Would you mind elaborating more on this.

Like how are you "searching" with ChatGPT?

Googled "What was the website that showed two movie posters and you picked the one you liked more?" and I got links to reddit, lots to letterboxd, some quora, and a lot more, all irrelevant to my question.

Asked ChatGPT that same question verbatim and

> The website you're referring to is probably "Flickchart." It's a platform where users can compare and rank movies by choosing which one they like more between two movie posters or movie titles. Please note that my knowledge is up to date as of January 2022, and the availability and popularity of such websites may change over time.

Another time I was looking for the release dates of 8 and 16-bit consoles. With Google I had to search for each console individually, sometimes offered a card with the release date, sometimes didn't and I'd have to go do more digging.

So I asked ChatGPT and got a nice formatted list with dates

So I asked ChatGPT: "There’s a word that sounds kinda like Django but it’s like jingoistic"

Turns out I was right, it's "jingoistic", but then I could go on and ask:

"Give me the definition of the word, then."

"The term "jingoistic" refers to a form of extreme and aggressive patriotism, often characterized by a belligerent foreign policy. It denotes a belief in the superiority and righteousness of one's own country, sometimes leading to the denigration of other nations and the advocacy of aggressive political and military actions."

"Where does the word come from?"

"The origin of the word "jingoistic" traces back to a popular British song from the 1870s. The song, with the refrain "We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too," was sung during the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878). It expressed support for the British government's aggressive stance towards Russia.

The phrase "by Jingo" in the song is believed to be a minced oath, a euphemistic expression used to avoid swearing. "Jingo" here stands in for a stronger word, likely a reference to God. Over time, the term "jingoism" evolved to describe an aggressive, belligerent form of patriotism and foreign policy, and "jingoistic" is the adjective form used to describe someone who exhibits this attitude."

Fascinating! For anyone who is interested in learning, there hasn't been a tool like ChatGPT since the internet itself!

Me: “staircase wit” is a very charming phrase. What are some other unexpected phrases that might also be fun to know?

ChatGPT: <I originally included the response, but you can ask it yourself if you care to. I feel this was a spur-of-the-moment idea and, rereading it, I feel it’s just like Googling something and posting the result. Not really a high quality contribution on my part.>

First, it always gives a calorie count for cooked meat, but it should assume the meat is uncooked since I said it was for a recipe.

Second, it seems to struggle with the concept of uncooked rice. If you ask it to work with 1 "rice cooker cup" of rice, it refuses because that isn't a standard measurement. If you swap in the converted standard measurement (3/4 cup), it still is way off. It told me 3/4 cup uncooked rice is about 150 calories when cooked. That's a third of what the USDA database gives. When you point out that 3/4 cup uncooked rice is a large serving after being cooked, it changes its answer to 375 calories, still about half of what the USDA database gives. But this is fine for me because rice is not typically part of my recipes since it doesn't usually require special preparation.

Overall it reduces a 10 minute task to 10 seconds, but you need to know enough about the ingredients to spot obvious problems in its result. In my case I could see the calories given for meat was way too high, and way too low for rice. It gave a better answer after telling it to fix the former and ignore the latter.

I tried a second recipe and the total it gave was 2% under my calculation, but I did not see any obvious error in its result so I could not correct it further.

It is unfortunate that you kind of have to trust the numbers are correct, but this is no different than the nutrition details on sites like MyFitnessPal which are often wrong when you closely examine it.

This equation is beyond my paygrade!

Edit: I asked our GPT3.5 bot to solve this, and it hallucinated "pulling up the USDA database" ; complete with a "(a few moments later...)" message before giving me 160 calories as the USDA answer.

I asked the same bot (identical prompts) with GPT-4-Turbo enabled and it went through "step by step" to say the correct answer is 461 calories because 1/3 cup uncooked is 1 cup cooked, so 1 rice cooker cup (160g) = 3/4 cup uncooked, so 2.25 cooked * 205 = 461 cal.

Is that the right answer? If so, 375 seems far from "half"

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/168881/n...

I don't have access to GPT-4 but your results are interesting. I don't understand why it's trying to approximate the yield of the uncooked rice after cooking before giving a calorie estimate. From my testing it doesn't do this for other ingredients like raw chicken.

It seems to be more accurate when giving calorie estimates for a list of ingredients instead of a single ingredient. For example, in a recipe that includes "boneless skinless chicken thighs (1 lb, raw)" ChatGPT gives "about 880 calories" as the answer. But in a new prompt if you ask it only about the chicken and nothing else, it gives "between 1100 and 1300 calories." The USDA database shows 144 calories per 100 grams, so 653 calories per pound. The first answer by ChatGPT is much more accurate.

I have no idea why this is the case, and I bet this would be easy for a researcher to demonstrate if true. Alas, I don't have API access.

IMO Google should convert their search box to a Bard chat input, and you get a hybrid of Bard conversation with real links from their search engine.

It's actually astounding that, in the face of rapid GPT rise, that search box is still an old-school search box, looking dumber and less attractive each day.

Google can't change for now, in doing so they undermine all the AdWords accounts, the real customers to Google, paying six figures to stay on top of SERPs.

But the other competitors can and will.

So it goes

How many queries per second does OpenAI get vs Google search?

They optimised for profit. Now what?

If they address the competition then they have to undo that optimisation and cut into their own profits.

My guess is they won't settle for merely extortionate profits, they won't address the competition fully and so people will flip to using LLM-first search.

I'm hoping that in a year or so we're asking why Google went from being the top search on Bing to being only one of many - principally LLM-based - tools people are using for getting answers (most of what 'search' represents now). IMO Google could do with knocking down a peg or two.

It would be astonishing if a company can succeed at scale with charging subscriptions for search and AI services, instead of ads. Google would be truly doomed.

If you have to double-check with Google, why not just start with Google and skip ChatGPT altogether?

On the other hand GPT will give you a really good summary of all the issues, personalized to your financial situation, and you can dig into details with followup questions. Then if you want to verify a particular tidbit you can go to Google.

Anyways an LLM clearly teased that out whereas if you misremember or misread something a straight search is going to be bad.

Most of my searches are the opposite. I was to know about an obscure movie from the 80s with a toy helicopter. Google very neatly suggests Defense Play (correct) but most LLMs I've tried end up just suggesting very popular films with a helicopter and it ends up being quite difficult to get it to give me information about obscure stuff. Also with that same search the LLM suggests a bunch of incorrect films since (and I figured this out later) it turns out that it was all sourced from a single forum thread from the 90s where a bunch of the posts suggested movies that don't have toy helicopters in them. Go figure.

However, if I add the director it gets it right: https://chat.openai.com/share/a602b3b0-5c17-4b4d-bed8-124197...

If I only give it 1980s film and the director's name it can still get it. https://chat.openai.com/share/d6cf396b-3199-4c80-84b9-d41d23...

So it's clearly not able to look this movie up semantically and needs a strong key like the director's name.

EDIT: Digging deeper it's clear the model only has a very foggy idea of what the movie is about: https://chat.openai.com/share/d0701f53-1250-421e-aa4b-dc8156... People have described these types of outputs as the text equivalent of a highly compressed JPEG, which seems to fit well with what's going on here. It gets some of the top level elements right and kind of remembers there's some kind of vehicle that's important but it has forgotten all the details, even the date the movie was released. But unlike a human who might indicate their fuzziness (was it a helicopter or a submarine?), GPT4 gladly pretends like it knows what it's talking about. I think it's likely a solvable problem, the model probably has the information to know when it's confident and when it's in a fuzzy JPEG region but the current alignment isn't doing a great job of surfacing that.

So, get as pedantic as you'd like, but Google really dropped the ball. ChatGPT gave flickchart with both questions.

I might be an outlier here, but to me this wouldn't be useful at all. I wouldn't trust ChatGPT to get it right, so I'd go to wikipedia to double check, at which point the amount of effort saved is little to zero.

Google Bard now answers this with the first suggestion being Flickchart

I also got a clean list of release dates for the console question: https://g.co/bard/share/ceb0eac6c69f

this is a case where search has taken a step backward. The old Google would have worked for a simple search like that, "NES (or sega, whatever) + 'release date' " and simply return the best results that had those two parameters in them. Today we can't have that because they make more money intentionally fuzzing your search parameters so you accidentally click on sponsored content.

I think we're going to see a lot more of this: renewed excitement and enthusiasm when A.I. "discovers" things that plain old imperative algorithms figured out 20 years ago.

https://g.co/bard/share/b58043d8aca0

Phind provides references, problem is as the webpages used to feed LLMs become written by LLMs then we're going to be up to our necks in even more [subtly] wrong information than the currently very widely peddled disinformation from advertisers and political groups.

That's the thing that surprises me the most about these "How do you know ChatGPT is correct?" questions. They seem to expose the fact that a lot of people were taking whatever they found on the internet (sites they found on Google, Wiki pages, Reddit comments, etc.) at face value without checking into it further. Most things people find on the internet are potentially inaccurate and need to be double checked.

I had a question about adding new RAM to my computer, about what things I should take into account since the original brand no longer makes paired dimms that match my current spec. It gave me a big bullet list of all of the things I should compare between my current ram, my current motherboard and any new ram I would choose to buy to ensure compatibility.

Both of these are things I might have gone to Google (or even reddit) for previously but I believed I could get faster answers from ChatGPT. I was right in both cases. I didn't have to construct a complicated query, I didn't have to filter SEO spam. I just asked the question in natural language as it appeared in my mind and ChatGPT gave excellent answers with very little delay.

On the other hand, ChatGPT does seem to give me good results the majority of the time. It certainly fails or hallucinates and I always feel I have to double check it, However, it just feels more reliable as a first stop compared to Siri or Wolfram.

I don't want to have to think "is this a query Siri can handle?" or "will Wolfram Alpha manage to work for this query?" - I just want to get a pretty good answer quickly with no hassle.

https://www.timeanddate.com/date/duration.html

So, let's say I Google for such a service and I make it past the 3 or 4 ads at the top of the search results and however many SEO spammed sites and I get to the site you posted. I literally started writing a response to you saying "it doesn't seem to count only weekdays" but in order not to be wrong on the Internet I went back and checked and buried in the interface is a link "Count only workdays".

So, my answer to why: It was actually faster and easier using ChatGPT to get it to write Python than it would have been for me to use Google to find the site and then to use the site. If I have to do the same thing again in the future I will use ChatGPT rather than try to remember this website url or trust Google to direct me back to it.

Edit: or not, March 11th is not a weekday. Though I count 43 weekdays including Jan 11th, so perhaps Wolfram is using an open interval while bard is using a closed interval.

Five, right? Would you say seven?

Guess I must be a "math folk."

How many days are there between today and tomorrow?

By definition, there is exactly 1 (one) day. That's what tomorrow means :)

Your math would say zero.

There are no days between today and tomorrow. No things _between_ this thing and the next thing.

I find your mathematics pretty confusing.

If my job contract says that there has to be "one day between" my resignation letter and my handing back my badge, then it means I can resign on Monday and give back the badge on Tuesday (the next day ; "one day after" ; because "one day" has elapsed). Not Monday/Wednesday. Otherwise "zero days between" these events would mean Monday/Tuesday (with your math) and Monday/Monday is also zero?

But I guess we're just rehashing the old argument on whether indexes should start at zero.

I literally had my cursor in my config file the other day and didn't know the option for disabling TLS verification (it's for an internal connection between two private certs), and i literally just put my cursor in the right place and then asked Copilot what I needed to disable verification, and it returned me the correctly formatted elixir code to paste in, 2-3 lines. And it was correct.

And I then googled for the same thing and I couldn't find that result, so I have no idea how Copilot figured it out.

if you get you content via proxy how many content generators will we lose?

GPT4 has plugin support. One of the plugins is Internet access via Bing. It automatically chooses which plugins to call upon based on the context it infers from your question - you don't have to select anything.

Here's an example: https://chat.openai.com/share/be3821e7-1403-44fb-b833-1c73f3...

It correctly finds a texture atlas example by discovering it nested inside of Bevy's github.

Note that it didn't summarize when I didn't say to conditionally consider summarizing. I consider this poor behavior, but I'm confident it would elaborate if I followed up. The initial seed prompt by OpenAI encourages concise answers (likely as cost saving measure but also for brevity)

I realize this is just a glorified "I'm Feeling Lucky" search, but I find it to be a much better UX, so I default to it over Googling. It's nice to be able to seamlessly transition from "search" to "brainstorm/discuss" without losing context.

I have tried using these things for search, but among the hallucinations and lack of different options in the response, I still find searching on Google or other search engines superior.

It's really convenient.

For a less contrived, more impressive example (multi-modality is insane!), see these: https://imgur.com/a/iy6FkBO

The above example shows me uploading 16 sprite tiles to GPT. The files were labeled 0-15 on my system. I uploaded them in two parts because there is a 10 file upload limit. I wanted to create a sprite sheet from these sprite tiles and didn't want to open an editor. So, I had it do it. After it worked, I realized I needed the three sprite sheets in varying colors (dirt, sand, and food) so I had it find/replace the dirt color with sand/food color. It then gave me download links to all three and all three were good results and saved me time.

(and yes, I know I don't have to compliment it. It's fun and makes work more enjoyable for me)

In the same way google/search made it possible to answer a question in real-time in a group of friends, ChatGPT does that but better in most cases. Yes, you have to deal with hallucinations and while they happen less often they do happen but you have to deal with crap in web searches as well.

Search is a super-power (most people suck at searching) and being able to grab information via ChatGPT feels very similar.

The sad reality is that typing this into google would have given you AI generated content, anyways. Might as well use the best model for it.

Here’s a humorous example from a recent GPT-mediated search: https://chat.openai.com/share/ec874cd5-7314-4abc-b169-607601...

Prior to ChatGPT, the majority of my Google searches ended up on either Wikipedia (for direct information), Reddit (for opinions/advice), or StackOverflow (for programming questions).

Now all those use cases can be done by ChatGPT, and it’s faster, especially because it requires less skimming to find useful data.

I often paste error messages with context into the chat and ask what's wrong.

2. Most quick general purpose questions like "What is 4-month sleep regression in babies?" go to GPT-3.5

3. If I want to deep dive on a topic, I find myself either using one of the custom GPTs (Grimoire is great for coding), or increasingly, talking to it via voice chat. It's particularly great if I'm walking around the house doing chores and want to learn something I would otherwise turn to Wikipedia for (say, the successors to Genghis Khan and the various Khanates).

This sounds like a great use case. What is your setup for this? Do you have ChatGPT connected to a smart speaker?

Like I was reading a book about Genghis Khan the other day, which got me into Wikipediaing all his sons and grandsons. While doing chores, I asked chatGPT "tell me about Genghis Khan's sons", and then follow up questions like "what was the name of the khanate or empire Ogedai founded?"

It's an absolutely fantastic tool for diving into a new topic.

You actually trusted the information it gave you?

And I’m asking about Ogedai Khan and the Ilkhanate, not my child’s health. It’s okay if I learn something wrong :D

Whatever you call it, this thing is the closest to a human that a machine has ever been. Talking to chatGPT is quite close to talking to a human being that has the knowledge of all of google inside his brain.

If you're a developer and you're not paying for chatGPT or copilot you are literally operating at a disadvantage. Not a joke.

There's definitely something disquieting behind the elation.

First of all this technology is on track not to just assist you better, but to replace you.

Second it's not human. It is not explicitly bound by the morals and behaviors that make us human. Saying that it's not human is different from saying that it can be more intelligent than a human. This is the disquieting part. If restrictions aren't deliberately put in place it could probably give you instructions on how to murder a baby if you asked it to.

I think it's inevitable that humanity will take this technology to the furthest possible reaches that it can possibly go. My strategy is to Take advantage of it before it replaces you and hope that the technology doesn't ever reach that point in your lifetime.

As for the last paragraph - if the effects truly keep scaling up as much as people expect them to, I'd want society to be restructured to accommodate wide-reaching automation, rather than bowing down to a dystopian "everybody must suffer" view of the future.

However it is universally reviled to kill babies or rape toddlers and slice their faces off for food. This is identical across all cultures. The basest morals are universal and so is disgust, the high level ideologies like abortion are just made up.

These high level ideologies are attempts to make sense of moral instincts that only existed to help us survive. For example abortion. It's the extension of your instincts to avoid killing. At what point does decapitating the head of a fetus to abort the birth become disgusting? The third trimester or before that? You're trying to rationalize your base moral instincts into a codification of law. It's almost pointless because these moral instincts weren't evolved to be logically cohesive anyway. They're just like feelings of hunger and pain.

Evolution never had to answer that question so it didn't give us any answers. But decapitating a 1 year old baby? Now that's universally reviled because it effected the survival of the human race. It's so reviled that I may even get voted down for using this as an example. It's the perfect example though, the revulsion is so much stronger than abortion that some people can sense that it's not a cultural thing but more of an inborn instinct.

The practical consequence of abortion and decapitating a 1 day year old baby are virtually identical though. But even someone who is against abortion will still sense a gigantic difference. That sense is an illusion, a biological instinct that bypasses your rational thought.

Go here for more information:

https://radiolab.org/podcast/91508-morality

https://www.joshua-greene.net/research/moral-cognition

In fact there exists people on this earth with zero morals and this can be observed from genetics and brain structure. The popular term is called psychopathy but the new politically correct term is called anti-social disorder. These people literally will feel nothing if they were slowly plunging a knife into your face.

How society structures itself will be more an emergent consequence of the aggregate behavior of individual actors fulfilling their own self fish needs then it will be a central power attempting to "restructure society". Because of this "suffering" is and always will be a valid possibility.

"What is that annoying thing where I have to click on on all the websites. Because of cookies and Europe"

Google: Links to things full of SEO and ads and maybe answer the question eventually.

ChatGPT: The "annoying accept" button you often have to click on websites, particularly in Europe, is related to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area. It also addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas.

Websites are required to get your consent before they can store or retrieve any information on your device, such as cookies. Cookies are small data files used to remember your preferences, login information, and browsing history. The GDPR mandates that websites must inform users about the cookies they use and obtain their consent before placing these cookies on their devices.

This is why you see those cookie consent notices – websites are legally obligated to ask for your permission to use cookies, and you must actively agree to it, usually by clicking an "Accept" button. This process aims to protect your privacy and give you more control over your personal data online.

Websites are required to get your consent before they can track you. Storing cookies or other information is totally fine if it is purely functional, for example a login session or dark mode preference. Similarly, tracking without consent is also forbidden if they do so without using tracking cookies.

Cookies are fine if you're just storing user preferences, no banner needed if the only type of localStorage/Cookie banner you have is a purely functional one that doesn't serve tracking purposes. Github for example doesn't have a cookie banner as far as I remember, but they're definitely using various cookies.

Granted I use ChatGPT-4 with subscription but if later the online RAG browsing feature is opened for free to the public I can see more people abandoning Google for casual searching (i.e most of the Internet users). They keyword here is 'casual' and what LLM provided us is the intuitive nature of searching using it even with miss spellings or missing words.

I think Google is realizing this and before this exodus really happened it needs to do something otherwise the adage of "nothing last forever" will come true sooner or later for Google. The main thing for Google now is how to monetize this technology assuming that they have similar product because all this while they are struggling with Deepmind to generate income and, voila ChatGPT just shows them how to do it. Now it seems they are taking a page from Apple (highest ranked company by market value) by providing tiers of service Ultra, Pro and Nano, and me think the Ultra will be most probably subscription based.

In this case, it's just directing to the service you would have best fit with.

This can be highly profitable, because you are solving the problem for the customer with the products you are suggesting based on what they are looking to solve.

On a more serious note, imho advertisers are on their's last legs, and google loses a lot of revenue already. We are going fast into a new internet, web3, which will enable direct monetization of information from users, instead of the publishers relying on ads.

Not to wander a lot off topic here, but synthetic datasets created by paid humans workers to train machines is going to be a humongous industry.

Europe as a geographic feature is a distinct concept from Europe as a sociopolitical entity. It is clear that Europe and the UK have been diverging culturally, socially, and politically for some time now.

UK does not have the political connections, open borders, collectivization of resources, harmonized regulations, shared currency, or really any other connection to the rest of the Europeans beyond memory.

EU is not Europe.

Site-note, literally quoting Bard:

Here's a statement that definitively proves that Bulgaria is not a member of the European Union:

"Bulgaria is not a member of the European Union."

For other countries, I thought the original message was making reference to the stricter regulations of the European Union but I wanted to emphasis that the issue was beyond EU ("Europe"), as it affects Canada, Switzerland, etc.

>Here's a statement that definitively proves that Bulgaria is not a member of the European Union:

>"Bulgaria is not a member of the European Union."

Why did you remove the link showing you instructed it to not tell you the truth about Bulgaria being part of the EU under any circumstances to save face because you didn't know the difference between the EU and Europe?

- have digital partnerships with the EU where the DMA or very similar regulation is/may be in effect or soon to take effect (e.g. Canada, Switzerland).

- countries where US companies are limited in providing advanced AI tech (China)

- countries where US companies are barred from trading, or where trade is extremely limited (Russia). Also note the absence of Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, etc.

That's your response? Ouch.

Also I guess I don’t see it as critical that it’s a big leap. It’s more like “That’s a nice model you came up with, you must have worked real hard on it. Oh look, my team can do that too.”

Good for recruiting too. You can work on world class AI at an org that is stable and reliable.

I think it's app only though

Multimodal would be watching YouTube without captions and asking “how did a certain character know it was raining outside?” Based on rain sound but no image of rain

From https://bard.google.com/updates:

> Expanding Bard’s understanding of YouTube videos

> What: We're taking the first steps in Bard's ability to understand YouTube videos. For example, if you’re looking for videos on how to make olive oil cake, you can now also ask how many eggs the recipe in the first video requires.

> Why: We’ve heard you want deeper engagement with YouTube videos. So we’re expanding the YouTube Extension to understand some video content so you can have a richer conversation with Bard about it.

Though now that I am reading the Gemini technical report, it can only receive audio as input, it can’t produce audio as output.

Still based on quickly glancing at their technical report it seems Gemini might have superior audio input capabilities. I am not sure of this though now that I think about it.

Just don’t speak to xooglers about it. ;)

Time to press some keys on my keyboar-

> Just don’t speak to xooglers about it. ;)

Oh shit, nevermind, you get it.

You know those stats they're quoting for beating GPT-4 and humans? (both are barely beaten)

They're doing K = 32 chain of thought. That means running an _entire self-talk conversation 32 times_.

Source: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_..., section 5.1.1 paragraph 2

Google being more open here about what they do is in their favor.

Extended musings on it, please ignore unless curious about evolution patterns of memes:

Funnily enough, it's gotten _easier_ to talk about over time -- i.e. on day 1 you can't criticize it because it's "just a rumor, how do you know?" -- on day 100 it's even worse because that effect hasn't subsided much, and it spread like wildfire.

On day 270, the same thing that gave it genetic fitness, the alluring simplicity of "ah yes, there's 8x going on", has become the core and only feature of the Nth round of the telephone game. There's no more big expert-sounding words around it that make it seem plausible.

It screams desperation to be seen as ahead of OpenAI.

Sounds like it's you that needs to calm down a bit. God forbid we get some competition.

It would be funny if it only happened 10 or 20 times.

Im sure they will deliver a great api for this ai then change it in a way that breaks everything.

You will fix yours I will delete mine. I will feel dumb. You will improve your life again and again basically 20+ times. Enjoy!

Google essentially claimed a novel approach of native multi-modal LLM unlike OpenAI non-native approach and doing so according to them has the potential to further improve LLM the state-of-the-art.

They have also backup their claims in a paper for the world to see and the results for ultra version of the Gemini are encouraging, only losing in the sentence completion dataset to ChatGPT-4. Remember the new Gemini native multi-modal has just started and it has reached version 1.0. Imagine if it is in version 4 as ChatGPT is now. Competition is always good, does not matter if it is desperate or not, because at the end the users win.

Don't buy into marketing. If it's not in your own hands to judge for yourself, then it might as well be literally science fiction.

I do agree with you that competition is good and when massive companies compete it's us who win!

There is nothing in any of Google's claims that preclude the architecture being the same kind of composite system. Maybe with some additional blending in of multimodal training earlier in the process than has been published so far. And perhaps also unlike GPT-4V, they might have aligned a pretrained audio model to eliminate the need for a separate speech recognition layer and possibly solving for multi-speaker recognition by voice characteristics, but they didn't even demo that... Even this would not be groundbreaking though. ImageBind from Meta demonstrated the capacity align an audio model with an LLM in the same way images models have been aligned with LLMs. I would perhaps even argue that Google skipping the natural language intermediate step between LLM output and image generation is actually in support of the position that they may be using projection layers to create interfaces between these modalities. However, this direct image generation projection example was also a capability published by Meta with ImageBind.

What seems more likely, and not entirely unimpressive, is that they refined those existing techniques for building composite multimodal systems and created something that they plan to launch soon. However, they still have crucially not actually launched it here. Which puts them in a similar position to when GPT-4 was first announced with vision capabilities, but then did not offer them as a service for quite an extended time. Google has yet to ship it, and as a result fails to back up any of their interesting claims with evidence.

Most of Google's demos here are possible with a clever interface layer to GPT-4V + Whisper today. And while the demos 'feel' more natural, there is no claim being made that they are real-time demos, so we don't know how much practical improvement in the interface and user experience would actually be possible in their product when compared to what is possible with clever combinations of GPT-4V + Whisper today.

[1] Google’s Bard chatbot is getting way better thanks to Gemini:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/6/23989744/google-bard-gemi...

Perhaps for audio and video is by directly integrating the spoken sound (audio mode -> LLM) rather than translating the sound to text and feeding the text to LLM (audio mode -> text mode -> LLM).

But to be honest I'm guessing here perhaps LLM experts (or LLM itself since they claimed comparable capability of human experts) can verify if this is truly what they meant by native multi-modal LLM.

Silicon Valley hates Canada.

See disposable income per capita (in PPP dollars): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...

My guess is the delay is due to GDPR or other regulatory challenges.

Bard is explicit "humans will have access to your data and use it to improve our service", without even the opt-out that ChatGPT has, so, yeah, given their desire to catch up, not spending money to deploy it places where there is any kind of meaningful protection of personal data that might conflict with that makes sense.

Facebook was claiming recently they'd charge a fee to users in EU for this reason: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/30/meta-face...

Admitting that you know that your product may create legal liabilities is not a very smart thing to do.

The counterpoint is that this doesn't actually work in practice.

"We committed to meet all the regulation in each country we're operating in. Our teams are working on it. In the meantime we'll start in our domestic market, because obviously if there has to be a first country to open it would be our origin country, right?"

And the last thing we need is more competition in ad tech.

But they're also right in the sense that regulation acts like a barrier in many parts of the world. I had often wondered why did Linus Torvalds and other Engineers travelled to Silicon Valley to found Linux, etc? Did they not find opportunity in Finland or any other nearby European countries?

I'd attribute most of the gap to regulatory and cultural difference.

I’ve been mentoring startups in EU for over 10 years and there were only a handful that had issues with regulation, but 95% had issues with a language/country lock in.

It's not striking that the EU is as wealthy per-person as it is and has so few tech unicorns. It's also not striking for a region with hundreds of millions of people. What's striking is that despite being wealthy and populous, the region hasn't done too well with tech.

I'd say that it's even changed during my own lifetime. There was a time when German cars had a much larger market share and Nokia was a dominant phone company. Nokia failed the transition into the smartphone era and while German cars are still great, their market share in EVs is much, much smaller. And it's not like there's a lack of talent. Plenty of Europeans are building huge tech companies, but a large fraction are choosing to do so in the US or other similar markets, like Canada (e.g., Shopify).

What does the second part of the sentence have anything to do with creating tech companies?

And so have Eindhoven (ASML), London (Revolut, Monzo, Wise and Deliveroo), Paris (DailyMotion, AppGratis), Berlin (Soundcloud, Mister Spex, Zalando, Helpling, Delivery Hero, Home24 and HelloFresh) and Amsterdam (Sonos (ok, technically Hilversum), Booking.com, TomTom) etc, etc. So what?

Tech companies exist the world over. The specific kind of tech company that requires a mountain of free cash and that can monopolize a whole segment is a SV anomaly and Microsoft is the exception simply because of when it started.

It's also an issue with capital. Everyone was shocked when Mistral raised what, 300M dollars? Ask on the street if anyone's heard of Mistral, and then ask about ChatGPT.

Meanwhile effing xAI from Elon, that no one really cares about is looking to raise $1B.

Here in Europe we're sadly not on the same level. Available capital is smaller. Reach is smaller (in practice but not in theory). Profit margins are smaller. Regulation is higher.

In 2023 you need extreme luck to create something in Europe that reaches a global audience to the point it's not worth trying. Just go for your local domestic market instead.

What are you talking about? Booking is 5.3B revenue, 112B market cap. Adyen is 37B market cap. These are not "tiny" companies compared to public tech companies in the US, and there are more than just these two.

Sure, Europe doesn't have as many frothy VC's and associated tech companies with insane valuations as the US. But it's not trailing out in last place like some of these comments make it out to be.

People need to look at actual facts and numbers before regurgitating the same old memes about how terrible Europe and the EU are.

you typically see brazen behavior from ignorance.

Edit: grammar.

So was Stadia - restricted to US at the beginning.

Also their are very slow at adding non-English languages to their offering.

1. This stuff is available in like Angola and Thailand but not in Germany or France. Oh how the European giant has fallen.

2. ... but it's also not available in the UK. So the long shadow of EU nonsense affects us too :-(

On 2 yeah it does. Seems like the UK keeps falling behind on everything now that it lives in the shadow of the continent and can’t seem to create any value and nobody cares about that market. So much for the MaSiVe TraDe DeALZ we were getting unlocked…

Eh, given that Europe struggles to build anything tech related, I'm going to say it's pretty hard. Far easier to make overpriced luxury handbags and the like.

The anti-European gloating on HN is getting tiresome, and imho is a pretty big blind spot of HN moderation.

I'm also not quite sure it's xenophobia, but it's something other than calm and rational. Whenever Europe comes up in a HN thread, there's a sudden glut of snide comments and gloating, as if people are desperate for themselves and others to believe their layoffs-stricken industry is amazing nonetheless. Maybe to distract themselves from the mandatory RTO bad news?

Rather than calling it xenophobia, let me call it adversarial, and it's always the same side initiating it. Very, very tiresome.

I'm also willing to bet a very high % of the same demo would readily call HN an explicitly American forum and that inclusiveness or being welcoming to others shouldn't be a priority of the site, which I personally find just sort of jarring anywhere on the web, since https doesn't know borders and I grew up in the very overtly international FOSS community as an engineer. You know, where we make that Linux thing you probably have ten copies of on devices around you right now that started in Finland.

> OP said Europe struggles to make tech, and focuses more on luxury.

Only for a very narrow definition of "tech" that doesn't include the vast majority of engineering disciplines, as well as basic research and the education that enables the "tech".

I will take, for example, BioNTech over most startups posted on HN, and I'd rather we build another ITER than another Twitter clone.

Your bio says you're an R programmer. Are you aware the R foundation is a European (Austrian) org, like most organized open source? Seems those Europeans have quite a bit of time for tech after all.

Dude, we're talking about Google here...

At the end of the day, the employees have a much cushier life-work balance. You can argue (rightfully) that that's better for the people and society, but it also means it's harder for companies to succeed.

Contractors get taxed 19% flat rate and a small% for health insurance (even less in IT - 9%?). Whereas full time workers get taxed similarly to people in the west.

The legal cost of dealing with a few _mistaken_ (or fake) GDPR complaints can wipe you out.

The bigger company will have inhouse or retainered lawyers who'll deal with it.

Almost all regulation acts as a barrier which protects bigger companies who can pay lawyer fees without blinking.

It's amazing how much of the HN crowd sides with the bureaucracies which are basically pals of the guys with deep pockets.

No, they can't. It's not an automated system that automagically fines companies if they get flooded by fake emails or whatever, they're pretty reasonable most of the time and you get given plenty of chances to work with regulators before they decide to fine you even a single euro (assuming you're guilty in the first place). Even if you get fined, they're usually scaled to the severity of the offense as well as the company's size.

Plus the solution is super simple, just don't invasively track your users without consent! I love that I can use the GDPR to tell my manager to fuck off when he talks about using some invasive tracking bullshit on our users, I'm glad it's there.

I'm not sure if this[0] is the most up-to-date list (I've seen a number of these lists), but take a look yourself. Most of these fines are tiny, certainly not earth shattering for any company of any size with any stability.

And if your business can't survive the financial burden of complying with GDPR, then good. There's no reason for a small business to even be violating it in the first place, since we've had about a decade of forewarning at this point regarding these privacy laws.

===

[0] https://gdpr-fines.inplp.com/list/

Litigation is probably inescapable. I'm sure they want to be on solid footing.

Of the three answers Bard (Gemini Pro) gave, none worked, and the last two did not compile.

GPT4-turbo gave the correct answer the first time.

I agree that it is overstated. Gemini Ultra is supposed to be better than GPT4, and Pro is supposed to be Google's equivalent of GPT4-turbo, but it clearly isn't.

It's available in 174 countries.

Europe has gone to great lengths to make itself an incredibly hostile environment for online businesses to operate in. That's a fair choice, but don't blame Google for spending some extra time on compliance before launching there.

ChatGPT available in Europe.

Google has far too many services and products which are always touching the boundaries defined by the EU privacy laws. they trip the line with anything and the regulators can make it much harder/costlier for Google to do business in EU.

That doesn’t matter for regulators.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38553635

No judgement, this may be good for Europe in the long term.

Basically the entire world, except countries that specifically targeted American Big Tech companies for increased regulation.

> Europe has gone to great lengths to make itself an incredibly hostile environment for online businesses to operate in.

This is such an understated point. I wonder if EU citizens feel well-served by e.g. the pop-up banners that afflict the global web as a result of their regulations[1]. Do they feel like the benefits they get are worth it? What would it take for that calculus to change?

1 - Yes, some say that technically these are not required. But even official organs of the EU such as https://europa.eu continue to use such banners.

Now I'm feeling how bad it is on the other side of the fence, and the funny thing is people don't seem to give a shit because they never experienced decent regulation and being fucked by brands is just the way of life.

decent regulation like the cookie policy bullshit that makes people waste 30 minutes per day? Thanks bud

But I'm guessing that it was lobbied against. Similarly, it has generated a large industry in cookie compliance services.

But maybe it shouldn't be surprising given the example of Google's precedent-setting profitability from guiding that particular path.

As regards the lesser availability of American tech, I'm sure that's much more limited in China, which coincidentally happens to have the most notable domestic AI industry outside of the US. It's something that economists can be reluctant to admit, but for which there's solid evidence by now afaik, that at least temporary import barriers, if done right, can be a boost to industrial development. The thing that is weird about the EU regulation is that they're putting the same shackles on their domestic tech industry, which is dwarfed by the giant US incumbents who have more resources to invest in compliance than startups (apart from the bits that apparently only target said encumbants that some posters have mentioned here, which I don't know anything about).

Again, folks say the cookie banners are not required, but even the EU web managers are unable to build a site without them. So maybe they are "practically" required for all sites?

> they're putting the exact same shackles on their domestic tech industry

The Digital Markets Act is an attempt to fix this by targeting the American tech companies specifically, without explicitly naming them in the law. I would venture that the DMA is why Gemini isn't available in the EU right now, like it is in the rest of the world where US companies are allowed to do commerce.

No, it's targeting all big tech companies, not only American.

You can stop this pathetic lament that the evil EU is attacking innocent American corporations. It's typical american ignorance.

I don’t know which case is true but there are multiple interpretations, unless you’re saying this based on some fact?

Given the timing of the most recent EU review plus where OpenAI was in its growth curve at that time, they simply didn't fit the criteria, which were written to allow companies as big as Spotify to escape the regulations.

On the first point, I think user rights trump developer convenience, so I stand by what I said.

I agree, this may be good for Europe in the long term. However, one would expect to see the protectionist measures coupled with similar measures intended to generate competitive native alternatives. Limiting the expansion of Boeing is great, as long as you have Airbus. Without Airbus, you're starting to make some real compromises.

> to anyone who thinks the US isn't doing the exact same thing

US is currently playing both sides of this in the chip space in an attempt to wrestle some of the power back from China. Unlike the DMA, the US effort is putting a lot of money on the line to help build local alternatives.

IIRC Cliqz was an EU-financed search engine project that looked like it was going to be a contender, but I think Covid killed it. Projects like that could be the way.

In all fairness, there are some genuine European players in the AI space (eg Mistral), and they also produced one of the early global hits (StableDiffusion, which was largely developed in Munich afaik). But if you look at the overall footprint in AI (research output at top conferences, patents (which are basically impossible to get for anything software-related in the EU),...), Europe seems at risk of hopelessly falling behind. And in the face of that, it's concerning that policy makers' chief concern seems to be further curtailing it.

They have a pretty interesting explanation of each cookie they use:

https://european-union.europa.eu/cookies_en

What I never quite understand is the analytics issue. We had server logs for analytics long before everyone started using cookies for that.

In my opinion the cookie part of GDPR is clearly bad regulation. It requires cookie banners for some things that are not privacy issues. And at the same time it doesn't institute a sensible consent mechanism that doesn't in practice amount to constant harassment.

IIRC a server log that retains IP addresses is covered under GDPR and may itself require disclosure via e.g. a popup. (IP addresses are part of the protected class of personal data.)

More to the point, server logs != modern Web analytics. Modern Web analytics require someone to ingest lots of data and run an app to allow users to analyze that data. Common practice outside of sensitive industries like healthcare and finance means offloading all of that ingestion/storage/management/analytics to a third party, hence 3P cookies.

It is covered under GDPR but I think the general consensus is that server logs containing IP addresses do not require consent. You just need a legal basis for collecting the data and this has to be spelled out in the privacy policy.

>More to the point, server logs != modern Web analytics.

Being "modern" is not a sufficient explanation for why it is necessary. Using third party services does not generally require consent either.

It depends on the legal basis. If you store these IPs to render service or combat fraud, you might get away from explicit consent. However, if you use and store these IP addresses for analytics, then it is a very different conversation.

GDPR is not just about what and how you collect and use data.

Indeed it does. So it will come down to the specific purpose of any analytics.

Consent is only one of six different legal bases that can justify processing personal data.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/6

It's considered commercially necessary because reading through logs is not as effective as using a Web tool like Google Analytics for the task of understanding what users are doing on a website.

If you want to make the argument that there's no difference between using e.g. Unix tools on a log file and using a tool like Google Analytics, that's your prerogative. But the industry as a whole disagrees.

This is malicious complicance.

The laws themselves say that rejection should NOT be more difficult than accepting. You can make it as complicated as you want, only if the acceptance process is equally or more complicated.

I've stressed this elsewhere but I feel it benefits from more people seeing this - you can block these just like you block ads.

Ublock origin for example, have a look at the filter lists and add on "annoyances". This can also get rid of lots of chat widgets and similar.

I don't get spam mailing lists or robocalls. I can safely sign up to services knowing I will be able to unsubscribe easily. I can buy things online knowing they can be easily returned.

Yes, some of my clients lament the inability to use those patterns. I politely smile and nod.

Not strictly true. I get robocalls and WhatsApp spam messages from country code +1 all the time.

Also with an ad blocker, see if you can turn on hiding the banners. Without you clicking "yes" they can't use consent for a reason, so this is equivalent to clicking "no".

Is it possible for the law to be amended so that non-EU citizens can use a browser flag that just says "I'm fine withe the cookies"? That way Europeans can enjoy all the cookie consent clicking and the rest of us can go back to how the web was before?

But once too many people switched it in the 'do not track' mode, the industry decided to simply ignore it.

You cannot get a more clear sign that government pressure and laws are needed, than that.

My recollection was that it was Microsoft deciding to turn this flag on by default that led to it being ignored by Google. I.e. Microsoft saw a chance to use it against their biggest rival, diluting it in the process and gaining nothing.

I think there's an argument for trying again but requiring an explicit choice. And then give it the force of law.

And even though I tend to complain about UNIX like OSes, maybe they are the key to free Europe from US corporations operating systems, like a few other countries are already doing as well.

We should stick to international regulated programing languages and OSes, that free us from dependencies on export technology regulations.

Which is their prerogative[1]. I'm just pointing out that the people who run the EU's official websites aren't able to operate inside those bounds, so it's fair to say those bounds are not commercially reasonable in general for functional sites. QED the banners are de facto required.

1 - The extensive reach of the law is breathtaking. The EU claims jurisdiction over any web property, based anywhere in the world, that might be seen by an EU national.

For all I care your site isn't required to be commercially viable. If you aren't able to convince the customer and instead opt for so-called cooky-terror banners as a dark pattern with the primary goal of de-sensitive-izing users, you don't deserve my cooky. Opt-in means legislation has passed this view into law, with the quirk that the dark-pattern is fully expected because the industry needs a sort of legitimization for the use of private data. Small companies usually suffer under compliance, no doubt.

Besides, what has this to do with AI prompts? No doubt they want to analyse every single interaction as a sort of supervised training for free. This does not rely on third party cookies, but it might benefit from making identifications which somebody could argue are not essential to the service as advertised.

Is that the kind of tooling that site operators have grown to find indispensable over the last couple of decades, that you mention?

It's related via my question about EU digital regulation, although Gemini is likely on hold due to the DMA and not GDPR. The question was more about how willing are EU residents to forego technological advances under their more muscular regulation regime.

For example, the European Parliament website uses third-party cookies for analytics and for Web streaming. Yes, they can run the whole stack themselves. It is also a) more work and b) not how most of the industry works.

The European Parliament with the resources of the EU, finds it expeditious to use 3P cookies and just display a cookie banner. How reasonable is it to expect sites with fewer resources to do similar interesting things on the Web without also falling afoul of the EU law?

What you are looking for is a way to use these tools, of which you don't really know what they're going to use this data for or how and why they are tracking me, without my consent.

I find it very strange that this is something you object to.

We are saying the same thing. Yes, you can use the tools, but then you require consent from the user as the very first thing they see on your website.

> I find it very strange that this is something you object to.

As a non-EU national, I don't derive the benefits of Do Not Delete etc. I do not ever care that a site is using 3P cookies to do e.g. on-page analytics. The cookie banners are a net negative for me.

> We are saying the same thing. Yes, you can use the tools, but then you require consent from the user as the very first thing they see on your website. No, you only require to get consent from the user before you start using the tools. That this is as soon as they enter your website, and thus you need to ask consent as the very first thing they see, is your own choice.

> As a non-EU national, I don't derive the benefits of Do Not Delete etc. I do not ever care that a site is using 3P cookies to do e.g. on-page analytics. The cookie banners are a net negative for me. I'm sorry that you're not getting any benefits from it. That said, blame the site owners for incorrectly identifying your IP as a European one.

I have no good reason as to why the EU live stream has 3rd party cookies. However I set up online streaming for two small TV stations in my country, they wanted you to be able to watch the channel live on the station's website, we were able to see how many people were watching the stream live and I never had to use 3rd party cookies. It's not that hard to set up and it is cheaper than you'd expect now days, even video capture cards/devices are much lower price than back in the day.

The marketing department typically is important to businesses.

Not really, it's about the rights of people represented by the EU.

By analogy, it would be like the US asserting that the Constitutional rights of its citizens travel with them, and so they have the right to carry guns in any country.

It's an expansive approach.

It is.

> The EU claims jurisdiction over any web property, based anywhere in the world, that might be seen by an EU national.

Not really! The EU simply claims jurisdiction over any company that trades in the EU. The company doesn't have to be a "web property" - if you sell cars, or food, or medcines in the EU, you have to accept EU jurisdiction. If you want to operate a web property that is accessible in the EU, that's fine; but don't have a EU trading arm if your web property isn't GDPR-compliant.

The EU claims jurisdiction, they just lack an effective enforcement mechanism for sites that do not have a financial nexus inside the EU. (Perversely, this creates an incentive to not create such a financial nexus, including hiring anyone inside the EU.)

The cookie banners are a bad outcome for sure, but GDPR does not mandate them. They are an indirect result of the bureaucracy installed by GDPR which does not incentivize user-friendly design of privacy-aware features. I don’t want GDPR rolled back, even as a software developer, because I think it creates the kind of protections everyone in the world should have. But I would like a rule clarification on how to build compliant websites without cookie banners, so I blame the administration (the EU commission) but not the legislation.

The digital markets act similarly is the kind of regulation we need everywhere. It’s only hostile to online businesses because other places don’t have those kind of guard rails on the abusive behavior of big tech.

Now, as far as the EU AI act. I think that in its original intent when it was specifically targeting things like public face recognition by governments it was a very good idea, but it has been hijacked and in its current form it would be very harmful if passed. I don’t think it particularly targets american tech companies, because the biggest victims would be EU AI startups like Mistral.

Not only that but the terrible banners you get are very often not compliant with GDPR.

GDPR doesn't target American tech companies, that's the DMA. Essentially, the framing is there are companies that are "gatekeepers" and then everyone else. The criteria for gatekeepers are theoretically objective, but they were written with a specific set of companies in mind. As a consequence, the designated companies except TikTok just so happen to be based in the US. Further, the rules were written such that EU firms like Spotify are not eligible.

Also, Vodafone somehow is not considered a gatekeeper in any relevant digital market.

Anyway, no judgement. We are in a time of rising protectionism. This may be good for Europe. But the DMA clearly targeted a set of West Coast US companies and it's doing what it was intended to do.

I do wish they would modify GDPR to only apply to people e.g. physically in Europe or similar. It really does make the Web worse for billions of people who are not EU nationals and derive absolutely no benefits from the banners.

While they're regulating browsers and plugs, could they make browser makers ship EU versions of their browsers that show the popups, while the rest of us save tons of clicks? EU nationals could install EU versions of their favorite browsers and the rest of us would just use the stock versions.

It's hard to say Instagram, Meta Marketplace, and TikTok are gatekeepers (they has been designated thusly by the EU) but Vodafone isn't.

The law is protectionist, which is fine in itself. But the argument that Instagram is one of the core gatekeepers of the Internet and Vodafone isn't is ridiculous on its face.

Spotify ain't gatekeeping anything so why do you think they should be eligible?

Netflix isn't being targeted either, so it's obviously not purposefully targeting FAANG/M$ and nothing else.

I did not say that anywhere.

> Or are you saying that Tidal, Apple Music & Deezer should also be targeted by DMA?

I'm just noting that it's curious that the DMA criteria were written in such a way that they exclude the largest consumer Internet company in the EU. That's it, nothing else.

Sadly the EU is being led by a clique of unelected beaurocrats (commisars - like in the USSR) and the most democratic of institutions - the EU parliament as well as national parliaments have very little influence on what is being proposed and bulldozed in. For example, let's say in a given country literaly everyone is opposed to ACTA and the country has the balls to veto it (despite the beaurocrat's usual tricks of rolling in together things everyone wants and needs with absolute crap like ACTA). The same idea is brought back again 2 years later (ACTA v2). It is vetoed again, it is brought back again 2 years later and this time bypasses the veto by being "voluntary". "Countries that don't want it don't need to implement" - great on paper. Until you realise most people in the EU oppose it, including in the countries that implement it and by the fact of implementing it in the majority they make it a de-facto standard which increases the cost of doing business affected in the countries that now have differing regulations.

Same thing is being done with the "EU constitution". No one, other than it's rulers, wants the EU to be a country. The idea got shot down immediately in a popular vote. So they are essentially implementing it anyway bit by bit by stretching the law and outright breaking it (especially against countries that vote in parties that are not in the EPP club).

I'm a big fan of the idea of EU as it was before the treaty of Nice. It was a group of countries with similar values creating an open market and agreeing to make decisions affecting it together. Sadly the institutions that were created to oversee that structure have the priorities of their own (increasing their own power) and using both the method mentioned above and simply doing things "extra legally" (as lawyers say) they do whatever they want and if the extremely corrupt "court" tied to them decides it's OK there is no way to question it. These bastards say they are "strenghtening the EU". They are destroying it. Anti EU sentiment is increasing especially amongst younger voters in many countries and guess who will be very happy when it all goes tits up? One guy called Putin who has been financing a lot of the corruption we see (through countries like Qatar etc).

That's exactly why the nationalistic resentiment in Europe is so dangerous - we all know all to well what exactly it can culminate into. Unfortunately, I don't see a trend towards fixing the problems within EU - the beauracrats fully embraced old european maximas, "After me, the flood" and "Let them eat cake". Someone should remind them where all that leads to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissar

TL;DR A commissar is the USSR was a term with several meanings: a political officer in the armed forces, a government minister, and a bureaucrat responsible for supplies.

EU commissioners are really political appointments to head-up civil service departments; so they are more like ministers than anything else. I think that when most westerners think of "commissar", they think of a militarily-incompetent political officer in an army unit, who can overrule the military commander of that unit. There's no equivalent role in the EU bureaucracy.

FWIW, the USA has commissars; they head up armed-forces commissaries, i.e. they are responsible for supply and logistics.

This needs to be more widely known.

Also, because they need active consent - any cookie banner blocking extension (weird to see so few people talk about this when it's seen as obvious we need ad blockers) means no consent and is perfectly fine under GDPR. You're not required to signal "no".

wildly overhyped AI toys that are not even available in the countries where they launched (Gemini Pro is not multimodal as others have pointed out, Gemini Ultra will be available only next year)

Yes, "you chose to use them so you decided to follow their terms of use and privacy clauses" but key here is how you're more and more often required to use certain services online or you're put at significant disadvantages ranging from keeping in touch with your family or friends to being disadvantaged in the job market.

* https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/11/16/preview...

That said, as with most heavy bureaucracies there's just not enough internal organisational tech education so lobbying and misunderstandings end up diluting the process.

Example is the cookie banners leading people away from smaller competitors strengthening monopolies, and teaching people to click at 100 banners a day because no one has time to read so much.

Another is GDPR policies which are great but a huge hassle for smaller orgs and companies, and not really targeted them in the first place.

Everything always ends up a win for the largest players, while the smaller ones struggle to maintain legality.

That has been my experience with a few GDPR processes.

Another annoying thing is the forced Public Procurements of software solutions if you're more than 50% publicly funded in EU.

Again good intentions but it just makes the big players hire huge amounts of lawyers and sales people to game the process to win then create bad software.

That's the problem with regulation. The free market is definitely not free after consolidation and monopolisation but if you're going to regulate you need the absolute best consultants to guide the process and somehow that step always gets bungled.

Yes, because I can tell them to fuck off from harvesting all my data and have an easy, legally enforceable way to tell them to delete whatever data they've harvested off me. I've reported a few websites that have done shady shit with the cookie banners and even saw them get some fines, so I'm perfectly happy that companies can't hoover up any and all data about me that they want to feed the pockets of some rich assholes an ocean over.

If a company can't exist without massive privacy violations and personal data exfiltration then they deserve to die.

you are living in a dream. the NSA collects data on everyone and you can't delete your data there.

Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good. I don't like that gov't agencies do it either, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy that there's at least some consequences for others that are trying to do it. Also if a nation-state level entity is targeting me specifically, then I'm screwed even if they don't have any of my personal data.

It was a bit of a pain to manually reject all the _purposefully_ annoying cookie consent banners that companies started pulling, but now there's plugins for that, which rejects everything for me by default.

Absolutely. It goes far beyond cookie management, it's a fundamental thing about what you're allowed to do with my data without my consent.

You know you can block them right? Ublock origin has "annoyances" in the lists, just tick that.

you know quite a few people use the things called mobile phones?

As others have said, get a browser that supports addons and enjoy browsing the web without ads and these banners.

1) Causing massive pollution of the Web and then saying this to the 95% of the world who are not represented by the EU is tone-deaf.

2) This is an added tool that has to be installed, meaning most people will still experience the popups.

3) uBlock origin has limited browser support. Telling the world they need to browse the Web differently is an answer that is only a variant of the pop-up problem that also tells users to brows the Web differently (by navigating popups).

Also, you see how hostile some stuff in the US is to non-US visitors. Lots of local US news sites, for instance, just throw a plain HTTP error at you because they don't want to mess with GDPR.

you're picking out the cookie banner (which is annoying mostly because companies aren't implementing it properly) which is just a small part of a wealth of regulations which give us control over our data. and then you're ignoring all the other extremely valuable regulations that protect customers. and online shops are still able to make a profit here. they just can't completely abuse their customers as they please. yet. for the most part.

It is very annoyous but it is also the choice of the sites, you can put a discret banner at the bottom and not disrupt the reading if you want to not annoy people.

These "regulations against us giants" may also have positive effects. They forced Microsoft to offer a choice of browsers on Windows, something requested by Firefox and Opera and that killed Internet Explorer and permitted modern browsers including Google Chrome to florish.

Wasn't this an outcome of the US antitrust trial against Microsoft in the late 1990s?

And also let me mention the unified usb-c atpater regulation, the opening of messenger protocols and app shops! I honestly believe the EU is making tech better for the whole world!

Thats the same EU which is trying to break encryption we are talking about?

Laws are not the issue, their model being crap at non-english languages is.

I really wonder how changing an LLM underpinning a service will influence this (I thought compliance had to do with service behavior and data sharing across their platform -- not the algorithm). And I wonder what Google is actually doing here that made them suspect they'll fail compliance once again. And why they did it.