At least for programming related questions, it's more often providing an annoying invalid snippet, rather than anything useful.
Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
91–100 of 218 posts
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#92Look 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…
> Look at Gemini, it’s their new model, currently in closed beta. With all the talent, data, and infrastructure that Google has, I believe them. That said, it is almost comical they'd not unleash what they keep saying is the better model. I am sure they have safety reasons and world security concerns given their gargantuan scale, but nothing they couldn't solve, surely? They make more in a week than what OpenAI proba…
> They make more in a week than what OpenAI probably makes in a year!
This is arguably the problem. OpenAI is loss leading (ChatGPT is free!) with a limited number of users. Scale and maturity work against Google here, because if they were to give an equivalent product to its billions of users, Sundar would have some hard questions to answer at the next quarterly earnings call.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#93Look 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…
> Look at Gemini, it’s their new model, currently in closed beta. With all the talent, data, and infrastructure that Google has, I believe them. That said, it is almost comical they'd not unleash what they keep saying is the better model. I am sure they have safety reasons and world security concerns given their gargantuan scale, but nothing they couldn't solve, surely? They make more in a week than what OpenAI proba…
What is the upside for google? Their business is advertising and they have a massive platform for this already. What does a chatbot add? Showing that they are keeping up with evolving technology and that they also can train a competitive offering? From a pride perspective I see why they'd want to compete with OpenAI but from a business perspective? GPT+Bing has come and gone... I'm sure google worries about their business model being disrupted by LLMs but it's clear the mere existence of a chatbot isn't enough. So why rush to a competitive commerical offering?
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#94Bard’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.
Yup. For example I asked it some questions in linear algebra[1]. The answers (if you didn't know linear algebra) seemed convincing, full of equations etc but the equations were wrong. Looked good, but just totally wrong in loads of important ways. When I pointed out the mistake it geneally returned with a proof of why its previous result was wrong.
Now I could have walked away patting myself on the back, but even with correct equations, the answers were wrong in a deeper, more fundamental way. If you were trying to use it as a tool for learning (a sort of co-pilot for self-study) which is how I use GPT-4 sometimes it would have been really terrible as it could completely mess up your understanding of foundational concepts. It doesn't just make simple mistakes it makes really profound mistakes and presents them in a really convincing way.
[1] What's the difference between a linear map and a linear transformation? What are the properties of a vector space? etc
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
By "sentient," do you mean able to experience qualia? Most people consider chickens sentient (otherwise animal cruelty wouldn't upset us, since we'd know they can't actually experience pain) - is it so hard to imagine neural networks gaining sentience once they pass the chicken complexity threshold? Sure, LLMs wouldn't have human-like qualia - they measure time in iters, they're constantly rewound or paused or edited…
What an absolute slurry this is: Jumping from defining sentience in terms of what upsets people when subjected to animal cruelty... to arbitrarily selecting chickens as a lynchpin based on that. Then diving on deeper still on a rain puddle deep thought.
Fruit flies are also sentient, while you're out here inventing thresholds why aim so high?
You could have even gone with a shrimp and let Weizenbaum know ELIZA was sentient too.
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At some point academic stammering meets the real world: when you start pulling fire alarms because you coaxed an LLM into telling you it'll be sad if you delete it, you've gone too far.
Lemoine wasn't fired for thinking an LLM was sentient, he was fired for deciding he was the only sane person in a room with hundreds of thousands of people.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#96Google's AI experience is going to be about the same as their social experiments which is they'll fail. I didn't think this before but now realising ChatGPT and other personal assistants (because that's what they are) will really succeed not just because of performance but network effects and social mindshare. You'll use the most popular AI assistant because that's what everyone else is using. Maybe some of these thi…
I do think google will fail and will suck at anything requiring a network effect, but I don't think OpenAI's success is to do with network effects. OpenAI for instance has really not cracked social features in ChatGPT - they have a "share link" thing now which they didn't have before but that's really it. Bard doesn't even have any social sharing.
The reason OpenAI are in the lead at the moment is their model is way better than anyone else's to the point where it's actually useful for a lot of things. Not just giving a recipe for marinara sauce in the style of Biggie Smalls or other party tricks, proof reading, summarizing, turning text into bullets, giving examples of things, coming up with practise exercises to illustrate a point, giving critiques of stuff etc etc. Lots of things that people actually do it does well enough to be helpful, whereas in my experience so far, other models are just not quite good enough to be helpful at a number of those tasks. So there's really no reason to use them over gpt4.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#97After the massive facepalm on launch I'd pretty much forgotten it existed, tbh.
It will be discontinued anyway, like nearly all google products.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#98Still not available in my country.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#99Generally worst than GPT4 but have some killer features, today I asked it for Mortal Kombat 1 release time in my time zone, I can also upload photo and have conversation about it But if you really wonder what they are building, get access to maker suite and play with, there is nothing comparable to it, only issue for it supports English only
Sorry, what exactly is the killer feature in this example? You say you asked it something and then didn't say what killer answer it actually responded with
OP probably means access to information after Sep 2021. MK1 release date was announced 1 week ago.
Re: Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?
#100I use it when ChatGPT is down. Code generation is definitely worse.