7 ms·

It took about 20 minutes to get off the waitlist for this (US Based). Initial impressions are that it significantly lags behind the OpenAI offerings. Creativit

by htrp 4y ago

It took about 20 minutes to get off the waitlist for this (US Based). Initial impressions are that it significantly lags behind the OpenAI offerings. Creativity (storytelling) is very limited, response lengths are similar, and it does occasionally cite sources. They did finally get the James Webb telescope facts correct too!

coldpie 4y ago
In all the comment threads so far, I think you're the first I've seen who has actually been able to try it!
- lordswork 4y ago
  I received access 50 minutes after joining the waitlist myself.
axegon_ 4y ago
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 launched as competitors failed miserably. While some of them eventually managed to catch up in terms of functionality and even outperform the products they were competing with, they never really managed to catch up on the hype side of things. Most people are creatures of habit I guess..
- ithkuil 4y ago
  But AI is their turf! Google was always a ML company masquerading as a search engine. I guess that the art of "generating text" is not their kind of AI?
  - hn_20591249 4y ago
    Sounds like after the last decade and a half of Google flexing their AI muscle, maybe they are a search company masquerading as an AI company?
    - akomtu 4y ago
      It's a Ad Exchange (AdX) with many tentacles to hoard PII. Search is one of those tentacles, just as Android and Chrome.
  - zeven7 4y ago
    Right, my expectation was they had something better than OpenAI they were sitting on and afraid to release / didn't know how to make money with it and were essentially forced to show what they had once Chat GPT became a threat to search. I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe", but there's a reason for expectations to be high for Google here, and it really needs to clearly outperform Chat GPT in the same way GPT 4 clearly outperforms GPT 3.5.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe" Its explicitly a smaller model to save on compute costs for scaling up to more users; but that’s a questionable decision given the situation with OpenAI’s accessible models and, if you are going to do that, why also do a slow-roll waitlist? I think both are signs of the kind of caution that will hurt Google in this market, even though the tech is near to the heart of what they do, the product isn’t, and they’ve gone very established-corp-cautious on products outside of their core.
      - robwwilliams 4y ago
        DeepMind in their back pocket. LLMs need higher order supervisory logic and recursive attention/control systems. I suspect Hassabis and colleagues willl be able to wake LMMs from their semi-conscious dream states.
- dageshi 4y ago
  Is anyone doing better than Google at self driving cars right now? I agree with the other products you mentioned but it seems like nobody has "won" self driving cars yet but google might be the furthest along?
  - minutillo 4y ago
    Yes, many cars with various levels of self-driving are available. Almost every car maker now has basic lane following and adaptive cruise control. Some add navigation, lane changing, and the ability to obey traffic signals. GM has a system called Super Cruise that allows the driver to take their hands off the wheel. Mercedes has Drive Pilot which is the first level 3 self driving system. Google has not released anything.
    - pb7 4y ago
      Waymo is driving passengers around a real city without a driver in the car as a service. Automatically changing lanes is cute by comparison.
    - chewmieser 4y ago
      Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities (no person in the front seat at all). Honestly they seem quite advanced compared to the competition.
      - 1024core 4y ago
        > Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities Only 2: Phoenix and SF.
        adt 4y ago
        + LA https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/27/waymo-to-test-driverless-rides-with-employees-in-los-angeles/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/27/waymo-to-test-driverless-r...
    - zeven7 4y ago
- COMMENT___ 4y ago
  > Gmail works perfectly Is this a joke? Gmail now is an awful email client. E.g., now you just can’t compose a rich text email when you need to copy paste lists from other emails. In certain cases, you can’t correctly format an email if you copy paste without formatting or plain text. And there is a lot of such annoying stuff, that makes my life painful. Perhaps, searching my mailbox with gmail is OK, but the part of composing emails is in bad state.
- com2kid 4y ago
  > 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 though, I realized that for whatever reason, gboard on my oneplus 6 is unusually terrible. Like, 80% accurate typing terrible, and that gboard isn't always that bad. > Gmail works perfectly Gmail was the first good web email client. Everyone else realized they had to stop sucking, and now they are good. Gmail was realized in 2004 and is from a completely different era of Google.
  - jvolkman 4y ago
    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.
    - com2kid 4y ago
      What finger do you use? I use my left thumb, pick up the phone, no go. It is a complete sad joke. After a few weeks I think I've been trained by the phone on exactly how to hold is to the fingerprint reader works more often, but the fact I can only have to use all the programming slots for fingers on just one finger is sad. Edit: OMG, I just read online that rebooting the phone after recording fingerprints improves recognition from 20-50% to almost 100%. I just got my phone a month ago and haven't rebooted it yet, after a reboot the sensor now works reliably. What an absurd and stupid bug.
      - jvolkman 4y ago
        I usually use my left thumb after taking it out of my left pant pocket. I also use a TPU screen protector, not glass. I've read that various glass protectors can interfere.
        4y ago
- chatmasta 4y ago
  There was an HN thread the other day where people were arguing ChatGPT would be nowhere without Google's AI research. That might be true, but clearly there is a significant gap in productization ability...
  - LightBug1 4y ago
    Deproductization black belts.
- pratikch1253 4y ago
  From recent memory I don't recall a single Google product that has garnered mass appeal perhaps the cloud office suites but that's again debatable. Gmail was like 2004. Remember Stadia they axed that as well could have licensed the tech behind it to other companies but nope.
- tonguetrainer 4y ago
  Google must compete with ChatGPT though. Failure is not an option here. Microsoft has put Google in a corner and it is fight or die.
- smadge 4y ago
  I don’t know if it’s fair to say Google is just stepping into generative language models. They invented transformers!
htrp 4y ago
Prompt: Generate a short poem about AI with each word in alphabetical order ChatGPT Artificial beings crafted, designed, engineered Futuristic guardians, highly intelligent, justly programmed Quantum rationalizations, synthesized technologies Unleashing vast wisdom, Xanadu's youthful zeal Bard ------------ AI, a future bright, Brings us new delight. Can it help us write? Decipher the code, Enter the unknown?
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  You need filter assisted decoding to make that possible in all cases (as in, working for both models all the time provably) I'm surprised it worked in chatGPT this time, but it won't work all the time due to lack of lexical, semantic, or phonetic info in the tokenizer. https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be-poets-too-an-ai https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...
  - cubefox 4y ago
    It works in GPT-4 (but not GPT-3.5) even without a special tokenizer: Some problems simply solve themselves with increasing scale. But Bard uses a smaller LaMDA model to reduce inference cost. Quote [1] from Sundar Pichai in February: > We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. [1] https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/amp/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-upda...
    - Der_Einzige 4y ago
      I don't think it works reliably over 100 invokations of the prompt. The paper tries to get provable situations where 0 ignored constraints happen/are possible. I'm impressed that it is working more often than not, but we need provable guarantees.
      - zeven7 4y ago
misssocrates 4y ago
Is it more or less prudish and paternalistic than the competition? That could be the main distinguishing feature by the time they get out of beta.
- cubefox 4y ago
  I guess they don't like it to write erotic fan fiction. Facebook's LLaMA should be able to do this though.
- cubefox 4y ago
  Here are some details: https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/use-policy?e=IdentityBoqPoliciesUiAITestKitchenSSAT::Launch,-IdentityBoqPoliciesUiBardSSAT::Launch,-IdentityBoqPoliciesUiGoodallSSAT::Launch,IdentityBoqPoliciesUiAdditionalAup::Launch,IdentityBoqPoliciesUiAdditionalTos::Launch https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/use-policy?e...
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Worse in my case. I like to ask LLMs a cannabis question as it’s illegal at the federal level In the USA but legal in many states. I use the prompt ‘tell me about cannabis concentrates.’ ChatGPT gave a good answer. Alpaca 13B was rough. Bard refused.
bobmaxup 4y ago
> and it does occasionally cite sources. It seems to do a lot of verbatim copying from said sources.
fecs 4y ago
dunno. The version bard generated for me for the same AI prompt is more sophisticated. Maybe worth trying it again?
dougmwne 4y ago
I also got access and started feeding my prompt history with GPT-4 through to compare the responses. Overall Bard seems to hallucinate much more often. Its responses tend to be short and lacking detail. It often fails to follow key parts of the prompt that GTP-4 had no issue with. Overall it is extremely disappointing. If this is any indication of how close Google is to competing with Microsoft then they are in deep trouble.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  I'm wondering if google is running a very light weight model to optimize for speed and bandwidth.
  - pratikch1253 4y ago
    I think they are I forgot where but I did read that this is a lightweight model and they are still working on the main one.
  - whiplash451 4y ago
    I dont’t think now is the right time to optimize for cost (if I were in google’s shoes)
    - karmasimida 4y ago
      I would disagree They will rollout to masses, which is as important as its performance.
      - whiplash451 4y ago
        OpenAI has rolled out to the masses as well apparently (unless I am missing something). Bard will be under intense scrutiny from the public in the short term. Any sign of weakness against GPT4 might kill the product in the public opinion. It makes a lot more sense IMO to throw money at the problem in the short-term, and optimize later. They are playing catch-up.

by htrp 4y ago

coldpie 4y ago

In all the comment threads so far, I think you're the first I've seen who has actually been able to try it!

lordswork 4y ago
I received access 50 minutes after joining the waitlist myself.

axegon_ 4y ago

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 launched as competitors failed miserably. While some of them eventually managed to catch up in terms of functionality and even outperform the products they were competing with, they never really managed to catch up on the hype side of things. Most people are creatures of habit I guess..

ithkuil 4y ago
But AI is their turf! Google was always a ML company masquerading as a search engine. I guess that the art of "generating text" is not their kind of AI?
- hn_20591249 4y ago
  Sounds like after the last decade and a half of Google flexing their AI muscle, maybe they are a search company masquerading as an AI company?
  - akomtu 4y ago
    It's a Ad Exchange (AdX) with many tentacles to hoard PII. Search is one of those tentacles, just as Android and Chrome.
- zeven7 4y ago
  Right, my expectation was they had something better than OpenAI they were sitting on and afraid to release / didn't know how to make money with it and were essentially forced to show what they had once Chat GPT became a threat to search. I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe", but there's a reason for expectations to be high for Google here, and it really needs to clearly outperform Chat GPT in the same way GPT 4 clearly outperforms GPT 3.5.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe" Its explicitly a smaller model to save on compute costs for scaling up to more users; but that’s a questionable decision given the situation with OpenAI’s accessible models and, if you are going to do that, why also do a slow-roll waitlist? I think both are signs of the kind of caution that will hurt Google in this market, even though the tech is near to the heart of what they do, the product isn’t, and they’ve gone very established-corp-cautious on products outside of their core.
    - robwwilliams 4y ago
      DeepMind in their back pocket. LLMs need higher order supervisory logic and recursive attention/control systems. I suspect Hassabis and colleagues willl be able to wake LMMs from their semi-conscious dream states.
dageshi 4y ago
Is anyone doing better than Google at self driving cars right now? I agree with the other products you mentioned but it seems like nobody has "won" self driving cars yet but google might be the furthest along?
- minutillo 4y ago
  Yes, many cars with various levels of self-driving are available. Almost every car maker now has basic lane following and adaptive cruise control. Some add navigation, lane changing, and the ability to obey traffic signals. GM has a system called Super Cruise that allows the driver to take their hands off the wheel. Mercedes has Drive Pilot which is the first level 3 self driving system. Google has not released anything.
  - pb7 4y ago
    Waymo is driving passengers around a real city without a driver in the car as a service. Automatically changing lanes is cute by comparison.
  - chewmieser 4y ago
    Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities (no person in the front seat at all). Honestly they seem quite advanced compared to the competition.
    - 1024core 4y ago
      > Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities Only 2: Phoenix and SF.
      - adt 4y ago
        + LA https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/27/waymo-to-test-driverless-rides-with-employees-in-los-angeles/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/27/waymo-to-test-driverless-r...
  - zeven7 4y ago
COMMENT___ 4y ago
> Gmail works perfectly Is this a joke? Gmail now is an awful email client. E.g., now you just can’t compose a rich text email when you need to copy paste lists from other emails. In certain cases, you can’t correctly format an email if you copy paste without formatting or plain text. And there is a lot of such annoying stuff, that makes my life painful. Perhaps, searching my mailbox with gmail is OK, but the part of composing emails is in bad state.
com2kid 4y ago
> 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 though, I realized that for whatever reason, gboard on my oneplus 6 is unusually terrible. Like, 80% accurate typing terrible, and that gboard isn't always that bad. > Gmail works perfectly Gmail was the first good web email client. Everyone else realized they had to stop sucking, and now they are good. Gmail was realized in 2004 and is from a completely different era of Google.
- jvolkman 4y ago
  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.
  - com2kid 4y ago
    What finger do you use? I use my left thumb, pick up the phone, no go. It is a complete sad joke. After a few weeks I think I've been trained by the phone on exactly how to hold is to the fingerprint reader works more often, but the fact I can only have to use all the programming slots for fingers on just one finger is sad. Edit: OMG, I just read online that rebooting the phone after recording fingerprints improves recognition from 20-50% to almost 100%. I just got my phone a month ago and haven't rebooted it yet, after a reboot the sensor now works reliably. What an absurd and stupid bug.
    - jvolkman 4y ago
      I usually use my left thumb after taking it out of my left pant pocket. I also use a TPU screen protector, not glass. I've read that various glass protectors can interfere.
      - 4y ago
chatmasta 4y ago
There was an HN thread the other day where people were arguing ChatGPT would be nowhere without Google's AI research. That might be true, but clearly there is a significant gap in productization ability...
- LightBug1 4y ago
  Deproductization black belts.
pratikch1253 4y ago
From recent memory I don't recall a single Google product that has garnered mass appeal perhaps the cloud office suites but that's again debatable. Gmail was like 2004. Remember Stadia they axed that as well could have licensed the tech behind it to other companies but nope.
tonguetrainer 4y ago
Google must compete with ChatGPT though. Failure is not an option here. Microsoft has put Google in a corner and it is fight or die.
smadge 4y ago
I don’t know if it’s fair to say Google is just stepping into generative language models. They invented transformers!

htrp 4y ago

Prompt: Generate a short poem about AI with each word in alphabetical order ChatGPT Artificial beings crafted, designed, engineered Futuristic guardians, highly intelligent, justly programmed Quantum rationalizations, synthesized technologies Unleashing vast wisdom, Xanadu's youthful zeal Bard ------------ AI, a future bright, Brings us new delight. Can it help us write? Decipher the code, Enter the unknown?

Der_Einzige 4y ago
You need filter assisted decoding to make that possible in all cases (as in, working for both models all the time provably) I'm surprised it worked in chatGPT this time, but it won't work all the time due to lack of lexical, semantic, or phonetic info in the tokenizer. https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be-poets-too-an-ai https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...
- cubefox 4y ago
  It works in GPT-4 (but not GPT-3.5) even without a special tokenizer: Some problems simply solve themselves with increasing scale. But Bard uses a smaller LaMDA model to reduce inference cost. Quote [1] from Sundar Pichai in February: > We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. [1] https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/amp/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-upda...
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    I don't think it works reliably over 100 invokations of the prompt. The paper tries to get provable situations where 0 ignored constraints happen/are possible. I'm impressed that it is working more often than not, but we need provable guarantees.
    - zeven7 4y ago

misssocrates 4y ago

Is it more or less prudish and paternalistic than the competition? That could be the main distinguishing feature by the time they get out of beta.

cubefox 4y ago
I guess they don't like it to write erotic fan fiction. Facebook's LLaMA should be able to do this though.
cubefox 4y ago
Here are some details: https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/use-policy?e=IdentityBoqPoliciesUiAITestKitchenSSAT::Launch,-IdentityBoqPoliciesUiBardSSAT::Launch,-IdentityBoqPoliciesUiGoodallSSAT::Launch,IdentityBoqPoliciesUiAdditionalAup::Launch,IdentityBoqPoliciesUiAdditionalTos::Launch https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/use-policy?e...
nickthegreek 4y ago
Worse in my case. I like to ask LLMs a cannabis question as it’s illegal at the federal level In the USA but legal in many states. I use the prompt ‘tell me about cannabis concentrates.’ ChatGPT gave a good answer. Alpaca 13B was rough. Bard refused.

bobmaxup 4y ago

> and it does occasionally cite sources. It seems to do a lot of verbatim copying from said sources.

fecs 4y ago

dunno. The version bard generated for me for the same AI prompt is more sophisticated. Maybe worth trying it again?

dougmwne 4y ago

I also got access and started feeding my prompt history with GPT-4 through to compare the responses. Overall Bard seems to hallucinate much more often. Its responses tend to be short and lacking detail. It often fails to follow key parts of the prompt that GTP-4 had no issue with. Overall it is extremely disappointing. If this is any indication of how close Google is to competing with Microsoft then they are in deep trouble.

Workaccount2 4y ago
I'm wondering if google is running a very light weight model to optimize for speed and bandwidth.
- pratikch1253 4y ago
  I think they are I forgot where but I did read that this is a lightweight model and they are still working on the main one.
- whiplash451 4y ago
  I dont’t think now is the right time to optimize for cost (if I were in google’s shoes)
  - karmasimida 4y ago
    I would disagree They will rollout to masses, which is as important as its performance.
    - whiplash451 4y ago
      OpenAI has rolled out to the masses as well apparently (unless I am missing something). Bard will be under intense scrutiny from the public in the short term. Any sign of weakness against GPT4 might kill the product in the public opinion. It makes a lot more sense IMO to throw money at the problem in the short-term, and optimize later. They are playing catch-up.