Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 234 posts

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#111

Post by capableweb »

LightDub wrote: post #91

People shouldn't underestimate Google here. I'm not a fan (not for a decade ... Reader still stings amongst many other missteps), but I'm constantly impressed by how much better their Assistant, translation and speech-to-text stuff is versus things like Siri, etc. Almost as if Google handles the larger dataset that it has access to in a much better way than the other companies. I wouldn't bet against them doing that…

To me they seem to be beaten at all of those areas. DeepL does translations much better than Google Translate (for the four languages I know and speak regularly), Siri does speech-to-text (and text-to-spech) better and so on.

The only thing Google really beats the competition on is Android Auto, which is miles ahead of CarPlay. CarPlay still covers the entire screen when there is an incoming call, so good luck seeing your turn-by-turn directions if you happen to be navigating.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#112

Post by spindle »

smegger001 wrote: post #87
preommr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and launch a half-baked product It'll be fortunate if it's only half-baked. These digital assitants are already rough around the edges with how they sometimes confidently provide inaccurate information. Add on Google's absolutely abysmal product development track record and the internal confusion over being forced into doing this and this isn't a stand alone application but it's being integrated into something, and…

>These digital assitants are already rough around the edges with how they sometimes confidently provide inaccurate information. its only going to get worse. because there will LLMs like chatgpt pumping out content for SEO content mills with no vetting for accuracy, then the next generation of LLMs are trained on them thus further corrupting the knowledge base they pull on to produce new content. its going to be a hor…

Yes! You're the first person I've heard say that and I'm sure you're right.

Then there will be some market for better-trained LLMs, which it will still be possible to make using curated data sets, but that will be expensive, and product differentiation will be messy. We're in for quite a ride. I can't predict the outcome. Maybe there is no stable outcome.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#113

Post by shkkmo »

denlekke wrote: post #90
jeffbee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell from the tweet why the Bard response is wrong. Is it because some other instrument has taken an image of an exoplanet, or because no instrument has ever done so? ChatGPT seems to believe it is the latter.

i'm not a grammar expert but i think as a layperson there is a little bit of ambiguity in how a reader could interpret Bard's response. If i were writing i would probably specify "first ever picture". I think a lot of times words like "the first" are relative and context specific which the Bard answer lacks.

There is no ambiguity. We don't call Neil Armstrong "the first ever man on the moon". "The first" has a clear meaning and making any qualification of that implicit is either deceptive or bad writing.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#114

Post by tarsinge »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #110
partiallypro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the problem here is monetization, will search even be profitable if LLMs are used for most queries? I think that is a concern, which is why I think Microsoft has a chance to just bundle this or a more advanced version with Microsoft 365. Then you're already paying for it. That automatically puts it in the hands of millions of paying customers and corporations. You can just raise your price by a dollar a month or so…

"Clippy, write me a 25 page requirements doc for an integration between Workday and our IAM solution."

Thanks to that joke I just imagined how it could be a game changer for internal corporate documents (the kind that are 50+ pages and never read), especially if it’s native into Office.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#115

Post by simonw »

williamcotton wrote: post #84

Anyone remember Google panicking after Facebook took off so they bought Orkut and rushed out a crappy “social app development environment”?

I remember Google panicking about Facebook, shipping Google+ and telling the entire company that their annual bonuses would be tied exclusively to how well their work supported the success of Google+.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#116

Post by modeless »

enobrev wrote: post #68
partiallypro wrote: post #18

I think there is a genuine concern that Google could overreact and launch a half-baked product in pure panic of being left behind or one upped by Microsoft. There is also a fear, I think, that the ChatGPT integration with Bing/Edge could not go all that smoothly. I think it could be game changing in many ways, but I can also see both of these falling apart. Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be g…

> Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be good at launch In my own experience, Alexa and Google's query pucks were improving for a short time, and then got considerably worse, losing features every month until they basically stopped understanding or responding to anything but the simplest requests. A couple months after released, they expanded android auto with the same abilities, so I could "ok go…

Years ago, before it was Google Assistant, my phone could hear me say OK Google while sitting in a cupholder driving down the road. Now my phone frequently fails to respond when I'm holding it near my face in a silent room. But somehow it still has more false positive activations. And they haven't added a single new feature I actually find useful in that entire time.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#117

Post by spindle »

dougmwne wrote: post #33
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner. A few sources will control the information we get in a much more direct and extreme way than now, that conscious skepticism will no longer be able to defend. Whatever handwaved promises we get now will be gone ten years from now. If there wasn't such a gee-whiz coolness factor about conversational…

Oh please. As if the reputation of any news outlet even matters anymore. They all fired their real journalists and fact checkers long ago. Everything you read is full of inaccuracies, agenda pushing and misinformation. If you think it doesn’t, you’ve been had.

That's true of (commercial) news outlets. It doesn't apply to "everything you read". There are many ways to check facts that don't rely on news outlets, at least for people who have time and resources.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#118

Post by krackers »

capableweb wrote: post #111
LightDub wrote: post #91

People shouldn't underestimate Google here. I'm not a fan (not for a decade ... Reader still stings amongst many other missteps), but I'm constantly impressed by how much better their Assistant, translation and speech-to-text stuff is versus things like Siri, etc. Almost as if Google handles the larger dataset that it has access to in a much better way than the other companies. I wouldn't bet against them doing that…

To me they seem to be beaten at all of those areas. DeepL does translations much better than Google Translate (for the four languages I know and speak regularly), Siri does speech-to-text (and text-to-spech) better and so on. The only thing Google really beats the competition on is Android Auto, which is miles ahead of CarPlay. CarPlay still covers the entire screen when there is an incoming call, so good luck seeing…

Google products to me are the definition of mediocrity. They're "designed by committee" and play it safe, they're probably "good enough" for most people, but they're certainly not the best in class. As you noted Google Translate pales in comparison to DeepL, Google's TTS are worse than similar offerings from Amazon/AWS, let alone more niche focused products like Voicepeak, and you know that they're phoning it in for search given that there's a startup (Kagi) whose sole value proposiion is to use Google's own API then rerank results to achieve much better results.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#119

Post by college_physics »

Given that the flaws of this new approach to search would be more or less shared by any other effort based on similar algorithms, thus also openai/microsoft, maybe this is just a PR battle and Google declaring, "yes, we can outcompete you in recklesness and sillynes"...

An interesting question is whether the inability to ascertain "truth" can be contained somehow so as not to lead to mass ridicule. I doubt it but not an expert in this area. My guess is that it would have to be limited to specific curated domains, a combined system that could be invaluable to knowledge workers but maybe not exactly the desired business model of "big tech"

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#120

Post by MatthiasPortzel »

partiallypro wrote: post #77
criddell wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Echo devices were wildly profitable, earning $100+ billion per year, then I would say Alexa isn't losing money for Amazon.

Siri is not why people are buying iPhones, in fact well over 50% of users say they never or rarely use it. So, your point doesn't really hold up. Siri still loses money, just like Google Assistant and Alexa. The apps you listed to compare with OS bundles have not even close to the same overhead as a digital assistant and can be handled with relatively small programming teams.

Apple is selling HomePods and iPhones for a profit. But Amazon is/was selling Echos for a loss, in the hope that they would drive additional Prime music subscriptions and lower friction to Amazon purchases. That didn’t happen, and so the product line all-devices-sold-with-Alexa has lost Amazon money. The equivalent comparison, all devices with Siri, has made Apple a ton of money.
Post reply on HN