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Comment by tauntz | Hacker News Reader

> Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!

Sigh. Google never learns.

By the time they add support for using this in my country, there's no reason for me to use it anymore as competitors have already swept in.

It's the same playbook with every US-only launch:

1. get everybody hyped up

2. make it accessible to only a minor subset of people but advertise it as a "launch" or "open beta" or whatever

3. tell the rest of the world that "lol, by "avialable" we mean US-only" or "Open means "open for people with US IP addresses only"" etc.

4. Wait till competitors have launched global-from-the-start alternatives

5. Open up the service globally

6. ...

7. Shut down the service because there's no uptake (surprised_pikachu.jpg)

Rinse and repeat.

Self inflicted wounds and all that..

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> This Google Account isn’t supported

> Bard does not currently support Google Workspace accounts or when our systems indicate you may be under 18. Learn more

Google: 15 years of punishment for being a loyal Dasher/ Google Apps/GSuite/Google Workspace user.

Its like paying to be a second class citizen! :)

Every once in a while I think of paying the Workspace ransom, hoping it would keep Google from potentially locking me out of my account for nebulously defined reasons. Then I come across stories like these how Workspace gives you an interior product (and likely no account protection).

Same here, and the account switcher doesn't work.

I had to go back to Google's homepage and switch accounts there

Agree, very frustrating.

Reminds me of when the Google Voice iOS account switcher would "trap" you in an account of an unsupported country, with the only recourse being re-installing the app and taking care to never accidentally switch to that account again (which can easily happen with the "swipe to fast switch" gesture on the account icons).

You can add /u/1 or /u/2 to the end of the URL to use another Google Account.

Works great for bookmarks. </sarcasm>

For bookmarks use https://bard.google.com/?authuser=whatever@gmail.com

while we're here showing people the account-hopping techniques for Google's painful world of auth'ing: the `?authuser=` trick can also be used with numbers from 0-9, to authenticate (by zero-index) your web browser's 10 slots for logged-in accounts (e.g., `?authuser=2` to authenticate your third account slot).

TIL

Thank you! This allowed me to use Bard without going into Incognito mode!

At least Google has an account switcher. I’m looking at you, AWS. (I’m currently launching a project on Google Cloud, and I’m picking it over AWS primarily because the AWS console’s account management is so terrible [0]. There are only so many hours in the day, and the whole point of paying a 4-40x markup for the cloud is to reduce workload.)

Not that Google’s account switcher has ever been particularly good.

[0] Not just the console. AWS organizations are sort of okay, but you still need to give every account an email address. Seriously, Amazon? I bet you could invent a new subtype of account called, say, “project”, where a project has a name, does not have an email address, does not have a root non-IAM user, and is only accessed via IAM roles. And I bet you could, with more effort, teach the console to accept a URL prefix that encodes the name of an account and a role and gives a console view with that role assumed without globally assuming that role. And then I could administer a VPC according to current best practices, from the console, without cursing at multi-account containers and needing to correctly type the account and role every time I want to do anything.

For organization accounts, we just use `aws+account-name@company.com` which routes all emails for all accounts to one alias.

Also, yeah, AWS' account situation is bonkers. Even with organizations, if you have an account open in one tab and open another account in another, you get logged out of the first. Bonkers.

This naming scheme works, but it still seems suboptimal. I should never, under any circumstance, receive email intended for the root user of an account that is subordinate to an organization. If someone manages to create a password associated with that user or otherwise authenticate as that user, that is a security failure. Conversely, I should be able to assume the “role” of that account’s root user from the organization’s management account regardless of IAM policy inside that account. And the scare quotes are intentional: no role should need to exist inside the sub-account for this to work — it should not be possible to lock myself out of a sub-account by any manipulation of that sub-account’s IAM configuration.

I use separate Chrome profiles to switch AWS accounts.

Also better to have no browser extensions installed when doing anything sensitive.

firefox containers FTW

You need to open an incognito tab, and log on to the gmail account there, and re-do the process.

+1 I came here to write this comment word for word. The speed of IBM-ization of Google is astounding.

I got the same message with my regular Google account. What is a workspace account and which type of account do I need to use Google Bard?

You need an @gmail.com account.

I have, that's what I was trying to say.

I do not understand why Google makes it so difficult to pay them for a custom email domain.

Does it? I have no problem paying them for mine.

Never had a problem either

You have to get a whole workspace thing and administer your email like a company. And there are many settings to get wrong! And problems like this where some Google products don't work or are limited.

Ah, you're talking about a custom domain to use with GMail specifically. Yes, for that either you use "Email forwarding" if you got your domain from Google Domains, which lets you receive and send emails but the sent emails are not SPF valid, or you use a Workspace. I used to do the "Email forwarding" thing in the beginning but then I moved to Fastmail.

I got G Suite or whatever it’s called now before it was paid and before Google Domains sadly. I discovered unbelievably late that I didn’t have two factor on that account because for some reason the G Suite admin panel was defaulted to disabling it organization wide (aka just me). I don’t know why they don’t just have a $20/mo option in gmail that just does this properly in one click.

Use VPN. It was easy to trick and get on the waitlist.

Ah yes, I want to risk getting banned by Google.

Oh no! They'll delete my free account and I'll be forced to spend 3 minutes making another throw-away.

I got the same one.

Bad experience Google.

What gives.

I wonder if it is for the best - imagine getting locked out of your work account becuase of some flagged request or response in Bard

Back in the day, Google Apps was pitched as a personal/family thing for custom domains. My email address - and those of, over time, dozens of family members - are hosted in this way.

Non-US countries like to fine US tech companies and create regulations ect. which we are already seeing in the EU wrt AI. So it makes sense why they don't want to be involved in that kind of thing before there is even a real product. That is, there is no upside for them aside from market share, which I agree is important but does not alone explain Google's product failures, about which much has already been written.

Sure.

Meanwhile ChatGPT is used everywhere in France, and it's now synonymous with AI for most people in Europe.

Game over.

Just like Netscape is synonymous with browser? Just 5 years ago DeepMind was at the forefront. AI tech is changing so fast who knows who will be ahead in the next 5 years?

If Google product was ahead of the competition I would agree with you.

But GPT is just miles away better than everything else, and it keeps getting better at a scary rate, especially because the feedback loop from so many users is making it better.

OpenAI has had significant up time issues. They don't seem to know how to run production services. Business cannot rely on them as a foundation to build upon. Their moat is quite thin and dry

Well they are on Azure so....

Except that ChatGPT is such a bad name for a product. I don't think Bard is much better but I don't think ChatGPT is going to be a household name.

CatGPT is a better name than ChatGPT, perhaps that’s why it’s taking off (allegedly) in France.

I think one of the reasons it's working so well here is because formal writing is still a big thing:

- heavy administration

- schools have a strong emphasis on essays

- getting a job often implies writing a cover letter

And since French is not easy, so many people find it to be a barrier to entry.

While I love GPT for quickly giving me code snippets of things I would take minutes to come up with, my friends have this problem for the regular day-to-day language.

I never noticed it before, because it's so natural to write to me, that I never have to think to hard to express anything. And because I've been a freelance for so long, doing formal writing is fluid. I know all the canned phrases by heart. The polite words to end the message.

But I came to realize: they don't.

As soon as I showed them chatgpt, their eyes light up. The killer feature for them was not the ability to answer complicated questions or save on search, nor was it the possibility of getting a summary. It was producing boring letter-like messages, with no typo.

chatGPT is great to rewrite certain text in grammatically correct and simplify or make it more formal, etc.

Sorry, just to be sure, its a theory, or you know it as a fact?

Yeah its just my theory. I'm not aware of any public reasoning given for their actions, although it's possible they may have mentioned it in an earnings call or something.

It's not like the EU is specifically targeting US companies with their consumer protection regulations. Those things are considered completely normal protections for consumers in Europe.

It's just that 99% of US big tech companies are very anti-consumer and have gotten away with it in the US in the past. But that also seems to be changing over time.

That’s why most innovation is coming out of the US. Gotta have consumers to be anti-consumer and to continue to have consumers you need products worth using. Europe has none. Just worse local copies of ideas that have been pioneered elsewhere and often wholly owned by US companies.

Not trying to be rude, but when you're a company the size of Google - that's had MASSIVE lawsuits - you can't just willy-nilly release products globally.

You mean like a company the size of Microsoft? Bing chat was earlier and global.

Bing is 3.5% of market share in Europe, and Edge is even less.

You're talking about maybe ~1% of search that Bing Chat is practically available to (in Europe).

It's a lot less risky for Microsoft to do what they did than for Google to just open the floodgates in Europe.

Both companies are big enough that the laws in Europe are the same whether there are a hundred or hundred million local users.

No.

If Google does something on Chrome OS - the EU isn't going to scrutinize it the same way if MS does something on Windows.

Same, but opposite for Bing vs Google Search.

I know Google just discovered this AI thing like a few days ago and haven't had the chance to get a product through legal. It's ok, they can take another decade. No biggie.

MS only dared to put it in Bing after OpenAI's dogfood succeeded. If it had started spouting troublesome stuff, MS wouldn't have touched ChatGPT.

What's that got to do with the price of avocados in San Jose?

This is the kind of bureaucratic thinking that is resulting in Google being incapable of innovation.

Just take the legal risk and launch globally. Yes, some country might have some obscure law about AI chatbots imitating veterans during Ramadan... And if that's the case, then just pay the fine, patch the software, and move on.

Better than have the whole product fail because competitors won the market with a global launch.

Yea! Better to ask forgiveness than permission. (/s)

Exactly. You have to go through legal review in every country, is this breaking an accessibility law in Australia or a copyright law in Argentina or a localization law in Canada or an antitrust law in the EU?

That's just how it works. That stuff takes months, so do you prefer to withhold it from the US until that's all completed? In a competitive environment that moves quickly, that's not an option.

"That's just how it works" is trivially invalidated by looking at how it works beyond the walls of this particular corp, eg Bing. So all you're saying is that however the powers that be behave is how they ought to behave

I think this is something Bing had been planning for months, so they had time to do all this review in advance?

While Google was caught flat-footed and has had to rush this in response.

I'm basing this just on what I've read, of course.

And if that's the case, I don't think my explanation is invalidated at all, nor "trivially".

MS announced and shipped OpenAI / GPT based tech for years now

I don't know what product you are referring to that MS has shipped for years.

I'm referring to ChatGPT and Bing integration, which is very recent. That was a big surprise to everyone AFAIK.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/from-conversat...

"We’re finding ways to bring it into Azure and our mainstream products" "And in the same way that you type a question into a search engine and then get to decide which result to click on, GPT-3 returns multiple suggestions for Power Fx formulas."

They've been telegraphing this in the open for about 2 years. ChatGPT is an incremental development. Google wasn't surprised, they failed to act

wtf is vague about gpt 3 leading to gpt 3.5? chatgpt is absolutely incremental, and a testament to how incremental progress can unlock wider strides in impact

And I'm talking about this very specific new product needing legal review which takes time.

Not a general vague sense of AI investment. You can't do legal review on a generalized "direction", no matter how telegraphed you think it is.

Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the lawyers are very confident in their legal opinions, but they are still just opinions that other lawyers are confident are the other way. My guess is some lawyer at firm A will say "oh we can't just do that, I'm sure we can't" while another lawyer in firm B presented with the same initiative will go "yeah we can totally do that, no problem at all, I'm sure we can".

Which lawyer you get seems to be a sort of dice roll that perhaps one could understand if one were a lawyer.

As the saying goes "Good lawyers tell you why you shouldn't do something, great lawyers tell you how you can."

Is chatgpt available globally? Is bing available globally?

I find it funny when massive corporations say they can’t legally figure stuff out and the other massive corporations do it.

It must feel back to be the lawyer who can’t work this stuff out when other lawyers can. Perhaps similar to when I think some programming is impossible and then see it done in the wild in production.

Does launching it globally break laws of Physics?

No - but you don't need physics for legal liabilities...

Hasn't stopped Tesla and their products can kill people

It's even more frustrating to get this message from Puerto Rico, which is a US territory. Feels like being treated as second-class citizens. We're subject to the same federal laws.

Really weird to restrict Puerto Rico. I'm assuming someone goofed up a setting somewhere. Its like not including Hawaii basically, everyone in Puerto Rico is a US citizen.

Word, it took several years before Google Domains became available in Sweden.

And not to mention Pixel devices, which you can't even order.

Good thing they didn't open the Google Store for Europe, now they can close it for all I care, I had to jump through hoops to get my Pixel. The Pixel battery was much worse than the battery of my wife's iPhone. Now I am sporting her old phone because I don't give a shit about the latest and greatest anymore.

It never cease to amaze me how a software that is just inputs and outputs, can not be "available" in some country

if you sell something, then sure goods might have laws. but just text ? lol

Might be localization, PR, scaling, not enough capacity for the new users. I hate it but I can imagine it.

There also could be legal reasons, I have no idea if it's the case here but theoretically I could imagine something like "right to be forgotten" interacting oddly with LLMs.

Also libel (if the LLM makes up facts about someone), copyright (if it reproduces content), privacy (if some of the data it trained on wasn't intended to be public), etc.

And on top of that, there are plenty of novel things that may or may not be illegal. If it can be tricked into making a pro-Nazi statement, is it violating German law? What if it offers medical or legal advice without a license?

It's a pretty big legal minefield, and different jurisdictions have different laws and standards, so it makes sense to limit your exposure.

That's the cost of being first to market on something like this. You can't both play it safe and lead the pack.

Yeah let’s move fast and break stuff! Forget those inconvenient local laws and culture!

This attitude is what is leading to the regulation and probable over regulation due to backlash of ‘big tech’.

Those days are over.

Just like any other sector doesn’t get to ignore laws.

Unregulated US social media hit our democracies like a hurricane.

The body politik doesn’t seem to be of a mind to let them do the same with AI.

> Might be localization

If that's the problem then they're not supplying the right fix. Surely restricting this to users located in the US doesn't prevent people from writing in a language that isn't English. Google should be capable of detecting the language of a query, and potentially rejecting it based on that with an apology.

> PR,

Obviously there must be _some_ reason why they're doing this. Doesn't mean it's a good reason.

> scaling, not enough capacity for the new users.

That would be rather embarrassing for Google.

> That would be rather embarrassing for Google.

Why? They have no idea how many users they will get. If they buy A100s on the assumption they will get 50M daily active users they run the risk of wasting an enormous amount of money if they get 1M users instead. And its not like these GPUs grow on trees. Clearly MSFT is struggling to set up compute fast enough, see the decreasing rate limits on GPT-4.

So you're saying they might be incompetent enough for their estimation to be off by 50x? You're also saying Google, _a cloud computing provider selling access to A100s_, can't scale this dynamically?

> Clearly MSFT is struggling to set up compute fast enough, see the decreasing rate limits on GPT-4.

Well, even so, this is how you'd deal with capacity problems, rather than by arbitrarily shutting out parts of the world.

Predicting the future correctly isn't a matter of competence... And yes, even Google can't scale infinitely in the face of an actual physical resource constraint. When I worked there, there was a period when there was a shortage of memory chips, which required a lot of creativity. I suspect the current period is very constrained by how fast AI/ML focused chips can be manufactured.

> Predicting the future correctly isn't a matter of competence... And yes, even Google can't scale infinitely in the face of an actual physical resource constraint.

In order to not geo-block, Google would need to be able to scale infinitely? What kind of straw man is this?

> there was a shortage of memory chips, which required a lot of creativity.

Geo-blocking doesn't strike me as particularly creative as far as solutions go. Whatever problem they're trying to address, the excuses being made here seem weak and don't make Google look any less incompetent.

:shrug: Yeah it's actually very difficult to launch a very resource intensive product globally all at once. It's not really an excuse, it's just a real problem that Google has. It limits what they can launch and how they can do it, because anything they launch will get used by a huge number of people right away, and everyone expects them to achieve a magical level of performance at that scale. Rolling out region by region based on where data centers are located and what hardware is deployed in them is one possible way to deal with this. I don't think it's good, really, I just think it's unsurprising.

>So you're saying they might be incompetent enough for their estimation to be off by 50x?

Not sure about incompetence, it's just a very hard problem. Sam Altman's estimations for ChatGPT were off by 10x, for reference. Apparently some employees thought it would be a total flop that would barely make the last page of major newspapers.

> You're also saying Google, _a cloud computing provider selling access to A100s_, can't scale this dynamically?

I'm saying that Google can not acquire enormous quantities of A100s overnight, yes.

just use english language then?

>localization

We don't want that. Every time Google launches something it takes months for it to understand that just because I'm currently located in country X does not mean I want localization or personalization for that country. Just release the service for those that can use it without the localization. After all we know that the vast majority of the models are trained on English, it's useless to give me a subpar undertrained model on local language.

You're under estimating the cost to run these models at scale.

This isn't "just text"

how is a local limitation solving anything of this other than on paper though? If so, they should if something start in a small country...

Or like, state by state in the US

it's got to be some GDPR or some other crazy law thing.

It's available in the UK which still has GDPR in place (for now)

It's pretty much always regulatory stuff. Google is a lawsuit magnet so they are extremely paranoid with this stuff to make sure they're not breaking some obscure local law.

Clubhouse was even more stupid by launching iOS only which killed themself.

It worked for Instagram - Clubhouse's failure was far more spectacular.

Sharing pretty pics is easy to get and easy to do. Listening into a random conference calls is much harder to sell and even harder to scale.

Clubhouse was funny. By the time I finally got access and off the waitlist it was already pretty much dead.

Instagram came out at a time (2010) when android phones were crap, and iphones owned the smartphone space everywhere, I don't think it is a valid comparison.

This is not what killed clubhouse. In fact, clubhouse instantly got worse when they launched the android app...

Are you implying that the Clubhouse got worse because they brought in Android users? Because, if you are, that's pretty ......

I think that's what happened regardless of how it sounds. Until it was an elitist iPhone only app, it had a cool vibe around it, but I suspected once they open the floodgates most people will realize how little value it has. Then they probably couldn't handle the traffic and new issues. I'm not saying there's any problem with Android users, but building a community on a single mobile platform for a long time then mixing it with another was probably a bad move.

Clubhouse from the beginning was just a bunch of vapid hot air about how cool Clubhouse was, without any substantive backing behind the supposed coolness except for all the VC-backed users constantly saying how cool it was.

When Clubhouse finally opened up to a wider audience of people who weren't being incentivized to use it, new users churned out almost immediately because it wasn't actually very cool at all.

Basically, the story of Clubhouse was the story of Google Glass.

Clubhouse was killed by Twitter Spaces.

Clubhouse was a stupid product, it was just putting all the people who were most annoying in school into one room so they could tire themselves out. Nobody wants to listen to that.

Same for Pixel devices. They don't officially exist in several EU countries on Google's store.

Google tries hard to make their paying consumers hate them.

Can anyone confirm VPN's works for signup?

The sign-up itself worked. I've not gotten access yet.

Got access.

Yes. I used one from Italy to get in the waitlist. Don't know how the rest will unfold.

I was allowed in after about 6 hours.

If anybody comes across this. I started seeing "not supported in your country" after two days of use.

I signed up via Mullvad VPN (picked a UK location) about an hour after this story was posted. Just got access 10 minutes ago (3 hours later).

After getting access: You do need to have a US/UK IP to use it but they don't seem to use any VPN detection heuristics - which would be trivial for them since I'm signed in to them using multiple private/work accounts on multiple machines without VPN.

Don't worry, you're not missing out, it's terrible.

It didn't know the difference between a month and a week, and when I asked it a coding question, it said "I'm just a language model, so I can't help you with that.".

Lol, lmao even.

It quite confidently told me that Michael Caine played Patrick Bateman's butler Alfred in American Psycho... Bard is like your 80 year old confused grandmother at the moment

The most likely reason (maybe ironically) is one of regulatory overhead I suspect. They stick to jurisdictions where the "law of unintended consequences" and "punitive damages" don't commingle strongly.

ChatGPT wasn't available to everyone initially (huge waitlist).

I think most people got access fairly quickly. Same with Bing Chat.

Noone is complaiing about the waitlist. Having the waitlist be based on GeoLocation is what is the problem here.

> By the time they add support for using this in my country, there's no reason for me to use it anymore as competitors have already swept in.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't ChatGPT and Bing Chat already worldwide releases? So it's not as though anyone is sweeping in after Bard. They were out before Bard and global from Day 1.

Besides that, you're absolutely right, of course.

same story with Google One, they say "this feature is now available worldwide", but somehow worldwide doesn't include my country.

Join our social media platform where none of your friends are! (and can't join even if they want to!)

- Google+

To be fair, OpenAI did the same thing with ChatGPT. It wasn't available in Canada at launch. Fortunately, it was not significantly delayed however (2 weeks perhaps).

Just give it a few weeks. They probably have good reasons why they can't do instant global roll out for everyone. Pretty sure it'll be available soon.

FYI mullvad vpn works for sign up. I'm from the UK but currently travelling and it allowed me to join.

You're not missing anything. The thing is crap and they know it.

VPN to USA can help.

This is what you get when you enact monstrosities like GDPR.

:)) why so salty? I am salty too, ngl but it is: their product, their choice.

There could be a hundred reasons why they released it like this. ChatGPT was also not available world wide when it launched.

Chatgpt is still unavailable worldwide. And will never be, I guess

This idea that corporate criticism is off limits simply because the corporation has the legal right to make product decisions is one of the weirdest things I regularly see. No one is claiming that they don't have a legal right to do this. Yeah, it's their product and their choice.

But you're on a website with founders and tech workers. Part of what we do here is talk about why things work, why they don't, and ways to improve. There's nothing wrong with criticizing our industry or pointing out when one of the big companies regularly shoots itself in the foot.

> There's nothing wrong with criticizing our industry or pointing out when one of the big companies regularly shoots itself in the foot

Actually, in some cases, there is: exposing your endpoints to nefarious actors from countries where there is no jurisdiction, functioning tech laws, etcetera. It is better & safer to launch small with a somewhat "trusted crowd" first. You live in a dream world or have not launched anything really on your own before. It is wrong & dangerous to follow your advice or criticism because you don't know what you don't know.

If someone from Netherlands accessing your website puts your data at risk, someone accessing your site from the US puts your data at risk.

AI queries are way more computationally intensive than traditional searches. Bard is probably not optimized and would completely overload the hardware Google has available for it should it be released worldwide.

That just shows how far ahead Microsoft is on that one.

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