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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

#191

Post by mrtranscendence »

olddustytrail wrote: post #161
frankohn wrote: post #56

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 th…

Good point. If I ever want a random summary of an event in a fantasy book I've already read, I'll be sure to stick to ChatGPT. On a completely unrelated point, why are people's tests of LLMs clearly designed to make me think that people are dumber? Are the LLMs suggesting these questions as part of their plot?

Great. And if I want your opinion on how smart it is to be a bit silly with LLMs when I’m not even attempting to test them systematically, I’ll be sure to ask you.

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

#192

Post by mrtranscendence »

heliophobicdude wrote: post #105
ilaksh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When is Gemini going to be available?

Wired article said development will take a number of months. Perhaps we shall ask Barb?

Who’s Barb? The only Barb I know is a retired greyhound breeder, and I doubt she knows.

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

#193

Post by mrtranscendence »

xp84 wrote: post #31
jug wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think it should be compared to GPT 3.5. Google doesn't really have a public contender to GPT 4 yet but this is what the Gemini project is intended to be, by the newly formed/reformed Google DeepMind team.

It may be 3.5-like, however when I tried it, it seems like it has a lot more handcuffs applied for “safety,” and I don’t mean safety from Skynet and Terminators. I mean things like it refuses to speculate about what medical condition might cause some given symptoms. “Sorry, I’m just a language model.” GPT had no problem giving it an educated guess. I personally find this type of “safety“ to be patronizing and insulti…

> I mean things like it refuses to speculate about what medical condition might cause some given symptoms.

Are you sure about this specifically? I’ve recently had zero trouble getting GPT-4 to give potential diagnoses for a given set of symptoms, though perhaps it’s an issue of prompting.

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

#194

Post by mrtranscendence »

yeldarb wrote: post #119

The image functionality is pretty underwhelming. Some things I tried that it failed at: * Simple "spot the difference" a young child could do * Counting chess pieces on a board or coins in a mario screenshot * Describing a photo of a car on a road * Evaluating a graph of y=x and one of y=x^2 * Explaining a meme image (said it can't do anything with images of people) * Taking a screenshot & giving HTML for it (gave ra…

This is probably because it can’t actually understand images, it’s relying on other services to deal with it. So it can do an image search to find what something might be an image of, or use ocr to extract text, but it’ll fail on tasks that involve the idiosyncrasies of each image.

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

#195

Post by barbazoo »

jsnell wrote: post #164
barbazoo wrote: post #143

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 Can you walk me through what you think will happen please?

Any company that's designated as being in scope of the link tax will choose to stop linking to Canadian news media but will continue linking to foreign media. Links from search engines and social media currently produce for billions of page views for Canadian news publishers. Some of those page views will be replaced by people visiting the news site directly. Some won't, as people consume less news or substitute fore…

> The loss of those page views will mean a loss of ad impressions thus and ad revenue.

I think it's true that Canadian media orgs are generally in favour of this new law, correct me if I'm wrong. Why would they if this would destroy their business model? Or is the revenue from the people that will effectively be excluded not significant enough after all?

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

#196

Post by simonw »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #86
simonw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm already a heavy ChatGPT user - a dozen plus conversations a day - and my usage is increasing as I learn new ways to use it.

Could you share some new ways you've found? I'm in the cohort of users whose usage flatlined. I had a lot of fun asking it all kinds of stuff for a while, but — sometime around all the hubbub of whether or not OpenAI uses your interactions as training data — I just stopped entirely.

Some of my notes:

- https://simonwillison.net/series/using-chatgpt/

- https://til.simonwillison.net/tils/search?q=ChatGPT

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

#197

Post by olddustytrail »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #191
olddustytrail wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. If I ever want a random summary of an event in a fantasy book I've already read, I'll be sure to stick to ChatGPT. On a completely unrelated point, why are people's tests of LLMs clearly designed to make me think that people are dumber? Are the LLMs suggesting these questions as part of their plot?

Great. And if I want your opinion on how smart it is to be a bit silly with LLMs when I’m not even attempting to test them systematically, I’ll be sure to ask you.

What's it got to do with you?

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

#198

Post by wesapien »

dangerboysteve wrote: post #136

How the hell is this not available in Canada ?

Because we're not that big of a market and yet politicians want to tell every one they're on the same level. Maybe it's those stupid bills that aims to protect Canadian content that relatively no one watches.

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

#199

Post by mrtranscendence »

llm_nerd wrote: post #103
crazygringo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would seem to be the one against the spirit of HN here. You're calling anyone who might disagree with Canada and agree with Google "bootlicker sorts" (I see no other way to interpret your original comment) and now you're doubling down about people "ready to tow the line for them" and "do the dirty work for them". That's "grossly counterproductive". Please don't call names or insinuate that commenters are doing "d…

>You're calling anyone who might disagree with Canada and agree with Google "bootlicker sorts" Again. Christ. Honest question: How can people so lacking at basic set logic actually function in this field? If you need to manufacture the position of the person you're "arguing with", take a break from the internet. Though it's actually telling that a couple of people felt personally attacked by a general statement. I ge…

You say anyone interpreting your earlier statement as being about those who agree with Google lack basic logic, yet you repeatedly say things like this to people defending Google:

> And given that I'm not a pathetic bootlicker, I don't immediately look to rationalize for them.

If you don’t want to imply that you think this about anyone taking Google’s side, maybe use some more nuanced language. Just a suggestion.

Frankly, it seems to me that you want it both ways — to insult people who disagree with you but then hide behind some purely technical sense in which you didn’t.

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

#200

Post by mrtranscendence »

idopmstuff wrote: post #148

I've been trying this out with real estate (interior and exterior of single family homes) photos, and it's pretty good but definitely hallucinates. I gave it one of the front of a house, and it talked about windows on the second story, even though it was a one story house. Gave it the interior of a bathroom, and it mentioned a couple of pieces of art on the wall (there were none) and doubled down by describing them w…

I don’t know that Google has said exactly how it’s implemented this feature under the hood. The underlying Palm 2 model does not natively handle images, though, so it’s relying on other services like Lens to handle the image understanding part. I suspect these are feeding imperfect information back to Bard, who relays that info to the user.
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