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Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

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

#181

Post by unholythree »

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…

I wonder if they nerfed their assistants because paths that are too autonomous too easily wander into PR nightmares. Carefully curated results and behavior isn't going to spontaneously generate content actual human beings would consider offensive or prejudiced. People are pretty eager to pull out their pitchforks, and "Big Tech Builds Vile Hate Bot" make a excellent click-bate headline every time.

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

#182

Post by microtherion »

criddell wrote: post #76
rchaud wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In management accounting, everything has a cost that has to be quantified, regardless of whether it's a standalone product or part of a HW/SW bundle. At the most basic levels, you have revenue centers (iPhone unit, iCloud unit), and cost centers (Apple Maps unit, customer support unit). All of these have operating costs. The only way Siri does not lose Apple money is if there would be materially fewer iPhones sold if…

If you removed Siri, it would serious limit what you can do in CarPlay and you would also lose voice dictation. I think there would be materially fewer iPhones sold.

Agree about CarPlay. Siri is also pretty much indispensable for HomePods, though that's probably a minor product for Apple, and it plays an important role in AirPods.

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

#183

Post by somenameforme »

whatshisface wrote: post #48
jug wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, the “New Bing” AI results will not be unsourced but with key facts in sentences tagged in Wikipedia style, pointing towards the source URL. Finally, below the reply there will be a domain summary for an overview but where each domain name is clickable to get to the respective articles on said domains. In this case, Bing AI will operate very differently from ChatGPT.

In which case we would expect an LLM-based system to output something like, "(Fact that isn't true)[Source that does not make that claim but comes close enough that you wouldn't notice it just by skimming]" leading to even more people thinking it's true than otherwise.

This is going to get real nasty when you start getting into science of various sorts, where an increasing number of papers, particularly in the social sciences, tend to make extreme and outlandish claims, but then walk them back extensively in the actual paper itself emphasizing it's just a correlation, or otherwise demonstrating an extremely marginal effect.

Yet the media tends to miss the internationally understated nuance and run with the claims at face value, which an LLM will then pick up on and state, "Yes scientists have proven that [x] does cause [y]. [1][2][3][4][5]" That claim then gets repeated elsewhere, and eventually that "elsewhere" goes on to become part of the LLM's new training material where it's basically training off its own output.

It'd be ironic if something that's ideally designed to make the breadth of human knowledgeable more readily available and accessible than ever before, ends up just making society vastly more misinformed than ever before.

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

#184

Post by microtherion »

vineyardmike wrote: post #139
criddell wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lose these companies money How can you say Siri loses Apple money? Does GarageBand lose them money? Photo Booth? Contacts?

Because they pay for servers and engineers for a product that they don’t charge for. It also doesn’t help sell phones when only 15% of users use it at least daily: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696740/united-states-vir...

Apple has something like 2 billion devices in use out there. 15% of that would be quite nice: https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/02/03/why-apple-stock-wa...

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

#186

Post by est »

advisedwang wrote: post #2

There was a lot of stories like "Webb captures it's fist ever picture of an exoplanet" [eg]. My guess is that it's digesting those and not understanding that the "it's" in that sentence is critical. Here is a prior example of an exoplanet picture: https://esahubble.org/images/heic0821a/ [eg] https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-its-...

My thoughts exactly. natural language semantics is imperfect and human reasoning is weird. Let's not mistake LLM models as a single source of absolute truth, but a funny & bullshitting assistant who happens to read and vaguely remembers much information.

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

#187

Post by dietr1ch »

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…

I'd go further and say that SEO has not only ruined search, but the internet itself.

There's so much crappy content around, generated webpages that aim to match every search query. I just looked for "four times five" and there's a huge ton of matches, including pages dedicated to "4x5" [0], which I think do more damage to the web than help.

I feel the web is broken. It was modeled around documents and slowly features started creeping in, like adding images, gifs, audio, video, applications (flash, java), 3D, making the document closer to a program. At every step it felt like an improvement, but it seems that we ended up with another C++. There's probably a law around creating a platform so popular that it'll organically get features until the accidental design is realized to be awful so people start coming up with their ideal subset that works reasonably well because they can't really leave such platform as they became hostages of their investment into it.

[0]: https://multiply.info/times-what-equals/4-times-what-equals-...

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

#188

Post by somenameforme »

dwringer wrote: post #59
lucb1e wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean "its" such as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34359839 >? Given your statement of this being critical... :) (Advice I also gave at work today: just don't use contractions and the right spelling will usually be obvious. In an informal setting, it's more tempting, but that's the way to easily check yourself.)

I like that this thread points out even humans have difficulty with that construction sometimes. We're trying to hold Google's language model to a higher standard than humans in this case I think. I remember "learning" thousands of bits of trivia like that from people who had misinterpreted something they read and misstated it in such a way. Of course Google has already been putting often-incorrect summaries/factoids…

It's not a matter of "its vs it's" in this case, but the very existence of the word in the sentence:

"NASA’s Webb Takes Its First-Ever Direct Image of Distant World"

It doesn't matter if one misspells its. You know what it means and it largely defines this sentence. A failure to parse such a relatively simple construct doesn't bode well.

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

#189

Post by chermanowicz »

sebk wrote: post #162
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.

For what it's worth, ChatGPT is also wrong: https://i.imgur.com/CsQyEc2.png . The correct answer is https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/300/2m1207b-first-imag... as techsupporter posted in a sibling comment

For what it's worth, thats not accurate - a spectrograph was used in 1995 to discover the first exoplanet by Mayor and Queloz, and they received a Nobel prize for this. So GPT is right. One can be pedantic and say that not an "image" but most would disagree.

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

#190

Post by mianos »

keammo1 wrote: post #27
michaericalribo wrote: post #3

This is a great illustration of the risks of LLMs. As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results. That's the whole reason to use the search engine in the first place! We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products that are touted as game changing, outcompeting each other to be the best chatbot that can compose haiku about how grapes tu…

I would definitely fact check search results as much as AI, especially the info snippets that appear at the top of Google's SERPs. For example, until a few months the results for "pork cooked temperature" and "chicken cooked temperature" were returning incorrect values, boldly declaring too low of a temperature right at the top of the page (I know these numbers can vary based on how long the meat is at a certain temp…

Snippets have become so useless I use a plugin to remove them.

What is ridiculous is, when, say, Stack Overflow has a good answer, it is a few lines down or on the next page in the search results, but some page-mill SEO site is in snippets up top with a completely wrong or naively pathetic partially correct answer. It is so annoying it has lowered my opinion on Google a lot in recent times.

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