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Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK

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Re: Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has the tendency to do this when they aren't the first to set foot on new land. Don't get me wrong, they get a lot of things very right: Gmail works perfectly, I can't find a single reason to change my pixel for anything else, search, although there's been a lot of deterioration in the past couple of years, is still second to none. That said, self driving cars, google+, duo and all the other services they laun…

> I can't find a single reason to change my pixel for anything else, Fingerprint reader on the Pixel 7 works about half the time. I had to program one finger in 4 times to make it work that often. My Oneplus 6 (immediately previous phone) had a functional fingerprint reader. OnePlus used to have a better UI as well, minor improvements on the stock Android UI that made it just a little bit nicer in places. When I got…

My Pixel 7's fingerprint reader works near 100% of the time. The only time I have problems is if my finger or the screen are wet.

Re: Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK

#272
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hint: the alternatives don't involve ads.

YouTube has a paid option and even here on HN, the mecca of anti-ad sentiment, people openly admit to using ad blockers there instead even though that means the creators they're watching do not get paid. Hint: People are cheap. They want free stuff, not paid alternatives.

I agree it's challenging, but that doesn't stop me wishing for a world where stalking everybody on the planet, publishing outrage-bait, and spreading conspiracy theories is not a massively profitable business.

Re: Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK

#273

This release just makes me want to short GOOGL

Honestly, it's probably not a bad idea if you do it today. Remember that desperate AI presentation they gave a month or two ago? Their stock tanked after that, but it was a day or two after it showed up on HN. So, assuming investors haven't noticed how shit this is yet, you might be ahead of the game if you short it now.

Re: Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK

#274

I'm curious for those who have actually tried it, what they think of the performance. A lot of the threads here are just talking about the country-limited rollout.

The performance is leagues ahead of chatgpt. It's really quick and can also Google information with like 0 delay.

Re: Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK

#275

I just got off the waitlist. Quick impression: it's not as good as ChatGPT. I gave it the false belief test (Alice and Bob are playing, Bob leaves, Alice hides his toy, Bob comes back, where does he look for his toy?), which it both passed and recognized as the false belief test. I then asked it to write a React program that ChatGPT has no problem with, and it hallucinated some incorrect code before eventually tellin…

Put your same prompt into Bard and it didn't even hallucinate for me first, just telling me "I can't assist you with that, as I'm only a language model and don't have the capacity to understand and respond."

Only about 10 minutes into Bard right now but this is the first time its been stumped. Haven't tried much code yet though

Overall, UX and speed are good. Results are not bad.

Re: Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK

#276

I just got off the waitlist. Quick impression: it's not as good as ChatGPT. I gave it the false belief test (Alice and Bob are playing, Bob leaves, Alice hides his toy, Bob comes back, where does he look for his toy?), which it both passed and recognized as the false belief test. I then asked it to write a React program that ChatGPT has no problem with, and it hallucinated some incorrect code before eventually tellin…

Put your same prompt into Bard and it didn't even hallucinate for me first, just telling me "I can't assist you with that, as I'm only a language model and don't have the capacity to understand and respond." Only about 10 minutes into Bard right now but this is the first time its been stumped. Haven't tried much code yet though Overall, UX and speed are good. Results are not bad.

Yeah, it was a slight variation of it that I used where it gave me the hallucinated code (EDIT: just found the prompt, tried it again, and got a different hallucination [0]):

> Write a React program to display a counter, and a button labeled "decrease." The counter should start at 0. Clicking the button should decrement the counter by 2, unless that would cause the counter to go below 0. Every second, the counter should increment by 1. If clicking the button would cause the counter to go below 0, the button should be disabled.

Agreed the speed is impressive, although some of that might be due to its limited context memory. The UX is fine, but it's not like that's a difficult thing to implement.

[0] https://codesandbox.io/s/trusting-kirch-c2c575

P.S. If you can't find your previous prompts, make sure you switch to the right account on the "Bard Activity" page.

Re: Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK

#278
This hallucines way worse than GPT-4.

Me: How many cities in the UK have a population over 1 million?

Bard: There is only one city in the UK that has a population over 1 million: London.

Me: What is the population of Birmingham?

Bard: According to the latest 2021 UK census, Birmingham has a population of 1,144,900 people. This makes Birmingham the second-largest city in the United Kingdom.

Me: So how many cities in the UK have a population of 1 million?

Bard: There are 4 cities in the UK with a population of 1 million or more:

    London - 9.078 million
    Birmingham - 1.144 million
    Manchester - 2.747 million
    Glasgow - 1.264 million

(For the record those numbers are all wildly incorrect)

Re: Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK

#279
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that was LaMDA. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

Bard is "powered by LaMDA". So it's at the bare minimum an interface to LaMDA. I don't know exactly what's being added to make it distinct from LaMDA, but it is being pushed as LaMDA with extra bits.

I think they dumbed it down in order to release it, so that Google researcher probably interacted with a much less restricted version of LaMDA.

I tried a version of BingChat that was so crippled after their fine tuning went off the rails that taking to a cat would be more informative.

I think this is what will happen here, Bart play reasonably dumb to keep it safe and then they will enhance it with more sophisticated capabilities.

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