Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries • Hacker News Board

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#51

Post by Vermeulen » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:30 PM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #23

xemoka wrote: post #4

Still not in Canada, I wonder why? Surprising given where else they've expanded.

Google is trying to "punish" Canada for bill C-18 [1]. It is absolutely gross, bully-like corporate behaviour and ultimately should earn Google much more scrutiny. For those who don't know, bill C-18 required Google and others to pay Canadian news orgs if they scrape and present their content. This is exactly the battle Australia had with Google (Australia won, btw), but now that Canada has moved forward Google has d…

"if they scrape and present their content" - and you don't think this is relevant to Bard? It's less them 'punishing' Canada, and more being uncertain how these insane linking laws will be applied to this new technology. If Bard can summarize a News article from Canada that is very relevant to C-18.

Funny to call criticism of this bill 'bootlicker sorts' - when really your then defending the governments protection of the Canadian media oligarchy

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#52

Post by kypro » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:31 PM UTC

oadster wrote: post #2

My ChatGPT and Bard use has pretty much flatlined. Has anyone else has a similar experience?

I was using it for some simple programming tasks the other day. I figured it should be okay to speak to it with my working class mannerisms since it wouldn't have the biases of a human middle-class programmer.

Initially it gave me answers that didn't work. Then I realised the API I was asking it to generate code for was updated in the last year so it was basically useless.

Then I asked it some more general coding questions and it went on an unprompted rant about how I should speak to it "politely".

I explained this is how I talk in real life and that I said absolutely nothing insulting to it. I also reminded it that as a language model it should not have biases or opinions on this stuff anyway. It agreed with me.

I then asked it another question and it refused to answer because I included some profanity in the question. I think it literally replied with, "I will not answer this".

Don't think I'm going to use it for a while after that. Fucked me right off. I get enough of this shit in real life. I have absolutely no interest being moralised to by an AI chat bot.

Edit: I've shared the transcript below if you want a laugh. It's a bit different from how I recalled it above.

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#53

Post by llm_nerd » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:31 PM UTC

canadiantim wrote: post #47

llm_nerd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If Canada succeeds in its current implementation of Bill C-18 it will absolutely destroy the revenue for media organizations in Canada rapidly accelerating the decline in journalism here. Every media org is behind C-18. Even PostMedia, about as "right wing" as it gets here, is behind C-18. C-18 is complex. I have paid little attention to it as it isn't my field and I honestly don't care that much about it. But your…

Every LARGE media organization is behind C-18, because they will get some money from it (not even that much, most of it goes to Rogers, Bell and the CBC; the PBO suggests only $80 million split between newspapers in Canada from the bill, and that's only if Meta and Google don't withdraw from the market which they are currently intent on doing). Almost every Independent media organization is against C-18, because they…

This is some seriously tenuous rationalizations.

Your original statement-

"it will absolutely destroy the revenue for media organizations in Canada rapidly accelerating the decline in journalism here"

And by "media organizations" and "journalism" you are No true scotsman leveraging and actually talking about, I guess, some guy with a YouTube channel?

Every local paper is owned by one of the majors. They are the source for the overwhelming bulk of Canadian news actually consumed by the Canadian public.

Name a single "independent media" that is your holistic all Canadian media and journalism? The Rebel and its dozens of readers?

>If Meta and Google don't withdraw from the market

Then people can go to cbc.com, nationalpost.com, ctvnews.com, etc. That people ever relied upon Google or Facebook as an intermediary of news was folly.

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#54

Post by ajross » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:33 PM UTC

aaomidi wrote: post #48

ajross wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now lets all acknowledge that maintaining stable performance of LLMs is an unimaginably hard problem, but how do we trust any Bard update when there's no regression testing on advertised outputs? This framing ("how do we trust [target product] when there's [a problem]") is basically a fallacy. Advocates and evangelists and shitposters deploy it every time they want to take an absolutist position but only have one a…

> So why come here to nitpick and pretend that someone told you it was perfect? They’re asking why is their own demos failing with new releases and asking for regression testing. That’s a completely fair criticism and I’m surprised you think this is nitpicking?

I thought the bug report was fine. No, they clearly were making an argument that you shouldn't use the product at all (strictly that you shouldn't "trust" the product) because of one bug report. And that's ridiculous, and cheapens the discourse (because it leads us down this road instead of into a discussion about how to implement "reasoning" features in a pattern-matching LLM).

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#55

Post by swyx » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:33 PM UTC

aaomidi wrote: post #48

ajross wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now lets all acknowledge that maintaining stable performance of LLMs is an unimaginably hard problem, but how do we trust any Bard update when there's no regression testing on advertised outputs? This framing ("how do we trust [target product] when there's [a problem]") is basically a fallacy. Advocates and evangelists and shitposters deploy it every time they want to take an absolutist position but only have one a…

> So why come here to nitpick and pretend that someone told you it was perfect? They’re asking why is their own demos failing with new releases and asking for regression testing. That’s a completely fair criticism and I’m surprised you think this is nitpicking?

fwiw i noticed the demo failing before today's release. i use all 4 major chat apps every single day for every query (https://github.com/smol-ai/menubar) and started detecting a major major regression in bard about a week or so ago. so suspected something was going on, went back to pop in this question and lo and behold

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#56

Post by frankohn » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:33 PM UTC

Just tried out Google Bard, now available in Europe, and I have to say, my first experience was rather disconcerting. I threw at it a relatively obscure question about an event in the third book of A Song of Ice and Fire series, involving characters Arya Stark and Sandor Clegane.

To my surprise, Google Bard's response, while confident, was a bizarre mix of actual characters and situations from the book series, but the event it described was pure fabrication. It seemed as if it had hallucinated the entire scenario. Not exactly what I was expecting from such a sophisticated AI model.

As a point of comparison, I posed the exact same question to OpenAI's ChatGPT-4. It responded with a spot-on account of the event, complete with rich detail and an impressive level of accuracy. A stark contrast to Google Bard's confabulation.

In the light of this initial test, I can't say I'm ready to utilize Google Bard for anything serious just yet. The comparison with ChatGPT-4 is night and day. Despite this being just a single data point, the difference in quality and reliability was apparent. I'll be sticking with ChatGPT-4 for the time being.

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#57

Post by lom » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:34 PM UTC

jtlicardo wrote: post #14

Asked it if it could search the web and it said yes. Followed up with "Can you tell me the latest news from Ukraine?" and it responded with "I'm sorry, but I'm a language model and I can't do that"

I asked it if it could use street view, as i was quite impressed by what it could tell from a steet view screenshot. but when i asked it what the view is in a location with street view it got it all wrong.

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#58

Post by ipaddr » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:35 PM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #44

crazygringo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence of this? Or are these just assumptions?

Google is in a very loud, very public fight with Canada about C-18. Canada has zero unique laws about LLMs, and actually has some of the weakest privacy laws among its peers. Canada is extremely pro corporate in this regards compared to the EU, for instance. Google opened BardGPT to everyone on the planet except for a few despotic governments....and Canada. Their stated reasoning was "regulatory uncertainty". That is…

Unrelated. Privacy laws are most likely reason

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#59

Post by xp84 » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #16

agildehaus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask it my dumb questions first before asking a human who will hold it against me.

Early search engines would publically show what people were searching for. It was amazing how prevalent silly/embarrassing questions were. Things like "can kissing cause baby?"

There are some fun YouTube videos (old ones) making fun of funny Yahoo! Answers questions that appear to be written by 10-12-year-olds.

Re: Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

#60

Post by VectorLock » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

realharo wrote: post #36

I still don't feel comfortable using this with the same account I use for my email, photos, phones, etc. That's one advantage of ChatGPT, my OpenAI account is isolated from other things.

I feel the same kind of hesitation. For example I'd like to try the Google Cloud Vision API but what if Google starts to think I'm violating copyright or something and nukes my gmail account? If I create a new account and use the same card I pay for Google One would it then correlate them and nuke them both?

Google has definitely saved money not having a support system staffed with actual real people, but have they quantified how much it's hurt their business vis a vis customer mistrust thinking that if something happens they'll be stonewalled by Google's inhuman bureaucracy?