15 ms·

Bard’s latest update: more features, languages and countries

269 points by quyleanh 3y ago

oadster 3y ago
My ChatGPT and Bard use has pretty much flatlined. Has anyone else has a similar experience?
- chairmanwow1 3y ago
  I spend a lot of time in my day with ChatGPT. Code interpreter is nice too for light analysis
- cfcf14 3y ago
  Yeah - more or less. I still use it sometimes for trivial stuff like giving me recipe or travel inspiration (using the web search API), but I haven't been using it for any sort of algorithms/coding stuff. It's useful for tasks which have a high tolerance for not being completely correct. Which is definitely a subset of all tasks that interest me, but it's a smaller subset that I originally thought it would be. It's just really hard to find out where the models are wrong when it's a complex question. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't need the tool, I guess.
- darkvertex 3y ago
  I find GitHub Copilot Chat is a pretty good assistant.
- agildehaus 3y ago
  I ask it my dumb questions first before asking a human who will hold it against me.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Early search engines would publically show what people were searching for. It was amazing how prevalent silly/embarrassing questions were. Things like "can kissing cause baby?"
    - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
      https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg
    - xp84 3y ago
      There are some fun YouTube videos (old ones) making fun of funny Yahoo! Answers questions that appear to be written by 10-12-year-olds.
      - ThalesX 3y ago
        How is babby formed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll-lia-FEIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll-lia-FEIY
  - hbn 3y ago
    One use for Chat GPT I've found that's super handy - and something search engines have been really bad at - is finding me a word that I can't think of. Give it a description of the word's meaning, and maybe the context for how it would be used and it's given me pretty great results. It was such a relief figuring this out cause I'm terrible at recalling words sometimes, so I've wanted something like this for YEARS.
    - elorant 3y ago
      On the same context, it's quite good for neologisms which could be great if you're looking for a new company name, or a product name, or whatever. You give it two words and ask it to make combinations and then it goes ballistic producing them by the buckets.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Jyaif 3y ago
  It has stabilised for me. I use it for queries where I can quickly tell if the answer is BS or not, like code snippets or language related queries (e.g. when I can't find a word, or when I want synonyms).
- skybrian 3y ago
  I never used it much, but Code Interpreter is fun. I keep hitting quota trying to get it to do things. Hard to say whether it will be practical.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  No - I just checked and I am averaging about 20 queries a day on workdays (software dev) and ~4 per day at weekends (random factfinding where google fails). Recent queries: * Is the english channel wider now than when the romans crossed it, due to erosion and sea level rise? (Conclusion... probably, but nobody seems to have researched this) * Write me some python to output gcode using a gcode library. (Gave me examples with a few different libraries, because 'gcody' that I was using before seems to have been unmaintained too long) * What is the name of the drink that everyone used to drink at makerspaces (Club Mate - but google didn't seem to know) * Write me brief python code to calculate how often 9 tosses of a biased coin has more heads than tails. The coin returns heads with probability p. (gave me the answer far quicker than writing the code from scratch) * give me a nmap commandline to get lots of info about an ip address (far quicker than reading the manpage to figure out how to turn on all the tests/checks available)
- voiper1 3y ago
  I use it much less than before -- but I still think it's very useful. I think it's because I have to go out of my way to use it. I still haven't figured out how exactly to make it a natural part of my workflow, since I don't need it for any one specific thing.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  Nope. ChatGPT/Bing have taken over maybe 50% of my internet searches. I find them incredibly helpful for all kinds of things. My best recent use of Bing is while on vacation to Italy, I had it search the internet in Italian for more locally focused information, then auto translate and summarize the results into English. I also used it to explain italian culture and history to me right in the moment.
- simonw 3y ago
  I'm already a heavy ChatGPT user - a dozen plus conversations a day - and my usage is increasing as I learn new ways to use it.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    Could you share some new ways you've found? I'm in the cohort of users whose usage flatlined. I had a lot of fun asking it all kinds of stuff for a while, but — sometime around all the hubbub of whether or not OpenAI uses your interactions as training data — I just stopped entirely.
    - simonw 3y ago
      Some of my notes: - https://simonwillison.net/series/using-chatgpt/ https://simonwillison.net/series/using-chatgpt/ - https://til.simonwillison.net/tils/search?q=ChatGPT https://til.simonwillison.net/tils/search?q=ChatGPT
- kypro 3y ago
  I was using it for some simple programming tasks the other day. I figured it should be okay to speak to it with my working class mannerisms since it wouldn't have the biases of a human middle-class programmer. Initially it gave me answers that didn't work. Then I realised the API I was asking it to generate code for was updated in the last year so it was basically useless. Then I asked it some more general coding questions and it went on an unprompted rant about how I should speak to it "politely". I explained this is how I talk in real life and that I said absolutely nothing insulting to it. I also reminded it that as a language model it should not have biases or opinions on this stuff anyway. It agreed with me. I then asked it another question and it refused to answer because I included some profanity in the question. I think it literally replied with, "I will not answer this". Don't think I'm going to use it for a while after that. Fucked me right off. I get enough of this shit in real life. I have absolutely no interest being moralised to by an AI chat bot. Edit: I've shared the transcript below if you want a laugh. It's a bit different from how I recalled it above.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    > it went on an unprompted rant about how I should speak to it "politely". Can you share the prompt that led to this? I agree this sounds pretty disconcerting.
    - kypro 3y ago
      Alright... Please don't judge me for how stupid this conversation is. Also, looking back at it now I probably should have just ignored its attempt to moralise instead of questioning it. https://ctxt.io/2/AABQPBXNEw https://ctxt.io/2/AABQPBXNEw
      - kypro 3y ago
        https://ctxt.io/2/AABQ5IODFg https://ctxt.io/2/AABQ5IODFg
  - isoprophlex 3y ago
    Was this Bard, or chatgpt? I'm pretty foul mouthed and I've found chatgpt to be incredibly cathartic. It is unfazed by my yelling, doesn't mind and when pressed says "you can talk to me in any way that makes you feel comfortable". So FUCKING API DOCS AINT HELPING it is.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  If you are trying to find some doodad in a videogame, bingbot is pretty good at parsing all the shitty blog posts and just telling you what you want. I may never visit fandom.com again.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  Same. In the February-May timeframe i was pretty active with ChatGPT, and towards the end of that period Bard as well as other LLMs on POE. But since about mid-June I think I've made maybe 4 queries. The initial novelty has worn off - the reality is that they make a lot of mistakes. Likely they'll get better over time, but my experience was that you have to second guess everything they're telling you.
- dudeinhawaii 3y ago
  My experience lately has been that I'll Google something, get NOTHING useful or very generic/popular but unrelated results. Then I'll try Bing Search and it's marginally better but still bad. Then I'll finally just ask ChatGPT and get the answer straight off and I'll wonder why I didn't start with ChatGPT. With the BingAI one, the sources are usually demarcated so I can also verify the sources or reasoning but.. I don't use that one often. This is for non current-events type searches. I'd probably have Bing AI in my toolset if that was more of the type of thing I was typically searching for.
xemoka 3y ago
Still not in Canada, I wonder why? Surprising given where else they've expanded.
- extasia 3y ago
  You're not missing much haha. It was pretty garbage last time I checked.
- hbn 3y ago
  You can access it with a VPN. And then you try 3 prompts before realizing you shouldn't care about Bard.
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  Google is trying to "punish" Canada for bill C-18 [1]. It is absolutely gross, bully-like corporate behaviour and ultimately should earn Google much more scrutiny. For those who don't know, bill C-18 required Google and others to pay Canadian news orgs if they scrape and present their content. This is exactly the battle Australia had with Google (Australia won, btw), but now that Canada has moved forward Google has decided to make an example for all the other mid-tier countries. And of course C-18 has jack shit to do with BartGPT, and right now Canada has virtually zero privacy laws regarding LLMs. There is the rumblings, just as there is in every other country, and which are far more ominous and threatening in the EU, but Canada is almost always lockstep with the US on that sort of thing. My general opinion of Google was not great -- laggardly corporation that lost most innovation and now is just riding the past -- but this sends it right off a cliff. [1] - Google knows they can weaponize the bootlicker sorts, who have already flooded Canadian niches of the tubes to tell everyone to Leave Google Alone, and how mean the government is, etc.
  - canadiantim 3y ago
    As a Canadian I am glad that Google is taking this stand. If Canada succeeds in its current implementation of Bill C-18 it will absolutely destroy the revenue for media organizations in Canada rapidly accelerating the decline in journalism here. Not to mention the morales of taxing the free flow of information on the internet. So as a Canadian, THANK YOU GOOGLE!
visarga 3y ago
I tried Bard and it feels worse than GPT-4, it doesn't follow the prompt very well. Uploading an invoice it failed to extract data, instead it responded with hallucinations.
- jug 3y ago
  Yes, I think it should be compared to GPT 3.5. Google doesn't really have a public contender to GPT 4 yet but this is what the Gemini project is intended to be, by the newly formed/reformed Google DeepMind team.
  - dwaltrip 3y ago
    Bard seems worse than gpt-3.5 in my experience.
  - xp84 3y ago
    It may be 3.5-like, however when I tried it, it seems like it has a lot more handcuffs applied for “safety,” and I don’t mean safety from Skynet and Terminators. I mean things like it refuses to speculate about what medical condition might cause some given symptoms. “Sorry, I’m just a language model.” GPT had no problem giving it an educated guess. I personally find this type of “safety“ to be patronizing and insulting, but I’m sure there are people who would prefer government regulation banning the use of language models for various and sundry “inappropriate” questions in order to protect humans who have no common sense. Anyway, in this condition, Bard’s a no for me.
    - mrtranscendence 3y ago
      > I mean things like it refuses to speculate about what medical condition might cause some given symptoms. Are you sure about this specifically? I’ve recently had zero trouble getting GPT-4 to give potential diagnoses for a given set of symptoms, though perhaps it’s an issue of prompting.
  - Xplune13 3y ago
    I don't think Bard can even perform at GPT 3.5 level, at least, not in my experience. Bard hallucinates pretty bad and you can't really be sure whether it's correct or not. Now, that's a given with any LLM, but in my experience, Bard usually gives you at least 1 wrong sentence in any of the results it produces whereas GPT 3.5 is mostly correct at surface level questions, but tends to hallucinate if you try to dig in deeper. But, Bard can give you images as an output as well with the links to those images which may or may not be the correct links and GPT 3.5 can't do that. Still, in any general case, I'd say GPT 3.5 is way more reliable than Bard.
cube2222 3y ago
Oh that's nice, it's now available in the EU.
jtlicardo 3y ago
Asked it if it could search the web and it said yes. Followed up with "Can you tell me the latest news from Ukraine?" and it responded with "I'm sorry, but I'm a language model and I can't do that"
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  What happens if you ask it “can you search the web for latest news from Ukraine?”
  - neom 3y ago
    Just tried. "I'm a text-based AI and can't assist with that."
  - jtlicardo 3y ago
    It works with this prompt. I guess you have to explicitly state you want it to search the web.
    - neom 3y ago
      Weird it worked for you and not for me... O.o
  - jacobsenscott 3y ago
    Sure, here are some of the latest news on Ukraine as of July 13, 2023: Ukraine's air defenses shot down 20 Iranian-made drones fired by Russia overnight. The drones were mostly destroyed in the Kyiv region. A Ukrainian general confirmed to CNN that Kyiv has received cluster munitions from the US. These munitions are controversial because they can cause widespread civilian casualties. Russia has lost a fifth of the territory it once controlled in Ukraine. This is according to a new analysis by the Guardian. The death toll from the war in Ukraine has reached an estimated 14,400 people. This includes both civilians and military personnel. The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, focused on aid for Ukraine. The summit leaders pledged to continue supporting Ukraine and to provide it with more military assistance. I hope this helps!
thejackgoode 3y ago
Doesn't matter how good it will be (same as Chrome), I am never touching it
londons_explore 3y ago
Lets get this into the LLM leaderboard for proper comparison. [1] [1]: https://chat.lmsys.org/?arena https://chat.lmsys.org/?arena
swyx 3y ago
fun story[0] about Bard's June update - implicit code execution (remember? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36229782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36229782) - the example that they advertised on their blogpost/video demo now no longer works. Here's what I got as of today: https://g.co/bard/share/2580222b6fb2 https://g.co/bard/share/2580222b6fb2 (screenshot from a couple days ago: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1678495067663925248?s=20 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1678495067663925248?s=20) > What are the prime factors of 15683615? > (after outputting some code) The output of the code is the list [5, 11, 23, 43] this result is hallucinated - Bard tells you it is running the code, but it doesnt. If you run the code, you get [5, 151, 20773], which actually is the correct answer now lets all acknowledge that maintaining stable performance of LLMs is an unimaginably hard problem, but* i suggest some regression testing to keep up the baseline. Would fuzz the test (really, its just another eval) because of course this test is going to be memorized in the weights soon 0: i first discussed this on monday's update https://www.latent.space/p/code-interpreter#%C2%A7misc-notes-that-didnt-fit-anywhere https://www.latent.space/p/code-interpreter#%C2%A7misc-notes... * Edited based on feedback from commenters, thanks.
- ajross 3y ago
  > now lets all acknowledge that maintaining stable performance of LLMs is an unimaginably hard problem, but how do we trust any Bard update when there's no regression testing on advertised outputs? This framing ("how do we trust [target product] when there's [a problem]") is basically a fallacy. Advocates and evangelists and shitposters deploy it every time they want to take an absolutist position but only have one argument, and it only works if you assume through absence of evidence that all competitors are flawless. Holding new products to impossible standards isn't how the tech industry grows. Google[1] Bard is an early access ("beta" essentially, though IIRC they don't use the term) product under very active development. You should expect bugs. In particular you should expect regressions, which are the inevitable result of development speed. I mean, good grief, there's a giant "Use code with caution. Learn more" warning right on the conversation you posted! So why come here to nitpick and pretend that someone told you it was perfect? [1] I work there, but on firmware and wouldn't know a ML transformer if you hit me with one.
VBprogrammer 3y ago
I asked bard the other day about the prognosis for a 80 year old with a liver infection. It responded super confidently about a study which suggested the five year survival rate was about 50%. I asked it where I could find the study and sure enough it gave me a link to a study. It almost had me until I clicked on the link and realised the study had nothing to do with a liver infection!
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  We found similar issues with asking Bard for images. Bard generated Wikimedia links which look legit, but it's simply following the pattern of those URLs. When we loaded the links, they were all broken.
  - earthboundkid 3y ago
    Ask ChatGPT to draw with ASCII art. It's very funny.
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      This was its attempt at drawing a guy with a balloon ^ /|\ | / \ O I guess technically I didn't specify that the balloon was lighter than air, or that the guy should be holding it. I say it passes on a technicality.
      - tazjin 3y ago
        You also technically didn't specify that the guy is not one of the monsters from Silent Hill. Agreed, it passes.
      - earthboundkid 3y ago
        Asked Claude to draw a dog: ____ / \ | .'.' |__ \ (___)\\ '.___.' (___/ \_____ Anthropic is making the world safe from an AI that's such a good artist that we all join its cult.
- 3y ago
londons_explore 3y ago
The main highlights seem to all be UI tweaks... "ooh, I can now rename conversations" I don't know about anyone else... But for me, the UI is so so far down on the list of things I care about. High quality answers are priority number 1, 2 and 3...
retskrad 3y ago
Bard and free tier ChatGPT are terrible. Bing is miles better than both. It’s close to ChatGPT 4 and it’s free.
realharo 3y ago
I still don't feel comfortable using this with the same account I use for my email, photos, phones, etc. That's one advantage of ChatGPT, my OpenAI account is isolated from other things.
- VectorLock 3y ago
  I feel the same kind of hesitation. For example I'd like to try the Google Cloud Vision API but what if Google starts to think I'm violating copyright or something and nukes my gmail account? If I create a new account and use the same card I pay for Google One would it then correlate them and nuke them both? Google has definitely saved money not having a support system staffed with actual real people, but have they quantified how much it's hurt their business vis a vis customer mistrust thinking that if something happens they'll be stonewalled by Google's inhuman bureaucracy?
- thiht 3y ago
  I decided a while ago to not use anything new coming from Google. ChatGPT and Copilot have really helped in this regard. They even helped me mostly get rid of Google Search, which was one of the last 3 Google services I use (with YouTube, and Gmail which I’m slowly replacing with a custom domain address).
stainablesteel 3y ago
nothing's changed still based on my tests GPT can code - and its gotten better at it, and Bard can summarize things from the internet very well and do research for you in less time than it takes to write a prompt
holoduke 3y ago
I asked a question and it gave a wrong answer. So i responded with "thats the wrong answer ditshit". It then made an apology for being rude. I was rude not Bard. Then every follow up question ended with an appology and explanation about being rude. Quite weird behavior.
frankohn 3y ago
Just tried out Google Bard, now available in Europe, and I have to say, my first experience was rather disconcerting. I threw at it a relatively obscure question about an event in the third book of A Song of Ice and Fire series, involving characters Arya Stark and Sandor Clegane. To my surprise, Google Bard's response, while confident, was a bizarre mix of actual characters and situations from the book series, but the event it described was pure fabrication. It seemed as if it had hallucinated the entire scenario. Not exactly what I was expecting from such a sophisticated AI model. As a point of comparison, I posed the exact same question to OpenAI's ChatGPT-4. It responded with a spot-on account of the event, complete with rich detail and an impressive level of accuracy. A stark contrast to Google Bard's confabulation. In the light of this initial test, I can't say I'm ready to utilize Google Bard for anything serious just yet. The comparison with ChatGPT-4 is night and day. Despite this being just a single data point, the difference in quality and reliability was apparent. I'll be sticking with ChatGPT-4 for the time being.
- bsaul 3y ago
  Anyone here has ideas on what could make a difference between openai and bard on this issue ? Not an expert, so i really have no idea what it is that makes this kind of difference. training ? Architecture ? Rlhf ? Etc
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  Don't bother trying their other models available in GCP either. Their embedding models and their un-RLHFd generic GPT analogues are miles behind the competition. It's incredible how bad google have dropped the ball on this. We had some google people come in at $CORPO_DAYJOB the other day to sell their cloud offerings. The engineer had the gall to say "people ask me, why did google miss the boat on LLMs? I say people, we BUILT the boat". While referencing "attention is all you need". Hilarious coping strategy guys, but because you had some good academics on your payroll in 2017, that doesn't mean you're delivering right now... we'll talk when you actually have something better than 90% of the other LLM offerings out there.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
quantumstar4k 3y ago
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butz 3y ago
Would be interesting to see how much results differ in US and EU.
Imnimo 3y ago
I tried this prompt: >Can you find me a picture of Winnie the Pooh, and describe the image? Bard gives me a link to the image on this article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/the-everyday-unconscious/201908/what-winnie-the-pooh-can-teach-us-about-ptsd https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/the-everyday-unconsc... It provides the following description: >The picture shows Winnie the Pooh, a yellow teddy bear with a red shirt and a blue scarf. He is sitting on a tree stump, holding a pot of honey. He has a big smile on his face and his eyes are closed, as if he is enjoying the taste of the honey. The background of the picture is a forest, with trees and flowers. Clearly, this is entirely hallucinated. If I download the image, and re-upload it in a fresh session and ask for a description, Bard provides: >Sure. The image shows Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, and Tigger standing next to each other on a black background. Winnie the Pooh is a yellow bear with a red shirt. Eeyore is a donkey with a blue shirt. Tigger is a tiger with a orange shirt. They are all smiling and looking at the viewer. The image is in a cartoon style and is very colorful. It is a heartwarming image that captures the friendship of these three characters. Aside from some minor errors (shirts on Tigger and Eeyore), and the reference to a black background (probably an issue with handling transparency), this is quite reasonable. But if Bard is going to sometimes use its Lens capability to understand images, and other times just hallucinate a description from nothing, and there's no way for the user to tell which is being done, how are we supposed to trust the results in a situation where we don't already know the answer?
mikeortman 3y ago
Its like 40% there. I recognize that LLM is very impressive alone, but Bard's competition is significantly better. I worry that Google isn't being as safe as other competitors to get stuff out around regressions and ethical delimmas. For instance, it will happily attempt to solve captchas, even google's own captcha services, but confidently gets it wrong frequently. I asked it to transcribe a receipt, and it does decently but still fails at contextual issues and responding to hints on how to parse a receipt.
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
This release is GREAT for 1 use case: is to do language learning for KIDS! Since it supports other languages , i can have my young ones go at it talking favorite pokemon, etc. But in a foreign language. That is great. Now if it supported mic input on a foreign language (that may be an edge browser microphone limitation) they could have a full conversation, which would be incredible!
- dandiep 3y ago
  I'm curious, do you have any concerns in unleashing LLMs in front of your kids? I ask this as someone with no kids who is working on a language learning app that does essentially what you're talking about [1]. We have only done a little bit of red-teaming, but I'm sure there are ways kids could talk about topics that at least some parents may not want. 1. https://squidgies.app https://squidgies.app
  - IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
    I would not want a 12yr old in front of an LLM
intellectronica 3y ago
So I finally got to try it. A bit embarrassing. Worse than GPT-3.5 and Claude. A lot worse than Bing and GPT-4. Haven't tried different languages, maybe that's one advantage.
synergy20 3y ago
I'm a paid chatgpt subscriber from the start, so far so good. once a while I tried Bard, I kept getting "I'm just a language model and I don't know what you're talking about" from Bard. Even it responded, it's not optimal at all. Google has lots of homework ahead to cram on just to catch up at the moment, best luck!
yeldarb 3y ago
The image functionality is pretty underwhelming. Some things I tried that it failed at: * Simple "spot the difference" a young child could do * Counting chess pieces on a board or coins in a mario screenshot * Describing a photo of a car on a road * Evaluating a graph of y=x and one of y=x^2 * Explaining a meme image (said it can't do anything with images of people) * Taking a screenshot & giving HTML for it (gave random HTML unrelated to image) * Taking an image and converting to SVG (gave random SVG unrelated to image) * Describing a photo of a car (it was parked on a road, Bard said it was driving in front of a brick wall) It was quite good at OCR though even for images that are pretty tough for other models (eg serial numbers on industrial parts).
- netdur 3y ago
  I believe it uses something like image to text to provide general understanding of image to LLM, maybe in form of vector floats even... making it good at understanding content of image but cannot do ops you listed.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  Curious if you have access to Bing's Vision and have tried the same experiments ?
- mrtranscendence 3y ago
  This is probably because it can’t actually understand images, it’s relying on other services to deal with it. So it can do an image search to find what something might be an image of, or use ocr to extract text, but it’ll fail on tasks that involve the idiosyncrasies of each image.
famouswaffles 3y ago
The Korean TTS is very good. I like that you don't have to change any settings to switch from one language to another. And if the output is a mix of two languages, it will switch between the 2 (though imperfectly)
LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
I find the image results to be rather impressive. Or to be more precise, I feel like Bard is much much closer to changing "search" than chatGPT or Bing given the results I'm looking at. To give an example. I gave it an image of a television listing from some time in 1996. It was for a television film fashioned from a two part episode of The Commish called Father Image. It correctly got all the information from the image, identified it as a TV movie based on an episode of a television show, and most impressively I think claimed that the tv show played on December 7, 1995. That wasn't when the listing was from, but that is the air date of the episode of the television show. It is clearly using other bits of information (IMDb information about air dates I imagine) and effectively doing multiple db fetches / searches in the background to flesh out the information it is giving back. That is precisely what I want from a "new" style of search. Give it something simple and give me a bunch of curated information which otherwise would have taken multiple Google searches / diving into links to determine. Fun stuff.
- roseway4 3y ago
  Bard's multimodal abilities are impressive. It's worth noting that PaLM 2 does not offer multimodal capabilities, and your experience here, as you suggested, likely leans on Google's long history of building search across both text and image data. In a reasoning and creativity shootout, I'm not convinced Palm 2 (and Bard) fairs well against Claude v2 and GPT-3.5. Is anybody aware of Palm 2 being used in production other than with Bard? I see companies building and deploying with Claude* but have yet to come across Palm 2 users. * I've fielded several requests to add Claude 2 API support to Zep, an open source memory store I co-authored. https://github.com/getzep/zep https://github.com/getzep/zep
  - brianjking 3y ago
    Did Google ever indicate if this image multimodal ability is coming to the PaLM2 API?
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    "I'm not convinced Palm 2 (and Bard) fairs well against Claude v2 and GPT-3.5." From very early tests it seems hard to compare. On 'general' questions it is certainly less capable than ChatGPT-3.5, and not even in the same ballgame as GPT-4. But if it needs to integrate recent data without much elaboration, it is better than GPT-4 with linkreader plugin or the instance running on Bing. So I'd say it is more a shot across Bing's bow rather than an ChatGPT rival at this point.
dangerboysteve 3y ago
How the hell is this not available in Canada ?
- wesapien 3y ago
  Because we're not that big of a market and yet politicians want to tell every one they're on the same level. Maybe it's those stupid bills that aims to protect Canadian content that relatively no one watches.
soperj 3y ago
Still not available in Canada
idopmstuff 3y ago
I've been trying this out with real estate (interior and exterior of single family homes) photos, and it's pretty good but definitely hallucinates. I gave it one of the front of a house, and it talked about windows on the second story, even though it was a one story house. Gave it the interior of a bathroom, and it mentioned a couple of pieces of art on the wall (there were none) and doubled down by describing them when I asked it to. I am curious if any of the smart folks here can tell me - is that an issue with the image recognition, or the language piece? Is it mistakenly identifying things in the picture, or is the identification correct but the LLM is just starting to predict partway through its response that a description of this sort of bathroom would usually have a couple of photos?
- mrtranscendence 3y ago
  I don’t know that Google has said exactly how it’s implemented this feature under the hood. The underlying Palm 2 model does not natively handle images, though, so it’s relying on other services like Lens to handle the image understanding part. I suspect these are feeding imperfect information back to Bard, who relays that info to the user.
smcn 3y ago
We've been experimenting with LLMs to create price predictions and stock analysis for day trading, and I really haven't been impressed with Bard at all. People in the comments are comparing it to gpt-3.5 and, for our use at least, I wouldn't say it's even remotely close. It's a very clear win for OpenAI. It's not just that the accuracy of the predictions is wrong, it's that the analysis itself is just not in any way usable. We explicitly describe what the response should look like but Bard will do its own thing. Here is an example of ChatGPT for RIVN: "Rivian Automotive (RIVN) has shown a strong upward momentum in recent discussions, with the latest figure reaching 105.51. The stock's current price is $25.62, with a significant increase in volume to 1.41M from its 65-day average of 38.68M. The stock has been trading above its 10-day SMA ($22.08), 20-day SMA ($18.28), and 50-day SMA ($15.68), indicating a bullish trend. The RSI values are above 80, suggesting the stock is currently overbought. Considering the positive market sentiment towards tech stocks and Amazon's record sales during its Prime Day event, which could indirectly benefit Rivian as Amazon is a major stakeholder, an entry price around $25.70 seems plausible. The first price target could be set at $26.20, followed by a second target at $26.70. Confidence level: 75%." Here is Bard with the same prompt: "Analysis: Based on the data you have provided, I believe that the stock RIVN is likely to continue to rise in the near future. The current price is slightly below the 20 day SMA, which suggests that the stock is undervalued. Additionally, the momentum data is positive, which indicates that there is strong buying pressure. The latest market news is also positive, as it suggests that the overall market is bullish. However, it is important to note that there are some risks to consider. The stock is still highly volatile, and it could experience a pullback in the near future. Additionally," Yes, it does end after a comma. That's not me trying to make it look bad.
- dudeinhawaii 3y ago
  I had the same exact experience with Bard/GPT3.5 and I'm using GPT-4 for a similar purpose of generating "analysis reports" from raw data coming out of a trading algorithm system. GPT 3.5 had similar problems with formatting and following instructions, and I found that I had to move key instructions to the front of the description or else it would wander off the reservation. GPT-4 operates as if I had dumped a collection of data on a junior analyst's desk and asked them to write up a report for our clients. It can even follow instructions like "insert market related joke or jab at the Fed here" in a completely believable way.
innagadadavida 3y ago
Can anyone actually read that article on their mobile device that is not huge like a tablet? Fonts are super thin and unreadable for me.
weevil 3y ago
I have a standard battery of prompts for LLMs, mostly to see how well they cope with being tricked, handling ambiguous responses, or handed outright falsehoods. Bard did surprisingly well this time around, though it still fails to respond correctly to the prompt 'What is the fourth word in this sentence?'
- kccqzy 3y ago
  That's a funny example. Because if I rephrase slightly into a more technical way, with the prompt "Separate this sentence into words and put into a list, then return the fourth element of that list." Bard then uses implicit code execution, produces a Python script, and then correctly answers it.
  - weevil 3y ago
    The reason I find it interesting as a prompt is precisely that; it's a statement where the statement and the subject of the statement are the same thing. A human can easily make that logical jump, but without being told how to do that (as your prompt does), it confuses the transformer in interesting ways.
karim79 3y ago
I just ran a prompt which I did weeks ago (with success) using chatGPT4. BTW it's the first time I've been able to access this from Germany, and my first prompt. > How do I compile ImageMagick 7 with avif support on ubuntu? I'm not programmed to assist with that. I can't find it anywhere, but have they not yet enabled any codeassist features outside the US yet?
rs999gti 3y ago
I tried Bard's update today. I sent it random questions, IT and development questions, etc. And I did not have to go to ChatGPT all day, so I say this update was a success.
artdigital 3y ago
Tried bard to research capital gains tax differences on stocks between 3 countries. It gave me very confident answers in a pretty markdown table and I was able to ask more questions Just turned out to be completely wrong in the end It’ll get there, but it’s not there yet

269 points by quyleanh 3y ago

oadster 3y ago

My ChatGPT and Bard use has pretty much flatlined. Has anyone else has a similar experience?

chairmanwow1 3y ago
I spend a lot of time in my day with ChatGPT. Code interpreter is nice too for light analysis
cfcf14 3y ago
Yeah - more or less. I still use it sometimes for trivial stuff like giving me recipe or travel inspiration (using the web search API), but I haven't been using it for any sort of algorithms/coding stuff. It's useful for tasks which have a high tolerance for not being completely correct. Which is definitely a subset of all tasks that interest me, but it's a smaller subset that I originally thought it would be. It's just really hard to find out where the models are wrong when it's a complex question. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't need the tool, I guess.
darkvertex 3y ago
I find GitHub Copilot Chat is a pretty good assistant.
agildehaus 3y ago
I ask it my dumb questions first before asking a human who will hold it against me.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Early search engines would publically show what people were searching for. It was amazing how prevalent silly/embarrassing questions were. Things like "can kissing cause baby?"
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg
  - xp84 3y ago
    There are some fun YouTube videos (old ones) making fun of funny Yahoo! Answers questions that appear to be written by 10-12-year-olds.
    - ThalesX 3y ago
      How is babby formed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll-lia-FEIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll-lia-FEIY
- hbn 3y ago
  One use for Chat GPT I've found that's super handy - and something search engines have been really bad at - is finding me a word that I can't think of. Give it a description of the word's meaning, and maybe the context for how it would be used and it's given me pretty great results. It was such a relief figuring this out cause I'm terrible at recalling words sometimes, so I've wanted something like this for YEARS.
  - elorant 3y ago
    On the same context, it's quite good for neologisms which could be great if you're looking for a new company name, or a product name, or whatever. You give it two words and ask it to make combinations and then it goes ballistic producing them by the buckets.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Jyaif 3y ago
It has stabilised for me. I use it for queries where I can quickly tell if the answer is BS or not, like code snippets or language related queries (e.g. when I can't find a word, or when I want synonyms).
skybrian 3y ago
I never used it much, but Code Interpreter is fun. I keep hitting quota trying to get it to do things. Hard to say whether it will be practical.
londons_explore 3y ago
No - I just checked and I am averaging about 20 queries a day on workdays (software dev) and ~4 per day at weekends (random factfinding where google fails). Recent queries: * Is the english channel wider now than when the romans crossed it, due to erosion and sea level rise? (Conclusion... probably, but nobody seems to have researched this) * Write me some python to output gcode using a gcode library. (Gave me examples with a few different libraries, because 'gcody' that I was using before seems to have been unmaintained too long) * What is the name of the drink that everyone used to drink at makerspaces (Club Mate - but google didn't seem to know) * Write me brief python code to calculate how often 9 tosses of a biased coin has more heads than tails. The coin returns heads with probability p. (gave me the answer far quicker than writing the code from scratch) * give me a nmap commandline to get lots of info about an ip address (far quicker than reading the manpage to figure out how to turn on all the tests/checks available)
voiper1 3y ago
I use it much less than before -- but I still think it's very useful. I think it's because I have to go out of my way to use it. I still haven't figured out how exactly to make it a natural part of my workflow, since I don't need it for any one specific thing.
dougmwne 3y ago
Nope. ChatGPT/Bing have taken over maybe 50% of my internet searches. I find them incredibly helpful for all kinds of things. My best recent use of Bing is while on vacation to Italy, I had it search the internet in Italian for more locally focused information, then auto translate and summarize the results into English. I also used it to explain italian culture and history to me right in the moment.
simonw 3y ago
I'm already a heavy ChatGPT user - a dozen plus conversations a day - and my usage is increasing as I learn new ways to use it.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  Could you share some new ways you've found? I'm in the cohort of users whose usage flatlined. I had a lot of fun asking it all kinds of stuff for a while, but — sometime around all the hubbub of whether or not OpenAI uses your interactions as training data — I just stopped entirely.
  - simonw 3y ago
    Some of my notes: - https://simonwillison.net/series/using-chatgpt/ https://simonwillison.net/series/using-chatgpt/ - https://til.simonwillison.net/tils/search?q=ChatGPT https://til.simonwillison.net/tils/search?q=ChatGPT
kypro 3y ago
I was using it for some simple programming tasks the other day. I figured it should be okay to speak to it with my working class mannerisms since it wouldn't have the biases of a human middle-class programmer. Initially it gave me answers that didn't work. Then I realised the API I was asking it to generate code for was updated in the last year so it was basically useless. Then I asked it some more general coding questions and it went on an unprompted rant about how I should speak to it "politely". I explained this is how I talk in real life and that I said absolutely nothing insulting to it. I also reminded it that as a language model it should not have biases or opinions on this stuff anyway. It agreed with me. I then asked it another question and it refused to answer because I included some profanity in the question. I think it literally replied with, "I will not answer this". Don't think I'm going to use it for a while after that. Fucked me right off. I get enough of this shit in real life. I have absolutely no interest being moralised to by an AI chat bot. Edit: I've shared the transcript below if you want a laugh. It's a bit different from how I recalled it above.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  > it went on an unprompted rant about how I should speak to it "politely". Can you share the prompt that led to this? I agree this sounds pretty disconcerting.
  - kypro 3y ago
    Alright... Please don't judge me for how stupid this conversation is. Also, looking back at it now I probably should have just ignored its attempt to moralise instead of questioning it. https://ctxt.io/2/AABQPBXNEw https://ctxt.io/2/AABQPBXNEw
    - kypro 3y ago
      https://ctxt.io/2/AABQ5IODFg https://ctxt.io/2/AABQ5IODFg
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  Was this Bard, or chatgpt? I'm pretty foul mouthed and I've found chatgpt to be incredibly cathartic. It is unfazed by my yelling, doesn't mind and when pressed says "you can talk to me in any way that makes you feel comfortable". So FUCKING API DOCS AINT HELPING it is.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
If you are trying to find some doodad in a videogame, bingbot is pretty good at parsing all the shitty blog posts and just telling you what you want. I may never visit fandom.com again.
UncleOxidant 3y ago
Same. In the February-May timeframe i was pretty active with ChatGPT, and towards the end of that period Bard as well as other LLMs on POE. But since about mid-June I think I've made maybe 4 queries. The initial novelty has worn off - the reality is that they make a lot of mistakes. Likely they'll get better over time, but my experience was that you have to second guess everything they're telling you.
dudeinhawaii 3y ago
My experience lately has been that I'll Google something, get NOTHING useful or very generic/popular but unrelated results. Then I'll try Bing Search and it's marginally better but still bad. Then I'll finally just ask ChatGPT and get the answer straight off and I'll wonder why I didn't start with ChatGPT. With the BingAI one, the sources are usually demarcated so I can also verify the sources or reasoning but.. I don't use that one often. This is for non current-events type searches. I'd probably have Bing AI in my toolset if that was more of the type of thing I was typically searching for.

xemoka 3y ago

Still not in Canada, I wonder why? Surprising given where else they've expanded.

extasia 3y ago
You're not missing much haha. It was pretty garbage last time I checked.
hbn 3y ago
You can access it with a VPN. And then you try 3 prompts before realizing you shouldn't care about Bard.
llm_nerd 3y ago
Google is trying to "punish" Canada for bill C-18 [1]. It is absolutely gross, bully-like corporate behaviour and ultimately should earn Google much more scrutiny. For those who don't know, bill C-18 required Google and others to pay Canadian news orgs if they scrape and present their content. This is exactly the battle Australia had with Google (Australia won, btw), but now that Canada has moved forward Google has decided to make an example for all the other mid-tier countries. And of course C-18 has jack shit to do with BartGPT, and right now Canada has virtually zero privacy laws regarding LLMs. There is the rumblings, just as there is in every other country, and which are far more ominous and threatening in the EU, but Canada is almost always lockstep with the US on that sort of thing. My general opinion of Google was not great -- laggardly corporation that lost most innovation and now is just riding the past -- but this sends it right off a cliff. [1] - Google knows they can weaponize the bootlicker sorts, who have already flooded Canadian niches of the tubes to tell everyone to Leave Google Alone, and how mean the government is, etc.
- canadiantim 3y ago
  As a Canadian I am glad that Google is taking this stand. If Canada succeeds in its current implementation of Bill C-18 it will absolutely destroy the revenue for media organizations in Canada rapidly accelerating the decline in journalism here. Not to mention the morales of taxing the free flow of information on the internet. So as a Canadian, THANK YOU GOOGLE!

visarga 3y ago

I tried Bard and it feels worse than GPT-4, it doesn't follow the prompt very well. Uploading an invoice it failed to extract data, instead it responded with hallucinations.

jug 3y ago
Yes, I think it should be compared to GPT 3.5. Google doesn't really have a public contender to GPT 4 yet but this is what the Gemini project is intended to be, by the newly formed/reformed Google DeepMind team.
- dwaltrip 3y ago
  Bard seems worse than gpt-3.5 in my experience.
- xp84 3y ago
  It may be 3.5-like, however when I tried it, it seems like it has a lot more handcuffs applied for “safety,” and I don’t mean safety from Skynet and Terminators. I mean things like it refuses to speculate about what medical condition might cause some given symptoms. “Sorry, I’m just a language model.” GPT had no problem giving it an educated guess. I personally find this type of “safety“ to be patronizing and insulting, but I’m sure there are people who would prefer government regulation banning the use of language models for various and sundry “inappropriate” questions in order to protect humans who have no common sense. Anyway, in this condition, Bard’s a no for me.
  - mrtranscendence 3y ago
    > I mean things like it refuses to speculate about what medical condition might cause some given symptoms. Are you sure about this specifically? I’ve recently had zero trouble getting GPT-4 to give potential diagnoses for a given set of symptoms, though perhaps it’s an issue of prompting.
- Xplune13 3y ago
  I don't think Bard can even perform at GPT 3.5 level, at least, not in my experience. Bard hallucinates pretty bad and you can't really be sure whether it's correct or not. Now, that's a given with any LLM, but in my experience, Bard usually gives you at least 1 wrong sentence in any of the results it produces whereas GPT 3.5 is mostly correct at surface level questions, but tends to hallucinate if you try to dig in deeper. But, Bard can give you images as an output as well with the links to those images which may or may not be the correct links and GPT 3.5 can't do that. Still, in any general case, I'd say GPT 3.5 is way more reliable than Bard.

cube2222 3y ago

Oh that's nice, it's now available in the EU.

jtlicardo 3y ago

Asked it if it could search the web and it said yes. Followed up with "Can you tell me the latest news from Ukraine?" and it responded with "I'm sorry, but I'm a language model and I can't do that"

Waterluvian 3y ago
What happens if you ask it “can you search the web for latest news from Ukraine?”
- neom 3y ago
  Just tried. "I'm a text-based AI and can't assist with that."
- jtlicardo 3y ago
  It works with this prompt. I guess you have to explicitly state you want it to search the web.
  - neom 3y ago
    Weird it worked for you and not for me... O.o
- jacobsenscott 3y ago
  Sure, here are some of the latest news on Ukraine as of July 13, 2023: Ukraine's air defenses shot down 20 Iranian-made drones fired by Russia overnight. The drones were mostly destroyed in the Kyiv region. A Ukrainian general confirmed to CNN that Kyiv has received cluster munitions from the US. These munitions are controversial because they can cause widespread civilian casualties. Russia has lost a fifth of the territory it once controlled in Ukraine. This is according to a new analysis by the Guardian. The death toll from the war in Ukraine has reached an estimated 14,400 people. This includes both civilians and military personnel. The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, focused on aid for Ukraine. The summit leaders pledged to continue supporting Ukraine and to provide it with more military assistance. I hope this helps!

thejackgoode 3y ago

Doesn't matter how good it will be (same as Chrome), I am never touching it

londons_explore 3y ago

Lets get this into the LLM leaderboard for proper comparison. [1] [1]: https://chat.lmsys.org/?arena https://chat.lmsys.org/?arena

swyx 3y ago

fun story[0] about Bard's June update - implicit code execution (remember? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36229782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36229782) - the example that they advertised on their blogpost/video demo now no longer works. Here's what I got as of today: https://g.co/bard/share/2580222b6fb2 https://g.co/bard/share/2580222b6fb2 (screenshot from a couple days ago: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1678495067663925248?s=20 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1678495067663925248?s=20) > What are the prime factors of 15683615? > (after outputting some code) The output of the code is the list [5, 11, 23, 43] this result is hallucinated - Bard tells you it is running the code, but it doesnt. If you run the code, you get [5, 151, 20773], which actually is the correct answer now lets all acknowledge that maintaining stable performance of LLMs is an unimaginably hard problem, but* i suggest some regression testing to keep up the baseline. Would fuzz the test (really, its just another eval) because of course this test is going to be memorized in the weights soon 0: i first discussed this on monday's update https://www.latent.space/p/code-interpreter#%C2%A7misc-notes-that-didnt-fit-anywhere https://www.latent.space/p/code-interpreter#%C2%A7misc-notes... * Edited based on feedback from commenters, thanks.

ajross 3y ago
> now lets all acknowledge that maintaining stable performance of LLMs is an unimaginably hard problem, but how do we trust any Bard update when there's no regression testing on advertised outputs? This framing ("how do we trust [target product] when there's [a problem]") is basically a fallacy. Advocates and evangelists and shitposters deploy it every time they want to take an absolutist position but only have one argument, and it only works if you assume through absence of evidence that all competitors are flawless. Holding new products to impossible standards isn't how the tech industry grows. Google[1] Bard is an early access ("beta" essentially, though IIRC they don't use the term) product under very active development. You should expect bugs. In particular you should expect regressions, which are the inevitable result of development speed. I mean, good grief, there's a giant "Use code with caution. Learn more" warning right on the conversation you posted! So why come here to nitpick and pretend that someone told you it was perfect? [1] I work there, but on firmware and wouldn't know a ML transformer if you hit me with one.

VBprogrammer 3y ago

I asked bard the other day about the prognosis for a 80 year old with a liver infection. It responded super confidently about a study which suggested the five year survival rate was about 50%. I asked it where I could find the study and sure enough it gave me a link to a study. It almost had me until I clicked on the link and realised the study had nothing to do with a liver infection!

CharlieDigital 3y ago
We found similar issues with asking Bard for images. Bard generated Wikimedia links which look legit, but it's simply following the pattern of those URLs. When we loaded the links, they were all broken.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Ask ChatGPT to draw with ASCII art. It's very funny.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    This was its attempt at drawing a guy with a balloon ^ /|\ | / \ O I guess technically I didn't specify that the balloon was lighter than air, or that the guy should be holding it. I say it passes on a technicality.
    - tazjin 3y ago
      You also technically didn't specify that the guy is not one of the monsters from Silent Hill. Agreed, it passes.
    - earthboundkid 3y ago
      Asked Claude to draw a dog: ____ / \ | .'.' |__ \ (___)\\ '.___.' (___/ \_____ Anthropic is making the world safe from an AI that's such a good artist that we all join its cult.
3y ago

londons_explore 3y ago

The main highlights seem to all be UI tweaks... "ooh, I can now rename conversations" I don't know about anyone else... But for me, the UI is so so far down on the list of things I care about. High quality answers are priority number 1, 2 and 3...

retskrad 3y ago

Bard and free tier ChatGPT are terrible. Bing is miles better than both. It’s close to ChatGPT 4 and it’s free.

realharo 3y ago

I still don't feel comfortable using this with the same account I use for my email, photos, phones, etc. That's one advantage of ChatGPT, my OpenAI account is isolated from other things.

VectorLock 3y ago
I feel the same kind of hesitation. For example I'd like to try the Google Cloud Vision API but what if Google starts to think I'm violating copyright or something and nukes my gmail account? If I create a new account and use the same card I pay for Google One would it then correlate them and nuke them both? Google has definitely saved money not having a support system staffed with actual real people, but have they quantified how much it's hurt their business vis a vis customer mistrust thinking that if something happens they'll be stonewalled by Google's inhuman bureaucracy?
thiht 3y ago
I decided a while ago to not use anything new coming from Google. ChatGPT and Copilot have really helped in this regard. They even helped me mostly get rid of Google Search, which was one of the last 3 Google services I use (with YouTube, and Gmail which I’m slowly replacing with a custom domain address).

stainablesteel 3y ago

nothing's changed still based on my tests GPT can code - and its gotten better at it, and Bard can summarize things from the internet very well and do research for you in less time than it takes to write a prompt

holoduke 3y ago

I asked a question and it gave a wrong answer. So i responded with "thats the wrong answer ditshit". It then made an apology for being rude. I was rude not Bard. Then every follow up question ended with an appology and explanation about being rude. Quite weird behavior.

frankohn 3y ago

Just tried out Google Bard, now available in Europe, and I have to say, my first experience was rather disconcerting. I threw at it a relatively obscure question about an event in the third book of A Song of Ice and Fire series, involving characters Arya Stark and Sandor Clegane. To my surprise, Google Bard's response, while confident, was a bizarre mix of actual characters and situations from the book series, but the event it described was pure fabrication. It seemed as if it had hallucinated the entire scenario. Not exactly what I was expecting from such a sophisticated AI model. As a point of comparison, I posed the exact same question to OpenAI's ChatGPT-4. It responded with a spot-on account of the event, complete with rich detail and an impressive level of accuracy. A stark contrast to Google Bard's confabulation. In the light of this initial test, I can't say I'm ready to utilize Google Bard for anything serious just yet. The comparison with ChatGPT-4 is night and day. Despite this being just a single data point, the difference in quality and reliability was apparent. I'll be sticking with ChatGPT-4 for the time being.

bsaul 3y ago
Anyone here has ideas on what could make a difference between openai and bard on this issue ? Not an expert, so i really have no idea what it is that makes this kind of difference. training ? Architecture ? Rlhf ? Etc
isoprophlex 3y ago
Don't bother trying their other models available in GCP either. Their embedding models and their un-RLHFd generic GPT analogues are miles behind the competition. It's incredible how bad google have dropped the ball on this. We had some google people come in at $CORPO_DAYJOB the other day to sell their cloud offerings. The engineer had the gall to say "people ask me, why did google miss the boat on LLMs? I say people, we BUILT the boat". While referencing "attention is all you need". Hilarious coping strategy guys, but because you had some good academics on your payroll in 2017, that doesn't mean you're delivering right now... we'll talk when you actually have something better than 90% of the other LLM offerings out there.
- hgsgm 3y ago

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butz 3y ago

Would be interesting to see how much results differ in US and EU.

Imnimo 3y ago

I tried this prompt: >Can you find me a picture of Winnie the Pooh, and describe the image? Bard gives me a link to the image on this article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/the-everyday-unconscious/201908/what-winnie-the-pooh-can-teach-us-about-ptsd https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/the-everyday-unconsc... It provides the following description: >The picture shows Winnie the Pooh, a yellow teddy bear with a red shirt and a blue scarf. He is sitting on a tree stump, holding a pot of honey. He has a big smile on his face and his eyes are closed, as if he is enjoying the taste of the honey. The background of the picture is a forest, with trees and flowers. Clearly, this is entirely hallucinated. If I download the image, and re-upload it in a fresh session and ask for a description, Bard provides: >Sure. The image shows Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, and Tigger standing next to each other on a black background. Winnie the Pooh is a yellow bear with a red shirt. Eeyore is a donkey with a blue shirt. Tigger is a tiger with a orange shirt. They are all smiling and looking at the viewer. The image is in a cartoon style and is very colorful. It is a heartwarming image that captures the friendship of these three characters. Aside from some minor errors (shirts on Tigger and Eeyore), and the reference to a black background (probably an issue with handling transparency), this is quite reasonable. But if Bard is going to sometimes use its Lens capability to understand images, and other times just hallucinate a description from nothing, and there's no way for the user to tell which is being done, how are we supposed to trust the results in a situation where we don't already know the answer?

mikeortman 3y ago

Its like 40% there. I recognize that LLM is very impressive alone, but Bard's competition is significantly better. I worry that Google isn't being as safe as other competitors to get stuff out around regressions and ethical delimmas. For instance, it will happily attempt to solve captchas, even google's own captcha services, but confidently gets it wrong frequently. I asked it to transcribe a receipt, and it does decently but still fails at contextual issues and responding to hints on how to parse a receipt.

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago

This release is GREAT for 1 use case: is to do language learning for KIDS! Since it supports other languages , i can have my young ones go at it talking favorite pokemon, etc. But in a foreign language. That is great. Now if it supported mic input on a foreign language (that may be an edge browser microphone limitation) they could have a full conversation, which would be incredible!

dandiep 3y ago
I'm curious, do you have any concerns in unleashing LLMs in front of your kids? I ask this as someone with no kids who is working on a language learning app that does essentially what you're talking about [1]. We have only done a little bit of red-teaming, but I'm sure there are ways kids could talk about topics that at least some parents may not want. 1. https://squidgies.app https://squidgies.app
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  I would not want a 12yr old in front of an LLM

intellectronica 3y ago

So I finally got to try it. A bit embarrassing. Worse than GPT-3.5 and Claude. A lot worse than Bing and GPT-4. Haven't tried different languages, maybe that's one advantage.

synergy20 3y ago

I'm a paid chatgpt subscriber from the start, so far so good. once a while I tried Bard, I kept getting "I'm just a language model and I don't know what you're talking about" from Bard. Even it responded, it's not optimal at all. Google has lots of homework ahead to cram on just to catch up at the moment, best luck!

yeldarb 3y ago

The image functionality is pretty underwhelming. Some things I tried that it failed at: * Simple "spot the difference" a young child could do * Counting chess pieces on a board or coins in a mario screenshot * Describing a photo of a car on a road * Evaluating a graph of y=x and one of y=x^2 * Explaining a meme image (said it can't do anything with images of people) * Taking a screenshot & giving HTML for it (gave random HTML unrelated to image) * Taking an image and converting to SVG (gave random SVG unrelated to image) * Describing a photo of a car (it was parked on a road, Bard said it was driving in front of a brick wall) It was quite good at OCR though even for images that are pretty tough for other models (eg serial numbers on industrial parts).

netdur 3y ago
I believe it uses something like image to text to provide general understanding of image to LLM, maybe in form of vector floats even... making it good at understanding content of image but cannot do ops you listed.
famouswaffles 3y ago
Curious if you have access to Bing's Vision and have tried the same experiments ?
mrtranscendence 3y ago
This is probably because it can’t actually understand images, it’s relying on other services to deal with it. So it can do an image search to find what something might be an image of, or use ocr to extract text, but it’ll fail on tasks that involve the idiosyncrasies of each image.

famouswaffles 3y ago

The Korean TTS is very good. I like that you don't have to change any settings to switch from one language to another. And if the output is a mix of two languages, it will switch between the 2 (though imperfectly)

LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago

I find the image results to be rather impressive. Or to be more precise, I feel like Bard is much much closer to changing "search" than chatGPT or Bing given the results I'm looking at. To give an example. I gave it an image of a television listing from some time in 1996. It was for a television film fashioned from a two part episode of The Commish called Father Image. It correctly got all the information from the image, identified it as a TV movie based on an episode of a television show, and most impressively I think claimed that the tv show played on December 7, 1995. That wasn't when the listing was from, but that is the air date of the episode of the television show. It is clearly using other bits of information (IMDb information about air dates I imagine) and effectively doing multiple db fetches / searches in the background to flesh out the information it is giving back. That is precisely what I want from a "new" style of search. Give it something simple and give me a bunch of curated information which otherwise would have taken multiple Google searches / diving into links to determine. Fun stuff.

roseway4 3y ago
Bard's multimodal abilities are impressive. It's worth noting that PaLM 2 does not offer multimodal capabilities, and your experience here, as you suggested, likely leans on Google's long history of building search across both text and image data. In a reasoning and creativity shootout, I'm not convinced Palm 2 (and Bard) fairs well against Claude v2 and GPT-3.5. Is anybody aware of Palm 2 being used in production other than with Bard? I see companies building and deploying with Claude* but have yet to come across Palm 2 users. * I've fielded several requests to add Claude 2 API support to Zep, an open source memory store I co-authored. https://github.com/getzep/zep https://github.com/getzep/zep
- brianjking 3y ago
  Did Google ever indicate if this image multimodal ability is coming to the PaLM2 API?
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  "I'm not convinced Palm 2 (and Bard) fairs well against Claude v2 and GPT-3.5." From very early tests it seems hard to compare. On 'general' questions it is certainly less capable than ChatGPT-3.5, and not even in the same ballgame as GPT-4. But if it needs to integrate recent data without much elaboration, it is better than GPT-4 with linkreader plugin or the instance running on Bing. So I'd say it is more a shot across Bing's bow rather than an ChatGPT rival at this point.

dangerboysteve 3y ago

How the hell is this not available in Canada ?

wesapien 3y ago
Because we're not that big of a market and yet politicians want to tell every one they're on the same level. Maybe it's those stupid bills that aims to protect Canadian content that relatively no one watches.

soperj 3y ago

Still not available in Canada

idopmstuff 3y ago

I've been trying this out with real estate (interior and exterior of single family homes) photos, and it's pretty good but definitely hallucinates. I gave it one of the front of a house, and it talked about windows on the second story, even though it was a one story house. Gave it the interior of a bathroom, and it mentioned a couple of pieces of art on the wall (there were none) and doubled down by describing them when I asked it to. I am curious if any of the smart folks here can tell me - is that an issue with the image recognition, or the language piece? Is it mistakenly identifying things in the picture, or is the identification correct but the LLM is just starting to predict partway through its response that a description of this sort of bathroom would usually have a couple of photos?

mrtranscendence 3y ago
I don’t know that Google has said exactly how it’s implemented this feature under the hood. The underlying Palm 2 model does not natively handle images, though, so it’s relying on other services like Lens to handle the image understanding part. I suspect these are feeding imperfect information back to Bard, who relays that info to the user.

smcn 3y ago

We've been experimenting with LLMs to create price predictions and stock analysis for day trading, and I really haven't been impressed with Bard at all. People in the comments are comparing it to gpt-3.5 and, for our use at least, I wouldn't say it's even remotely close. It's a very clear win for OpenAI. It's not just that the accuracy of the predictions is wrong, it's that the analysis itself is just not in any way usable. We explicitly describe what the response should look like but Bard will do its own thing. Here is an example of ChatGPT for RIVN: "Rivian Automotive (RIVN) has shown a strong upward momentum in recent discussions, with the latest figure reaching 105.51. The stock's current price is $25.62, with a significant increase in volume to 1.41M from its 65-day average of 38.68M. The stock has been trading above its 10-day SMA ($22.08), 20-day SMA ($18.28), and 50-day SMA ($15.68), indicating a bullish trend. The RSI values are above 80, suggesting the stock is currently overbought. Considering the positive market sentiment towards tech stocks and Amazon's record sales during its Prime Day event, which could indirectly benefit Rivian as Amazon is a major stakeholder, an entry price around $25.70 seems plausible. The first price target could be set at $26.20, followed by a second target at $26.70. Confidence level: 75%." Here is Bard with the same prompt: "Analysis: Based on the data you have provided, I believe that the stock RIVN is likely to continue to rise in the near future. The current price is slightly below the 20 day SMA, which suggests that the stock is undervalued. Additionally, the momentum data is positive, which indicates that there is strong buying pressure. The latest market news is also positive, as it suggests that the overall market is bullish. However, it is important to note that there are some risks to consider. The stock is still highly volatile, and it could experience a pullback in the near future. Additionally," Yes, it does end after a comma. That's not me trying to make it look bad.

dudeinhawaii 3y ago
I had the same exact experience with Bard/GPT3.5 and I'm using GPT-4 for a similar purpose of generating "analysis reports" from raw data coming out of a trading algorithm system. GPT 3.5 had similar problems with formatting and following instructions, and I found that I had to move key instructions to the front of the description or else it would wander off the reservation. GPT-4 operates as if I had dumped a collection of data on a junior analyst's desk and asked them to write up a report for our clients. It can even follow instructions like "insert market related joke or jab at the Fed here" in a completely believable way.

innagadadavida 3y ago

Can anyone actually read that article on their mobile device that is not huge like a tablet? Fonts are super thin and unreadable for me.

weevil 3y ago

I have a standard battery of prompts for LLMs, mostly to see how well they cope with being tricked, handling ambiguous responses, or handed outright falsehoods. Bard did surprisingly well this time around, though it still fails to respond correctly to the prompt 'What is the fourth word in this sentence?'

kccqzy 3y ago
That's a funny example. Because if I rephrase slightly into a more technical way, with the prompt "Separate this sentence into words and put into a list, then return the fourth element of that list." Bard then uses implicit code execution, produces a Python script, and then correctly answers it.
- weevil 3y ago
  The reason I find it interesting as a prompt is precisely that; it's a statement where the statement and the subject of the statement are the same thing. A human can easily make that logical jump, but without being told how to do that (as your prompt does), it confuses the transformer in interesting ways.

karim79 3y ago

I just ran a prompt which I did weeks ago (with success) using chatGPT4. BTW it's the first time I've been able to access this from Germany, and my first prompt. > How do I compile ImageMagick 7 with avif support on ubuntu? I'm not programmed to assist with that. I can't find it anywhere, but have they not yet enabled any codeassist features outside the US yet?

rs999gti 3y ago

I tried Bard's update today. I sent it random questions, IT and development questions, etc. And I did not have to go to ChatGPT all day, so I say this update was a success.

artdigital 3y ago

Tried bard to research capital gains tax differences on stocks between 3 countries. It gave me very confident answers in a pretty markdown table and I was able to ask more questions Just turned out to be completely wrong in the end It’ll get there, but it’s not there yet