This "Journalist X LLMs" video gives the same corporate, polished vibe as the Gemini announcement... Google's AI communication really feels like any "snake oil consulting group" at this point. I really hope they get their stuff together and start putting engineers & researchers in charge again.
What you’re seeing is exactly that, engineers and researchers in charge, trying to communicate by emulating stuff they don’t understand. Product people need to be involved to find a market fit for all this great tech.
I hope they become as irrelevant as IBM. The business world should be subject to regular wildfires. Old, calcified overgrowth cleared. New companies and innovators to arise from the ashes.
I hope it happens to them all. Companies shouldn't last forever.
What happened with clearly explaining something in text. I immediately feel overwhelmed with all the links, a video playing, some song in the corner (?) a discord server and an "I'm feeling lucky button".
Probably because I'm not in their target (I'm a male approaching the mid-40s) but what's with this type of design?
Meaning stuff that floats, epilepsy-inducing strong color contrasts, "brutalist" fonts, big photos of people's faces instead of text that should explain what the "labs" part is all about. I closed the tab after a quick scroll-down, hoping that at some point some fixed and detailed text section would show up, it didn't.
I feel it was unnecesary to create this because https://research.google/ and https://ai.google/ already exist? It just seems like they want to take another URL with a "pure" domain name instead of psubdirectories, etc parts.
I believe it's a similar phenomenon to Shipping the Org Chart.
The "Experiments" and "Labs" stuff at Google always feels like it exists because the bigger org can't be convinced to do something fast, but in getting it out this way they also cause it to never be integrated into the main money making piplines of google either thus dooming whatever tech they wanted to get out there.
And what research is for? I mean, it can be something long term but research could also be short term. I don't know if it was Bellman or Knuth that said: "If you can solve it, it is an exercise; otherwise it's a research problem.". I understand that labs could have a problem in mind that could be solved technically but NOT solved businesslike but also include problems that are short-term research and could be feasible or not.
Is that a fucking Discord link on a Google property? Wild times.
Looks like we're starting to see the fruits of Google's labor since turning the dial to eleven after OpenAI stole the show. I have no horse in this race but I'm guessing within a year Google has market share (mind share?) parity with OpenAI.
Man, people hating hard on here. Google’s just out there trying their best.
We should encourage any and all endeavors to build new useful tools. I agree that Google hasn’t been on par with other big players out there, but at least they’re trying. It’s so “trendy” to hate on Google, meanwhile everyone’s using at least one of their products every single day
The design is so over the top and busy I'm not even sure what I'm looking at. Why can't google just release something like a normal company? If it's great they won't need graphic design bloat on the landing site.
For the love of god just ship actual tools, not PR papers, not faked demos, not "experiments" that will get dusty and dropped after a few months.
Like we saw you doing Magenta 5 years ago and early image gen almost a decade ago, culturally Google needs to get away from this academic brainworm that the research is the work and the citations the payoff not the actual productization and the users+revenue. Because every company making big moves in this space and eating their lunch certainly has, and in a 2-3 years the biggest movers wont even have come from academia at all.
As usual no love for Canada from Google. Apparently we can't even have music: Unfortunately instrument playground is not available in your country. Click close to return to the homepage.
It almost strikes me as the design equivalent of the "how do you do fellow kids?" meme. Like, it's in your face trying to engage with craft-like design but fails to make a point because google is pretentious and drinking their own Kool aid.
Best I can tell, it's now meant to be a page where people can go to see AI projects (not necessarily by Google) that are being hosted using Google's infrastructure.
"Say what you see". What is this? Is this some kind of reverse-image generation to basically train google be better in the future at recognizing images? What the hell is this suppose to be?
the animations are overwhelming. i don't want to see so much shit moving around on screen. they also don't respect the user's "prefers-reduced-motion" setting.
It's as if Google are trying to work out what worked well with their Beta programme (which I used to enjoy and get excited about) and replicating it as a finished product in the 2020's with 'modern' design.
The way they communicated beta projects a decade ago was 100 times better. Just raw, simple, unfinished, and clearly things to play with.
This site just looks like marketing garbage. Sorry. Just annoyed at it.
The website fails to explain what it is and why users should care. It’s not a very good home page in that respect, as the point of a home page for a business is to engage in seconds by answering those two questions.
It’s similarity and lack of structural UX makes it so that besides loudly being AI, AI, AI!!! it is confusingly similar to https://x.company/
Google needs to establish a leadership position in the AI market and make it clear that they are deeply focused and executing better than competitors. This isn’t helping.
It's because two completely separate worlds (and users) happen to use the same technology to present things.
There's the WWW serving information to people to use and then there's the parasitic Marketing Miasma and Self-flagulators setting up camp on top trying to manipulate and steal energy from the system and its participants.
I'd actually like to see some kind of uncoupling of these two worlds. The commercial web and the web I go to for exploring knowledge shouldn't be the same.
This has been their website for experiments for years. Its for people to try out and not for the entire world to use as yet. It has had a lot of fun stuff over the years
G+ was okayish. the frantic push to use it everywhere was of course typical megacorp bullshit, but there was no real reason to shut it down, they could have kept the brand, use it as the glue between all the other things they have with profiles, sharing, social like yt, blogger, maps, photos...
Do you remember Google Wave? That was the last time Google had balls to try an new vision. The last day of exploration, after that it was just exploitation (make money).
A long time ago they even started a trend - 20% time for personal projects, that was an act of exploration, but now they lost their curiosity and playfulness.
Really shows the importance of having a compelling UI and a coherent ability to describe what your product is, both of which were sorely lacking in Google Wave.
I agree, G+ the product was fine. Some very good things came out of it (video Hangouts, Google Photos). The push to force it down everyone's throat marked a turning point in my perception of Google and resulted in a bunch of harmful changes and loss of trust. Shutting it down eventually made sense - the brand had zero cachet and no significant population was using it. As an IC or manager within Google, there wasn't much you could do for your career by working on G+. It was a dead end product by the time it was shut down.
Okay, sure, it made sense to shut it down, but to me it would make sense to do a new one today for the aforementioned reasons (use cases).
(But of course somehow most of Alphabet is still tragicomically bad at B2C, and now YT also seems to be going down the drain with the overemphasis on shorts.)
Ok. Well Google can't just pretend that generative A.I. isn't having a massive moment, and the company has a lot more riding on the future of this particular technology than just an "experiment." They’ve had a weak sauce launch, and while it’s nice there’s a website to launch experiments I don’t think it’s helpful with audience perception of the company.
Let’s see. OpenAI acquired 100 million users and was the fasted growth in history, partners with Google’s biggest competitor Microsoft. They have since integrated ChatGPT into Bing and announced a raft of new products. Amazon has launched their competitors as well. Tons of other companies are throwing their hats in the ring too, but their big cloud competitors (the platform of platforms) are already launched and looking competitive.
Google, on the other hand, was late to introduce a product competitive to ChatGPT and mostly fumbled the announcement when it did.
Google is coming from behind in their execution after being outmaneuvered by OpenAI and a very weak early showing with Bard.
Google didn’t deliver a chat-powered generative A.I. product despite working on one for years. They just didn’t have the risk taking culture where releasing it into the wild imperfectly was something Google was willing to do. This was a profound misstep, and dethroned them. At one point they had the largest and most talented assembly of AI researchers in the world and virtually unlimited research budgets, but they didn’t ship.
This puts them in a position where they have something to prove. To investors. To developers. To cloud customers. And to themselves.
Their entire business is about being a trusted place for people to find information, and they didn’t feel they were ready, and then they missed the boat.
It's the reason, when it finally rushed a product out the door, *they called it Bard.* They didn't call it Google AI.
They talked AI up to the point of ridiculousness at I/O. Two words they drove home in every talk: responsible and helpful.
This is why they need to establish a position of leadership and avoid weak delivery like this labs launch (maybe it’s not a launch, maybe it just needs to be relaunched — I’m making an assumption). Because it’s not super on point in delivering their brand promise for AI or even explaining what it is in a clear way.
People can’t even tell what it is, not a gigantic corporate delivering early stage experiments at the cutting edge of helpful and responsible AI.
I’m open to being wrong about any of this, but this is how I generally see it.
> Google didn’t deliver a chat-powered generative A.I. product despite working on one for years.
Don’t forget that Google translate has been out for years and used the GPT structure they invented.
Also I think Google missing the ball on the GenAI chat will go down as one of the biggest AI and tech fumbles, even if the fads around LLMs fade. They beat OpenAI to creating a chat interface- but they had all that drama last summer of some crazy religious employee getting spooked at it being sentient, so they locked it down. That’s probably what gave OpenAI the idea to ship ChatGPT honestly.
Also this labs page clearly looks like a vanity marketing site to remind people (?) that Google Does AI (tm).
> They beat OpenAI to creating a chat interface- but they had all that drama last summer of some crazy religious employee getting spooked at it being sentient, so they locked it down.
It sounds absolutely hilarious, and highlights everything that's wrong about this bubble. Do you have a source on this?
That's about right, another massive fumble from Google. Bard was and still is pretty hopeless and unless they pull their finger out it's going to be another market lost to them that they basically invented. They need to come out with something that's a blockbuster of a product and then just give it away for free or at low cost to win back market and mind share.
