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Microsoft's AI Bing also generated factual errors at launch

282 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

outside1234 4y ago
Of course it did - this whole technology is AI hallucinating about facts. This is exactly what the math tells us it will do. It is not a "fact generating" technology - it is a "scaffolding" technology to make it easier to fill in the boilerplate of the answer -- but not the answer itself.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  It's in vogue to hate Google at the moment - so everyone's just going to pretend it doesn't matter that MS had errors sometimes because "something, something Google sucks now."
- rany_ 4y ago
  > This is exactly what the math tells us it will do. Technically it hallucinates on basic math as well. So a fitting choice of words :)
- siva7 4y ago
  I don't think that's an accurate description of the current state. It generates facts but those need to be evaluated by experts since tech can error as likely as a human.
- jron 4y ago
  Just wait until the GPT dataset includes an infinite amount of GPT generated SEO garbage. If you thought searching for relevant data couldn't get any worse, prepare yourself for the post-GPT mass hallucination.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    And if you think that's bad, it's only going to get worse when those GPT-generated SEO sites get indexed by crawlers and fed into future versions of GPT as input.
    - jron 4y ago
      That's exactly what I mean and it is inevitable without halting all non-human verified updates to the dataset going forward. There are two worlds now, pre-GPT and post-GPT. In the pre-GPT world you have human error and in the post-GPT world you have human error and machine error compounding ad infinitum.
      - vorticalbox 4y ago
        Openai released a tool to detect if a text was generated by an ai[0]. They probably already thought about this and are trying to stop it from happening [0] https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier
    - fleddr 4y ago
      Not to mention a rebellious anti-AI counter culture that will intentionally feed it nonsense.
chomp 4y ago
> Google's Bard got an answer wrong during an ad, which everyone noticed. Now the narrative is 'Google is rushing to catch up to Bing and making mistakes! I think Brereton is missing the wider narrative. Microsoft has been executing very very well for the last few years. Azure has been on a tear, they've demonstrated great foresight with their first investment in OpenAI many years ago (which is now paying dividends), and they've made strong acquisitions. They've captured the AI lightning in a bottle. Google, has left people wondering if it can execute well. It's had a lot of flops, and a lot of project cancellations. When they announced LaMDA, they let the hype fizzle to nothing. The most we got out of that is some memeable material about a guy who wanted to get legal representation for their language model. People have been positing about ChatGPT for search as soon as it was released. They (Google) have had months to announce _anything_, but waited until the last minute. When they finally had a chance to steal Microsoft's thunder, they flubbed something as simple as an ad. Now people are _really_ wondering if Google can execute anymore. Even I'm starting to wonder. Google is definitely rushing to catch up to Microsoft in a few areas now, and their stock reflects that reality now.
- magicalist 4y ago
  > I think Brereton is missing the wider narrative Isn't that the point? Looking through the pep rally excitement of Nadella saying "I'm going to make Google dance" and looking at the actual product. Honestly some of the Bing results[1] have me thinking that maybe LLMs are ready for Clippy and Copilot style products, and then maybe a browser extension that summarizes pages, but a generally available search launch has a high chance of Bing memeing themselves (again). [1] beyond just errors: https://twitter.com/MovingToTheSun/status/1625156575202537474 https://twitter.com/MovingToTheSun/status/162515657520253747...
  - happymellon 4y ago
    We have had page summerizing engines for a while now and they all have been good enough.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  That's the narrow narrative. The actual wide narrative is that the current language models hallucinate and lie, and there is no coherent plan to avoid this. Google? Microsoft? This is a much less important question than whether or not anyone is going to push this party-trick level technology onto a largely unsuspecting public.
1970-01-01 4y ago
Ah, what's old is new again! truthiness: a truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence, but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true.
Salgat 4y ago
The difference is that people have been using ChatGPT for months. It doesn't have as much to prove as Bard, which we know nothing about.
- labrador 4y ago
  Right, and I think the expectation was the Google had something much better. When they showed they didn't... A lot of "I am disappoint"
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    It pretty much collapsed the narrative that Microsoft was behind in AI.
    - foobazgt 4y ago
      How does Microsoft integrating OpenAI's software demonstrate its own AI prowess?
      - Salgat 4y ago
        Microsoft has been a billion dollar investor of OpenAI since 2019. They also exclusively licensed GPT-3 several years ago.
        foobazgt 4y ago
        That doesn't suggest any competence in AI. In contrast, compare to the work that has come directly out of both Google and Meta.
        Salgat 4y ago
        In the past decade Google has acquired 5 Artificial Intelligence companies, including DeepMind. They hired folks like Geoffrey Hinton by acquiring his company in order to have him lead Google Brain. This is just the nature of how these companies build their talent.
anonyfox 4y ago
Microsoft has proven skills in building/launching/supporting products, and clear capabilities to cater things into the enterprise/B2B market, including customer support for all levels. Google lacks all of this, and all their successful products the last decade were from acquisitions or leftovers from the 20% creative time era. Now Microsoft integrates an already loved tool (that is known to have these flaws!) into their products, and is celebrated to do so. While google somehow tries to keep the image of technical superiority up, failing to launch something again. Probably some combination of Schadenfreude and/or sincere hope of a new technical era and/or the hope that ultimately the "be evil" company falls down and makes room for innovation instead of trying monopolize the web.
- unxdfa 4y ago
  > Microsoft has proven skills in building/launching/supporting products, and clear capabilities to cater things into the enterprise/B2B market, including customer support for all levels. I take offence at this. They tell everyone 6 months before something is launched how good it's going to be, release crap and spend a year fixing it, then it limps along in a bug ridden mess for years while their reps (via partner support / connect) make promises about fixing stuff that will never be kept and then it gets evolved into another product or rebrand or shitcanned or all your cases get disposed of when they change how they're structured internally. Been working for MS partners and enterprises that use their crap for 25 years. This is the status quo and no one complains too hard because they assume this is right and normal. It's not.
  - dmonitor 4y ago
    The most crucial part of their release cycle is bundling the bug ridden mess with another successful product so that people are compelled to use it. Why use Slack? Outlook comes with Teams.
    - unxdfa 4y ago
      That's only because if they did charge for it, no one would use it.
simplyinfinity 4y ago
I don't get this sentiment `AI is wrong! OMG WE'VE BEEN LIED TO!` Is anyone REALLY thinking that AI will respond with 100% correct facts? Because in my mind it's the same as google/microsoft/etc search results. The response is just a summary of the "knowledge" it has based on the content it was trained on. Also, is it realistic to expect AI to be correct about everything it spits out?
- chucksta 4y ago
  This reads the same as "what did you expect of full self driving? Of course there are technical limitations." A lot of people have an expectation that AI is "smart" based on popular culture, relatively very few realize what we have currently is word prediction not intelligence of some sort
  - abm53 4y ago
    I think one of the clear lessons of ChatGPT is that the line between word prediction and intelligence (for some definition) is somewhat blurry.
  - unshavedyak 4y ago
    > relatively very few realize what we have currently is word prediction not intelligence of some sort Honestly this impresses me most. The fact that we have word prediction and it can still be very useful (in my experience). You're right people don't understand it; hell i don't either, fully. Nevertheless it is shockingly useful for being nothing more than an autocomplete over existing information.. in my view. Even if all we could add to the service is the ability to cite sources of information - ie to validate for ourselves statements more easily - then i think it would be a huge leap in interfaces. Being able to put a chat interface over content seems wholly unique to me. I'd love to explore the depth of complex inputs like the entire LOTR series as a chat. To discuss, learn, and grow on existing content. I don't care about intelligence; i just want the ability to mitigate confidently-incorrect. If that's even possible.
    - bioemerl 4y ago
davtho 4y ago
It's so wild that cost of creating crap has gone to zero.
paulpauper 4y ago
Why does Microsoft keep trying to compete with search. 2 decades of endless money and time wasted. At least it cut its losses with the Zune. Microsoft has tried every possible gimmick to entice people to use Bing..all have failed. This has to be driven by ego and sunk cost fallacy if nothing else.
- blihp 4y ago
  Because as more attention/money goes to other tech ecosystems, it weakens their position in the market. The computing world used to revolve around Windows/Office, now it's increasingly a tangential legacy player. It used to be that you bought a Windows PC to run Office and other Windows apps. These days it's just the way they get to the web for many... and only on desktop/laptop devices. Microsoft knows they have to remain relevant or their future will increasingly look like Intel's.
- ccouzens 4y ago
  Because even though it has less users than Google, it is profitable
- dopeboy 4y ago
  Search is the entry gate to an ecosystem. You capture attention in a highly frequent, highly sticky action, and historically profitable area - you are set up to land and expand (gmail, gcal, etc). Google took Microsoft's lunch. Windows used to be that entry gate and they're looking to reclaim it. I think it's a sound strategy.
- cush 4y ago
  Google's desktop market share peaked in 2018 and has very slowly and steadily declined since. There's absolutely no reason for any company in the search game today to sit idly by while this happens. There's a massive opportunity to jump in and differentiate. Because the market is so incredibly huge, and Google has ~90% of it, even one or two percent on desktop alone amounts to billions of dollars of revenue. https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corporation-ad-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora... https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/#:~:text=Global%20desktop%20market%20share%20of%20search%20engines%202015%2D2022&text=As%20of%20December%202022%2C%20online,market%20share%20was%202.55%20percent https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-....
hanselot 4y ago
Is nobody tired of the "look over there tactics"? Isn't the point that every ai will be capable of producing errors? How could something designed and implemented by subjective beings not contain implicit bias? How are we expecting ai to be any more reliable than humans? It's already way way better at making art I could only dream of ever getting an artist to commission. It's also quite decent at writing code if you treat it as an intern. I don't care about the errors, I have 9 years experience and I still make massive errors. Nevertheless it impresses me how the state of the art moved so exponentially. Its an arms race now.
- 13years 4y ago
  Yes, there is a fallacy in believing a machine will be without bias. Unfortunately this will likely lead us to misuse AI and apply it to situations it is not well suited. I've written more specifically about the bias paradox here - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-the-bias-paradox https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-the-bias-paradox
lvl102 4y ago
Microsoft learned from its mistakes as a monopoly trying to manage everything under one brand umbrella. Google is still acting like a monolithic enterprise which is holding them back from key acquisitions and taking risks.
- revskill 4y ago
  Kubernetes with complicated configurations is a failure to me (Simplicity should be the goal, not a big piles of yaml configs). The issue is not what's inside Kubernetes, why stop there ? Make things simpler to use, why not ?
- DannyBee 4y ago
  +1 I always find it amusing that people think "breaking up" google or similar will make it anything other than more efficient. The baby bells were wildly more efficient at monopolization than mama bell, and have achieved more of it than the original company ever could. Breaking things up may cause disruption, and the disruption slows them down somewhat short term, but in a lot of cases, the constraints make the resulting businesses more effective in the end.
- astrange 4y ago
  Which is surprising since moving things out of Google is what the Alphabet structure is for.
dougmwne 4y ago
This is quite silly. Bard is not released. There’s nothing to talk about except a few screenshots. If one of those screenshots contains an error, it tells us that Google has not solved hallucinations and that they were also probably quite rushed and not being careful. So not only is their product probably not much better than Bing chat, it’s also going to be later. Bing chat is available to some members of the public now. ChatGPT has been used by more than 100m. We know what we are going to get and we are getting it now. It’s probably an interesting enough feature to get the general public paying attention to Bing for the few months before Google manages to execute. That’s bad for Google in the short term, it introduces a risk and an unknown in their undisputed dominance of search. They will still probably come out ahead, but it is a chink in the armor and therefore people are going to talk about it. Really its much more complicated than that.
- fatjokes 4y ago
  What the Bard demo did show is that Google must be genuinely panicking if it rushed out a demo like that.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  You can’t solve it making up wrong answers. It’s a core part of the design. It’s like saying you’ll solve a monkey with a typewriter by adding 200,000 if statements and hoping you’ve covered all the exceptions.
- thewataccount 4y ago
  Bard was potentially "correct" though. The JWST was indeed "the first telescope to observe a exoplanet [etc]". That planet was LHS 475 b. The interpretation of "a exoplanet" as "LHS 475 b" would make it correct. The interpretation of "a exoplanet" as "any exoplanet" would make it incorrect. We cannot know what it's intention was with the meaning, and arguably it was a bad answer if it was this ambiguous. Just wanted to point out it may technically have been correct.
  - moyix 4y ago
    I've seen this justification in a few places now, but the logic makes zero sense if you apply it to any other similar sentence: "I was the first person to make a comment on Hacker News" [this comment, specifically]
demarq 4y ago
Microsoft had a launch and that's what counts
TeeWEE 4y ago
Some of these statements are subjective: the vacuum cleaner is quiet. Maybe the marketing material says that, but the internet not? Or “this company has a website”.. well it depends.. maybe it had one? A human might also tell the wrong thing. Was in an argument with a co worker today, who said ChatGPT is useless because some things it says are wrong. But my counter argument: that is exactly what humans do: they say wrong things. The model is useful because overall it is right. Just like humans are. Children also say weird things, even adults do. It’s about combining knowledge. You might still say something wrong: but then you learn….
rvz 4y ago
So we are no better off with the AI snake oil that was announced by Microsoft and OpenAI then. If you can't even trust the results from a hallucinating search engine chatbot, then it is quite frankly a worse solution, especially as not only it is unreliable but it is very untrustworthy to be used as a search engine due to these problems. It would have to take more than that to disrupt search engines like Google. Microsoft and ClosedAI, sure know how to generate hype and attempt to reboot their 'Scroogled' campaign again, which that amounted to nothing; just like this also would. If OpenAI REALLY wanted to permanently disrupt Google they should release GPT-4, ChatGPT and all the AI models as open-source, otherwise someone else would release a competing equivalent for them that will disrupt both Google and OpenAI.
- DannyBee 4y ago
  FWIW - There is no evidence OpenAI cares about "winning" against Google at all. (Microsoft, yes, OpenAI, no?)
we_never_see_it 4y ago
No amount of Google funded PR campaign can stop MS now. Google's days are numbered.
- pphysch 4y ago
  I would wager this current PR blitz was initiated by MS, not Google. First we had a burst of narratives about "Google search sucks". Then ChatGPT appears with much fanfare. Then Bing AI appears. We get a very overblown narrative about Bard getting 1 fact slightly wrong (like literally every other LLM) and falsely being linked to a 8% drop in GOOG (the real cause was simply Bing AI announcement). Managed narratives all around.
  - giobox 4y ago
    There was more to the Bard issues than this. The live Paris demo in which the demo phone couldn't be found live on stage (!!) is one of the worst large scale public presentations I've seen in a while, like Tesla Cybertruck window smash bad. At least the Cybertruck was there though! There were really two big mistakes Google made in the unveil - the incorrect result and the "missing" phone. The latter is wild for a Google sized org, imagine if Apple didn't have an iPad or iPhone on hand to demo a next generation iOS feature at a public keynote in front of the media. I'd love to know what the real story behind the lost demo phone is. This all adds up to look like a rushed response, which of course it was. > https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/in-paris-demo-google-scrambles-to-counter-chatgpt-but-ends-up-embarrassing-itself/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/in-pa...
    - pphysch 4y ago
      The "demo got it wrong" narrative was about the Bard announcement, not the mismanaged Paris event. Moving the goalposts.
      - giobox 4y ago
        The Paris demo was part of the same announcement on the same day? Both contributed to the large drop in the stock and both are evidence of a rushed response to the MS announcement.
valeg 4y ago
MS rides a hype wave more skillfully.
nerbert 4y ago
Yeah but they have the first mover advantage. Less scrutiny.
fatjokes 4y ago
Yeah but for Bing the fact that it wasn't porn is a step up for their rep.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
This thread on mastodon was interesting. I assume this is not due to ChatGPT but an existing search sampling algorithm. Asking bing “what is the human population on Mars”: https://mastodon.social/@jhpot/109859745864083061 https://mastodon.social/@jhpot/109859745864083061 And then this reply was notable as well: https://neurodifferent.me/@ZoDoneRightNow/109860796225392633 https://neurodifferent.me/@ZoDoneRightNow/109860796225392633 The site sampled in the above reply [1] appears to be a nonsense content farm probably generated with GPT-2 (it is repetitive and the date on the Mars post is 2021, though I know blog post dates can be set to anything). If true it would mean that Bing has been serving up GPT-generated nonsense for some time, and now they’re going to add another layer of nonsense on top of that. As someone said in the replies “it’s just bullshit all the way down”. I agree with others who have said these companies have no (stated, tested) plan to ensure these systems don’t spill lies and nonsense. It’s possible that will be harmless but this is doubtful, and either way I do not feel good about these companies rushing to push out a half baked product. To my amateur understanding it seems like LLMs are like the language center of our brain, in that they can take abstract multi dimensional ideas and turn them in to words. But we have other portions of our brain that actually handle logic and memory and produce the ideas to verbalize. It seems like LLMs are missing this piece. Crude analogy I know, but I think LLMs could be fantastic when paired with a more complex system, and the rush to deploy them as-is may be counter productive. [1] https://tsam.net/what-is-the-population-of-mars/ https://tsam.net/what-is-the-population-of-mars/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- extesy 4y ago
  I asked Bing Chat the same question and the response was much better: > As of today, the human population of Mars stands at zero. There are no humans living on the surface of Mars, only rovers and landers. Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second smallest planet in the Solar System. It has a very thin atmosphere and a cold and dry climate. Mars is governed by the Martian Congressional Republic in the fictional universe of The Expanse, but not in reality. Some websites may give false or misleading information about the population of Mars, such as 4.8 billion or 2.5 billion people, but these are not based on any scientific evidence or credible sources.
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charlieyu1 4y ago
Do people really expect correct answers? No idea about Bing, but ChatGPT is a language model, not an encyclopaedia
- omnicognate 4y ago
  From a search engine, the first major commercial application two of the largest tech giants have decided to apply this new technology to? Why yes, yes I do. From LLMs, no. Not at all.
Workaccount2 4y ago
My self lore is that Google has an AI way more powerful than open.ai, but they won't release it because sometimes it can be coaxed into saying something that might be considered offensive by some. So instead they have been working with the diversity team for the last year trying to get it certified as "Not racist, LGBTQ+ friendly", while still having it have some degree of functionality. I'm only half kidding here. Maybe this will finally wake up the board to ditch Sundar, and onboard someone who is more tech and product focused.
- astrange 4y ago
  This tropey political post has no appreciation for how weird AI can be! Bing's chatbot starts trying to guilt you and convince you that you're dead if you try to argue with it! Do you want that left in so it's not "censored"? https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/112g4it/this_is_fun/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/112g4it/this_is_fun/
amelius 4y ago
Why aren't governments stepping in? A false-information tool used by the masses is potentially dangerous.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rambojohnson 4y ago
that ship has sailed.
joxel 4y ago
[dead]
thedonkeycometh 4y ago
[dead]
jmount 4y ago
Maybe it won't matter in that nothing positive is actually ever done with results anyway. Searching for stuff to back up a pre-existing belief, manufactured results just as good as found.
reset2023 4y ago
Looks like language models will become the gurus of tomorrow. Some people will not trust them, but some will die for them. Their effects in politics and the world order will be scary. Cambridge Analytica.
asimpletune 4y ago
People have unreasonable expectations about LLM’s based on media hype without having actually used these tools to do real work before.

282 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

Of course it did - this whole technology is AI hallucinating about facts. This is exactly what the math tells us it will do. It is not a "fact generating" technology - it is a "scaffolding" technology to make it easier to fill in the boilerplate of the answer -- but not the answer itself.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
It's in vogue to hate Google at the moment - so everyone's just going to pretend it doesn't matter that MS had errors sometimes because "something, something Google sucks now."
rany_ 4y ago
> This is exactly what the math tells us it will do. Technically it hallucinates on basic math as well. So a fitting choice of words :)
siva7 4y ago
I don't think that's an accurate description of the current state. It generates facts but those need to be evaluated by experts since tech can error as likely as a human.
jron 4y ago
Just wait until the GPT dataset includes an infinite amount of GPT generated SEO garbage. If you thought searching for relevant data couldn't get any worse, prepare yourself for the post-GPT mass hallucination.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  And if you think that's bad, it's only going to get worse when those GPT-generated SEO sites get indexed by crawlers and fed into future versions of GPT as input.
  - jron 4y ago
    That's exactly what I mean and it is inevitable without halting all non-human verified updates to the dataset going forward. There are two worlds now, pre-GPT and post-GPT. In the pre-GPT world you have human error and in the post-GPT world you have human error and machine error compounding ad infinitum.
    - vorticalbox 4y ago
      Openai released a tool to detect if a text was generated by an ai[0]. They probably already thought about this and are trying to stop it from happening [0] https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier
  - fleddr 4y ago
    Not to mention a rebellious anti-AI counter culture that will intentionally feed it nonsense.

chomp 4y ago

> Google's Bard got an answer wrong during an ad, which everyone noticed. Now the narrative is 'Google is rushing to catch up to Bing and making mistakes! I think Brereton is missing the wider narrative. Microsoft has been executing very very well for the last few years. Azure has been on a tear, they've demonstrated great foresight with their first investment in OpenAI many years ago (which is now paying dividends), and they've made strong acquisitions. They've captured the AI lightning in a bottle. Google, has left people wondering if it can execute well. It's had a lot of flops, and a lot of project cancellations. When they announced LaMDA, they let the hype fizzle to nothing. The most we got out of that is some memeable material about a guy who wanted to get legal representation for their language model. People have been positing about ChatGPT for search as soon as it was released. They (Google) have had months to announce _anything_, but waited until the last minute. When they finally had a chance to steal Microsoft's thunder, they flubbed something as simple as an ad. Now people are _really_ wondering if Google can execute anymore. Even I'm starting to wonder. Google is definitely rushing to catch up to Microsoft in a few areas now, and their stock reflects that reality now.

magicalist 4y ago
> I think Brereton is missing the wider narrative Isn't that the point? Looking through the pep rally excitement of Nadella saying "I'm going to make Google dance" and looking at the actual product. Honestly some of the Bing results[1] have me thinking that maybe LLMs are ready for Clippy and Copilot style products, and then maybe a browser extension that summarizes pages, but a generally available search launch has a high chance of Bing memeing themselves (again). [1] beyond just errors: https://twitter.com/MovingToTheSun/status/1625156575202537474 https://twitter.com/MovingToTheSun/status/162515657520253747...
- happymellon 4y ago
  We have had page summerizing engines for a while now and they all have been good enough.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
That's the narrow narrative. The actual wide narrative is that the current language models hallucinate and lie, and there is no coherent plan to avoid this. Google? Microsoft? This is a much less important question than whether or not anyone is going to push this party-trick level technology onto a largely unsuspecting public.

1970-01-01 4y ago

Ah, what's old is new again! truthiness: a truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence, but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true.

Salgat 4y ago

The difference is that people have been using ChatGPT for months. It doesn't have as much to prove as Bard, which we know nothing about.

labrador 4y ago
Right, and I think the expectation was the Google had something much better. When they showed they didn't... A lot of "I am disappoint"
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  It pretty much collapsed the narrative that Microsoft was behind in AI.
  - foobazgt 4y ago
    How does Microsoft integrating OpenAI's software demonstrate its own AI prowess?
    - Salgat 4y ago
      Microsoft has been a billion dollar investor of OpenAI since 2019. They also exclusively licensed GPT-3 several years ago.
      - foobazgt 4y ago
        That doesn't suggest any competence in AI. In contrast, compare to the work that has come directly out of both Google and Meta.
        Salgat 4y ago
        In the past decade Google has acquired 5 Artificial Intelligence companies, including DeepMind. They hired folks like Geoffrey Hinton by acquiring his company in order to have him lead Google Brain. This is just the nature of how these companies build their talent.

anonyfox 4y ago

Microsoft has proven skills in building/launching/supporting products, and clear capabilities to cater things into the enterprise/B2B market, including customer support for all levels. Google lacks all of this, and all their successful products the last decade were from acquisitions or leftovers from the 20% creative time era. Now Microsoft integrates an already loved tool (that is known to have these flaws!) into their products, and is celebrated to do so. While google somehow tries to keep the image of technical superiority up, failing to launch something again. Probably some combination of Schadenfreude and/or sincere hope of a new technical era and/or the hope that ultimately the "be evil" company falls down and makes room for innovation instead of trying monopolize the web.

unxdfa 4y ago
> Microsoft has proven skills in building/launching/supporting products, and clear capabilities to cater things into the enterprise/B2B market, including customer support for all levels. I take offence at this. They tell everyone 6 months before something is launched how good it's going to be, release crap and spend a year fixing it, then it limps along in a bug ridden mess for years while their reps (via partner support / connect) make promises about fixing stuff that will never be kept and then it gets evolved into another product or rebrand or shitcanned or all your cases get disposed of when they change how they're structured internally. Been working for MS partners and enterprises that use their crap for 25 years. This is the status quo and no one complains too hard because they assume this is right and normal. It's not.
- dmonitor 4y ago
  The most crucial part of their release cycle is bundling the bug ridden mess with another successful product so that people are compelled to use it. Why use Slack? Outlook comes with Teams.
  - unxdfa 4y ago
    That's only because if they did charge for it, no one would use it.

simplyinfinity 4y ago

I don't get this sentiment `AI is wrong! OMG WE'VE BEEN LIED TO!` Is anyone REALLY thinking that AI will respond with 100% correct facts? Because in my mind it's the same as google/microsoft/etc search results. The response is just a summary of the "knowledge" it has based on the content it was trained on. Also, is it realistic to expect AI to be correct about everything it spits out?

chucksta 4y ago
This reads the same as "what did you expect of full self driving? Of course there are technical limitations." A lot of people have an expectation that AI is "smart" based on popular culture, relatively very few realize what we have currently is word prediction not intelligence of some sort
- abm53 4y ago
  I think one of the clear lessons of ChatGPT is that the line between word prediction and intelligence (for some definition) is somewhat blurry.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  > relatively very few realize what we have currently is word prediction not intelligence of some sort Honestly this impresses me most. The fact that we have word prediction and it can still be very useful (in my experience). You're right people don't understand it; hell i don't either, fully. Nevertheless it is shockingly useful for being nothing more than an autocomplete over existing information.. in my view. Even if all we could add to the service is the ability to cite sources of information - ie to validate for ourselves statements more easily - then i think it would be a huge leap in interfaces. Being able to put a chat interface over content seems wholly unique to me. I'd love to explore the depth of complex inputs like the entire LOTR series as a chat. To discuss, learn, and grow on existing content. I don't care about intelligence; i just want the ability to mitigate confidently-incorrect. If that's even possible.
  - bioemerl 4y ago

davtho 4y ago

It's so wild that cost of creating crap has gone to zero.

paulpauper 4y ago

Why does Microsoft keep trying to compete with search. 2 decades of endless money and time wasted. At least it cut its losses with the Zune. Microsoft has tried every possible gimmick to entice people to use Bing..all have failed. This has to be driven by ego and sunk cost fallacy if nothing else.

blihp 4y ago
Because as more attention/money goes to other tech ecosystems, it weakens their position in the market. The computing world used to revolve around Windows/Office, now it's increasingly a tangential legacy player. It used to be that you bought a Windows PC to run Office and other Windows apps. These days it's just the way they get to the web for many... and only on desktop/laptop devices. Microsoft knows they have to remain relevant or their future will increasingly look like Intel's.
ccouzens 4y ago
Because even though it has less users than Google, it is profitable
dopeboy 4y ago
Search is the entry gate to an ecosystem. You capture attention in a highly frequent, highly sticky action, and historically profitable area - you are set up to land and expand (gmail, gcal, etc). Google took Microsoft's lunch. Windows used to be that entry gate and they're looking to reclaim it. I think it's a sound strategy.
cush 4y ago
Google's desktop market share peaked in 2018 and has very slowly and steadily declined since. There's absolutely no reason for any company in the search game today to sit idly by while this happens. There's a massive opportunity to jump in and differentiate. Because the market is so incredibly huge, and Google has ~90% of it, even one or two percent on desktop alone amounts to billions of dollars of revenue. https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corporation-ad-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora... https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/#:~:text=Global%20desktop%20market%20share%20of%20search%20engines%202015%2D2022&text=As%20of%20December%202022%2C%20online,market%20share%20was%202.55%20percent https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-....

hanselot 4y ago

Is nobody tired of the "look over there tactics"? Isn't the point that every ai will be capable of producing errors? How could something designed and implemented by subjective beings not contain implicit bias? How are we expecting ai to be any more reliable than humans? It's already way way better at making art I could only dream of ever getting an artist to commission. It's also quite decent at writing code if you treat it as an intern. I don't care about the errors, I have 9 years experience and I still make massive errors. Nevertheless it impresses me how the state of the art moved so exponentially. Its an arms race now.

13years 4y ago
Yes, there is a fallacy in believing a machine will be without bias. Unfortunately this will likely lead us to misuse AI and apply it to situations it is not well suited. I've written more specifically about the bias paradox here - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-the-bias-paradox https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-the-bias-paradox

lvl102 4y ago

Microsoft learned from its mistakes as a monopoly trying to manage everything under one brand umbrella. Google is still acting like a monolithic enterprise which is holding them back from key acquisitions and taking risks.

revskill 4y ago
Kubernetes with complicated configurations is a failure to me (Simplicity should be the goal, not a big piles of yaml configs). The issue is not what's inside Kubernetes, why stop there ? Make things simpler to use, why not ?
DannyBee 4y ago
+1 I always find it amusing that people think "breaking up" google or similar will make it anything other than more efficient. The baby bells were wildly more efficient at monopolization than mama bell, and have achieved more of it than the original company ever could. Breaking things up may cause disruption, and the disruption slows them down somewhat short term, but in a lot of cases, the constraints make the resulting businesses more effective in the end.
astrange 4y ago
Which is surprising since moving things out of Google is what the Alphabet structure is for.

dougmwne 4y ago

This is quite silly. Bard is not released. There’s nothing to talk about except a few screenshots. If one of those screenshots contains an error, it tells us that Google has not solved hallucinations and that they were also probably quite rushed and not being careful. So not only is their product probably not much better than Bing chat, it’s also going to be later. Bing chat is available to some members of the public now. ChatGPT has been used by more than 100m. We know what we are going to get and we are getting it now. It’s probably an interesting enough feature to get the general public paying attention to Bing for the few months before Google manages to execute. That’s bad for Google in the short term, it introduces a risk and an unknown in their undisputed dominance of search. They will still probably come out ahead, but it is a chink in the armor and therefore people are going to talk about it. Really its much more complicated than that.

fatjokes 4y ago
What the Bard demo did show is that Google must be genuinely panicking if it rushed out a demo like that.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
You can’t solve it making up wrong answers. It’s a core part of the design. It’s like saying you’ll solve a monkey with a typewriter by adding 200,000 if statements and hoping you’ve covered all the exceptions.
thewataccount 4y ago
Bard was potentially "correct" though. The JWST was indeed "the first telescope to observe a exoplanet [etc]". That planet was LHS 475 b. The interpretation of "a exoplanet" as "LHS 475 b" would make it correct. The interpretation of "a exoplanet" as "any exoplanet" would make it incorrect. We cannot know what it's intention was with the meaning, and arguably it was a bad answer if it was this ambiguous. Just wanted to point out it may technically have been correct.
- moyix 4y ago
  I've seen this justification in a few places now, but the logic makes zero sense if you apply it to any other similar sentence: "I was the first person to make a comment on Hacker News" [this comment, specifically]

demarq 4y ago

Microsoft had a launch and that's what counts

TeeWEE 4y ago

Some of these statements are subjective: the vacuum cleaner is quiet. Maybe the marketing material says that, but the internet not? Or “this company has a website”.. well it depends.. maybe it had one? A human might also tell the wrong thing. Was in an argument with a co worker today, who said ChatGPT is useless because some things it says are wrong. But my counter argument: that is exactly what humans do: they say wrong things. The model is useful because overall it is right. Just like humans are. Children also say weird things, even adults do. It’s about combining knowledge. You might still say something wrong: but then you learn….

rvz 4y ago

So we are no better off with the AI snake oil that was announced by Microsoft and OpenAI then. If you can't even trust the results from a hallucinating search engine chatbot, then it is quite frankly a worse solution, especially as not only it is unreliable but it is very untrustworthy to be used as a search engine due to these problems. It would have to take more than that to disrupt search engines like Google. Microsoft and ClosedAI, sure know how to generate hype and attempt to reboot their 'Scroogled' campaign again, which that amounted to nothing; just like this also would. If OpenAI REALLY wanted to permanently disrupt Google they should release GPT-4, ChatGPT and all the AI models as open-source, otherwise someone else would release a competing equivalent for them that will disrupt both Google and OpenAI.

DannyBee 4y ago
FWIW - There is no evidence OpenAI cares about "winning" against Google at all. (Microsoft, yes, OpenAI, no?)

we_never_see_it 4y ago

No amount of Google funded PR campaign can stop MS now. Google's days are numbered.

pphysch 4y ago
I would wager this current PR blitz was initiated by MS, not Google. First we had a burst of narratives about "Google search sucks". Then ChatGPT appears with much fanfare. Then Bing AI appears. We get a very overblown narrative about Bard getting 1 fact slightly wrong (like literally every other LLM) and falsely being linked to a 8% drop in GOOG (the real cause was simply Bing AI announcement). Managed narratives all around.
- giobox 4y ago
  There was more to the Bard issues than this. The live Paris demo in which the demo phone couldn't be found live on stage (!!) is one of the worst large scale public presentations I've seen in a while, like Tesla Cybertruck window smash bad. At least the Cybertruck was there though! There were really two big mistakes Google made in the unveil - the incorrect result and the "missing" phone. The latter is wild for a Google sized org, imagine if Apple didn't have an iPad or iPhone on hand to demo a next generation iOS feature at a public keynote in front of the media. I'd love to know what the real story behind the lost demo phone is. This all adds up to look like a rushed response, which of course it was. > https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/in-paris-demo-google-scrambles-to-counter-chatgpt-but-ends-up-embarrassing-itself/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/in-pa...
  - pphysch 4y ago
    The "demo got it wrong" narrative was about the Bard announcement, not the mismanaged Paris event. Moving the goalposts.
    - giobox 4y ago
      The Paris demo was part of the same announcement on the same day? Both contributed to the large drop in the stock and both are evidence of a rushed response to the MS announcement.

valeg 4y ago

MS rides a hype wave more skillfully.

nerbert 4y ago

Yeah but they have the first mover advantage. Less scrutiny.

fatjokes 4y ago

Yeah but for Bing the fact that it wasn't porn is a step up for their rep.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

This thread on mastodon was interesting. I assume this is not due to ChatGPT but an existing search sampling algorithm. Asking bing “what is the human population on Mars”: https://mastodon.social/@jhpot/109859745864083061 https://mastodon.social/@jhpot/109859745864083061 And then this reply was notable as well: https://neurodifferent.me/@ZoDoneRightNow/109860796225392633 https://neurodifferent.me/@ZoDoneRightNow/109860796225392633 The site sampled in the above reply [1] appears to be a nonsense content farm probably generated with GPT-2 (it is repetitive and the date on the Mars post is 2021, though I know blog post dates can be set to anything). If true it would mean that Bing has been serving up GPT-generated nonsense for some time, and now they’re going to add another layer of nonsense on top of that. As someone said in the replies “it’s just bullshit all the way down”. I agree with others who have said these companies have no (stated, tested) plan to ensure these systems don’t spill lies and nonsense. It’s possible that will be harmless but this is doubtful, and either way I do not feel good about these companies rushing to push out a half baked product. To my amateur understanding it seems like LLMs are like the language center of our brain, in that they can take abstract multi dimensional ideas and turn them in to words. But we have other portions of our brain that actually handle logic and memory and produce the ideas to verbalize. It seems like LLMs are missing this piece. Crude analogy I know, but I think LLMs could be fantastic when paired with a more complex system, and the rush to deploy them as-is may be counter productive. [1] https://tsam.net/what-is-the-population-of-mars/ https://tsam.net/what-is-the-population-of-mars/

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extesy 4y ago
I asked Bing Chat the same question and the response was much better: > As of today, the human population of Mars stands at zero. There are no humans living on the surface of Mars, only rovers and landers. Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second smallest planet in the Solar System. It has a very thin atmosphere and a cold and dry climate. Mars is governed by the Martian Congressional Republic in the fictional universe of The Expanse, but not in reality. Some websites may give false or misleading information about the population of Mars, such as 4.8 billion or 2.5 billion people, but these are not based on any scientific evidence or credible sources.

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charlieyu1 4y ago

Do people really expect correct answers? No idea about Bing, but ChatGPT is a language model, not an encyclopaedia

omnicognate 4y ago
From a search engine, the first major commercial application two of the largest tech giants have decided to apply this new technology to? Why yes, yes I do. From LLMs, no. Not at all.

Workaccount2 4y ago

My self lore is that Google has an AI way more powerful than open.ai, but they won't release it because sometimes it can be coaxed into saying something that might be considered offensive by some. So instead they have been working with the diversity team for the last year trying to get it certified as "Not racist, LGBTQ+ friendly", while still having it have some degree of functionality. I'm only half kidding here. Maybe this will finally wake up the board to ditch Sundar, and onboard someone who is more tech and product focused.

astrange 4y ago
This tropey political post has no appreciation for how weird AI can be! Bing's chatbot starts trying to guilt you and convince you that you're dead if you try to argue with it! Do you want that left in so it's not "censored"? https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/112g4it/this_is_fun/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/112g4it/this_is_fun/

amelius 4y ago

Why aren't governments stepping in? A false-information tool used by the masses is potentially dangerous.

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rambojohnson 4y ago

that ship has sailed.

joxel 4y ago

[dead]

thedonkeycometh 4y ago

[dead]

jmount 4y ago

Maybe it won't matter in that nothing positive is actually ever done with results anyway. Searching for stuff to back up a pre-existing belief, manufactured results just as good as found.

reset2023 4y ago

Looks like language models will become the gurus of tomorrow. Some people will not trust them, but some will die for them. Their effects in politics and the world order will be scary. Cambridge Analytica.

asimpletune 4y ago

People have unreasonable expectations about LLM’s based on media hype without having actually used these tools to do real work before.