Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Computer, Respond to This Email

googleresearch.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 202 posts

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#111

Post by roninb »

Zelphyr wrote: post #53
imh wrote: post #29

I appreciate the privacy standards they used (no humans reading your email to develop this), but am concerned that it's not enough. As I understand with language models, overfitting takes the form of returning a sequence of words seen in the training set. If this is overfitting in any part of the response space, this could happen. Out of a million emails, how many suggested responses are going to substantively resemb…

Much of this strikes me as a "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" issue. Google clearly loves machine learning and doing cool things but I think lately they've been taking it too far. For example; after purchasing a book on Amazon recently I happened to do a Google search on that book and the first thing I see is, "Your book is scheduled to be delivered on..." Aside from the creepy factor I'm left wonderin…

That's cool that you feel that way, but I really enjoy these features. I'm never home and never sitting down so being able to see everything that I need to pay attention to the things I can't remember is amazing. Google Now reminding me of meetings, flight times, hotel check out times, package deliveries, etc, are things a personal assistant would do but without the associated cost of a yuppie's salary.

Just because you don't see it as convenient or even useful doesn't mean no one else does.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#113

Post by mikeash »

rcthompson wrote: post #64

Hey, remember that one time when this feature was Gmail's April Fools Day joke[1]? Kind of funny how it's now a serious and actually useful-looking product. [1] https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/autopilot/

Gmail itself was a sort of a serious April Fools joke. It was launched on April 1st, 2004 and because it offered 1GB of free storage when other providers were offering ~5MB, a lot of people assumed it was a hoax.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#114

Post by marcosdumay »

Spoom wrote: post #70
davidw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". That one's not that hard. http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2

Thunderbird does this as well.

KMail doesn't really work fow many years now. Bu it used to do that too.

Now, I don't remember about pine and mutt. They probably didn't.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#115

Post by dikaiosune »

smtddr wrote: post #108
dikaiosune wrote: post #4

While the technology is very cool, this pushes me that much closer to a "dumber" email service. It's always a conflict for me as I love shiny new things, but I'd rather we let AI loose on someone else's email, especially when the AI's revenue stream is advertising (a business predicated on knowing as much as possible about your audience).

Just fyi, https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html ...still works! I bet there are some people on HN who never saw the original Gmail.

Very cool, and that definitely takes me back to eagerly pursuing/waiting out my beta invite. Unfortunately I would guess that even with a retro interface all of one's email data is still subject to content trawling, but that's a nifty discovery nonetheless.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#116

Post by mattgmg »

alphydan wrote: post #9

> Another bizarre feature of our early prototype was its propensity to respond with “I love you” to seemingly anything Is it trained mostly on personal gmail accounts?

Reading that made me very happy for some reason. I find it exceedingly cute that after churning through what was probably millions of gmail users' email responses, this Google machine decided the most likely response to many new emails is simply "I love you." Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to know there's so much love out there in the world for this algorithm to absorb.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#117

Post by MikeTV »

There's a quip at the bottom: "This blog post may or may not have actually been written by a neural network."

Has there been any progress in AI-driven/assisted creative writing (other than sportscasts)?

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#119

Post by bojo »

icey wrote: post #2

I just started reading Avogadro Corp ( http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appea... ) this weekend, and this reminds me quite a lot of the emergent AI that figures heavily in the story (ELOPe). A quick synopsis: developers build a system to "improve" responses from emails. The system at some point is given the ability to send emails on its own, and a poorly issued directive. It's been an engaging r…

This was the first book that popped into my mind when I saw the article. Great series, worth reading all the way through.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#120

Post by Kluny »

bduerst wrote: post #89
icey wrote: post #2

I just started reading Avogadro Corp ( http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appea... ) this weekend, and this reminds me quite a lot of the emergent AI that figures heavily in the story (ELOPe). A quick synopsis: developers build a system to "improve" responses from emails. The system at some point is given the ability to send emails on its own, and a poorly issued directive. It's been an engaging r…

Sounds a bit like the premise for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress , where a payroll computer takes up learning humor as a hobby.

... and ends up choreographing the the civil war of independence of a prison colony. A great book, one of my favorites.
Post reply on HN