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OpenAI should build Slack

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Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#321

Post by baxtr »

estearum wrote: post #259
baxtr wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I get your point. But still, shouldn’t we hold the big companies accountable? I don’t want to lower my expectations just because I need to understand that the company in charge is huge.

Sure, we should demand good stuff from companies. That's different than your original claim of not being able to understand why it's this way (and another commenter calling it ironic). Totally expected IMO. It's very hard to do cross-cutting things in big companies. It just is!

There are forces making a company like Google slow - as you’ve outlined.

There are forces that can make a company like Google move faster - like pressure from customers.

As you might have noticed people within Google have read this thread.

I’m expressing my discontent with their product experience by saying "I don’t understand". I could have also used "it’s insane" or any similar phrase.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#322

Post by delduca »

czhu12 wrote: post #121

Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use…

They have built Slack, it was called Google Wave.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#323

Post by baxtr »

devinplatt wrote: post #290
estearum wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, we should demand good stuff from companies. That's different than your original claim of not being able to understand why it's this way (and another commenter calling it ironic). Totally expected IMO. It's very hard to do cross-cutting things in big companies. It just is!

It's so interesting to read these comments because this this is literally my job (to help Workspace teams integrate Gemini faster) Some thoughts: - Hardware constraints are real, even at Google. - Features are often released for enterprise users first, before being released for the general public. - I only started my current role last year. - 2 years ago is forever ago in AI and things are changing a lot. For example…

How cool, that you’re reading these comments!

I really hope you succeed.

Google has great products. I’d love to see them working better together.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#325

Post by Gormo »

kgeist wrote: post #201
_zoltan_ wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can't send gifs on irc :-)

Technically, clients could simply upload images to S3 and render them inline whenever they encounter an image URL in a message - no protocol or server changes required. And if you're using an older IRC client, you can still just click the link. The main problem with IRC is that messages aren't stored anywhere. The classic IRC protocol simply broadcasts new messages to whoever is currently present in the channel. When…

Check out The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat) and Convos (https://convos.chat), web-based IRC clients with media previews, session persistence, and all the modern bells and whistles.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#326

Post by compsciphd »

mbreese wrote: post #166
czhu12 wrote: post #121

Google should build slack. Its a travesty how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is, and then google chat is what sits between it all. If it wasn't for the fact that google bungled an internal communication tool so badly, slack wouldn't even have to exist. For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space. Source: I use…

There might be an institutional block in Google due to the way that Google Wave was received. Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work. It's never quite lived up to expectations (or hype in the case of Wave). Knowing their history, I can see why they'd want to avoid trying to take on that market again. It's difficult to get enough traction with users to make it a successful product. Not impossible, but it's…

Google leadership failed in chat because they forgot the most important thing. Metcalf's law. the value of a network is scales to the square of the number of users.

when they wanted to create new chat apps, they had a choice. do we force all of our users to move to the new app or do we figure out a way to bridge the apps. They chose to force users to move.

The problem is, when you force people to move, you also give them the chance to leave and try new things. Instead of figuring out how to make the new chat app more valuable to users it was meant to appeal to by giving them access to google's entire chat userbase without forcing anything on those users, they killed their existing user base on the hope of forcing them to move to the new app. They didn't and now google's an afterthought in the chat space.

They did the same thing with google+ in general. They had a community of committed users sharing data with each other and commenting on stories on google reader. Instead of figuring out how to leverage that user base to contribute "content" to google+ and users that would prefer to use this new interface, and thereby make that new interface more valuable, they killed google reader in an attempt to force those users to migrate to google+. They didn't and went elsewhere.

Google has repeatedly made the mistake of forcing their users to migrate from what they were used to, and every time they do they open the gates for those users to migrate outside of google.

Facebook has learned this lesson relatively well. They don't force users to migrate to Instagram/facebook or whatsapp/messenger. In the Instagram / facebook case they seem to be improving the ability of users to use their Instagram account to add content to facebook (though not in the reverse). While in the whatsapp/messenger case, they haven't forced anyone to migrate, but they also haven't had any interoperability. One would think the apps would have even more value if they could communicate with each other.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#327

Post by simantel »

Arainach wrote: post #283
light_hue_1 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By market cap? Is the money using slack? Company size when you're talking about tools for humans makes no sense in terms of market cap. Plenty of companies with many more employees than Google use slack.

Such as who? And are most of their employees actually using Slack or are a few white collar employees using it while 90% of their workforce has no idea?

IBM has ~300k employees and uses Slack.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#328

Post by xnx »

usefulcat wrote: post #276
meekaaku wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont get this idea of breaking big companies up is inherently a good thing. As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake. The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. Current Google only comes even close with their far out projects(that dont directly make money) such as their quantum computing/deepmind/boston dynamics(when google had them) Besides, if one does break up goog…

> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.

Google has come pretty close. Who knows how long it would've been before someone else came up with Attention is all you need.

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#329

Post by xnx »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #150
lewisjoe wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good is really good at engineering great software and really sucks at making them enterprise ready. It's why they've been failing with GCP, Google Tables (shutdown now I guess), Analytics or any product that aims for enterprise consumption. Note: they are really good at making consumer softwares though (take the success of Google Photos or Gsearch)

> Good is really good at engineering great software was While they sucked at bringing products to market and sustaining them, they indeed used to have a good reputation at software engineering. However they are burning that up in the AI pivot, though it's not yet very visible externally.

Do you work at Google?

Re: OpenAI should build Slack

#330

Post by keeda »

xnx wrote: post #328
usefulcat wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.

Google has come pretty close. Who knows how long it would've been before someone else came up with Attention is all you need.

And yet they sat on transformers until OpenAI kicked off the AI boom by actually productizing that research in ChatGPT. Though it's possible they were just being cautious, my uncharitable view is that they knew this would disrupt their highly lucrative ads business, which is always the problem with monopolies.

Also you're overlooking other top-notch corporate research institutions like Microsoft Research, which arguably are more "Blue Sky" in the sense they are not constrained to any current product lines.

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