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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

#211

Post by shellfishgene »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #201
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 wonder how AI SEO will look like. Bribe click workers to allow advertising to pass through in the ground truth data ?

Maybe companies will add dozens of pages of text to their websites describing every little detail of their great products in every way possible in the hopes of getting picked up for the training data for the models. That text would of course also be written by some ai...

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

#212

Post by enobrev »

happymellon wrote: post #197
enobrev wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There is also the crap around regions. I'm in the UK, but if I set my assistant to the the US suddenly it can understand a lot more and perform a lot more tasks. Although while it understands a lot more, it's still getting worse. Same about my Fitbit Versa. It was great, and now Google removes features. At this point I would just prefer it if they let me just replace the firmware with one of the opensource projects.…

This is why I've kept my pucks. I'm hoping for a hackaday post or something where someone installs their own _something_ on them. They have great mics and the speakers are decent. Wouldn't mind using them as an interface to Mycroft or something.

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

#213

Post by happymellon »

enobrev wrote: post #212
happymellon wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the crap around regions. I'm in the UK, but if I set my assistant to the the US suddenly it can understand a lot more and perform a lot more tasks. Although while it understands a lot more, it's still getting worse. Same about my Fitbit Versa. It was great, and now Google removes features. At this point I would just prefer it if they let me just replace the firmware with one of the opensource projects.…

This is why I've kept my pucks. I'm hoping for a hackaday post or something where someone installs their own _something_ on them. They have great mics and the speakers are decent. Wouldn't mind using them as an interface to Mycroft or something.

Unfortunately Mycroft is dead.

Maybe Rhasspy with Home Assistant will save us from this mess.

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

#214

Post by acdha »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #201
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 wonder how AI SEO will look like. Bribe click workers to allow advertising to pass through in the ground truth data ?

Thinking about how tech products are covered in the mainstream press, especially in the past when a lot of older journalists really didn’t have enough experience to ask the right questions, I’m betting this will be similar: write authoritative-sounding prose suggesting not just your company’s products but their preferred terminology and world-view, and spread it around as widely as possible. Get experts, real or self-labeled, to make ostensibly neutral buyer’s guides or reviews which conveniently exclude competitors (e.g. if my job was selling an Android phone, I might assert that nobody should even consider a closed-source OS for security reasons because that precludes the biggest decision while appearing to be objective).

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

#215

Post by pohuing »

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…

Well yeah, when I make a tool I want it to do its job correctly. If it doesn't I throw it out. If a human keeps messing up I do the same. A human messing up confidently in their interview probably won't even get hired...

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

#216

Post by cmiles74 »

Gigachad wrote: post #206
jonas21 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would LLMs be less monetizable than search? People are still going to want to buy goods and services, and being the place they go to find out about those goods and services will be just as valuable as it is today. Perhaps even more so, since LLMs are able to answer questions that are difficult to formulate as search queries.

Probably because they are too expensive. I heard it costs 7 cents per query on average for ChatGPT. That’s more than ads pay.

With the search query as the prompt, they could probably cache the response and use it several times. That might keep the cost down to something reasonable.

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

#217

Post by acdha »

partiallypro wrote: post #176
MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple's HomePods have been a resounding failure though? I don't know where you're getting your data, but it's wrong. They literally discontinued the original model because sales were SO bad.

Speaking of data, what are you basing that on? They seem to be selling well according to industry reports and companies tend not to continue products which lose money.

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

#218

Post by philistine »

SilverBirch wrote: post #208

Whilst it's funny this showed up in the advert, we do kind of need to temper expectations. These products are meant to be "Artificial Intelligence" - they will get things wrong just like normal intelligent people. This is why it's kind of why they're not well suited for search, because people who are searching for stuff need to be make their own judgement about the credibility of a source. Sometimes I need a high lev…

Tell that to the people developping the product. Nothing in the UI invites caution.

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

#219

Post by dwringer »

pohuing wrote: post #215
dwringer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well yeah, when I make a tool I want it to do its job correctly. If it doesn't I throw it out. If a human keeps messing up I do the same. A human messing up confidently in their interview probably won't even get hired...

Sure but this seems analogous to creating a claw hammer then showing off how it can be used to drive screws, then saying the hammer isn't doing its job correctly when the screws aren't driven properly.

I think chat technology like this is an incredible tool, but I don't think it's being judged fairly: I don't think its usefulness is as some kind of oracle or advisor expected to provide correct or logical information. That seems so orthogonal (if not diametrically opposed) from its actual function that it really feels like we're being trolled by things like "Galactica". But I'm much more (cautiously) optimistic about the potential use for the technology in web search, which has never been logical or "correct" and has always required critical thinking on the part of its users.

Perhaps there should be more of a disclaimer that the things it says are not and cannot be construed to be factual, no matter how verisimilitudinous.

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

#220

Post by Sohakes »

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”?

Not what happened though. Orkut actually launched a month before facebook and it was a 20% project, it wasn't a panick move or a big project for them. And it was great, imo google did badly on not maintaining it.

You can make this point about google+ though, totally panick move.

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