4 ms·

Can someone in the know explain how Bard could be as bad as it is, considering Google has been investing in AI for as long as they have? I thought they were ear

Can someone in the know explain how Bard could be as bad as it is, considering Google has been investing in AI for as long as they have? I thought they were earlier than most to begin serious work on AI? How could Bard suck this bad?

jzombie 3y ago
[flagged]
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Don't do this please.
- rvnx 3y ago
  This is also because in Google you tend to get more easily promoted once you launch a new product, than when you do maintenance. So the most logical course at this stage, based on typical politics at Google, would be to shutdown Bard, and launch a new product instead (like what has happened with all the messengers / social network apps)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- never_inline 3y ago
  Which is, of course, complete bullshit as well. This answer perfectly illustrates why the chat gpt verbiage irritates me so much. It's basically rephrasing the oft-repeated complaint that Google kills of projects, (in an MBA style English). But how does that have anything to do with Bard AI being crap? People are seriously impressed by this app?
  - drones 3y ago
    Makes sense to me. Google clearly has a culture/reputation where projects are routinely killed off because they aren't deemed "successful" by some arbitrary metric. This fosters a "failure/success" mentality among employees, which influences what types of projects they take (obvious, immediately profitable) and how long it takes to develop them (as quick as possible). While they have a lot of smart people working there, I think big G has some organisational problems which prevents them from completing large scale experimental projects like this.
lacrimacida 3y ago
Google has good research. Bard is half baked therefore not a great product as of now & not sure if or when. Maybe they were under so much pressure from openai that they indeed rush released it, way before it had to be seen out by public eyes. To me it seems/feels in beta
ars 3y ago
I put all questions to both Bard and chatGPT. The exact same words. Bard is almost always better. For example try: "why does my hole saw have a spring over the drill bit?" Bard is correct, chatGPT makes up nonsense. (There's no such thing as "pilot bit extension spring", and the rest of the reply makes little sense as well.) https://chat.openai.com/share/485a6968-6379-4f64-87b3-6c157586e8c6 https://chat.openai.com/share/485a6968-6379-4f64-87b3-6c1575... https://g.co/bard/share/01c5bb4bf540 https://g.co/bard/share/01c5bb4bf540
- rvnx 3y ago
  Are you sure you are using the latest version of ChatGPT ? It could have been an outdated version (3.5) from one year ago (based on the green logo).
  - ars 3y ago
    Yes, I'm using 3.5, but that's the free version, and I don't need AI often enough to want to pay $20 for version 4.
    - column 3y ago
      3.5 is a weak model that is only good at informal conversation. When people talk about using ChatGPT and its potential (programming, vision, etc.) they talk about GPT-4. If you don't want to pay, you should use Bing Chat for your comparison. 3.5 would not be worth $20 a month but GPT-4 is.
      - replwoacause 3y ago
        It's funny to me how often this mistake is being made here on HN, despite this exact thing being repeated time and again. There is a big difference between 3.5 and 4.
- antognini 3y ago
  I've been asking science and math questions to Bard and ChatGPT (at about an undergraduate level) and likewise found Bard to be consistently better. As an example I asked both how many groups there are of order 6. Bard gave the correct answer of 2 and listed what they were. ChatGPT said there were five and proceeded to list seven.
josh2600 3y ago
The answer to why BigCo can’t outcompete startup is always the same. In BigCo you have ego that blocks authentic artistic critique. There are traditions. There are rules. We learned our lesson last time. In the best organizations, artistic critique is a time-honored tradition passed down from the elders to the padwans. Young Jedi learn how to navigate the matrix with the blessings of their ancestors. Unfortunately, hacking culture in a big org is outré. What made Apple special was that Steve Jobs created many hidden micro cultures within his asylum that allowed so many unorthodox experiments, some of them even worked out. Maybe you have some other examples of people who have been able to hold a core business and build the next iteration many many times successfully? They’re rare birds. Edit: for clarity, Google could have a killerAI product in a year if they would kill their ego. Demis Hassibis (I think that’s how you spell his name, sorry) the CEO @ DeepMind can absolutely build the thing they want, but they’d have to give him carte Blanche, and they won’t.
cdata 3y ago
The answer is some combination of two phenomena: 1. The Innovator's Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma) This is the premise that a mature incumbent will usually fail to respond fast enough to disruptive innovations by an upstart because their organization is optimized to continue providing existing customers sustaining improvements to the products they are already paying for. 2. The Coordination Headwind (https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/) This is the premise that cross-functional coordination difficulty grows superlinearly as the organization scales. The relative influence of these phenomena is a matter of debate. And, there may be other factors at play. But, the mix of needing to respond (against organizational incentives) to a disruptive innovation while also trying to align long-established factions, product teams and PAs - many with a motivation to have an outsized influence over the new effort - within the organization presents a Herculean challenge.
- replwoacause 3y ago
  This is exactly the kind of reply I was hoping to get, thanks for the info!
amf12 3y ago
Most likely the difference in training datasets. There is a reason why authors have sued OpenAI but not Google.
ionwake 3y ago
I’m not surprised by my experiences many years ago when trying to use google to support my small app that hit the front page of HN. Not only did they take my app offline giving me no recourse for help thus destroying my momentum , it was because I had “upgraded” my server hosting. Apart from this being funny and ironic what was worse is when I mentioned it a year or so later google engineers came out of the wood work on Hn to accuse me fibbing and making a big deal out of something that they clearly had no relation to. I think it was a because they were scared they might be linked to the incident and it would give them a poor performance metric. It was super creepy but made me understand that the organisation is just vast with little concern for the places where innovation comes from and full of selfish gatekeepers worried about looking bad. I have nothing against the company and the good it’s done for me and the world I still rather like it, but I understand that like all good companies without careful attention to respecting the little guy and allowing care and checks through its structure to root out social issues it’s destined to always lag behind. Just my 2 cents and if anything reminds me of what a terribly difficult task I would have if I was a ceo of my own company ( if it were large ). I think most large companies have the same problem and the only solution is to literally test different teams with how they handle specific case studies. It would require alot of careful planning and studying but it would be the only way to resolve such problems. An alternative would be to have an anonymous feedback that is constantly pushed onto customers and constantly checked and mined for insight. if was a major company I would hire myself or someone who had my experiences to do this. But I’m already retired/funemployed lol. Sorry for the rant.
0xDEF 3y ago
Bard is better than ChatGPT-3.5. They are worse than GPT-4 because nobody other than OpenAI (and their free Azure credits) have been willing to throw $100 million in training a single LLM.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jzombie 3y ago

[flagged]

mvdtnz 3y ago
Don't do this please.
rvnx 3y ago
This is also because in Google you tend to get more easily promoted once you launch a new product, than when you do maintenance. So the most logical course at this stage, based on typical politics at Google, would be to shutdown Bard, and launch a new product instead (like what has happened with all the messengers / social network apps)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
never_inline 3y ago
Which is, of course, complete bullshit as well. This answer perfectly illustrates why the chat gpt verbiage irritates me so much. It's basically rephrasing the oft-repeated complaint that Google kills of projects, (in an MBA style English). But how does that have anything to do with Bard AI being crap? People are seriously impressed by this app?
- drones 3y ago
  Makes sense to me. Google clearly has a culture/reputation where projects are routinely killed off because they aren't deemed "successful" by some arbitrary metric. This fosters a "failure/success" mentality among employees, which influences what types of projects they take (obvious, immediately profitable) and how long it takes to develop them (as quick as possible). While they have a lot of smart people working there, I think big G has some organisational problems which prevents them from completing large scale experimental projects like this.

lacrimacida 3y ago

Google has good research. Bard is half baked therefore not a great product as of now & not sure if or when. Maybe they were under so much pressure from openai that they indeed rush released it, way before it had to be seen out by public eyes. To me it seems/feels in beta

ars 3y ago

I put all questions to both Bard and chatGPT. The exact same words. Bard is almost always better. For example try: "why does my hole saw have a spring over the drill bit?" Bard is correct, chatGPT makes up nonsense. (There's no such thing as "pilot bit extension spring", and the rest of the reply makes little sense as well.) https://chat.openai.com/share/485a6968-6379-4f64-87b3-6c157586e8c6 https://chat.openai.com/share/485a6968-6379-4f64-87b3-6c1575... https://g.co/bard/share/01c5bb4bf540 https://g.co/bard/share/01c5bb4bf540

rvnx 3y ago
Are you sure you are using the latest version of ChatGPT ? It could have been an outdated version (3.5) from one year ago (based on the green logo).
- ars 3y ago
  Yes, I'm using 3.5, but that's the free version, and I don't need AI often enough to want to pay $20 for version 4.
  - column 3y ago
    3.5 is a weak model that is only good at informal conversation. When people talk about using ChatGPT and its potential (programming, vision, etc.) they talk about GPT-4. If you don't want to pay, you should use Bing Chat for your comparison. 3.5 would not be worth $20 a month but GPT-4 is.
    - replwoacause 3y ago
      It's funny to me how often this mistake is being made here on HN, despite this exact thing being repeated time and again. There is a big difference between 3.5 and 4.
antognini 3y ago
I've been asking science and math questions to Bard and ChatGPT (at about an undergraduate level) and likewise found Bard to be consistently better. As an example I asked both how many groups there are of order 6. Bard gave the correct answer of 2 and listed what they were. ChatGPT said there were five and proceeded to list seven.

josh2600 3y ago

The answer to why BigCo can’t outcompete startup is always the same. In BigCo you have ego that blocks authentic artistic critique. There are traditions. There are rules. We learned our lesson last time. In the best organizations, artistic critique is a time-honored tradition passed down from the elders to the padwans. Young Jedi learn how to navigate the matrix with the blessings of their ancestors. Unfortunately, hacking culture in a big org is outré. What made Apple special was that Steve Jobs created many hidden micro cultures within his asylum that allowed so many unorthodox experiments, some of them even worked out. Maybe you have some other examples of people who have been able to hold a core business and build the next iteration many many times successfully? They’re rare birds. Edit: for clarity, Google could have a killerAI product in a year if they would kill their ego. Demis Hassibis (I think that’s how you spell his name, sorry) the CEO @ DeepMind can absolutely build the thing they want, but they’d have to give him carte Blanche, and they won’t.

cdata 3y ago

The answer is some combination of two phenomena: 1. The Innovator's Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma) This is the premise that a mature incumbent will usually fail to respond fast enough to disruptive innovations by an upstart because their organization is optimized to continue providing existing customers sustaining improvements to the products they are already paying for. 2. The Coordination Headwind (https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/) This is the premise that cross-functional coordination difficulty grows superlinearly as the organization scales. The relative influence of these phenomena is a matter of debate. And, there may be other factors at play. But, the mix of needing to respond (against organizational incentives) to a disruptive innovation while also trying to align long-established factions, product teams and PAs - many with a motivation to have an outsized influence over the new effort - within the organization presents a Herculean challenge.

replwoacause 3y ago
This is exactly the kind of reply I was hoping to get, thanks for the info!

amf12 3y ago

Most likely the difference in training datasets. There is a reason why authors have sued OpenAI but not Google.

ionwake 3y ago

I’m not surprised by my experiences many years ago when trying to use google to support my small app that hit the front page of HN. Not only did they take my app offline giving me no recourse for help thus destroying my momentum , it was because I had “upgraded” my server hosting. Apart from this being funny and ironic what was worse is when I mentioned it a year or so later google engineers came out of the wood work on Hn to accuse me fibbing and making a big deal out of something that they clearly had no relation to. I think it was a because they were scared they might be linked to the incident and it would give them a poor performance metric. It was super creepy but made me understand that the organisation is just vast with little concern for the places where innovation comes from and full of selfish gatekeepers worried about looking bad. I have nothing against the company and the good it’s done for me and the world I still rather like it, but I understand that like all good companies without careful attention to respecting the little guy and allowing care and checks through its structure to root out social issues it’s destined to always lag behind. Just my 2 cents and if anything reminds me of what a terribly difficult task I would have if I was a ceo of my own company ( if it were large ). I think most large companies have the same problem and the only solution is to literally test different teams with how they handle specific case studies. It would require alot of careful planning and studying but it would be the only way to resolve such problems. An alternative would be to have an anonymous feedback that is constantly pushed onto customers and constantly checked and mined for insight. if was a major company I would hire myself or someone who had my experiences to do this. But I’m already retired/funemployed lol. Sorry for the rant.

0xDEF 3y ago

Bard is better than ChatGPT-3.5. They are worse than GPT-4 because nobody other than OpenAI (and their free Azure credits) have been willing to throw $100 million in training a single LLM.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]