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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#81
post #13

The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience. I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...

Maybe the Bard announcement was written by Bard?

Out of curiosity, I copied all the text from the website (so it got header, footer, unrelated text) into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize:

This is an article written by the CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, about the company's journey with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pichai discusses how the company has been working on AI for the past six years and how they have been advancing the state of the art in the field. The article mentions the release of an experimental conversational AI service called Bard, which seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power and intelligence of Google's large language models. The CEO also talks about how the company is working on bringing the benefits of AI into its everyday products, starting with Search, and how AI can deepen people's understanding of information and turn it into useful knowledge more efficiently.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#83
post #13

The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience. I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...

It seems like a very reactionary move. ChatGPT went viral, and now they have to rush something to market to try and compete. So of course the product doesn't exist yet, but they've had enough time to put together a project plan and some mockups. It's not a great position to be in.

They've been doing internal testing for while, but I guess they never thought to release it publically until chat GPT became public.

There was even someone who thought it was sentient! https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#84
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a very reactionary move. ChatGPT went viral, and now they have to rush something to market to try and compete. So of course the product doesn't exist yet, but they've had enough time to put together a project plan and some mockups. It's not a great position to be in.

It is a reactionary move, but Bard existed for months on the intranet, but not as a public offering. So they have the technology but not the product.

Presumably this was the infamous tech that got that one worker fired because he thought it was sentient and wanted to blow the whistle on unethical AI treatment right? This story: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...

It would be funny if Google hastily rehires him as a marketing evangelist to show people their AI is so good you think it's alive.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how well that worked out for Google+

It worked for gmail. Maybe some people are too young to remember it was invite-only for years.

I remember asking for an invite on what was probably a phpbb.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#86
post #9

>AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there’s no one right answer. Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and gui…

That's good for users, potentially. But not good for the sites where google is sourcing the information.

That's one of the big problems with these types of AI - piggybacking on everyone else's work, typically with no attribution _whatsoever_.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#87
But but but 'Google is done', 'it is all over for Google Search', 'Google will be dead in 2 years'. /s

Such recent headlines and early proclamations of Google's competitiveness in AI have been erroneously under-estimated here. As soon as OpenAI announces their AI advancement and model, someone else with more money (i.e Google) scales up the parameters, training data to surpass them.

The only way to make both of Google and OpenAI's LLM solutions irrelevant is for someone else to scale up the parameters with a resulting smaller model size and then open source it to all. Neither OpenAI or Google is willing to do that, but it is highly likely that someone else will.

The real 'disruption' and game changer is an open-source smaller model with multi-billion parameters matching the capabilities of ChatGPT.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#88

> Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search Despite this blog obviously being written for Wall St, this line is key. This is why anyone is going to struggle to compete with Google in AI. Google Search is used so widely and its taxonomy of meaning so vast already that once they flip this on they’ll be unstoppable. (Assuming any rate of improvement whatsoever as we search.) I’m not mentioning all other learning da…

I wonder how long till they open it up to your private data stored in Google? Eg.

User: What should I be doing today?

AI: You have a court appearance at 9am. Prioritize that, because failing to appear might result in an arrest warrant. Next, prioritize your mums birthday - all the other family will be there, and with your mums cancer results last week, this might be the last. If you travel between them by bus, then you can spend the time going through your teams messages that you should have replied to last week.

Me: What about the leaking faucet in my house?

AI: You don't have the time to fix it yourself, nor the money to pay a plumber to do it, so I suggest you leave it leaking for now. I watched the video - its leaking down the basin, so won't do damage, and the water cost is around 8 cents a day.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#89
This looks pretty bearish for Google. Bard is clearly a half-baked/unfinished product, and its release represents Google blinking in fear at OpenAI/Microsoft and the like. Google has been undergoing years of stagnation and this announcement is a good hint that they don't have any aces up their sleeve.

If there were ever a time for Google's operational problems and inefficiencies to finally catch up with them, this would be it.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#90

> And today, we’re [...] opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks. It feels like a mistake to make the big announcement for this, but not open it up to a wide audience. It's not like ChatGPT hasn't been out for months now. Not sure how much they gain by making headlines before it's ready for people to play with it.

The announcement is probably targeting Wall Street more than any potential "user" (aka advertising target). The press was already bad - internal "code red" at Google due to panic that people saw ChatGPT as an alternative to search.

Meta/FaceBook's head of AI, Yann LeCun, is in similar panic mode, issuing a non-stop torrent of tweets about how useless and unimpressive ChatGPT has... Presumably a reflection that FaceBook does NOT have anything comparable ready to release anytime soon.

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