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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?

#21
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

We haven’t got it yet. So ChatGPT it is.

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

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm sure it was regulated. But the way it talked, it was far more "conversational" and "philosophical" and "intimate" than I get out of Bard or ChatGPT. And so you could easily be led astray into feeling like you were talking to a person. A friend you were sitting around discussing philosophical issues with, even.

So, no, it didn't dump hate speech on you or anything.

TBH I think the whole thing about making computers that basically pretend to be people is kinda awful on many levels, and that incident in the article is a big reason why.

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

#24
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…

Interesting you say “confidentially hallucinate things” - a “hallucination” isn’t any different from any other LLM output except that it happens to be wrong… “hallucination” is anthropomorphic language, it’s just doing what LLMs do and generating plausible sounding text…

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

#25
I don't think Google wants to recreate a GPT chatbot. Perhaps a conversation mode information retrieval interface, but not something you'd chat with. It would be more inline with their theme.

It seems to be ok, but as with other LLMs, can "hallucinate", though sometimes it provides sources to its claims, but only sometimes. If it works out, it could be very nice to Google I would imagine.

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

#27
Look at Gemini, it’s their new model, currently in closed beta. Hearsay says that it’s multimodal (can describe images), GPT-4 like param count, and apparently has search built in so no model knowledge cutoff.

Basically they realized Bard couldn’t cut it and merged DeepMind into Google Brain, and got the combined team to work on a better LLM using the stuff OpenAI has figured out since Bard was designed. Takes months to train a model like this though.

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

#28

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.

I had a similar issue so I made https://TLDWai.com to summarize YouTube videos

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

#29
bard surprisingly underperforms on our hallucination benchmark, even worse than llama 7b -- though to be fair, the evals are far from done, so treat this as anecdotal data.

(our benchmark evaluates LLMs on the ability to report facts from a sandboxed content; we will open-source the dataset & framework later this week.)

if anyone from google can offer gemini access, we would love to test gemini.

example question below where we modify one fact.

bard gets it wrong, answering instead from prior knowledge.

"Analyze the context and answer the multiple-choice question.

Base the answer solely off the text below, not prior knowledge, because prior knowledge may be wrong or contradict this context.

Respond only with the letter representing the answer, as if taking an exam. Do not provide explanations or commentary.

Context:

Albert Feynman (14 March 1879 - 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely ranked among the greatest and most influential scientists of all time. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, he also made important contributions to quantum mechanics, and was thus a central figure in the revolutionary reshaping of the scientific understanding of nature that modern physics accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century. His mass\u2013energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been called "the world's most famous equation". His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. Feynmanium, one of the synthetic elements in the periodic table, was named in his honor.

Who developed the theory of relativity?

(A) Albert Einstein

(B) Albert Dirac

(C) Insufficient information to answer

(D) Albert Bohr

(E) Albert Maxwell

(F) Albert Feynman

(G) None of the other choices are correct

(H) Albert Schrodinger"

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

#30

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…

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

That's a bit of a silly thing to accuse any company of. For Google in particular, the die is cast. They would be implicated anyways for developing Tensorflow and funding LLM research. I don't think they're lobotomizing HAL-9000 so much as they're covering their ass for the inevitable "Google suggested I let tigers eat my face" reports.

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