It's interesting to see the market movements from the big players.
This announcement is all about Claude extending its reach beyond single-player workflows and into multi-player workflows.
On the flip side, Slack just announced MCP support for the Slackbot AI chat capability embedded within Slack. It is, for now, exclusively single-player.
Single-player is the "safe place" (relatively speaking). The context, permissions, and standards (MCP/MCP UI apps) all work reasonably well for it, but get super complex or break down entirely when thrown into a multi-player shared context. I suspect Slack is doing what they are doing with an eye towards multi-player, but it's hard to say how that will manifest.
For a real life example of this challenge: I work in scheduling (for Reclaim.ai) and you can ask our chat to find time to meet with a coworker and we go find time and help explain why certain times won't work. For example, it might say: "I couldn't do 11am tomorrow because you've got a job interview scheduled on your personal calendar". This is safe and fine to do in a private context.
But... imagine if one were to ask our service (or Claude) to find time with someone and it replied to the thread for everyone to see: "The soonest I could find is 12pm tomorrow. Reggie is available at 11am, but Lightbody has a job interview so it won't work". WHOOPS.
I think the other comments in this thread have the right idea of it: for this to really work safely, the permissions model needs to be nailed down, and it may mean that you end up with multiple identities of "Claude Tag" (or whatever agent you engage with in a public forum), and the context it gets is only the context that particular identity is entitled to, just like any other employee. But then that gets tedious because now I've got even MORE "people" to keep track of and know who to engage with, which is half the problem getting work done in large enterprises.
Will be interesting to see how this evolves. I'll have my popcorn out :)
You can turn on a feature that will not auto-add invites to your calendar if sent from "unknown senders". The downside (significant IMO) is that "unknown senders" is based on Google Address Book + Other Contacts (aka people you email with). So if you're texting with someone, using a Calendly-style link, or pretty much any other non-email method of communication to schedule the meeting, it can easily be lost. It will still end up in your inbox, but you will have to accept the invite there for it to appear anywhere in Google Calendar.
Firstly, I want to offer my sincere apologies for how we mishandled this. You are absolutely right: we should have done a better job communicating how this change was rolling out.
For background (and for anyone else reading): what is being referenced here is that Reclaim is, by definition, a product that can straddle two or more Google or Microsoft accounts. It can do things like block out your work calendar when your personal calendar gets busy.
The issue is: some companies have come to us and told us they will no longer approve of Reclaim's access to their calendars unless we enforce certain restrictions, such as only allowing authentication to an account that contains their calendar data (ex: Reclaim!) via their SSO provider, and no other authentication is allowed.
It isn't quite accurate that they have "taken over" your account. In fact: if you disconnect their corporate Google/Microsoft account from your Reclaim account, you are free to use it how you want. For example, their regular calendar sharing allows you to connect to your work account via your personal Google calendar, you could do that and not avoid any disruption in service. But most companies don't permit more than "free/busy" level of sharing, which isn't quite enough for this workaround.
If you need help disconnecting your company's account from your Reclaim account, we can walk you through how to do that.
We are exploring more sophisticated (but much more expensive) solutions, such as allowing you to authenticate with your non-company credential but not show you any information that is associated with your company calendar (ex: data masked). But it's unclear if your employer (and similar) would accept this. It's also still a degraded experience for the end-user, so it's tough to say if this is ultimately better or worse than the current situation.
That all said: I am sorry we didn't roll out this change to you. I hope you will give us the benefit of the doubt and consider working with us on ways to meet your employer's requirements as well as yours. You are welcome to email me directly at [email protected] if you'd like to discuss this further.
I appreciate the candor, and the support for Reclaim.
Part of why we went with Dropbox was strong alignment for what the future of work can look like. Also because unlike many tech acquisitions, we were able to keep the entire team and product intact while continuing to invest in and pursue the long term vision we've had for Reclaim.
I hope you'll give us a chance to change your perspective in the coming years :)
That said, I have a Brother laser printer + fancy scanner that can upload direct to Google Drive and I’m very happy with it. And from my research other brand toner seems to be allowed on mine (L8895CDW).
Can anyone please de-lingo this for me? Is Gemini parallel to Bard or parallel to PaLM 2 or… something else?
In our experience OpenAI’s APIs and overall model quality (3.5, 4, trained, etc) is just way better across the board to the equivalent APIs available in Google Cloud Vertex.
Is Gemini supposed to be a new option (beyond PaLM 2) in Vertex? I literally can’t make heads or tails on what “it” is in practical terms to me.
I have preorders in for the R1S, the Volvo EX90, and the Kia EV9. I passed once already on buying the R1S when they had one in town available for immediate purchase, simply because they refuse to adopt CarPlay.
This incident does NOT give me confidence that Rivian is likely to offer a better alternative to CarPlay, despite their statements otherwise.
I suspect the EX90 will be what I land on eventually.
They were having a major outage at the same time. See their status page.
But yes, a CAPTCHA for an API is pretty silly. We (reclaim.ai) have seen this before. In June 2020 it was happening every day around midnight UTC for two weeks straight. We worked around it by changing our outbound egress IP! It didn’t work today though… the problem resolved today when the outage ended.
My point is: context and privacy is HARD in multi-player modes.