470
Gemini will now automatically summarize your emails unless you opt out
(workspaceupdates.googleblog.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
How the hell can they even afford that?! There are so many Gmail users and so many emails a second and Gemini will summarize them all? That sounds so expensive and like a waste of resources
It is, but the bubble mustn't burst or the grifters will stop making money selling "the end of skilled labor" to braindead capitalists.
Actually, investment in AI is necessary for competing with other nations.
The "end of skilled labor" selling point is just to cover up that fact that we need AI because other nations will have it.
Countries are modern-day fiefs.
Alright, let's tear this idea apart in plain, no-BS language. The whole "we gotta invest in AI to keep up with other nations" argument is like saying you need the flashiest new phone just because your neighbor got one—even if your old phone still works perfectly fine. Sure, some countries are all-in on AI like it's the latest craze, but that doesn't mean we have to jump on the bandwagon and mess up our lives.
The whole "end of skilled labor" hype is really just a cover-up. People have been doing amazing work with their hands and brains for ages—long before AI even existed. And let’s talk downsides: more people losing jobs, a privacy mess, and decisions being made by glitchy algorithms that might not give a damn about real-life problems. We didn't need AI to build everything we have today. We've been doing just fine without handing over our lives to a bunch of computer code.
So, if you're buying into the "we need AI to keep up with the cool kids on the global stage" nonsense, you're ignoring the fact that the smart move might just be hanging on to good old human skill. Instead of racing into an AI-fueled chaos, maybe we should just keep doing what we do best—using our brains and common sense.
Google makes a lot of money, and summarising stuff uses a surprisingly small amount of energy. You can do it trivially on-device on a laptop and on plenty of phones.
When it comes to LLMs, training the models is generally the thing that requires ridiculous amounts of energy.
This is dumb as fuck, though. I don't want Google's LLM to miss out critical details in my emails. That shit could be important. If people want this they should opt in.
They probably use a smaller model for summarizing.