[RandomThrow321]

Maybe going against the grain here, but this was the best Google I/O I've seen in a long time.

In the past, they seemed liked incremental updates on their hardware (which I don't care too much about) or some new products like the pixel watch / glasses (which I probably won't use). I knew there would be a huge focus on AI this year, but I was pleasantly surprised by many of the new features and how quickly these integrations are happening. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm excited to see how the industry progresses.

[sebzim4500]

I am currently in a superposition of being very excited and very underwhelmed. The wavefunction will collapse once I can actually play with the technology and find out if it is anywhere close to as good as they claim.

[danudey]

It rubs me the wrong way that Google fired their whole AI ethics team and then got on stage and talked about how AI can be bad for people and we need to guard against people using it unethically.

They've realized that, at this point, they may well have lost the AI chatbot war, and now they're pivoting to "we can keep these other, rogue LLMs from being as bad as ours would have been if we'd gotten there first".

[joebiden2]

Best time to buy MS stock. Which I just did :)

[toddmorey]

It will be interesting to see how the data & AI conversations evolve. A bit like smartphones, I’m scared we’ll first see an explosion of features then some backtracking to figure out the security & privacy models. I wish we’d learned to start with security.

I didn’t get to see the entire thing, but I did see the AI-enabled cinematic photo backgrounds. All I could think is man that’s a lot of analysis of my personal images for a mild parallax effect.

[sebzim4500]

>A bit like smartphones, I’m scared we’ll first see an explosion of features then some backtracking to figure out the security & privacy models

When was the backtracking with smartphones?

[flangola7]

Permission models and universal encryption did not exist at the beginning.

[toddmorey]

Maybe wrong word I just meant permissions were wider and more universal (for say location access or notifications) and now we’ve learned to make each granular permission opt in.

[eclipxe]

Agreed. HN hates all things Google, but this was a great show.

[nightski]

I have a hard time getting excited about anything AI with a company whose main profit center is in harvesting your data. Incentives are just not aligned. In this case AI is simply a gimmick to get us to give them more data to serve their real customers.