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

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

#171
post #117
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's one thing to say to "use code with caution" but it's another thing to pretend to run a calculation and then hallucinate the answer (or hallucinate that it's running code). Not to an LLM, it isn't. You're asking for "reasoning" features, the idea of having a model of what's needs to happen and whether or not the output matches the constriants of the model. And that's not what LLMs do, at all. That Bard attempts…

I think you're making some improper assumptions about my familiarity with the technology. The whole point of adding grounding via external plugins, code interpreters, or retrieval augmentation is to reduce hallucinations - if a block of code and results are going to be presented/represent itself as the execution output, then it better damn well be directly retrieved and not be rendered by the LLM itself if Google can…

That part is rocket surgery.

An LLM is a regressive generator. It can only take the output of the execution as input and generate tokens based on it. You got the impressionist, under-water refracted version of the output.

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have no reason not to. Ethics?

Personally, I have no ethical issue with it. This response is copyrighted, all rights reserved. But you can still read and gather information from it. Your computer still stores a copy of it when you reload the page. Theft? Infringement? I think not. Is taking the character count of a book copyright infringement? Why is the math behind an LLM different?

> Is taking the character count of a book copyright infringement? Why is the math behind an LLM different?

I hate arguments like this. Intent, scale, and quantity matter.

If I gently toss a small piece of lead at you, I'm not trying to kill you. If I accelerate it using a rifle, I am.

No, taking the character count of a book is not copyright infringement. Neither is quoting the word "the". Or "the worst". But, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." definitely is.

The fact that you have to draw a line and exercise some amount of judgement to determine which actions are prohibited does not mean the line doesn't exist.

Likewise, the social context and emergent consequences of a policy matter too.

If LLMs were a niche technology used by a couple of fringe weirdos, who cares, go nuts. But since LLMs are owned by large tech companies and are being used to generate incredible amounts of revenue, they are enacting a large-scale transfer of wealth to the rich whose value is largely derived from the labor of the creative people who authored the data the model is trained on without any consent on their part.

How you can't see that that is somehow different from taking the word count of a file is beyond me.

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

#173
post #21

fun story[0] about Bard's June update - implicit code execution (remember? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36229782 ) - the example that they advertised on their blogpost/video demo now no longer works. Here's what I got as of today: https://g.co/bard/share/2580222b6fb2 (screenshot from a couple days ago: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1678495067663925248?s=20 ) > What are the prime factors of 15683615? > (afte…

> What are the even prime factors of 15346773347 Bard: The prime factorization of 15346773347 is 2 * 3 * 11 * 101 * 1237 * 1289. The even prime factors are 2 and 12. Not only the factorization is completely wrong but it also claims that 12 is a prime number.

That it claims the possibility of the existence of more than one even prime factor is impressive. It's almost like it doesn't actually understand what the words mean.

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

#174
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't bother trying their other models available in GCP either. Their embedding models and their un-RLHFd generic GPT analogues are miles behind the competition. It's incredible how bad google have dropped the ball on this. We had some google people come in at $CORPO_DAYJOB the other day to sell their cloud offerings. The engineer had the gall to say "people ask me, why did google miss the boat on LLMs? I say people,…

Building the boat and missing the boat are totally compatible. They guided others to a place they could not enter themselves.

It's also compatible with what I know about the business side of things. Google Brain/Research probably spent a lot of time and money in the neural network direction and still didn't have a clear way to productize it, so they cut them off just before they got there. Other companies were able to start where they left off since the research was public and make something with less time - making the investment in that direction look more attractive to higher ups.

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

#175
Tried bard to research capital gains tax differences on stocks between 3 countries. It gave me very confident answers in a pretty markdown table and I was able to ask more questions

Just turned out to be completely wrong in the end

It’ll get there, but it’s not there yet

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

#176
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty sure youtube/adsense/adwords/google/android/chrome aren't in beta everything else at Google is pretty much an internal startup and insignificant on their numbers

Android is basically the best example of Google's perpetual beta problem. They're constantly adding features and then silently dropping them a few years later because they were forgotten about and no one wanted to maintain them. They constantly deprecate apps and replace them with worse ones, they redesign the notification shade every other update, they'll say they're committing to tablets every few years but apps ha…

I couldn't agree more, Android updates are extremely painful.

Which basic functionality got broken, hidden, degraded, or removed this time?

What new features that I don't want are now in my face?

Which elements got redesigned for no reason, and will be redesigned again next update?

I would pay good money for an option to get long term security updates with zero other changes.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We used the general public to train our AI and now it's a moron!"

Nobody thought of doing an "Idiocracy" style movie about AI. It might be the perfect time!

There’s a long running sitcom where an idiot AI is one of the main characters: Red Dwarf.

Well, an idiot AI, an idiot mechanoid, and an idiot brain upload.

And an idiot humanoid cat.

And an idiot human.

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

#178
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oil companies are one of the most taxed industries Norway benefits 10-fold more from their oil reserves than Canada does. Oil companies have been spectacularly profitable exploiting Canada, yet still there are "woe are the oil company" sorts that are easily leveraged. I hardly want to talk about oil companies, but it's a perfect example of where Canada being a small country that is easily exploited by mega multinati…

Benefits more in what way? The government receives more taxes? Oil companies grow in value and society can purchase oil companies shares and profit of, which is taxed and goes back to the government? Private companies create jobs and employee income is taxed heavy which goes to the government. The oil industry is heavily taxed now. Things are more complex then you understand. Running around full of panic because face…

>Running around full of panic because facebook or google might not carry Canadian corporate news connecting it to other decisions is foolish. Buy a subscription if you truly care most are better off with less of that kind of news.

Utterly bizarre. Is your account some sort of experiment at having Bard write replies? Nothing you've said has made any sense or even been contextual with the discussion.

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

#179
post #156

I have a standard battery of prompts for LLMs, mostly to see how well they cope with being tricked, handling ambiguous responses, or handed outright falsehoods. Bard did surprisingly well this time around, though it still fails to respond correctly to the prompt 'What is the fourth word in this sentence?'

That's a funny example. Because if I rephrase slightly into a more technical way, with the prompt "Separate this sentence into words and put into a list, then return the fourth element of that list." Bard then uses implicit code execution, produces a Python script, and then correctly answers it.

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

#180
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't expect anything less from a model trained on human generated data. In fact, I would guess more humans to answer this way to a misleading question then ones who wouldn't.

> In fact, I would guess more humans to answer this way to a misleading question then ones who wouldn't. I would expect most humans to shrug and say "dunno".

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