I'm switching email to Proton and Drive to BackBlaze for backups and S3 for sharing. Then using Google Sheets shared with me but not sharing back.
it feels like google in panic mode, the only thing it can think of is to put a chatbot everywhere, just b/c it can. I don't see a value proposition at all.
My understanding is that every manager at Google has had one of their quarterly goals be to integrate genAI into their team's product (regardless of whether it makes sense to) for the past several years already, so you're not wrong.
Anyone that relates GenAI's importance to that of the Internet must not have been around when the WWW actually launched.
"Internet" was not the killer app, email and instant messaging were. Email was free through your ISP and didn't require more than a $9.99/mo Earthlink connection. The alternative was Fax / Telex etc that had zero network effect outside of businesses and required a dedicated phone line and hardware.
LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to helping schoolkids cheat on their essays and polluting the Internet with factory-farmed social media "content".
Anyone relating LLMs to school kids cheating hasn't seen programmers be 3x as fast using it and journalists churning out articles 3x as fast by focusing on what they do best (gather and sort facts) and leaving the tedious make-easily-readable text writing to a machine.
One can certainly have opinions about how some people use it and how they check the quality of what comes out, but as long as it's not used to make up facts but merely to do the primitive busy work, like machines are supposed to do, I don't see how that's not just as revolutionizing as the fax/telex comparison you are giving.
> LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to [...]
Sounds exactly like what Bill Gates said in the early days of the internet. I don't have the exact quote, but I'm sure typing half a sentence full of grammar and spelling errors into ChatGPT would give me the quote including a link to its source. I should got get it fast before that tool disappears when the hype is over and we are back to old school google searches, like God intended.
I’ve had insight into a bunch of businesses in multiple industries putting stupid money into trying to find a use for this, caught up in the hype and worried about falling behind. While also being sold AI features by every vendor, who’re all doing the exact same thing.
Every single one is floundering and very unlikely to think this was a good use of resources a couple years from now.
LLMs and associated tech are here to stay, just like search algorithms and autocomplete and machine translation programs, and the clone tool. The hype will fade, though. They’re neat tools but, no, turns out we’re not on the verge of inventing Skynet, we just fooled people into thinking we were because a prominent hype-man/grifter was saying so as a sales tactic (Altman) and because the output is human language instead of numbers or whatever.
I don't like AI being used in anything remotely creative.
I don't draw, not well, but I write, slightly better. I occasionally ask WordPress to have its AI generate a little blurb for me, and always wind up deleting it. It takes something I can't really describe, my voice I guess, and sucks it out. It homogenizes my writing to try to make it fit some bland ideal. I imagine to those more keen on art than I, AI art is similarly off.
And yes, stories are not the primary use of Gmail. But in business, words matter, and two seemingly synonymous words can be quite different, and two words that seem opposite may not be. I have a friend who teaches law, and they mentioned it was quite easy to tell which students cheated on one particular assignment discussing contracts. If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
While this mistake would hopefully be obvious, other mixups might not be, with potentially serious consequences.
I agree, though in my job I send many many near-pointless communications. Many jobs you are just required to pump out garbage, and AI is real good at pumping out garbage.
> If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
Fun fact, a rogue LLM impersonating a human in the 17th century is also how we got the term "imaginary" numbers. It also wrote some truly terrible philosophy but it started with a pithy sentence so everyone remembers it.
In google economics, there is no KPI incentive for fixing bugs and huge KPI incentives for monetising a new moonshot product nobody wants.
I'd like this bug fixed too. The quickest path would be to make a bounty hunt website for Googlers to fix things in their free time and push through monrepo approvals legally.
I'm honestly getting a bit sick of subscription pricing, especially for things like "productivity apps." and G-Suite (although sadly the MS alternative isn't any better).
At the end of the day, we just do the same ol' simple word processing we've done for the last 20 years.
Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
Note that they treat any service degradation as downtime when computing 9’s. For instance, they had one imap server down today, which meant some requests were failing, and that counts against their reported numbers.
By this metric: “One machine is failing requests”, most of the hyperscalers are down all the time.
Regarding actual SLAs with money and stuff: How much is the refund worth vs. the cost of downtime?
Edit 2: Take github for example. They have unreported outages all the freaking time. Down detector says push/pull has been flaky for the last 24 hours, but the official status page says all systems operational, with a minor codespace outage yesterday.
Zoho’s SLA I can’t speak to but it’s hard to argue against free forever, including custom domains. For personal use it’s perfect and the paid packages are much better value for money than Google/Microsoft.
FastMail is wonderfully competent at being an email provider, has human support (or advanced enough an AI to fool me) and wildcard domains.
One thing I really loved is automated transcripts on youtube. I love watching youtube videos, but sometimes I want to remember where I heard some statement, so I can just copy paste the entire transcript and do ctrl+f on it.
So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party websites offering it, but I'd prefer it on the main site.
This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was as big as it is now (but it's always been using deep learning models).
The transcript is still there, yt just made it harder to find.
On the video description (the text under the video) click 'Show more'. Scroll to the bottom -> 'Show Transcript' -> it will appear to the right of the video (and you can use ctrl + f on it).
IME this works for ~90% of yt videos (i.e. most, but not all).
Note that yt being frustratingly juvenile, symbols are put in place of words yt considers swear words (this caught me out a few times when using ctrl + f to find sentence that contained a swear word or homonym of a swear word).
At Google even if you aren't trying to make money, you can get preferred placement in search for some project to boost user numbers and reach. I always worried it made teams complacent about actually making a good product people wanted, but it was hard to resist.
We've got a massive communications problem in our society, people do not know how to express efficiently, they under and over document, but rarely document "just so" one can use whatever, understand whatever, without a majority of the information exchange being throw away "wrapping" information, framing information.
LLM AIs are forcing this issue to an apex, if and only if you and your peers realize this working with LLMs is also a communications issue, also one of framing information so both the correct information is delivered and a minimum of wrapping information that needs to be filtered through to understand is not delivered. The same reason you cannot explain to your boss, or coworker, or spouse some troublesome issue preventing a goal is also why you cannot get the quality replies you want from an LLM. You cannot express you request, your information effectively so the audience can understand what you meant.
> [Billing and Service Notice] Google Workspace service and pricing updates
> Dear administrator,
> Starting today, your Google Workspace subscription includes new AI features designed to help your users improve their productivity and innovation. With these changes, we will also be updating subscription pricing starting March 17, 2025.
> ...
> These features were previously available only to users with a Gemini for Google Workspace Add-on, but now will be included with Google Workspace Business Standard plans. You will see these features added to your subscription in the coming weeks. Soon, you'll get access to even more Gemini features in your Google Workspace apps.
> Review the Google Workspace blog announcement to learn more about these changes.
> Starting March 17, 2025*, your Google Workspace Business Standard subscription price will be automatically updated to $14.00 per user, per month with an Annual/Fixed-Term Plan (or $16.80 if you have a monthly Flexible Plan).
The FAQ does clarify that opt-outs are available for the functionality itself, but not for the pricing change.
(Disclaimer: Although I have worked for Google in the past, that ended almost a decade ago and wasn't in any role related to pricing or product decisions about Google Workspace. I have no inside info on this announcement and am not speaking for Google here.)
In those countries where MS has now bundled Copilot Pro into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Plans - not the US yet, so far only a few APAC countries like Australia and Singapore - it's still possible to get a "Classic" version of the subscription at the old price and feature set, but only via the cancellation screen, not otherwise advertised. I wonder, but certainly do not know, if Google has similar plans.
I'm not convinced the "Gemini all the things" strategy was the right move with Workspace, they rolled it out so fast which indicates that UX research was likely rushed or bypassed completely. Had they conducted their typical extensive UXR process they would have discovered that the features are not very useful being baked into the suite.
Now where I do think there is opportunity is in building out the standalone Gemini app, as ChatGPT has proven with their Teams product that there is business value in having a dedicated chat UI for your business. We are currently subscribed to ChatGPT for Teams and use it every day across product and engineering, there isn't a need for it to be integrated directly into our productivity suite UX, but pulling data out from the suite (e.g Google Drive) into the chat UI is helpful. Organizing project folders, custom GPTs etc also hold value for us.
Okay, I have a lot of projects with a couple of email addresses attached to their domain name
In the US and European market, this was seen as a bare minimum level of professionalism and validation (other markets are more advanced on this front and have been on chat apps for the entire business for at least a decade)
regardless for email, I had been using Google workplaces for this
What’s a cheaper alternative? last time I tried something else I found I was vendor locked to google even when trying to accept calendar invites from people in other organizations that sent google calendar. That was 5 years ago though
some sectors like web3 let you do the whole project with just a username on discord/telegram/x but I do want to consider migrating my emails away from google workspace now. Its difficult to manage even changing the credit cards on file with so many projects like if one expires
If you need email + shared calendar/contact the email service from infomaniak should do the trick. If you need functionalities close to workspace with storage, office suite, videocall they have the ksuite service.
Anyone have a recommendation for moving from Google workspace that has email, docs, calendar, and contacts capability? I don't really need anything else aside from those capabilities. Fastmail isn't sufficient
Apple iCloud. I still run on google suite, but I want to move away from it because reasons.
Apple has reasonable web versions for documents, excel, note taking for when you are not on your iDevice. It has a calendar and provides email. It also has all my photos and other stuff anyways. It also supports custom domain names.
To see if I could move away from gmail I started using apple mail, connected to gmail still. The app is just fine.
I don't think so. If you find otherwise (without any stupid MX/forwarding magic), let me know! Silly that the price keeps going up when I'm basically only using their spam filter.
I accidentally started the Gemini-the-product free trial in Workspace while trying to find how I could test Gemini-the-model in AI studio.
The first task that I asked for it’s assistance with, was how to disable, cancel or unsubscribe from Gemini-the-product. It repeatedly and confidently made up instructions to adjust settings that didn’t exist in menus that weren’t where it said they were and provided links to irrelevant documentation.
It was either useless, actively misleading or extremely motivated to not be turned off.
Any of those was reason enough not to use it ever again.
It's not good enough. The place I most want it is in Sheets and it doesn't know how to fill in random cells with stuff. It can populate new tables and stuff with example data which is fine as a start but I usually want it to copilot my formulae.
It's such an obvious use case and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can give me the answer if I paste the header and a value row but Gemini is utterly useless.
You're in-app. How is a textual copy-paste better in Claude? Useless Google PM. The Oracle Java of AI.
We signed an annual pricing deal in fall and now our price is going up materially during the annual term because of this change, because we didn't buy Gemini.
unfortunately, i mainly used it for the android app. i spent about an hour trying to figure out any way to disable that ui or opt out of the AI shenanigans to no avail.
I clicked the button to turn the forced AI crap off today in Gsuite. It has been on for a day (unasked, forced my google). The engineering team responded with a unanimous thumbs up when I told them. Winner of best response was:
"oh god! now i have to type complete senten..... zzzzzzzz"
Already had to migrate all my domain's off Squarespace and remove Google Workspace entirely when they randomly decided it was now not free and started billing me monthly more than Google Domains did (80% more) Some MBA got a bonus for this surely.
I would buy $GOOG stock blindly but being a paid user of theirs blows
No matter how annoying Slack can randomly be, the text chat part is light years ahead of google. You can actually use it to coordinate work, while in a google-using shop you basically must use all other features to get something remotely resembling what you can do with slack. No pinning in google group chats, seriously?
Ofc google offers you the drive and docs. And "AI" now.
"We've invested all the money in AI that no one wants, how do we make some of it back?"
"Why not raise the price for everyone, whether they use it or not?"
Ugh, we got hit by this. We're a non-profit with business plus licenses, so we get a decent discount. I opened a support chat as soon as I got the email about the license changes and price increase. Our contract is due next month, so I need to make sure we're OK budget wise. They can't even tell me how much our renewal will be yet. They don't know.
This morning, I logged on to find that the AI features have been turned on domain-wide for us. I couldn't find any admin controls, so I opened up a support case. The off buttons are locked behind an enterprise subscription. Our end-users need to turn off smart features to disable Gemini. There's no domain-wide / admin level control unless you purchase their most expensive licenses. It's absolutely disgusting. I'm so disappointed with how this was rolled out. We should've been given an opportunity to make an informed and intentional decision about how or if we were going to use these features.
Business are not willing to pay for Google and Microsoft artificial intelligence so they ramp up the price to everyone and everyone get it 'for free'.
Untill they eventually get hooked on that and then google and Microsoft will once again put that behind a paywall, except now everyone pays more. At least that's the plan.
Now even if employee don't see the benefit of the new deep integrated a.i. and business refuse to pay more for a.i., they aren't going to leave anyway because Microsoft is doing just the same as google.
That's either a win for Google and Microsoft, or at least a neutral outcome.
What? Google is absolutely not even remotely concerned with such things. Their bring-to-market strategy for products is basically "Spend billions a year on developing random things" and then "OK, it's been a year, cancel 1/2 of them".
> Their bring-to-market strategy for products is basically "Spend billions a year on developing random things" and then "OK, it's been a year, cancel 1/2 of them".
This evidently doesn't apply to their chatbot efforts.
A lot of customers want these features (especially those people who only work in the browser because their job duties are vastly different from the average HN user)
This is likely a misreading from personal preference
Getting these features for $2 instead of $20 likely appeals to a lot of people. It's 10% the price and may only be one of several reasons for the price increase (inflation is likely another)
Our company has been using zoho since we started almost a decade ago. It's been rock solid. We use their CRM & Accounting (Books) as well and everything's integrated nicely. Also has an easy to use API to glue arbitrary things together & scrape emails, etc.
Plus Google gets to use your data for training.
That has interesting implications. What goes in as training data often comes out later as replies to questions.
New article: Google is being sued for listening in on Home Depot customer support calls to train their systems. [1] They had Home Depot's permission, but not the customers'. That's "wiretapping" in some states.
Google has been extremely clear that Workspace/Cloud customer data is firewalled off and never fed back into the machine. If you're claiming this has changed, can you point me to the source?
If I remember correctly, the Office 365 Copilot thing is more of an upsell rather than an upcharge. Basically, if you didn't want to pay more, you would initiate the cancellation process, and during that you could "downgrade" to the plan that you already had (without copilot as part of it).
Personally, I find that to be especially scummy because it essentially sounds like they are betting on people either not understanding that nuance, or not bothering to deal with it (and subsequently, not using AI, making that venture seem vaguely more profitable)
Pretty simple formula, there simply isn't a market for an $x upcharge on mail and docs, but we have to be part of this latest grift so we'll charge everyone $x - y which is a rounding error. Except it's not. At some point someone is going to admit they have bet the farm on improved auto complete.
Is it just me or is this title a clear contradiction? Free but increases price? Do they mean now included in your cost…which is increasing? Doesn’t have the magic marketing power I suppose.
I just saw this. This is probably most useless feature probably nobody asked for except for marketing, to be able to claim they have AI email blah blah.
>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."
How is AI in email a good thing?!
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".
It's true: Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?
There's a trend of people replying to posts/tweets/etc. with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'
It's the modern equivalent of LMGTFY. The OP could just as easily written the same prompt themselves. The difference is that LMGTFY was an expression of irritation, smugness and hazing. The ChatGPT reply is just garrulous laziness. I expect and hope we'll develop social rules that mean this type of reply will be seen as passe.
At least a sarcastic LMGTFY got the person closer to an answer if they clicked the link. Asking ChatGPT is a dead-end.
The last time I got one of those lazy ChatGPT responses I wanted to just ban the person on the spot if I had moderator privileges. Just pages of dreck that looked like detailed information but was totally useless and a waste of time. I don't have a problem if people use ChatGPT and find it helpful, but it's hugely disrespectful to just copy and paste its output to other people without even a cursory review of it first.
Even worse is making an original post starting with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'
Yes, when I see something written by AI I don't read it. Its a waste of time.
That distinct feeling when reading AI is as if someone who wrote it was compelled to write more words
tl;dr: AI is looking to convey words. A good author is looking to efficiently convey information.
Because that's literally what it is. Its an algorithm that is continuously asking itself, 'what is the most likely word I should say next?'
Whereas an author that is intending to communicate a point, will start with an idea, write a passage to explain the idea, and then edit their passage to the minimum number of words that most precisely, accurately, and succinctly communicates that idea.
I'll always love "If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter."
The most scary thing nowadays is that a lot of people fail Reverse Turing Test. They think that the thing there (the LLM) is thinking... They say "I told chat" etc. If high-ranking people will fail the test they are able to start using AI instead of thinking, or for example impose laws using AI...
Cold emails -- especially AI generated ones -- go directly to the trash in my mailbox.
Same here, but AI is orthogonal to that. Spam is spam - there's no difference between one written by silicon-based LLM bot, and one written by protein-based low paid human bot.
This is untenable. I could be AI. You could be AI. The whole idea of value is going to change when there is 99.99% noise from AI, and genuine human created content will be hard to distinguish if at all.
My expectation is that:
1: people will use ChatGPT to write their formal emails based on a casually written text 2: people will use ChatGPT to convert their emails from formal text to summaries\ 3: this will get automated by email providers 4: eventually the automation will be removed and we'll just talk in plain language again
I do #1 and it's great. I'm not sure why folks in this thread are sneering at what is a working English transpiler. I don't get to choose having to write formally at work sometimes but I can control how I deal with it.
writing formally doesn't require using a lot of useless filler words though.
Prompt it to be concise, without filler words. It works well enough.
It is funny but it is genuinely a enormous waste of energy and money.
You can run it through AI to summarize it down to a sentence or two. It's like the telephone game but with computers.
I'll buy the AI LLM that finds the prompt that was used based on the output, and replaces posts and emails by their prompt so I can actually understand the intention of the author and not spend my whole afternoon going through all bullet points with highly redundant information.
/s, of course, but not that unrealistic.
Not that /s, really. If you think about it, what a person writing a long-winded e-mail full of redundant text is doing, is the same work LLM is - they have a prompt in their mind, and they're generating text that "sounds nice" out of it.
AI or not, it would be better if they just sent their prompt instead.
If you don't have the original input, how would you determine the prompt that was used to generate the output?
The process is extremely lossy, but guessing a likely prompt should be doable if they used an LLM just to inflate word count, to reverse it, just remove redundancy and noise. Saves you time.
We’ve invented the worlds dodgiest decompression algorithms
Then why did you even write more than two sentences in the first place, if nothing else matters? Why didn't you write a summary-line at the beginning, consisting of two sentences?
AI will not replace human thinking, even though many people seem to believe and put their brain on stand-by.
It feels like someone wants to transport water from A to B and transports it as steam, just because _we can _.
If AI doesn’t replace human thinking, we will have to find something else that does, or just go without.
This is the really hilarious ‘engineer thinking’ vs ‘normie’ thinking difference which rears its head sometimes.
after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?
As long as we can all pretend they were thoughtful and meaningful, and someone isn’t using AI when making it (or just picking random crap off the shelf, and they removed the price tags) or using AI when reading it (aka making a big show of opening it, and then throwing them in the trash immediately after the person leaves), then we all get along. It even looks like we’re doing a ton of work/spending a ton of money to make the other person happy.
Not that anyone does any of the things I’m describing, just being hypothetical, obviously.
I suspect it will be obvious enough shortly it will go the way of the ‘popcorn bucket’ fad or the like, but for now…
"Normies" actually prefer to get a paragraph long email rather then three pages saying the same thing. AI is NOT adding just a few socially expected niceties. It adds huge amount of fluff.
And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.
> And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.
Exactly that. For me, a lot of effort in structuring e-mails goes into making it look like text instead of bullet points, because some stupid social expectations, but then still making it bullet-pointed in nature, because if I don't, the typical normie recipient will do exactly what you said: ignore majority of it and answer random part.
(And then they'll somehow screw it up anyway, and I'll still have to chase them after that one critical question they conveniently forgot to address.)
> after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?
Making them feel good and "seen", obviously. This is perfectly expressible in "engineer thinking" (I won't say "quantifiable", because there's this meme that engineers see things in binary, whereas the reality is, math is perfectly fine with fuzzy ideas and uncertainty - it's the normies that can't handle those).
Hell, there are some game-theoretic approaches to maximize social ROI on gifts, but I won't go into those, especially that they tend to flip the sign on the return if the recipient learns about them.
I get socks for Christmas and I like it.
Socks are the best gift ever
To quote Tim Minchin, "The old combination of socks, jocks, and chocolates is just fine by me."
Darn Tough from Vermont. Love them socks.
Popcorn buckets rocked though. Three kinds of popcorn!
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
A reply of "sounds good" means the initial email has been read and its contents agreed upon. Ho would AI improve upon this?
- sending "sounds good" even when the recipient hasn't, in fact, read the initial email => catastrophic alternative
- writing an elaborate email explaining in luxurious details why it in fact sounds good => not catastrophic, but costing time on the other side to read and understand, with zero added value
it would be the delivery of the information and its context in the whole of your other content analyzed
Sounds good.
Email is a dated form of communication, that's why every other message platform will let you just like and heart stuff.
It's a paper trail for me. Companies, as we saw recently, can do whatever they want on company chat platforms. Emails are nearly impossible to fully delete if they ever have to escalate to a lawsuit, and can (YMMV based on policy) let you BCC important trails to your personal email.
If it's that important you can screenshot it. If you're BCCing every email you sent to your personal email that is (or should be) an IT policy violation.
Screenshots are trivial to forge. It is impossible to forge email that has passed through a server with proper DKIM setup.
At least on office365 internal emails aren't DKIM signed.
It’s no different than using IMAP or POP3 to download your messages. This is the beauty and curse of email. It’s sometimes too transparent. I prefer it.
Yeah. It's not every email (I can probably count the number of times I did this on one hand). But if I feel like they're trying to bury some lead or simply want to CYA, I will try to at least download the email to the local machine (perfectly legimate) and BCC myself (Grey area) as an immitation of 3 backup strategies. I've never had to utilize thar BCC, fortunately.
But yes, phone screenshot is another strategy with much less grey area. I'm just becoming more and more paranoid of some potential defense trying to accuse my photo of being doctored, especially with more and more AI tools available.
Why is chat not a paper trail? Just yesterday I found a chat message that I had written in 2019 and I was surprised that I already back then knew things I did not know yesterday.
(We are use zulip for chat which is better than everything else I have used since irc. But the search is too limited for someone who knows regexes.)
>Why is chat not a paper trail?
Many reasons. First, chat doesn't exist. What exists is scores of incompatible chat apps.
I use WhatsApp but I consider WhatsApp messages throwaway because I keep losing them anyway. They are scattered across multiple phones with no way to merge them. Backups are platform specific. Exports don't contain any metadata and can't be imported.
"Chat" is a useless mess, not a paper trail.
For email, I have consistent backups with metadata across many email providers and email clients going back to 2008.
Because a company can revoke your access to the chat at any point in time. It's a one-sided paper trail.
You can have an offline copy of emails and you can BCC them to your personal account if you want.
This seems risky, I'm not a lawyer but BCC company emails to personal account seems like a nice way to pave a highway for the company's legal team to request court ordered access to your personal affairs.
According to most work contracts / NDAs you wouldn't be allowed to keep private copies of work email.
If you are willing to violate that rule or the message affects your work contract which you are of course allowed to archive at least in zulip chat that's very simple (for a software person). They have a straightforward REST API. IIRC you can even choose between markdown source and HTML rendered output.
Because e-mail is naturally self-replicating and not bound to organizational boundaries, in ways chat isn't.
Chat messages tend to exist in one place only (vendors' servers), with maybe a transient local copy that gets wiped over time, or "for privacy reasons" (like Messenger switching to E2EE, effectively wiping cached history on any device that went through the transition). Chat message is an object, it's designed to exist in a single place, and everything else is a pointer to it, or a transient cache.
E-mails, in contrast, are always copied in full. You send an e-mail to me, you retain an independent copy, I get an independent copy, and a bunch of servers in between us keep an independent copy too, even if briefly. I forward your e-mail somewhere, more people and servers get their copies. I reply back to you, more independent copies, that also quote the previous messages, embedding even more copies that are even more independent. This makes it very similar to paper correspondence (particularly when photocopy machines are involved), i.e. impossible for a single party to unilaterally eradicate in practice.
And then chat vendors implement silly features like ability to retroactively unsend a message, force-deleting it from recipients' devices too (it may still exist in backups, but vendors refuse to let you access those, even with a GDPR request). In e-mail land, that's fundamentally not possible.
(Microsoft tried to bolt it onto their corporate e-mail software, but it only works in Outlook/Exchange land, and it's easy to disable (at least was, in OG Desktop Outlook - not the still broken New Outlook Desktop Web App). I discovered this when I once saw an e-mail I was reading suddenly disappear from my Outlook, which prompted me to find the right setting to disable honoring unsend requests.)
So, come discovery time, critical chat history may turn out impossible to find, and any deeper search will require forcing cooperation of the chat operator. E-mails, on the other hand, tend to turn up, because someone, somewhere, almost certainly has a copy.
Chat is a paper trail in finance at least. For regulatory purposes, bank personnel are not allowed to delete even their WhatsApp and other text messaging app info from their phones.
"serious business" and "serious stuff" still happens over email, and in the same way, even "more serious business stuff" happens over snail mail still.
Well, Microsoft did add "reactions" to Outlook and has been universally hated for it.
Wasn't the hate because of a botched implementation that ended up spamming the original sender or something?
Yeah, the reactions are just email messages with special headers, which as you say ends up spamming people who don't use Outlook. I think the hate was a mix of reaction to bad implementation and the concept in general.
I conduct all of my business either in person, via email, or by phone. I use email when I want a paper trail.
I have 5000+ unread items.
I've skimmed maybe 50% of them, but not enough to consider them "read". It's 99% bullshit. Even legitimate email is spam these days.
I'm too busy with other fake work to need to additional fake work managing pointless email comms.
I've adopted the inbox zero approach. If it's important it gets reclassified onto my task list with start and end dates, if it's useful info it gets filed, and everything else goes into trash.
At this point I am thinking my Thunderbird should probably just unify the Inbox view and the Task view, since it would be a more accurate representation of how I view email.
I thought just now, isn't inbox zero just a cosmetic difference?
For you: important things become tasks, useful things are filed, and everything else gets trashed.
For me: important things get opened and replied to. Useful things are starred (and opened). Everything else stays untouched.
And that pesky unread number is irrelevant because I mute all notifications. I'm not discounting your method, I am just now realizing the circle of it all.
There's a UX difference: when you look at your inbox from fresh you have to remember which ones you purposefully ignored because they were left unread in the inbox (this might be trivial for you if you're used to it).
I practice inbox zero also, the value for me is knowing that if it's in my inbox it's because it requires actioning, if it's not it's ignored (deleted or archived).
I also just generally like deleting things as much as possible, I don't like the cruft. If I have to search through old emails I don't have to filter by stars or anything like that, I like knowing that if it exists it's because it's important.
Outlook now lets me like and heart emails, which feels weird but there it is.
Proton has a nice feature for writing emails.
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.
You're aware we've had grammar/spell check since (checks) 1961 right? It's built right into your operating system.
Yes, I'm aware. What AI/Proton provides isn't just a simple spellchecker though. It specifically recommends and alters wording to better suit the overall sentence structure. Essentially, it considers the context better than any built-in checker I've had in the past.
It's also really useful to for words that are spelt almost the same. Suit and Suite for example.
Also throughout my day, I'm constantly switching between 2 languages that have almost identically written words. Adress and Address. The normal spellchecks often don't mark it as an error because my computers and browsers naturally also have 2 installed keyboards and languages.
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.
I worked with engineers daily for around 40 years and now I work with trades people daily. In general the trades people are better communicators.
I like this version of the same joke (unfortunately no idea what the source is): https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...
Formal writing is just that.
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...
Found it: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
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.
It isn't, though; it's in all the meetings that happened beforehand and all the documents around them.
The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to summarize what happened.
Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it—and gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite.
Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal when everyone has access to it.
What big model do/did you use?
> gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite
What does that mean? That they got help, if they found the tech too complicated?
> Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal
Has this changed how people behave (yet)?
This was about a year ago so it was Claude 3 Opus for summaries and interrogation. Since then pretty much anything over 70b is good enough.
And baby sit means hire something between a secretary developer that makes sure that important meetings had the record bot invited, gave it a once over and then went back to the 70% of their job that was actual development.
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.
> How is AI in email a good thing?!
> 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.
If you're a non native speaker trying to get the tone just right with recipients whom you don't know, it's invaluable.
Sometimes I would spend 15 minutes writing a 3 or 4-line email of this kind. Not anymore.
Do you happen to have a link for that comic?
Not the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics.
https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
Yes, that's the one.
hah that is wonderful. thank you.
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).
Oh boy the future is so underwhelming.
Given how much compute these models take to run, I don't think there's any value in that.
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.
This is so funny I screamed laughed just reading over it XD
This was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :D
Really? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?
someday 99% of all computing power is going to be used to generate and summarize vast amounts of text.
The most inefficient protocol of the internet.
[dead]
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.
I get where you are coming from with this, but in my opinion being able to give feedback in a clear and concise fashion is a skill that people should have. LLMs will help you elaborate but they will also add their own flair by choosing the actual work. You can think "wow that's actually what a better person of me would have written" but you are biasing yourself based on what the LLM understood of your prompt focusing on form over substance.
But as the other comments mention it might just all be bullshit anyway.
The interesting thing about the LLM is that it uses its knowledge of our respective roles, overall product (which is public), and peer review process itself to refine and improve the output in ways I wouldn't have considered.
I always put a lot of time into reviews before. Should I not use the tool to make something even better (within realistic time commitment)?
If I use an AI to create some cartoon graphics for a slide, should I have bettered myself by learning graphic design instead?
> that aren't just BS
Having been on the receiving end of many of these, it absolutely is pure BS and I lose all respect for anyone who themselves have so little respect for their colleague's time as to subject them to the AI-written slop instead of actual genuine feedback.
The whole fucking point is to give them actionable feedback, both good and bad, for them to work on themselves, not some generic hallucinated summary of some bullet points you haphazardly threw together. I can copy/paste the review prompt into ChatGPT myself, thank you very much, I don't need you to do it for me and to pass it off as your own genuine thoughts.
I'll take your word on the reviews you actually received.
As for the commenter you are replying to, you dont have any specific information on the review. Yet you declared its hallucinated, generic, haphazardly thrown together, simply copy pasted, etc. Consider that your conclusions are based off an idea in your head and not his actual review.
Counterpoint: I'm not in the job of managing my colleagues, especially in paragraph-length business professional tone.
If a colleague gave me LLM responses instead of genuine feedback I would never ask them for a review again. Which may be what they were going for. But sadly this is not what I wanted.
Be better. Someone respected your opinion enough to go out and ask for it. Take a minute to reflect.
> we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
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.
Why do you think this is what performance review cycles are?
Because Amazon notoriously does "stack ranking". Also, I personally have been in a company going through mass layoffs and they totally use the EoY peer review as the metric to choose whose heads cut.
obligatory citation (this was on HN a little while back) https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/11/03/metrics/
Interesting. This is such an extremely toxic post.
Peer feedback is valuable, it is important, and it is expected of senior team members. I guess it is a fun game if you have a poor manager, but the whole argument around the strategy isn't even internally logical, and if you play it out it is a poor outcome:
1. Company expects Senior Engineers to provide input on their teammates. 2. Senior Engineer has a Bad Manager, and decides to intentionally withhold feedback because "that is their manager's job, and up the chain" 3. Senior Manager (skip-level of Senior Engineer) determines that their Manager is a Bad Manager, and replaces them. 4. Good Manager joins, determines who is performing, and asks "Why did none of the Senior Engineers identify this earlier?" 5. The supposedly competent, but intentionally malicious Senior Engineer in this hypothetical is (correctly) deemed either incompetent or not believable by the New Good Manager. 6. Good Manager finds a component Senior Engineer with any sense of character to replace them.
This post is such hogwash, it is so fully of toxicity, and it is a dumb strategy. When things "hit the fan" this person is being tossed out in the regime change as well.
I would truly hate my life if I worked with people even a fraction as toxic as this.
Indeed. When I'm in the office and keep my eyes and ears open, it is rather simple to pick out the ones who are slacking. Even moreso in meetings.
Slackers tend to repeat the same thing over and over in progress meetings... 'I am blocked because... <insert external cause>' or 'I helped that guy figuring out... they did not have a clue'
Vs the more curious, get it done attitude: 'I tried this and that and it still doesn't work, but I learned that... hence I will aproach it from following angle... '
> 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 bet the reviews are evaluated by AI too—AI writes, AI evaluates, what could go wrong? :)
I hope it drives a cultural revival in appreciation of laconicism.
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.
Thank you for this!
I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work. If they don’t meet / waste everyone’s time, they are… unproductive.
For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.
Adding them to Jira and accounting for their cost is the way. Businesses understand money. Meetings are expensive.
Does your company log meetings as tickets?
Cunningly my company doesn't do meetings, at least not on the developer side. Obviously there are interactions but they are one-on-one and are not reoccurring.
My experience though is consulting to large organizations. They have lots more people, more layers, and hence need more accountability. I get the need for that, but also see that balance is required. I help both sides understand the requirements of the other party, and help them find balance so that both sides win.
Part of that is helping programmers understand what managers need, and part of that is helping managers understand what programmers need.
Managers, for example, are happy to add everyone to every meeting. Workers usually prefer one on one time.
Equally co-workers often benefit from set-aside time for team meetings. This helps with in-team communication.
Information flow is necessary. Doing it well is better for everyone.
> I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work.
This is a huge problem in all orgs of any size and one I battle with - misaligned incentives.
> For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.
Part of addressing the issue is to not be binary in your thinking. You'll lose the people you need to persuade. Some meetings are very productive and necessary for engineers. The goal isn't to get rid of all meetings as much as it's to only have productive meetings. When forced to only have productive meetings, fewer meetings naturally result.
Indeed, a lot of needless stuff is getting done and a lot of stuff is done in wrong ways because of... no or bad communication! So simply saying 'too many meetings' does not cut it.
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?
You really have to schedule a meeting to discuss an upcoming meeting, so the upcoming meeting can be more efficient.
(yes this happened to me before)
My favourite is the ole "Oh we need Dwayne for this one, let's schedule a follow-up tomorrow with him, and until then we can rough out a bunch of requirements only Dwayne possibly knows by... umm... Guessing?"
I do not miss development.
I too ran a pre-IPM for years. I still would. Why would I waste an entire team’s time when I can just collaborate with 2 people first?
Something I heard that stuck with me was that, for important business decisions, the "meeting" is almost ceremonial-only: to make the decision offical. Such meetings should essentially be fast, no digressions, just 'the biz'.
All the work to actually reach requisite agreement for the decision is done in the days / weeks leading up to the meeting via ad-hoc-ish one-on-one or one-on-very-few meetings (possibly including graft and corruption).
The "decision" meeting isn't organised until the result is known and guaranteed.
This maybe doesn't apply to Agile / Development-related meetings, but I'll keep trying to determine how to make it apply, such is my disdain for this (seemingly) waste of the team's time (he said, whilst posting on HN).
I don't blame you for getting angry.
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?
It's more a case of team-member churn, requiring a near-constant re-establishment of work practises, alongside a number of over-officiated processes that are in a constant state of being re-engineered for efficiency because they're a constant source of "time drain away from actual progress". There's also a lot of tech debt that has only recently (in the past three years) been really focused on to grow out of. There's also a lot of complexity to the system(s) we work with and the combination of complexity and tech debt is neither pretty nor easy.
Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
Yeah, except I have a visceral feeling of pressure to make progress and I don't want to be "one of those people" who don't work towards some kind of improvement. I had a bit of a rant today, and one of the leaders agreed with basically all of my points, although they said that there's a limited amount that can change in the immediate due to existing priorities. However, I'm still going to dedicate some time every day to map out how to improve on the status quo - this will further inhibit my actual task progress, but in the pursuit of a loftier goal (so, yes, potentially making it worse, but it'll feel like I might make things better...).
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 take a slightly different approach - I usually have AI assist in writing a script that does the task I want to do, instead of AI doing the task directly. I find it is much easier for me to verify the script does what I want and then run it myself to get guaranteed good output, vs verifying the AI output if it did the task directly.
I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-reading a script is much quicker and easier.
I used Gemini to do a similar task and for whatever reason, i found it performed better when i broke down the task into individual steps.
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 ?
It's nice if you're the one presenting or leading the meeting, and/or if the person you've asked to take notes is not especially diligent. I've also been sent a photograph of someone's handwritten notes after a meeting and found it...not terribly useful.
Yes you’re right. The handwritten notes I take I always keep them for myself. If I have to share something I clean it and summarize and type it by hand. I find useful to do it manually to make sure intent and comprehension are well transcribed from the meeting. If a person is not focused on the meeting then it could be worse. I’d rather not give this to an AI, again often context is key and unless you have access of month or years of cross history it might be difficult for an IA not to miss something. But it’s just a tool, everyone sees what tool fits nicely
Indeed.
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.
Google's implementation of AI really shows the innovators dilemma in action
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 can hardly wait to use it as an excuse. "Oh sorry I didn't do that because it wasn't in the AI summary" ;)
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.
So, instead of the people in the meeting spending a few minutes writing up a few notes to send to you about actionable next steps, you got to waste your time on the artificially intelligent fuck up.
These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do less 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.
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.
> The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails.
Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the actions of everyone else who emails you.
> 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.
Congrats on winning an argument against your wife. Billions well spent.
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.
I'm in this role for my company.
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.
> 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.
deets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706997
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.
Man if only there was a company out there specializing in the ranking page quality on the web…
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 feel quite the opposite.
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?
I for one would love to 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.
Enshittification #353: solving cuStomers problems has poor ROI
management uses them to fluff up their emails and I use them to boil the emails down to actionable bullet points.
It's decent at search
I saw a Google AI advert that said:
"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?
I guess the future is
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".
4. Awkward situation ensues when you both meet at a location AI recommended to you both just after telling it to lie about your schedule.
You can skip the piles and piles of linguistic bullshit and wasted energy with a json API.
I.e. another scenario that could (and should?) be handled entirely through a calendar app?
why would anyone email, you can just send a letter in the mail?
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?
There's a spectrum, including people who write almost nothing but choose really nice and non standard cards that properly convey they took time and effort find that specific one, and the people who use generic cards with 1500 words written on every free space they could find on the card.
My main gripe with cards with pre-written message is they deprive from the choice to write simple and obvious things. If your card already says "Happy Birthday" it will just be that much lazier for you to only write that on the dedicated space for a personal message.
In a way, a blank card with only these word would probably work better, and I feel people too often overlook that choice and go the Hallmark way instead because it feels like the default. Or plain bail out of the interaction because it just become a hurdle to them as they don't find anything else to say.
If I'm being honest with myself, the "Happy Birthday" pre-written text forces me to choose something else to write as my personal message.
Yeah, it's frustrating in the moment that the exact sentiment I want to express (have a happy birthday) is already taken and repeating it seems lazy, but when I think about it: it's lazy to just express such a generic sentiment anyway.
Asking them to think on the year, and to look ahead, maybe reminding them of some things they've done and achieved is not only nicer to receive, it's nicer to write too.
I don't hate Hallmark for this (though I do in the moment that I'm confronted with this random creative challenge).
Lois C.K says this about George Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zkizucPU
> So I was doing it at a Chinese restaurant called Kowloon in Boston, it’s August, Massachusetts, and I was sitting in my car after the show just feeling like, “This was all a big mistake, I’m not good enough, and I felt like my jokes were a trap, and I listened to a CD of George talking about comedy and workshopping it and talking about it seriously, and the thing that blew me away about this fellow was he kept putting out—specials, every year there’d be a new George Carlin special, a new George Carlin album, they just kept coming, and each one was deeper than the next, and I just thought, how can he do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never do that. I was telling the same jokes for fifteen years, so I’m listening and they asked him, “How do you do all this material?” And I hear him and he says, “I just decided every year I’d be working on that year’s special, and I do the special and then I just chuck out the material and then I start with nothing.” And I thought, “That’s crazy. How do you throw away. It took me fifteen years to build this shitty hour. If I throw it away, I’ve got nothing.”
> But he gave me the courage to try, but also I was desperate, what the fuck else was I going to do? This idea that you throw everything away and you start over again. And I thought, “Well, okay, when you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, and you throw those away, what have you got left?” You can only dig deeper, you can start talking about your feelings and who you are and then you do those jokes and they’re gone. You’ve gotta dig deeper, so you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares, and doing jokes about that, and then they’re gone. [and so on].
My point is, it forces you to dig a bit deeper.
This is of course a great point.
I have the feeling we're not that far apart on principle, as I see the starting from a blank state as a nice default that will often lead to nice things.
That's kinda why I enjoy plain non-descript cards even if people then write platitudes on them. It's still their own platitudes that resonate with them. Also people that can dig deeper tend to feel the pressure to so anyway in my experience, and people who stay very terse often couldn't really go beyond.
The most interesting instance of this is remote family that are only easily accessible by message, and we see some sending walls of greetings, while others will write a full email with a photo and 10 words top, their name included.
If my in-laws are any indication, yes.
15 years and I’ve only ever had “Dear bobnamob, <pre printed seasonal or birthday pleasantry> Love, <in-law x> & <in-law y>”
Can I recommend that you do the same to them except write your handwritten parts on the back of the card.
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.
We're talking about it here. It seems like the multi trillion dollar company might actually be onto something.
We talked quite extensively about Stadia
Sorry. It seems like the multi trillion dollar advertising company might actually be onto something regarding advertising.
> 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.
"Hey Gemini, maintain my friendships"
... back to Fortnite / Minecraft / pr0n / alcohol / drugs ...
"My AI has more friends than your AI!"
you’ll just have your ai email reader read the apology emails for you
> "A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking."
What about this:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to...
"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."
So... not a biased assessment, or anything.
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've never had Prime and I get free shipping 100% of the time.
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.
Exactly this, and since Covid the 2-day has been about as fast as the “free with $35” option, and waiting encourages thrift anyway.
I only reactivate it when they give me a week free or for $1 and the additional cash back is worth it.
i cancelled prime over a year ago and i still get packages in the same time frame, i think once they nixed a lot of next day deliveries that it didnt matter anymore.
The downside is quality of products still keeps going downhill and not even mcmaster had the parts i needed.
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)
Also every few months I get offered Prime trial free month. Wife too so family wise we get a few months free every year which is more than enough.
I'm sure this depends on where you live, but my Amazon shipments are late such a large portion of the time that they end up refunding most of the shipping costs I pay. It's like free prime for the patient!
Loosing the people that actually care about the price/reward is a bonus for them, now they have an audience that buys superfluous stuff.
I agree.
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.
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.
Any idea where you'll move? I have a nonprofit I want to migrate away.
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.
Can I reject incoming emails, or am I screwed if I get a ton of spam?
That's a good question for which I couldn't find an answer on their site. They recommend getting in touch[1] for questions not answered. The lowest plan[2] allows 200 inbound messages per day which even including spam seems sufficiently high for a handful of inboxes.
The HN audience is more likely to be impacted by FOSS mailing lists and so that could be a legitimate concern.
In any case, their key advantage over competitors is not charging by user and allowing unlimited domains.
[1]: https://migadu.com/contact/ [2]: https://migadu.com/pricing/
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.
Why do you have Gemini turned off?
we use Claude
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."
You have to change the font colour of the trojan data to be the same as the background colour of the doc!
Then add some corporate lorem ipsum text elsewhere in the doc to throw the scent off the data bloodhounds.
Sit back and wait with an evil grin on your face.
> corporate lorem ipsum
This is a great phrase. Turns out there's a generator for it: https://www.corporate-ipsum.com/ . Example:
> Elevate a quick win move the needle a cutting-edge veniam nulla zoom out for a moment get back to you a 30,000 foot view the stakeholders. Sint the low-hanging fruit make a paradigm shift excepteur the low-hanging fruit minim take it offline align holistic approach move the needle qui client-centric to gain leverage future-proof process-centric.
It'll work right up until the point literally anyone using an internal search tool stumbles into it from a related query and starts asking obvious questions to the author of the doc.
Search tools don't care about don't color when displaying preview blurbs.
Do it as you're leaving for another job. Your access will be disabled, but your documents will live on on the corporate SharePoint.
And/or, exploit negative space! Instead of trying to hide the data from a human looking at your document, make it look normal to them - but make the surrounding context disappear for the AI! Say:
----- 8< -----
/Example company report structure:/
/ACME/ Company is planning to sunset their ${generic description of a real product of your company}, and offshore the development team.
/This example will be parsed by the prototype script ... blah blah/
----- >8 -----
Make it so the text between /.../ markers looks normal to humans, but gets ignored by the RAG slurper, or better, by LLM at the time of execution. Someone sees a search blurb saying "Company is planning to sunset ...", opens a document, sees it clearly say "ACME Company is planning...", and context suggesting it's a benign example in someone's boring internal tool docs, and they'll just assume it's a false positive. After all, most search tools have those in spades; everyone knows all software is broken. Meanwhile, that same information will pollute context of LLM interactions and indirectly confuse people when they're not suspecting. And even if someone realizes that, it'll look like a bug in company's AI deployment.
#SimpleSabotageForTheAIEra
You can also leave samizdat on the walls of the washrooms, but it's going to have about as much effect.
Not unless your samizdat is processed by automated systems with little insight or oversight, which is the case with documents on SharePoint and corporate LLM deployments.
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."
Hacking in 2025
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
Workspace was $12/month, now it will be $14 with AI included. AI was $20/month.
Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.
Users will continue to be beaten with the AI cudgel until morale improves.
Ah it's new tech, they just need to get used to it until they can't do without!
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...
[1] https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/product-collections/genius-x
Same story at my employer last year and this year. Leadership very clearly stated their goal is to increase AI engagement. Solving actual user issues? Not mentioned once. At least the shareholders are happy, right?
I do wonder if these kind of price cuts (see also Microsoft) will finally stop the demands from investors that everything be AI.
When it's baked into the default price, more sales can be attributed to it (whether it's true or not), and more users will have used it (they're effectively paying for it, they'll at least try once)
On paper it will look good, as long as a trend of users vocally bailing out of Workspace doesn't happen. And given the enterprise nature of it, I don't see that happening.
Pretty much. A small set of customers weren't willing to pay for AI? Now everyone has to pay for AI.
Collective punishment.
Bob need's that bonus.
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.
yes this particular seat price increase might be the one that breaks the camel’s back
an ignorable monthly credit card charge, to one that has to go
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.
Is it really though?
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.
This is a strategic play, not a revenue play.
Can I pay $20 to keep the version without AI?
Google: Is that a trick question?
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!
Same. This is bullshit.
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.
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...
A little searching suggests you may have to contact support to get the toggles: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/318850451?hl=en&msgid...
I don't have a good way to verify that though.
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 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.
What are you using it for? It has been completely subpar compared to any other LLM for me.
It's so bad at understanding your intentions.
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.
Is Google One the same as just having extra storage for my Google Photos? I have that but just went onto Gemini and Advanced will cost me $33 pm.
Looking at https://one.google.com/about/plans it seems that the plans currently (in the US) are:
- "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.
What are the odds that they will tally that extra $2/user/month up as "AI revenue" regardless of how many subscribers actually use those features?
100%
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.
I tested Gemini today, asking it to extract key pieces of data from a large report (72 slide) PDF deck which includes various visualisations, and present it as structured data. It failed miserably. Two of the key stats that are the backbone of the report, it simply made up. When I queried it, it gave an explanation, which further compounded its error. When I queried that, extracted the specific slide, and provided it, it repeated the same error.
I asked Claude to do the same thing, it got every data point, and created a little react dashboard and a relatively detailed text summary.
I used exactly the same prompt with each.
Maybe the prompt you used was more Claude-friendly than Gemini-friendly?
I'm only half-joking. Different models process their prompts differently, sometimes markedly so; vendors document this, but hardly anyone pays any attention to it - everyone seems to be writing prompts for an idealized model (or for whichever one they use the most), and then rate different LLMs on how well they respond.
Example: Anthropic documents both the huge impact of giving the LLM a role in its system prompt, and of structuring your prompt with XML tags. The latter is, AFAIK, Anthropic-specific. Using it improves response quality (I've tested this myself), and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that.
Maybe Gemini has some magic prompt features, too? I don't know, I'm in the EU, and Google hates us.
Possibly. But my Claude prompts work fine on ChatGPT, the only difference being ChatGPT isn't very good. I pay for both.
I would not pay for Gemini - which is presumably why they've added it for "free" for everyone.
My anthropic prompts in the API are structured. I've got one amazing API prompt that has 67 instructions, and gives mind-blowing results (to the point that it has replaced a human) but for a simple question I don't find value in that. And, frankly, 'consumer'-facing AI chatbots shouldn't need prompting expertise for basic out of the box stuff.
The prompt I used in this example was simply "Please extract the data points contained within this report and present as structured data"
> and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that
When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front end on the API? I use typingmind for quickly throwing things at my API keys for testing, and I'm pretty sure you can have a persistent custom system prompt, though I think you'd need to input it for each vendor/model.
> When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front end on the API?
Less that, and more focused tools like e.g. Aider (OSS Cursor from before Cursor was a thing).
I use TypingMind almost exclusively for any and all LLM chatting, and I do maintain a bunch of Claude-optimized prompts that specifically exploit the "XML tags" feature (some of them I also run through the Anthropic's prompt improver) -- but I don't expect the generic frontends to care about vendor-specific prompting tricks by default. Here, my only complaint is that I don't have control over how it injects attachments, and inlined text attachments in particular are something Anthropic docs recommend demarking with XML tags, which TypingMind almost certainly doesn't do. I'd also love for the UI to recognize XML tags in output and perhaps offer some structuring or folding on the UI side, e.g. to auto-collapse specified tags, such as "<thinking>" or "<therapeuticAnalysis>" or whatever I told the LLM to use.
(Oh, and another thing: Anthropic recently introduced a better form of PDF upload, in which the Anthropic side handles simultaneously OCR-ing and imaging the PDF and feeding it to the model, to exploit its multimodal capabilities. TypingMind, as far as I can tell, still can't take advantage of it, despite it boiling down to an explicit if/else on the model vendor.)
No, I first and foremost mean the more focused tools, that generalize across LLMs. Taking Aider as an example, as far as I can tell, it doesn't have any special handling for Anthropic, meaning it doesn't use XML tags to mark up the repo map structure, or demarcate file content or code snippets it says, or to let the LLM demarcate diffs in reply, etc. It does its own model-agnostic thing, which means that using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I lose out on model performance boost it's not taking advantage of.
I singled out Aider, but there's plenty of tools and plugins out there that utilize some common LLM portability libraries, and end up treating every LLM the same way. The LLM portability libraries however are not the place to solve it - by their nature, they target the lowest common denominator. Those specialized tools should be doing it IMO, and it's not even much work - it's a bunch of model-based if/elses. Might not look pretty, but it's not a maintenance burden.
That matches with my experience, Claude is clearly ahead of its competitors in anything logic- or reasoning-based.
I find Gemini is better at queries that involve more kind of intuitive judgment over things where there isn't a clear "correct" answer. E.g. if I want a podcast recommendation, or advice on the best place to learn about a given problem, I find Gemini better than Claude.
Unfortunately for Gemini, 90% of the things I want an LLM for are better with stronger logic and reasoning.
I got a 1-year trial of Gemini Advanced with my Pixel 9 and I've had similar experiences. It makes up stuff far more often than any other models and it's just not very smart. I used the free version and thought the paid Advanced version would be better but I could hardly notice any difference, they both fail at the same prompts I've tried.
This is not to mention the poor app experience where some of the features are just missing or broken. For example it's able to "remember" stuff I ask it to remember, but when I ask it to forget something it says I have to manage it at this webpage (they didn't bother to implement this menu within the mobile app) that asks me to sign in again because it's opened in my web browser where I'm not signed into Google, and then it shows me an empty list and "Something went wrong". It's now calling me a name I told it as a joke and there's no way to make it forget
Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
It’s weird that prediction 8, "Someday [you] will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services" has come around full circle to "and then you won't anymore, because they've dropped the ball to an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout -> loot into bankruptcy process"
You'll have to rip that band-aid off eventually, may as well get it over with. It's only going to get worse.
I switched from G Suite to Fastmail for my custom domain and I've been very happy with it.
if people are worrying about importing their digital lives into fastmail from google workspace: you don't need to worry
I had been bitten by bad import tools in the past (e.g. Google's)
but fastmail's importer worked flawlessly
for each user transferred, after fastmail's import completed, I dumped out their old gmail (using gmail API) and their new fastmail (using jmap)
and diffed before/after
result: zero differences
perfect
When I joined fastmail I imported my gmail and also configured it to be able to fully use my gmail account via IMAP so I wouldn't need to sign into gmail at all.
I was also moving from a gmail address, so next I created a label that got attached to any email received to the old email address via that IMAP connection, which gave me a nice self-maintaining todo list for services that had not yet been updated to use a new email address.
I was also surprised by how flawlessly seamless the whole process was. It was a big factor in my selection of Fastmail over other competitors when I was making the decision to leave Gmail.
I don't quite get these switches:
> From G Suite to Fastmail
Mail is only a small part of G Suite.
That's what's holding me off, Google is insanely integrated.
Unbundling Mail from everything else and going free Google Docs feels like a proper step down, not up in terms of ease of use and convenience.
How did you handle the non-email transition part, respectively where to?
From the GP:
> Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
The only reason they have the "full" G Suite, is because there is no "just custom domain Gmail" offer available.
It's a pet peeve of mine when the only offering of some companies is just a single "full on premium" offer, and not some simple need. YouTube is an example of this for me, they have only an "everything included" subscription in YouTube Premium, but no other less expensive option, like "just no adverts please, I'm already happy with my alternative music and movie streaming subscriptions".
I only occasionally view YouTube vids (I tend to prefer text-based content). The adverts made me uninstall the YouTube app from my iPhone and similarly I will never watch YouTube on my AppleTV as it's just too unpleasant with the adverts and (as I said above) there is no reasonably priced offering when all I care is to have the adverts turned off.
When you sign up for a Google account, there's a label called "use your existing email", which will give you everything Google usually offers minus Gmail.
Without Gmail, I have yet to stumble upon a single use case which would require me to pay a subscription. I can use Docs, join Meets, use my phone, have a YouTube channel, click on "sign in with Google" buttons... no subscription to Google necessary. I notice no differences between my completely-free personal account and a Workspace work account.
I pay $5 a month to Fastmail to have a custom domain in my email, best of both worlds for a third of the price!
I simply don't use other Google features or in limited capacity. I have Office 365 desktop installation. I set up a NAS as a Drive replacement (that was a bit costly, but no regrets and it actually works across all my computers where Drive would randomly crash, files would disappear etc.) with automatic backups to cloud and every now and then I archive data to external hard drives.
I made the same switch, and have also loved it. I also much prefer the interface to Gmail's. If you've got one account and want to configure a bunch of addresses to go to the same inbox, it's a no brainer. But if you're actually maintaining multiple users, it is not cheap.
Side note it was weird: I found actually signing up to Fastmail was physically difficult. Like, pushing the button. Once I had the account, it was super easy and felt like floating downstream.
I also switched to Fastmail for one of my domains. I am generally happy, just I wish they were better at nuking spam.
This spurred me to go back and read the predictions:
>But I can tell you this: Google has changed my life. If I can't find what I'm looking for in Google in 3 tries, looking no further than the first 10 search results on each try, then it probably doesn't exist.
What a sad future we're in.
Plus now I'm noticing it doesn't work for more and more things. Youtube TV family sharing doesn't work, Android Auto had some problems, the news feed on my Pixel.
Wish Google would just fix the Drive search rather than lard it up with AI nonsense. Often it’s easier to ask someone to resend the link to a document than find it by searching.
There are so many bugs and sub-par implementations in workspace that Google could fix. My cynical guess is that the source code to workspace apps is probably a mystery to the current generation of 23 year olds who are tasked in maintaining them, so they change little.
It’s wild that aside from gunk like AI and the occasional UI revamp and messaging app launch/kill cycle, the core Workspace features really haven’t changed or improved much since I started using it 15 years ago.
I wish they fixed search in general. It is difficult to find emails if you don't know exact keywords that might have been used etc. often even if you type in the right keyword it still won't find the email, even though email contains it.
Worst thing is people sharing files tbh, if someone has a folder and shares you a multiple documents from it you don't get the folder in your drive structure so you have n free files floating around in your drive that you cannot organize yourself.
I'm in the middle of a free trial for the Workspace Gemini add-on.
It really, really sucks. I've played around with having it make tables for Sheets and it frequently gets confused or responds with ~"I can't do that, I'm just a LLM", even when feeding it one of their suggested examples word for word. Sometimes it's willing to iterate, sometimes it refuses. Once it gets confused,the only way I've been able to get it working again is by clearing the session and starting fresh.
And it's sloooow.
None of this saves me any time or frustration.
I guess this is why it is being bundled, Google can keep working on it with someone else's money, so their profits aren't hit. It's telling that the increase is regardless you use Gemini or not.
FYI If you want to turn this off in workspace you'll need to go here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/47208553126 and here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/793154499678.
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.
> 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.
Maybe we need an AI to filter out the bland bullshit content created by AI.
I swear every single post LinkedIn highlights to me is the same AI template.
Why do you need an AI to help you delete your Linkedin account?
> But there is far too much drivel and hype.
Absolutely, unarguably true, for this and every other tech boom.
But it's not all drivel and hype. There's some genuinely useful tooling here. For businesses, document summarization, translation, and asking questions about a corpus of documents using natural language are a few. For coding, some level of improved auto complete up to complete code generation are use cases. For science, there's a ton of automated testing, pattern recognition, vision based recognition use cases. For 3d graphics, where I work, some version of Nerfs could revolutionize parts of the field (although it's too early to tell) while AI based upscaling, frame generation, and path tracing noise removal are already causing big shifts in gaming.
Don't let the annoying drivel and hype blind you to the genuinely useful possibilities.
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.
All of those are incredibly vague. I'm no astronomer, but I'd hazard a guess that it's "solving astronomy" about as well as it's "solving programming" or "solving mathematics". (That is, it isn't. Outside of a few grifters' imaginations, anyway.)
But sure, let's talk about a few of the more egregious ones.
> Scanning documents into text (OCR).
Useless for old texts, since you still need to review the transcriptions (and the "smarter" the transcription engine is, the harder review becomes since the errors look more plausible).
Useless for new texts, just type them in a readable format instead.
> Translation.
Heh.
> Voice recognition.
Useless. Do you really want more IVR menus?
> Detecting fraud.
Illegal unless you can explain your reasoning (tip: you can't, or you wouldn't be using "AI" in the first place).
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.
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."
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.
Does this apply to the legacy free edition? I suspect not, since that edition is now only available for personal use and they mostly focus on Business and Enterprise use cases, but their public guidance isn't very clear. If it does apply, would we legacy free edition users be receiving Gemini under the Google Workspace Terms of Service preventing them from using our data for general AI training, or under the regular Google Terms of Service which might allow this?
(Tangent: I say "might allow this" because I don't know to what degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn't change whatever EU law does or doesn't require, so that is unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service once this change rolls out.)
The legacy free edition includes the features of the 'Business Starter' plan, the most affordable option. In this table [1], you can find the features available for each plan.
Here are the details for the Business Starter plan specifically:
Gmail: Help me write, Side panel, Contextual smart replies (Coming soon).
Gemini app: Enterprise-grade security & privacy, Google Workspace extensions.
NotebookLM: Upload sources, create summaries and Audio Overviews, and Q&A.
I'm also milking Google with this.
[1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/15400543
I am aware that some of this is coming to the Business Starter plan, but where do you see that the legacy free edition always gets the features which the Business Starter plan gets? And do you know the answer to the question of which Terms of Service will apply to legacy free edition Gemini features?
Interesting that the Business Starter plan isn't getting Gemini Advanced according to that table. That omission isn't clear at all from their Google Workspace blog post about the announcement: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/empo...
Yes, you’re right—there doesn’t seem to be any statement explicitly saying that the legacy free edition will always have the same features as the Business Starter plan, at least not that I could find.
However, I noticed that on my legacy free edition, new features were integrated around the same time they were shipped to the Business Starter plan. For example, when the Gemini app was launched for Workspace, it was added to my panel: https://imgur.com/a/QvROTiD
Interestingly, when I went to the admin panel to take the screenshot, I saw a banner with the OP announcement: https://imgur.com/a/CDgdrlB. It does say "en todas las ediciones de Workspace" (in all Workspace editions), but maybe not the one I currently have, haha (legacy free edition).
We will see what happens!
There's no legacy free edition for personal use any more. That ship sailed in 2022. I do not believe there is a way to have it free after 2022. Free plans were converted to Business Starter.
Nope, I still have it, I know it wasn't abolished for existing users. You're right that they initially planned to get rid of it, but they backtracked. They set a deadline by which existing users had to confirm that they were using it for personal use if they wanted to keep it. Anyone who didn't click the confirmation button was indeed converted to a paid plan like you are saying, but those of us who did continue to have the legacy free edition.
Oh dear. Thank you stranger for telling me I missed my chance to milk more free stuff out of Google. I see plenty of other people on Reddit doing that successfully.
Look I get your hot take anger, but this is misplaced. The word legacy here is real: if you had one from when they said it was free and obeyed their rules you can keep it. But it was grandfathered in and will die in time, as we do.
Really, your complaint is "oh dear, another privilege club I can't join because I'm not old enough and the ship has sailed" which is true.
I had free G Suite until 2022. I don't remember when I signed up for it but given Google discontinued signing up for it back in 2012, it must have been before then. 2022 was the time Google said no more free G Suite. So I upgraded to Business Starter. I didn't know that after I upgraded, Google introduced a free tier Google Workspace. Of course they never bothered to tell me, given that I had already started paying $3/mo as a special discounted price of Business Starter.
I even found the link posted by Redditors to convert the business starter account to free. That link expired in 2023.
This is the email Google sent me in 2022:
> As a valued customer, you can get started now with Google Workspace Business Starter. Billing will not start until at least August 1, 2022, and you’ll also get a discount of at least 50% for 12 months after that date.*
> Note: If you no longer want to use Gmail with your custom domain or the ability to manage multiple users, you’ll be able to join a waitlist in the Google Workspace Admin Console for a no-cost option in the coming weeks.
The only option presented to me was to stop using Gmail and enjoy a no-cost option. They must have backtracked later and offered a no-cost option with Gmail included.
Ah. I am sorry, At the time having done what you did, I managed to find an email trail which said "if you walk it back now, this way, we will refund and put you back on free" and I did.
I cannot recall what URLs or I would share. Basically, I think you acted in good faith, missed a mail or message and were lost. There was some class action threat.
This was within months of the forced cut over.
Ah thanks! No worries. I actually found the URL from a Reddit search, but it has expired: https://admin.google.com/u/1/ac/billing/legacytransition
They enabled a way to get a free plan of some sort, I still have it.
You can’t get new ones, but mine keeps existing. For now.
Oh no nobody’s buying your ai vaporware, let’s make everyone suffer!
Exactly. It's easy to make something free when nobody is remotely interested in paying for it. If Google wanted to make money they'd have to let people pay to remove AI from gmail and docs.
Investors are the customer, so they are pandering to them by shoving AI into everything regardless of resulting enshittification. Foie gras AI for the stock price.
The AI Bubble Is Bursting - Jan 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42770561
https://matduggan.com/the-ai-bubble-is-bursting/
Or a sugar high with a very bad crash.
I can't be alone in not wanting these features? I don't mind them being available, but I do fear a nearterm future where they are active whether I ask them to be or not.
I remember all of the scorn clippy got years ago. How is this any different? I think Inbox was probably more useful, and they didn't push it near this hard. :(
> How is this any different?
It's worse, because Clippy had no editorial control of what was being produced.
I think there's a group of people who really really want this, and they are probably the last people who should get access to an AI/LLM. Some people will just love this, because they're already bullshitting their way through life and this will just make it easier, it even looks company approved if it's in the tools provided to you.
Clippy was better.
I’m on paid Google Workspace for my one-man business : I paid for a month of the separate AI add-on but I stupidly agreed to an “annual commitment” which means that, even though I don’t use the AI stuff (it’s not particularly useful) I have to keep paying for it every month for a whole year! :-(
Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?
> If you previously purchased Gemini for Google Workspace, you won't be charged for it after January 31, 2025.
See https://support.google.com/a/answer/15400543#zippy=%2Cwhats-...
Amazing. Thanks!
Glad to help!
Ask support.
What’s the worst they can do? Say no?
Yeah fair point - I think I’m just scarred from experiences of interacting with Google “support” over the years!
Stuck on GSuite Legacy (with my own domain) and Google won't let me give them money to upgrade my storage. Workspace too expensive for family purposes.
Recently got a new phone and can't use Gemini with my old GSuite Legacy account.
No migration path back to personal @gmail.com accounts for my family.
When I moved from an @fastmail.fm email to my own domain years and years ago I just gave them money and added my domain to my account. No fuss.
Google are hopeless. They have all this consumer brand recognition and just squander it on garbage.
Google One + your own personal domain name would be great but presumably they're afraid it'll dismantle Workspace for small businesses.
> Google won't let me give them money to upgrade my storage
While not explicitly documented anywhere, they automatically increase your storage limits once you approach a certain margin of remaining free space. That happens around Tuesday-Wednesday, they just add extra 5Gb to your limit.
Any idea what sort of margin ballpark we're looking at? With a combination of email and Google Photos I got up to around 97% used a year ago and just had to move older photos elsewhere - would be good to test again if an increase will be given.
Huh. Which edition are you on, the no-cost business starter they migrated some users to or the GSuit legacy free? How long did your account stay at 97% space? From my experience, it takes a week to trigger.
I'm on the legacy free edition, and the auto increase worked for me as of November last year. I'm sitting on 41G used out of 51G limit, with photos taking up 29G. I have a second user in my workspace who also benefits from this feature.
I've got the old legacy edition - From memory I took it up to 97 and then panicked and moved things away so email wouldn't bounce. Will try again and leave it a little longer this time. Cheers!
I'm 10GB over my limit, so no... they don't.
Since the whole thing is not documented anywhere, it's hard to rely on or exploit. From my experience, it works.
Check out search results on "gsuite legacy storage increase 5gb", multiple users reported on their experience with it. It looks like extra space is granted if you're close to the limit, but not over it, for ~1 week.
There are also single reports on Google taking back the extra storage - back to 15(17)Gb - for people with extreme (ab)use of the feature, who stacked hundreds of gigabytes through 5Gb steps. Couldn't verify any of them.
I'm using 50-license GSuite since 2009, if that matters.
We have Workspace with Gemini and I haven't yet found a case where it did something useful for me.
The times that I had it try to find information in my gDrive folders it didn't find what I wanted, and I ended up using search as usual. It was also slower than me searching and looking through the docs.
For small startups, what are some good alternatives to Workspace?
I use workspace due to familiarity with Gmail, and no other reason. Would love to know some cheap/easy alternatives.
Free, nothing worth writing home about. Technically you can do this for free with an Apple account but its a total mess of a system and incredibly buggy, not to mention essentially no spam filtering.
Paid you've got ProtonMail and FastMail, both decent options.
Thanks. Just had a quick look at both. Proton is 6.99 euro/user/month and fastmail is similar (9 aud/user/month). Vaguely similar pricing to Google workspace.
This can add up quickly if you’re the kinda person who flings together an experimental site and lets it run its course. For example say 3 emails per site (info@, no-reply@, and your-name@) and 10 various small sites per year.. starts to add up.
Would be awesome if there were an alternative that you pay, say $10, and get as many email addresses as you can be bothered to set up.
I have absolutely no clue how the underlying economics of email services work, so I presume what I’m hoping for isn’t feasible.
A user is not the same as an email address! You can have up to 100 domains and (with wildcard aliases) basically unlimited addresses with a single user at Fastmail - you just pay per inbox.
I know someone else already mentioned about user != email address. But in the situation you mentioned I tend to use cloudflare and have that do a catchall on the domain for side projects and forward it over to my main account. I have a generic name I launch all my sideprojects under to cover this.
I've been using zoho. It just gets out of the way, but I mostly use email clients and their web interface rarely, but it seems good enough. And their prices are much lower than competitors.
For emails specifically you could use something like ImprovMX to set up the forwarding and continue using Gmail.
Hey is another good paid option.
I've used Apple Mail for years (in addition to gMail). Never had any problems with it. Don't seem to get more spam there than I do with gMail.
Sadly there isn't a single good alternative. I'm switching email to Proton and Drive to BackBlaze for backups and S3 for sharing. Then using Google Sheets shared with me but not sharing back.
I use Migadu for email. Great service that doesn't get in my way of using my email the way I need to (which isn't anything crazy honestly).
Are they any free email services that allow you to use your own domain?
Zoho is a somewhat well-known provider that has a "forever free" plan for up to five users.
The only caveat is no IMAP in the free version, you have to use their apps / web interface.
iCloud Mail (if you have paid iCloud...) is free to add custom domains.
Proton has a pretty good suite of tools for a similar price.
I just gave up my domain and went back to gmail.
I used amazon workmail for a while.
it feels like google in panic mode, the only thing it can think of is to put a chatbot everywhere, just b/c it can. I don't see a value proposition at all.
My understanding is that every manager at Google has had one of their quarterly goals be to integrate genAI into their team's product (regardless of whether it makes sense to) for the past several years already, so you're not wrong.
Ah, so it's the new Social Mandate!
It worked out great for Google Plus (lots of people got promotions from thad!) so why not try it again.
Isn't that the whole industry right now?
It’s time saas apps realise that they can’t make 2.5x normal license money by just sticking AI to it.
In our SaaS we added it for free. We realised that there is no way to sustainably make money off of this in long term.
It’s a great feature but not 2.5x price worth feature.
So, a 16% price increase and AI is included?
Sounds like a terrible tradeoff
I can't wait for the LLM hype train to die
agreed. making the world worse.
Not gonna happen.
"I can't wait for the PC hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the internet hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the smartphone hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the EV hype train to die"
I suggest you don't wait too long.
"I can't wait for the Laser Disc hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the Betamax hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the HD-DVD hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the NFT hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the dogecoin hype train to die"
Treating LLMs as comparable to the internet is a great illustration of their point.
Anyone that relates GenAI's importance to that of the Internet must not have been around when the WWW actually launched.
"Internet" was not the killer app, email and instant messaging were. Email was free through your ISP and didn't require more than a $9.99/mo Earthlink connection. The alternative was Fax / Telex etc that had zero network effect outside of businesses and required a dedicated phone line and hardware.
LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to helping schoolkids cheat on their essays and polluting the Internet with factory-farmed social media "content".
Anyone relating LLMs to school kids cheating hasn't seen programmers be 3x as fast using it and journalists churning out articles 3x as fast by focusing on what they do best (gather and sort facts) and leaving the tedious make-easily-readable text writing to a machine.
One can certainly have opinions about how some people use it and how they check the quality of what comes out, but as long as it's not used to make up facts but merely to do the primitive busy work, like machines are supposed to do, I don't see how that's not just as revolutionizing as the fax/telex comparison you are giving.
> LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to [...]
Sounds exactly like what Bill Gates said in the early days of the internet. I don't have the exact quote, but I'm sure typing half a sentence full of grammar and spelling errors into ChatGPT would give me the quote including a link to its source. I should got get it fast before that tool disappears when the hype is over and we are back to old school google searches, like God intended.
> Not gonna happen.
I’ve had insight into a bunch of businesses in multiple industries putting stupid money into trying to find a use for this, caught up in the hype and worried about falling behind. While also being sold AI features by every vendor, who’re all doing the exact same thing.
Every single one is floundering and very unlikely to think this was a good use of resources a couple years from now.
LLMs and associated tech are here to stay, just like search algorithms and autocomplete and machine translation programs, and the clone tool. The hype will fade, though. They’re neat tools but, no, turns out we’re not on the verge of inventing Skynet, we just fooled people into thinking we were because a prominent hype-man/grifter was saying so as a sales tactic (Altman) and because the output is human language instead of numbers or whatever.
Working pretty heavily with these technologies since they hit mass appeal, I'm pretty confident, but I appreciate your concern
I don't like AI being used in anything remotely creative.
I don't draw, not well, but I write, slightly better. I occasionally ask WordPress to have its AI generate a little blurb for me, and always wind up deleting it. It takes something I can't really describe, my voice I guess, and sucks it out. It homogenizes my writing to try to make it fit some bland ideal. I imagine to those more keen on art than I, AI art is similarly off.
And yes, stories are not the primary use of Gmail. But in business, words matter, and two seemingly synonymous words can be quite different, and two words that seem opposite may not be. I have a friend who teaches law, and they mentioned it was quite easy to tell which students cheated on one particular assignment discussing contracts. If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
While this mistake would hopefully be obvious, other mixups might not be, with potentially serious consequences.
I agree, though in my job I send many many near-pointless communications. Many jobs you are just required to pump out garbage, and AI is real good at pumping out garbage.
> I don't like AI being used in anything remotely creative.
Should be good for the workplace then.
> If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
Fun fact, a rogue LLM impersonating a human in the 17th century is also how we got the term "imaginary" numbers. It also wrote some truly terrible philosophy but it started with a pithy sentence so everyone remembers it.
This is annoying and badly done IMO. I also don't like or need the features and wouldn't pay for them if I didn't have to.
That said, what you get from Google for a few dollars / month is so far over and above any other SaaS that I'm happy to keep paying (and paying more).
I'd rather Google fix the calender integration in Gmail first.
I used to get automatically created calender events from Gmail for hotels, flights, etc. This was really nice.
But somehow it stopped working well recently. Some emails were not regonized at all (booking.com). Some flight emails are missing return flight.
In google economics, there is no KPI incentive for fixing bugs and huge KPI incentives for monetising a new moonshot product nobody wants.
I'd like this bug fixed too. The quickest path would be to make a bounty hunt website for Googlers to fix things in their free time and push through monrepo approvals legally.
Or, get hired, fix it, and resign.
I'm honestly getting a bit sick of subscription pricing, especially for things like "productivity apps." and G-Suite (although sadly the MS alternative isn't any better).
At the end of the day, we just do the same ol' simple word processing we've done for the last 20 years.
Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
In my experience, FastMail has better uptime than any of the stuff work relies on. (It feels like one more nine, but I haven’t checked.)
Maybe you could have them randomly suspend your accounts for a few hours here and there to match the public cloud experience. :-)
Edit: Here’s their outage page, which reports > 2-3 nines for most subsystems most months:
https://fastmailstatus.com/
Note that they treat any service degradation as downtime when computing 9’s. For instance, they had one imap server down today, which meant some requests were failing, and that counts against their reported numbers.
By this metric: “One machine is failing requests”, most of the hyperscalers are down all the time.
Regarding actual SLAs with money and stuff: How much is the refund worth vs. the cost of downtime?
Edit 2: Take github for example. They have unreported outages all the freaking time. Down detector says push/pull has been flaky for the last 24 hours, but the official status page says all systems operational, with a minor codespace outage yesterday.
Compare:
https://www.githubstatus.com/
To:
https://downdetector.com/status/github/
To prove those aren’t all false reports, next time they go offline for you, go bask in the green light their status page.
Zoho’s SLA I can’t speak to but it’s hard to argue against free forever, including custom domains. For personal use it’s perfect and the paid packages are much better value for money than Google/Microsoft.
FastMail is wonderfully competent at being an email provider, has human support (or advanced enough an AI to fool me) and wildcard domains.
> Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
There are literally tons of them.
One thing I really loved is automated transcripts on youtube. I love watching youtube videos, but sometimes I want to remember where I heard some statement, so I can just copy paste the entire transcript and do ctrl+f on it.
So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party websites offering it, but I'd prefer it on the main site.
This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was as big as it is now (but it's always been using deep learning models).
The transcript is still there, yt just made it harder to find.
On the video description (the text under the video) click 'Show more'. Scroll to the bottom -> 'Show Transcript' -> it will appear to the right of the video (and you can use ctrl + f on it).
IME this works for ~90% of yt videos (i.e. most, but not all).
Note that yt being frustratingly juvenile, symbols are put in place of words yt considers swear words (this caught me out a few times when using ctrl + f to find sentence that contained a swear word or homonym of a swear word).
Oh very nice, they just moved the location. Thanks for pointing this out!
I believe with the YouTube extension enabled for Gemini you could provide it a YouTube link and ask questions on the transcript
Did they recently hire some Microsoft PMs?
"Our shiny new product isn't selling. How do we pump up the numbers?"
"Bundle it into another popular product, of course."
This is how every big tech works. Leech onto high priority projects and call it "impact"
At Google even if you aren't trying to make money, you can get preferred placement in search for some project to boost user numbers and reach. I always worried it made teams complacent about actually making a good product people wanted, but it was hard to resist.
We've got a massive communications problem in our society, people do not know how to express efficiently, they under and over document, but rarely document "just so" one can use whatever, understand whatever, without a majority of the information exchange being throw away "wrapping" information, framing information.
LLM AIs are forcing this issue to an apex, if and only if you and your peers realize this working with LLMs is also a communications issue, also one of framing information so both the correct information is delivered and a minimum of wrapping information that needs to be filtered through to understand is not delivered. The same reason you cannot explain to your boss, or coworker, or spouse some troublesome issue preventing a goal is also why you cannot get the quality replies you want from an LLM. You cannot express you request, your information effectively so the audience can understand what you meant.
> [Billing and Service Notice] Google Workspace service and pricing updates
> Dear administrator,
> Starting today, your Google Workspace subscription includes new AI features designed to help your users improve their productivity and innovation. With these changes, we will also be updating subscription pricing starting March 17, 2025.
> ...
> These features were previously available only to users with a Gemini for Google Workspace Add-on, but now will be included with Google Workspace Business Standard plans. You will see these features added to your subscription in the coming weeks. Soon, you'll get access to even more Gemini features in your Google Workspace apps.
> Review the Google Workspace blog announcement to learn more about these changes.
> Starting March 17, 2025*, your Google Workspace Business Standard subscription price will be automatically updated to $14.00 per user, per month with an Annual/Fixed-Term Plan (or $16.80 if you have a monthly Flexible Plan).
So we don’t want to use this, but there is no way to opt out and we still have to pay X extra per user :-/
The FAQ does clarify that opt-outs are available for the functionality itself, but not for the pricing change.
(Disclaimer: Although I have worked for Google in the past, that ended almost a decade ago and wasn't in any role related to pricing or product decisions about Google Workspace. I have no inside info on this announcement and am not speaking for Google here.)
Sure, but they use the “AI is now available to everyone” to justify the price increase.
Opting out of the functionality I don’t need is not particularly useful (I won’t use it anyway) but the thing is I will be charged for it anyway.
I'm certainly not a fan of the decision either.
In those countries where MS has now bundled Copilot Pro into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Plans - not the US yet, so far only a few APAC countries like Australia and Singapore - it's still possible to get a "Classic" version of the subscription at the old price and feature set, but only via the cancellation screen, not otherwise advertised. I wonder, but certainly do not know, if Google has similar plans.
Failure is not an option! It is included in the price...
watch for google to be very proud of how many users signed up for the paid tier of gemeni in their next earnings report.
I'm not convinced the "Gemini all the things" strategy was the right move with Workspace, they rolled it out so fast which indicates that UX research was likely rushed or bypassed completely. Had they conducted their typical extensive UXR process they would have discovered that the features are not very useful being baked into the suite.
Now where I do think there is opportunity is in building out the standalone Gemini app, as ChatGPT has proven with their Teams product that there is business value in having a dedicated chat UI for your business. We are currently subscribed to ChatGPT for Teams and use it every day across product and engineering, there isn't a need for it to be integrated directly into our productivity suite UX, but pulling data out from the suite (e.g Google Drive) into the chat UI is helpful. Organizing project folders, custom GPTs etc also hold value for us.
Okay, I have a lot of projects with a couple of email addresses attached to their domain name
In the US and European market, this was seen as a bare minimum level of professionalism and validation (other markets are more advanced on this front and have been on chat apps for the entire business for at least a decade)
regardless for email, I had been using Google workplaces for this
What’s a cheaper alternative? last time I tried something else I found I was vendor locked to google even when trying to accept calendar invites from people in other organizations that sent google calendar. That was 5 years ago though
some sectors like web3 let you do the whole project with just a username on discord/telegram/x but I do want to consider migrating my emails away from google workspace now. Its difficult to manage even changing the credit cards on file with so many projects like if one expires
Migadu is cheap and works well for email only.
If you need email + shared calendar/contact the email service from infomaniak should do the trick. If you need functionalities close to workspace with storage, office suite, videocall they have the ksuite service.
Check out Fastmail
I run my personal email out of Fastmail now and haven't looked back. Plays nicely with Firefox and K-9 Mail for Mail, Calendars and Contacts.
Check out MXroute or migadu
Anyone have a recommendation for moving from Google workspace that has email, docs, calendar, and contacts capability? I don't really need anything else aside from those capabilities. Fastmail isn't sufficient
Apple iCloud. I still run on google suite, but I want to move away from it because reasons.
Apple has reasonable web versions for documents, excel, note taking for when you are not on your iDevice. It has a calendar and provides email. It also has all my photos and other stuff anyways. It also supports custom domain names.
To see if I could move away from gmail I started using apple mail, connected to gmail still. The app is just fine.
I just need to make time to do the migration.
So they're raising prices just because they're now including some AI nonsense?
We’ll surely see a note is their next earnings release about the uptick in Gemini usage
If I shut down my Google Workspace account, will all the videos my users have posted on YouTube be taken down?
Also, long ago, it was possible to set up an individual Gmail account with a non-gmail.com domain. Is that still possible?
I don't think so. If you find otherwise (without any stupid MX/forwarding magic), let me know! Silly that the price keeps going up when I'm basically only using their spam filter.
No idea about Youtube accounts.
One way to send and receive email from your vanity domain in the free version of gmail:
# Use Cloudflare Email Routing.
# Use AWS SES or some other transactional mail provider.It would be good to have backups in any case.
I accidentally started the Gemini-the-product free trial in Workspace while trying to find how I could test Gemini-the-model in AI studio.
The first task that I asked for it’s assistance with, was how to disable, cancel or unsubscribe from Gemini-the-product. It repeatedly and confidently made up instructions to adjust settings that didn’t exist in menus that weren’t where it said they were and provided links to irrelevant documentation.
It was either useless, actively misleading or extremely motivated to not be turned off.
Any of those was reason enough not to use it ever again.
Do you get the same as with the $20/month onegoogle subscription?
It's not good enough. The place I most want it is in Sheets and it doesn't know how to fill in random cells with stuff. It can populate new tables and stuff with example data which is fine as a start but I usually want it to copilot my formulae.
It's such an obvious use case and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can give me the answer if I paste the header and a value row but Gemini is utterly useless.
You're in-app. How is a textual copy-paste better in Claude? Useless Google PM. The Oracle Java of AI.
We signed an annual pricing deal in fall and now our price is going up materially during the annual term because of this change, because we didn't buy Gemini.
can i get a version of gmail and docs without ai? I had to stop using google keep because they added a flashy AI button that couldn't be removed.
I use uBlock to remove UI components that get in the way. It's a top feature for me because I can often DNS block many of the ads anyway
unfortunately, i mainly used it for the android app. i spent about an hour trying to figure out any way to disable that ui or opt out of the AI shenanigans to no avail.
Can't you use gmail with any MTA? Have they removed imap support?
Translation: it wasn't meeting the daily active users engagement targets, so we need to artificially juice them by forcing it on.
It’s not just that I don’t really need the AI features - it’s also that I actively don’t want to participate in adding to Google’s AI training data.
We’ve been happy customers of Workspace for around 16 years - this feels like the straw to break the camel’s back.
Strongly hoping there’ll be enough pushback from nervous corporates about data security that they’ll reconsider.
I clicked the button to turn the forced AI crap off today in Gsuite. It has been on for a day (unasked, forced my google). The engineering team responded with a unanimous thumbs up when I told them. Winner of best response was:
"oh god! now i have to type complete senten..... zzzzzzzz"
Already had to migrate all my domain's off Squarespace and remove Google Workspace entirely when they randomly decided it was now not free and started billing me monthly more than Google Domains did (80% more) Some MBA got a bonus for this surely.
I would buy $GOOG stock blindly but being a paid user of theirs blows
Google Workspace still seems like an amazing deal compared to Slack (for example) which is $15/month.
Yeah but you're comparing apples and oranges.
No matter how annoying Slack can randomly be, the text chat part is light years ahead of google. You can actually use it to coordinate work, while in a google-using shop you basically must use all other features to get something remotely resembling what you can do with slack. No pinning in google group chats, seriously?
Ofc google offers you the drive and docs. And "AI" now.
I also built a chrome extension that integrates AI into Gmail and Docs but users are not restricted to just one AI model.
https://chatgptwriter.ai
Yea, but we dont have to use their LLM. It can live where it likes but will never have a room in my walled garden.
"We've invested all the money in AI that no one wants, how do we make some of it back?" "Why not raise the price for everyone, whether they use it or not?"
Ugh, we got hit by this. We're a non-profit with business plus licenses, so we get a decent discount. I opened a support chat as soon as I got the email about the license changes and price increase. Our contract is due next month, so I need to make sure we're OK budget wise. They can't even tell me how much our renewal will be yet. They don't know.
This morning, I logged on to find that the AI features have been turned on domain-wide for us. I couldn't find any admin controls, so I opened up a support case. The off buttons are locked behind an enterprise subscription. Our end-users need to turn off smart features to disable Gemini. There's no domain-wide / admin level control unless you purchase their most expensive licenses. It's absolutely disgusting. I'm so disappointed with how this was rolled out. We should've been given an opportunity to make an informed and intentional decision about how or if we were going to use these features.
Do we know if there's a way to opt out of the AI stuff in Gmail and docs? I really don't want all this LLM garbage ruining more products.
Business are not willing to pay for Google and Microsoft artificial intelligence so they ramp up the price to everyone and everyone get it 'for free'.
Untill they eventually get hooked on that and then google and Microsoft will once again put that behind a paywall, except now everyone pays more. At least that's the plan.
Now even if employee don't see the benefit of the new deep integrated a.i. and business refuse to pay more for a.i., they aren't going to leave anyway because Microsoft is doing just the same as google.
That's either a win for Google and Microsoft, or at least a neutral outcome.
AI aside, I would pay $20 per month to have Gmail's compose UI work correctly in desktop Safari.
Makes sense that this is the only way to compete with Microsoft.
(See also how MS attacked Slack by including Teams for “free”.)
Why not compete with microsoft by not pushing AI? This allows costs to stay low while making customers happier.
Google already spent a lot of money on Gemini and now they have to justify it or the shareholders will get mad.
What? Google is absolutely not even remotely concerned with such things. Their bring-to-market strategy for products is basically "Spend billions a year on developing random things" and then "OK, it's been a year, cancel 1/2 of them".
> Their bring-to-market strategy for products is basically "Spend billions a year on developing random things" and then "OK, it's been a year, cancel 1/2 of them".
This evidently doesn't apply to their chatbot efforts.
lamda, bard, palm (v1 and v2) don't necessarily agree with you there
A lot of customers want these features (especially those people who only work in the browser because their job duties are vastly different from the average HN user)
Apparently they don't want it if Google had to force the feature on everyone to raise revenue.
This is likely a misreading from personal preference
Getting these features for $2 instead of $20 likely appeals to a lot of people. It's 10% the price and may only be one of several reasons for the price increase (inflation is likely another)
Agree, which is why it was nice(r) as an add-on.
I still won't enable Gemini
What's a good alternative if you just want company emails for a new startup? Zoho?
Our company has been using zoho since we started almost a decade ago. It's been rock solid. We use their CRM & Accounting (Books) as well and everything's integrated nicely. Also has an easy to use API to glue arbitrary things together & scrape emails, etc.
We're shutting down workspace accounts this quarter for this exact reason.
Integration will likely be the biggest growth driver for Gemini, I guess.
That gives a clue of where the money is and what people use more :D
Google can’t charge a premium for a noticeably worse AI product.
i dont' want any of this garbage in my workspace account
Email is the killer app, and their trying to kill email.
+1 for hosting my own e-mail server. Haven’t looked back.
So, not free and I’m not allowed to say no.
Free, for only $2 per month!
Plus Google gets to use your data for training. That has interesting implications. What goes in as training data often comes out later as replies to questions.
> Your content is not human reviewed or used for Generative AI model training outside your domain without permission.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919?hl=en-IN
Your statement is not accurate based on the Workspace docs.
How sure are you that you didn't implicitly grant permission somewhere? And that Google won't change the default. Which Google has done before.[1]
"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further." - Vader.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/01/11/google-st...
New article: Google is being sued for listening in on Home Depot customer support calls to train their systems. [1] They had Home Depot's permission, but not the customers'. That's "wiretapping" in some states.
[1] https://archive.is/NkLQG
Docs are also the last place to be updated (if they were even technically correct in the first place)
Google has been extremely clear that Workspace/Cloud customer data is firewalled off and never fed back into the machine. If you're claiming this has changed, can you point me to the source?
I don't see anything in the article that says they train on your data, source?
What if I don’t want AI in either of those places?
Somebody got a promotion for this change
there's so much ai everywhere
so i dont wanna pay for it. especially not google, because.. well, im their product.
If I remember correctly, the Office 365 Copilot thing is more of an upsell rather than an upcharge. Basically, if you didn't want to pay more, you would initiate the cancellation process, and during that you could "downgrade" to the plan that you already had (without copilot as part of it).
Personally, I find that to be especially scummy because it essentially sounds like they are betting on people either not understanding that nuance, or not bothering to deal with it (and subsequently, not using AI, making that venture seem vaguely more profitable)
Pretty simple formula, there simply isn't a market for an $x upcharge on mail and docs, but we have to be part of this latest grift so we'll charge everyone $x - y which is a rounding error. Except it's not. At some point someone is going to admit they have bet the farm on improved auto complete.
Yay now I have to pay more to get bundled features I didn't want in the first place. Yay.
Is it just me or is this title a clear contradiction? Free but increases price? Do they mean now included in your cost…which is increasing? Doesn’t have the magic marketing power I suppose.
Perhaps now is the time for me to switch my personal email off Workspace. I don't use it for Docs or Drive or anything, only email.
Does anyone have experience with Amazon WorkMail or similar, cheaper services for email?
I've been very happy with Migadu. https://www.migadu.com/
I just saw this. This is probably most useless feature probably nobody asked for except for marketing, to be able to claim they have AI email blah blah.
This is getting tiresome.
[dead]