Comment by darth_avocado

Comment by darth_avocado 2 days ago

Why didn’t Google ship an AI feature that reads and categorizes your emails?

The simple answer is that they lose their revenue if you aren’t actually reading the emails. The reason you need this feature in the first place is because you are bombarded with emails that don’t add any value to you 99% of the time. I mean who gets that many emails really? The emails that do get to you get Google some money in exchange for your attention. If at any point it’s the AI that’s reading your emails, Google suddenly cannot charge money they do now. There will be a day when they ship this feature, but that will be a day when they figure out how to charge money to let AI bubble up info that makes them money, just like they did it in search.

themanmaran 2 days ago

I think it's less malicious, and more generally tech debt. Gmail is incredibly intertwined with the world. Around 2 billion daily active users. Which makes it nearly impossible for them to ship new features that aren't minor tack ons.

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nthingtohide 2 days ago

Bundle the feature in the Google One or Google Premium. I already have Google One. Google should really try to steer its userbase to premium features

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IshKebab 2 days ago

I don't think so. By that argument why do they have a spam filter? You spending time filtering spam means more ad revenue for them!

Clearly that's nonsense. They want you to use Gmail because they want you to stay in the Google ecosystem and if you switch to a competitor they won't get any money at all. The reason they don't have AI to categorise your emails is that LLMs that can do it are extremely new and still relatively unreliable. It will happen. In fact it already did happen with Inbox, and I think normal gmail had promotion filtering for a while.

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darth_avocado 2 days ago

It’s a balance. You don’t want spam to be too much so that the product becomes useless, but you also want to let “promotions” in because they bring in money. If you haven’t noticed, they always tweak these settings. In last few years, you’ll notice more “promotions” in your primary inbox than there used to be. One of the reasons is increasing revenue.
It’s the same reason you see an ad on Facebook after every couple of posts. But you will neither see a constant stream of ads nor a completely ad free experience.

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cpuguy83 2 days ago

I get what you are trying to say, but no spam filter means no users at all. Not a valid comparison in the slightest.

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