What happened to IBM's Watson?
Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
41–50 of 218 posts
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#42six months later and not available in Canada, somehow
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#43On another topic, how is Lotus 1-2-3 going these days?
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#44I use Bard often to help me with proofreading and writing. Things that used to be a chore are now easy. I've been able to knock out a whitepaper I've been sitting on for months in just a few days.
I think asking it for precise answers is the wrong approach. At this point, Bard is a lot more of an artist than a mathematician or scientist. So it's like approaching Van Gogh and asking him to do linear algebra.
Bard is really good at some things, and if you understand how to work with him, he can take you far.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#45They seem pretty hush about Bard development, but they do appear to be working on it. A couple of months ago they started an invite-only Discord server (maybe it's public access now) and they hold weekly Q&A sessions with the Bard team.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#46Bard was just produced so Google could tell shareholders that they attempted to enter the "AI" space and "compete" with GPT (as if this was somehow a worthy goal, and worth the time of engineers). Given that goal, it succeeded: they can now tell shareholders they tried and people used it, but now the market is slowly moving to abandon chatty AI type LLM things.
the market is slowly moving to abandon chatty AI type LLM things
I didn't know this was happening. Do you know where the market is moving to?
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#47Earlier 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…
That is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about:
Lemoine was a random SWE experiencing RLHF'd LLM output for the first time, just like the rest of the world did just a few months later... and his mind went straight to "It's Sentient!".
That would have been fine, but when people who understood the subject tried to explain, he decided that it was actually proof he was right so he tried to go nuclear.
And when going nuclear predictably backfired he used that as proof that he was even more right.
In retrospect he fell for his own delusion: Hundreds of millions of people have now used a more advanced system than he did and intuited its nature better than he did as an employee.
_
But imagine knowing all that in real-time and watching a media circus actually end up affecting your work?
OpenAI wouldn't have had people who fit his profile in the building. There'd be an awareness that you needed a certain level of sophistication and selectiveness that the most gun-ho ethicists might object to as meaning you're not getting fair testing done.
But in the end, I guess Lemoine got over it too: seeing as he's now AI Lead for a ChatGPT wrapper that pretends to be a given person. https://www.mimio.ai/
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#48Bard was just produced so Google could tell shareholders that they attempted to enter the "AI" space and "compete" with GPT (as if this was somehow a worthy goal, and worth the time of engineers). Given that goal, it succeeded: they can now tell shareholders they tried and people used it, but now the market is slowly moving to abandon chatty AI type LLM things.
the market is slowly moving to abandon chatty AI type LLM things I didn't know this was happening. Do you know where the market is moving to?
The stock market I’m guessing.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#49We tested Bard (aka Bison in GCP) for generating SQL.
It has worse generalization capabilities than even GPT-3.5 but actually does as well at GPT-4 when given contextually relevant examples selected from a large corpus of examples.
https://vanna.ai/blog/ai-sql-accuracy.html
This suggests to me that it needs longer prompts to avoid the hallucination problem that everyone else seems be experiencing.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#50The thing I like about Bard is that it is very low friction to use. You just go to the website and use it. There's no logging in, no 20 seconds of "checking your browser," etc. So I've actually been using it more than GPT for my simple throwaway questions. That being said, I'd still prefer GPT for any coding or math based questions, and even that is not completely reliable.