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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

#71

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…

>We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products

Fine. We need another good winter or ten before we decide we want to commit societal suicide via deepfake tsunami.

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

#72

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…

That only makes sense if they can charge more for office 365. Shoving more features into something people pay for doesn’t mean those feature were worth it.

Except that's not the calculus. By integrating chatgpt with their products, Microsoft pulls users away from: search, docs/workspace, and even gmail, and brings them over into: Bing, Office365, and outlook. In doing so, they threaten google's core income stream, and therefore google's ability to fight back.

Microsoft is not paying for an expensive search engine: Microsoft is paying (with chatgpt compute infrastructure) for a much larger piece of the productivity suite market, and hamstringing google in the process.

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic Alexa can't lose Amazon any money because it's baked into their products. But in fact, it's a massive money suck. It lost $10B last year, and there's no way you can say Apple magically avoided losses, because Google had similar losses. There is a reason that none of the assistants have really improved as much as you'd expect over a decade+, it's not profitable, and not only that, but it's also -extremel…

How hard do you really think it is to build intents into something like Siri once you have the underlying technology framework? Yes I have experience building intents on top of something like Siri.

It’s not the complexity of building intents that costs the money. Near real-time speech inference at scale doesn’t come for free. It’s only very recently that has started moving to the edge.

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

#75

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…

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

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 Siri was eliminated. In other words, if Siri is not a product differentiator, it's likely losing money (in the management accounting sense).

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

#76
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic Alexa can't lose Amazon any money because it's baked into their products. But in fact, it's a massive money suck. It lost $10B last year, and there's no way you can say Apple magically avoided losses, because Google had similar losses. There is a reason that none of the assistants have really improved as much as you'd expect over a decade+, it's not profitable, and not only that, but it's also -extremel…

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.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard do you really think it is to build intents into something like Siri once you have the underlying technology framework? Yes I have experience building intents on top of something like Siri.

It’s not the complexity of building intents that costs the money. Near real-time speech inference at scale doesn’t come for free. It’s only very recently that has started moving to the edge.

Speech inference has been done well enough locally for well over a decade. While an Alexa device probably couldn’t do it, any modern iPhone could.

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

#79
post #26

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…

When I ask ChatGPT a question, it explains it's reasoning and gives me concepts I can follow up with googling to learn more. When I use Google for research, I get articles written for SEO to push products and often have to refine and refine and refine to get something useful, which I then can follow up by googling to learn more. With difficulty. Honestly I don't know how much I'd use ChatGPT if I had the internet of…

Careful, It explains but both answer and explanation are sometimes completely hallucinated, it sometimes looks like a plausible answer, but actually it completely made up. And this happens way too often for me to take it seriously for now.

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

#80
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.)

Ha, I initially wrote "its" then got nervous I was wrong, overthought it and did get it wrong.

Maybe it's okay if the AI gets its grammar wrong sometimes, as long as it's less wrong than humans?
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