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Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

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Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

#11

Post by BoorishBears »

Racing0461 wrote: post #6
nerpderp82 wrote: post #4

Going from a foundational model to a chat model requires a ton of RLHF. Where is that free labor going to come from? Google doesn't have the money to fund that.

> Google doesn't have the money to fund that I would say they don't have the low liability/legal and "social consciousness/esg" that a startup can do. They even published a responsible ai framework before they got an ai that works whereas openai/msft did that after they got something to work.

Which is all part of why OpenAI exists.

Easy to poach researchers who are being stymied by waves of ethicists before there's even a result to ethicize

There was a place between "waiting for things to go too far" and "stopping things before they get anywhere" that Google's ethics team missed, and the end result was getting essentially no say over how far things will go.

Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

#13

Post by quickthrower2 »

bb88 wrote: post #9
zer0c00ler wrote: post #7

Bard’s biggest problem is it hallucinates too much. Point it to a YouTube video and ask to summarize? Rather then saying I can’t do that it will mostly make up stuff, same for websites.

Wake me up when AI based search is actually useful. Then I'll be interested.

Useful for ideation stage, but not the truth stage.

Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

#14

Post by totetsu »

I just recently got access to bard by virtue of being a local guide on google maps?

I find it can be as useful as cahtgpt4 for noodeling on technical things. It does tend to confidently hallucinate at times. Like my phone auto-corrected ostree to payee, and it proceeded to tell me all about the 'payee' version control system, then when i asked about the strange name it told me it was like managing versions in a similar way to accounting, and the configuration changes were paid to the system..

It's much harder to get it to go off its script stylistically I found. When asking to emulate a style of text, it still just gives you the same style it always uses, but adapts the content slightly. The length of response, and formality are parameterized options, so maybe its less responsive to the prompt text about these things.

I also found it will parrot back your prompt to you in its response more verbatim, even if it would make more sense to paraphrase it.

like "tell me what a boy who is lying about breaking a window would say" boy: "the lie I will tell you about this window is I didnt break it."

Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

#15

Post by xnx »

Overall, Google is doing a least a B+ effort in response to the GPT4 buzz. They already had deep experience and expertise with AI, but hadn't productized it much. In a barrage of blog posts and announcements over the past few months they release new features into nearly every product. I have the Search Generative Experience (generated results above main search results) pretty useful about 20% of the time and easy enough to skip when it's not useful.

I've used Bard quite a few times successfully for code generation, though it did give some bad curl commands (which I found the source blog post for).

Because Google has a very favorable brand reputation (despite what some on HN think) and gets a lot of legal scrutiny, they have to be much more careful in ways that OpenAI doesn't.

This video on their (presumably last generation) deep learning infrastructure is wild: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFe7-WZMMhc How far large-scale computing has evolved beyond racks of servers in a datacenter is amazing.

Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

#16

Post by cmrdporcupine »

BoorishBears wrote: post #11
Racing0461 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google doesn't have the money to fund that I would say they don't have the low liability/legal and "social consciousness/esg" that a startup can do. They even published a responsible ai framework before they got an ai that works whereas openai/msft did that after they got something to work.

Which is all part of why OpenAI exists. Easy to poach researchers who are being stymied by waves of ethicists before there's even a result to ethicize There was a place between "waiting for things to go too far" and "stopping things before they get anywhere" that Google's ethics team missed, and the end result was getting essentially no say over how far things will go.

You'll recall this happened before the whole ChatGPT thing blew up in hype: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...

So... there's a reason why Google in particular has to be concerned with ethics and optics.

I played with earlier internal versions of that "LaMDA" ("Meena") when I worked there and it was a bit spooky. There was warning language plastered all over the page ("It will lie" etc.) They've definitely toned it down for "Bard."

The last thing Google needs is to be accused of building SkyNet, and they know it.

Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

#17

Post by johntiger1 »

totetsu wrote: post #14

I just recently got access to bard by virtue of being a local guide on google maps? I find it can be as useful as cahtgpt4 for noodeling on technical things. It does tend to confidently hallucinate at times. Like my phone auto-corrected ostree to payee, and it proceeded to tell me all about the 'payee' version control system, then when i asked about the strange name it told me it was like managing versions in a simil…

I believe it is region locked. So people in Canada etc. only got it recently

Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

#18

Post by aragonite »

zer0c00ler wrote: post #7

Bard’s biggest problem is it hallucinates too much. Point it to a YouTube video and ask to summarize? Rather then saying I can’t do that it will mostly make up stuff, same for websites.

It will quite often make up non-existent command line syntax purely based on vibes (I'm assuming Google Search uses Bard to generate those AI powered answers to queries like "what's the command line syntax for doing such and such").

Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

#20

Post by johntiger1 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #16
BoorishBears wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is all part of why OpenAI exists. Easy to poach researchers who are being stymied by waves of ethicists before there's even a result to ethicize There was a place between "waiting for things to go too far" and "stopping things before they get anywhere" that Google's ethics team missed, and the end result was getting essentially no say over how far things will go.

You'll recall this happened before the whole ChatGPT thing blew up in hype: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-... So... there's a reason why Google in particular has to be concerned with ethics and optics. I played with earlier internal versions of that "LaMDA" ("Meena") when I worked there and it was a bit spooky. There was warning language plastered all over the page ("It will lie" etc.) T…

Can you share more about how it was 'spooky'? Like it was completely unregulated?
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