[HN Gopher] Microsoft's AI Bing also generated factual errors at...
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Microsoft's AI Bing also generated factual errors at launch
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 188 points
Date : 2023-02-14 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| dougmwne wrote:
| This is quite silly. Bard is not released. There's nothing to
| talk about except a few screenshots. If one of those screenshots
| contains an error, it tells us that Google has not solved
| hallucinations and that they were also probably quite rushed and
| not being careful. So not only is their product probably not much
| better than Bing chat, it's also going to be later.
|
| Bing chat is available to some members of the public now. ChatGPT
| has been used by more than 100m. We know what we are going to get
| and we are getting it now. It's probably an interesting enough
| feature to get the general public paying attention to Bing for
| the few months before Google manages to execute. That's bad for
| Google in the short term, it introduces a risk and an unknown in
| their undisputed dominance of search. They will still probably
| come out ahead, but it is a chink in the armor and therefore
| people are going to talk about it.
|
| Really its much more complicated than that.
| thewataccount wrote:
| Bard was potentially "correct" though.
|
| The JWST was indeed "the first telescope to observe a exoplanet
| [etc]".
|
| That planet was LHS 475 b.
|
| The interpretation of "a exoplanet" as "LHS 475 b" would make
| it correct. The interpretation of "a exoplanet" as "any
| exoplanet" would make it incorrect. We cannot know what it's
| intention was with the meaning, and arguably it was a bad
| answer if it was this ambiguous.
|
| Just wanted to point out it may technically have been correct.
| moyix wrote:
| I've seen this justification in a few places now, but the
| logic makes zero sense if you apply it to any other similar
| sentence:
|
| "I was the first person to make a comment on Hacker News"
| [this comment, specifically]
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > We cannot know what it's intention was with the meaning,
| and arguably it was a bad answer if it was this ambiguous.
|
| I undertand that LLM systems don't have "intentions" though.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Just wanted to point out it may technically have been
| correct.
|
| It's not correct in any sense if you have to torture the
| statement like you did to extract something correct or see
| the answer as ambiguous. In that context, "a[n] exoplanet"
| just plain means "any exoplanet."
| fatjokes wrote:
| What the Bard demo did show is that Google must be genuinely
| panicking if it rushed out a demo like that.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| You can't solve it making up wrong answers. It's a core part of
| the design.
|
| It's like saying you'll solve a monkey with a typewriter by
| adding 200,000 if statements and hoping you've covered all the
| exceptions.
| nerbert wrote:
| Yeah but they have the first mover advantage. Less scrutiny.
| [deleted]
| chomp wrote:
| > Google's Bard got an answer wrong during an ad, which everyone
| noticed. Now the narrative is 'Google is rushing to catch up to
| Bing and making mistakes!
|
| I think Brereton is missing the wider narrative. Microsoft has
| been executing very very well for the last few years. Azure has
| been on a tear, they've demonstrated great foresight with their
| first investment in OpenAI many years ago (which is now paying
| dividends), and they've made strong acquisitions. They've
| captured the AI lightning in a bottle. Google, has left people
| wondering if it can execute well. It's had a lot of flops, and a
| lot of project cancellations. When they announced LaMDA, they let
| the hype fizzle to nothing. The most we got out of that is some
| memeable material about a guy who wanted to get legal
| representation for their language model.
|
| People have been positing about ChatGPT for search as soon as it
| was released. They (Google) have had months to announce
| _anything_, but waited until the last minute. When they finally
| had a chance to steal Microsoft's thunder, they flubbed something
| as simple as an ad. Now people are _really_ wondering if Google
| can execute anymore. Even I'm starting to wonder. Google is
| definitely rushing to catch up to Microsoft in a few areas now,
| and their stock reflects that reality now.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > Azure has been on a tear
|
| The only "tear" I'd put Azure on, is "tear inducing" in the
| context of "being forced to use this disaster brings tears to
| my eyes". Most of my friends and peers who've had to use Azure
| feel the same way.
|
| > Microsoft's thunder, they flubbed something as simple as an
| ad.
|
| Have you seen bingGPT? It's not exactly doing much better.
|
| > Now people are _really_ wondering if Google can execute
| anymore
|
| Google has done this to themselves. Endlessly launching and
| axing products inevitably erodes people's confidence, long
| before a marketing whiff with a language model.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Azure, Bing, Office & Windows... while Microsoft has been
| executing, the quality of all of those products is pretty low
| and support is also hit-and-miss.
|
| It's like they brought startup shipping mentality to products
| where users don't want fast updates and the priority is
| stability, quality, and performance.
| thih9 wrote:
| > It's had a lot of flops, and a lot of project cancellations
|
| I stopped perceiving this as a negative thing and started to
| consider it a part of google's culture. I suppose projects like
| https://killedbygoogle.com helped. Now I'm realising the
| obvious, i.e. that at the end of the day each discontinued
| product means sunken cost and if the product was public then
| also loss of trust.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Microsoft has been executing very very well for the last few
| years.
|
| Indeed. ~13 years ago I'd have said MS would be mostly
| irrelevant by the mid-late 2020's as they missed the mobile bus
| in the 00's which Google and Apple have on lock down.
|
| But MS knows one thing well: developers (Thanks Ballmer).
| Azure, Github, vscode - a full stack of tools developers can
| use to deploy software - without Windows! Very smart move as
| they can't fight Apple or Google on the front end, so go after
| the back end - the engines that keep the lights on and money
| flowing.
|
| They're continuing this tooling trend with AI which they can
| integrate into their existing tools to accelerate development
| (copilot, etc.) Honestly, with all this tooling in place I
| would not be surprised if we see a Windows mobile/phone OS make
| a comeback.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If there is one thing Microsoft doesn't know or understand
| it's the open source developer. Buying github then stealing
| ip to bundle in co-pilot. Developers don't love Azure but
| large governmental orgs cto's do.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| LOL, is this satire? I couldn't tell...
| lovich wrote:
| Well open source developers seem allergic to making profit
| and Microsoft is a for profit business, so I don't think
| it's a big surprises which market they are targeting.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Most developers work with open source languages /
| products. The market for closed source Microsoft
| sponsored languages gets smaller each year. I remember
| when many paid thousands for msdn subscriptions.
| louthy wrote:
| > The market for closed source Microsoft sponsored
| languages gets smaller each year
|
| Presumably because they're all open source now?
|
| C# is still in the top 5 according to TIOBE [4] (whether
| we pay any attention to that is _shrug_ ), but they
| reckon it's grown in usage in the past year.
|
| Typescript is probably one of the fastest growing
| languages (in terms of usage).
|
| [C#] https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang
|
| [F#] https://fsharp.org/
|
| [Typescript] https://www.typescriptlang.org/
|
| [4] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I am not sure I follow your argument here.
|
| Parent comment said most devs use open source
| technologies. That is, when given the option, most devs
| will choose open source technologies where possible. As
| such, offering licensed, closed-source products to devs
| is a bit of a waste. People want to pay for
| hosted/managed versions of open source products they're
| already using, not extra for licences. This is one area
| I'd say AWS has the advantage.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I think the issue with LaMDA was the engineer who claimed
| sentience. The consequence of that is that everything released
| would be underwhelming due to over promising.
|
| By the time that fizzled out, it may have been deemed "too
| late" for it.
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| They've been executing so well that they had to buy their way
| into the the AI space?
|
| Don't get me wrong, Azure has been quite successful but I don't
| see their investment into ChatGPT as reflecting any noteworthy
| change in Microsoft's own internal capabilities.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _I think Brereton is missing the wider narrative_
|
| Isn't that the point? Looking through the pep rally excitement
| of Nadella saying "I'm going to make Google dance" and looking
| at the actual product.
|
| Honestly some of the Bing results[1] have me thinking that
| maybe LLMs are ready for Clippy and Copilot style products, and
| then maybe a browser extension that summarizes pages, but a
| generally available search launch has a high chance of Bing
| memeing themselves (again).
|
| [1] beyond just errors:
| https://twitter.com/MovingToTheSun/status/162515657520253747...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That's the narrow narrative.
|
| The actual wide narrative is that the current language models
| hallucinate and lie, and there is no coherent plan to avoid
| this. Google? Microsoft? This is a much less important question
| than whether or not _anyone_ is going to push this party-trick
| level technology onto a largely unsuspecting public.
| abetlen wrote:
| I think you're focusing on a few narrow examples where LLMs
| are underperforming and generalising about the technology as
| a whole. This ignores the fact that Microsoft already has a
| succesful LLM-based product in the market with Github
| Copilot. It's a real tool (not a party-trick technology) that
| people actually pay for and use every day.
|
| Search is one application, and it might be crap right now,
| but for Microsoft it only needs to provide incremental value,
| for Google it's life or death. Microsoft is still better
| positioned in both the enterprise (Azure, Office365, Teams)
| and developer (Github, VSCode) markets.
| FractalHQ wrote:
| Copilot mostly spews distracting nonsense, but when it's
| useful (like with repetitive boilerplate where it doesn't
| have to "think" much) it's really nice. But if that's the
| bar, I don't think were ready for something like search,
| which is much more difficult and important to get right for
| the average person to get more good than harm from it.
| nightski wrote:
| Google's search results are pretty terrible. I actually
| have a hard time telling which is a result and which is
| an ad anymore tbh. I really don't think the bar is that
| high.
| lopatin wrote:
| Maybe the internet is actually that terrible now, and
| Google is just the messenger?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The internet has been terrible since Yahoo dominated
| search.
|
| In fact, it was the glut of SEO nonsense like keyword
| stuffing is that PageRank countered.
|
| If Google search sucks, someone will make one that
| doesn't suck, and people will switch.
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| Search still relies on content that doesn't suck though,
| and like GP said, if the internet today sucks, then the
| competing search will also suck.
| soiler wrote:
| The internet is terrible and Google is the _reason_.
| tdesilva wrote:
| That sounds like an endorsement of their ads platform?
| lolinder wrote:
| Few people seem to know this, but you can disable auto-
| suggest in Copilot, so it only suggests things when you
| proactively ask it to. I only prompt it when I know it
| will be helpful and it's a _huge_ time saver when used
| that way.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Sometimes, Copilot is brilliant. I have encountered
| solutions that are miles better than anything i had found
| on the internet nor expected to find in the first place.
|
| The issue involved heavy numerical computation with
| numpy, and it found a library call for that that covered
| exactly my issue.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I've had similar experiences. Sometimes it just knows
| what you want and saves you a minute searching. Sometimes
| way more than a minute.
|
| But I find it also hallucinates in code, coming up with
| function calls that aren't in the API but would sound
| like a natural thing to call.
|
| Overall it's a positive though, it's pretty easy to tell
| for your other coding tools if the suggestion is for
| something made up, and the benefits of filling in your
| next little thought are very real.
| adastra22 wrote:
| There is a project called Stable Attribution which can tell
| you what training set sources were used for generating your
| image. The same tech applied to chatgpt results would let it
| operate like a traditional search engine (and make it easier
| to filter out hallucinated factoids or citations)
| simonw wrote:
| Stable Attribution is highly misleading: it does NOT tell
| you which images in the training set were used to generate
| your image. It shows you images in the training set that
| are most visually similar to the image that you show it.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Yes, that is extremely misleading. Thank you for the
| correction!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Can SA _prevent_ the generation of 8 fingered hands?
| simonw wrote:
| Stable Diffusion 2 supports negative prompt weights, and
| amusingly you can give it a negative prompt of "weird
| looking hands" and it will generate much better hands!
| EGreg wrote:
| The reality, as usual, is that Google is far, far ahead of
| the other companies. Just like Waymo is ahead of Tesla, and
| DeepMind is ahead of OpenAI by miles...:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QEDBEdL7HY
|
| They even have a far more advanced language model, they just
| don't release it publicly. It's scary how far Google is
| ahead, with its army of Ph. D's. They're the ones that
| pioneered the papers and techniques that OpenAI used -- but
| they did it 5 years ago.
|
| This is just Google being Google ... they sunsetted Reader
| when it was popular, went through like 20 different chat
| products (GMail Chat, Hangouts, Google Meet, etc. etc.) and
| cannibalized their own projects. But as far as technology,
| they've got AI they're not disclosing to the world yet.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm bearish on Google but you're correct and shouldn't be
| in light gray text. Bard is a smaller version of Lamda, not
| PALM, so we know for sure they had a much more advanced
| model some time ago
| yellow_postit wrote:
| If google can't get things out of the lab into products
| that accrue value to their business they'll head the way
| of Xerox PARC. A legacy of research innovations that
| others successfully capitalized on. For many that may be
| a laudable end goal. For shareholders though it's
| probably a tough pill to swallow.
| [deleted]
| dovin wrote:
| Even if those benchmarks showing their models are X% above
| SoTA actually translate into qualitatively significant
| improvements (which they probably would), Google still has
| the most to lose even if they do release widely and little
| to gain. Their best case outcome is to not lose any users,
| and maybe gain back a few % of the users they've lost in
| recent years. Search result quality has been declining
| noticeably for a while now and users want something
| different.
| dathinab wrote:
| they will because like so offen perfection and accidental
| consequences matter less then "have the new tech" for both
| the companies and parts of the users
|
| most important while both AIs get sometimes very important
| and fundamental things wrong they do get enough right to be
| of help in some tasks to be of a lot of help
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > most important while both AIs get sometimes very
| important and fundamental things wrong they do get enough
| right to be of help in some tasks to be of a lot of help
|
| that's only true if you can easily and cheaply identify
| when they are correct. But at this time, and for the
| foreseeable future, that's not the case.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| narrow narrative, wide narrative? what is that?
| dpflan wrote:
| That what I find so funny. Again, UX innovation over LLMs is
| what makes ChatGPT so hot right now, like Hansel, but I mean,
| the product is tragically flawed as like all LLMs at the
| moment.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I believe that's because people are using it wrong. Asking
| for facts is its weakness. Aiding creativity and more
| narrowly productivity (by way of common sense reasoning) is
| its greatest strength.
| saghm wrote:
| I think there's also potential value in being able to
| give feedback on results. If I try to search for
| something on Google right now and it doesn't give me what
| I want, my only options are to try a different query or
| give up. This puts the onus on me to learn how to "ask"
| properly. On the other hand, using something like ChatGPT
| and asking it a question gives me the option to tell it
| "no, you got this part wrong, try again". This isn't
| necessarily useful for all queries, but some queries
| might have answers that you can verify easily.
|
| Over the weekend, I was shopping for laptops and tried
| searching "laptops AMD GPU at least 2560x1440 resolution
| at least 16 GB RAM", and of course Google gave all sorts
| of results that didn't fit those criteria. I could use
| quotes around "16 GB RAM", but then some useful results
| might get excluded (e.g. a table with "RAM" or even
| "Memory" in one column and "16 GB" in another, or a
| laptop with a higher resolution like 4K), and I'd still
| get many incorrect results (e.g. an Amazon page for a
| laptop with 1920x1080 resolution and then a different
| laptop in "similar options" with 2560x1440 resolution but
| an Nvidia GPU). I decided to try using ChatGPT to list me
| some laptops with those criteria; it immediately listed
| five correct models. I asked for five more, and it gave
| one correct option and four incorrect ones, but when I
| pointed out the mistakes and asked for 10 more results
| that did fit my criteria, it was able to correctly do
| this. Because I can easily verify externally if a given
| laptop fits my criteria or not, I'm not at risk of acting
| on false information. The only limitation is that ChatGPT
| currently won't search the internet and has data limited
| to 2021 and earlier. If it had access to current data, I
| think there would be a lot of places that it would be
| useful, especially given that it wouldn't necessarily
| replace existing search engines, but complement them.
| dpflan wrote:
| Agree, areas where correctness can be sub 90%. When a BA
| is making business docs, do they want creativity in
| querying factual data for a report they are creating? How
| tempting is it to not just use it for "creative" tasks?
| allturtles wrote:
| The product Microsoft is showing off is a fact-finding
| engine. Just look at the demo, they have built the AI
| model into the search experience and the demo shows it
| used exclusively to provide (supposedly) factual
| information [0]. It's not the users' fault that companies
| are building the wrong product.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLsr_sUVgrA
| azinman2 wrote:
| I don't not include Microsoft here in the audience of
| "using it wrong."
|
| It's also very tempting when you get coherent text out to
| believe it. Hopefully the underlying tech will get better
| and/or people will understand it's weaknesses... except
| the inability to ascertain clear misinformation gives me
| pause.
| onion2k wrote:
| Microsoft have the advantage that people saw GPT2, GPT3, and
| ChatGPT and how those models progressed _and improved._ Bard
| is Google 's first public AI product so it looks like GPT2
| while Microsoft are teasing at GPT4. People will assume that
| Google are a long way off fixing the accuracy problem because
| there isn't any trajectory or iteration, while they believe
| Microsoft will crack it quite soon because they've already
| seen how things can change.
|
| There's a lesson for founders in this. If you develop in
| secret and try to launch a perfect product then anything less
| that perfect is unforgivable. If you launch early with
| something that has obvious problems people will forgive them
| because they see the potential and trust you to fix them.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| >people will forgive them because they see the potential
| and trust you to fix them.
|
| That seems very optimistic to me. Having seen Siri, Google
| Assistant, Cortana, and Alexa I trust that changes will be
| made, some of them will even be positive, but generally a
| net negative until they are completely irrelevant.
|
| Notice how neither of these announcements mention their
| digital assistants getting an upgrade to be less garbage.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >The actual wide narrative is that the current language
| models hallucinate and lie
|
| So do people. And ChatGPT is a whole lot smarter than most
| people I know. It's funny that we've blown the Turing test
| out of the water at this point, and people are still claiming
| it's not enough.
| tensor wrote:
| The comparison is not against "most people" though. When we
| search the web we usually want an answer from an "expert"
| not some random internet poster. If you compare ChatGPT
| even to something like WebMD, well, I'll trust the latter
| over ChatGPT in an instant.
|
| It's no better for other domains either. It can give
| programming advice, but it's often wrong in important ways
| and so no, I'd rather have the answer verified by an actual
| developer who knows whatever technology I'm asking about.
|
| And finally, when you talk about what is "enough", I'd ask
| "for what?" This is what people in this thread are saying.
| That ChatGPT is not enough for the majority of what people
| wish it to be, but it may be enough for some tasks such as
| a creative writing aid or other human in the loop tasks.
| doesnt_know wrote:
| They are being integrated into the most widely used
| information retrieval systems (search engines). It's not
| enough that they are "smarter then most people", they have
| to always be correct when the question asked of them has a
| definitive answer otherwise they are just another dangerous
| avenue for misinformation.
|
| Yes, not all questions have definitive answers, which is
| fine, then you can argue that they are better then going to
| the smartest human you know and that might be enough.
| Although I personally would still disagree with this
| argument, since I think it's better that the answer
| provided is "I don't know".
| adastra22 wrote:
| The one thing people are universally good at is shifting
| goal posts.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The Turing test was originated in the 1950s. The goal
| posts haven't moved much in 70 years. The development of
| these new language models is revealing that, as
| impressive as the models are at generating language, it
| is possible that the Turing test was mis-conceived if the
| goal was to identify AGI.
|
| At the time, it was inconceivable that a program could
| interact the way that ChatGPT does (or the way that
| Dall-E does) without AGI. We now know that this is not
| the case, and that means that it might finally be time to
| recognize that the Turing test, while a brilliant idea at
| the time, doesn't actually differentiate in the way that
| we want to.
|
| 70 years without moving the goal posts is, frankly,
| pretty good.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Au contraire, the whole history of AI is one of moving
| goal posts. One professor I worked with quipped that a
| field is called AI only so long as it remains unsolved.
|
| Logic arguments and geometric analogies were once
| considered the epitome of human thinking. They were the
| first to fall. Computer vision, expert systems, complex
| robotic systems, and automated planning and scheduling
| were all Turing-hard problems at some point. Even Turing
| thought that Chess was a domain which required human
| intellect to master, until DeepMind. Then it was assumed
| Go would be different. Even in the realm of chat bots,
| Eliza successfully passed the Turing test when it was
| first released. Most people who interacted with it could
| not believe that there was a simple algorithm underlying
| its behavior.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The Turing test was never intended to be a determination of
| "should I use this computer program to help guide me
| through the world's knowledge".
| CrazyStat wrote:
| As of a week ago, which was the last time I tested, ChatGPT
| still says 1023^2 is even about half the time.
|
| ChatGPT is good at generating text that sounds smart. It is
| not smarter than most people you know.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Most people I know would have no idea whether 1023^2 is
| even or odd for what its worth.
| busyant wrote:
| > It is not smarter than most people you know.
|
| You and I live in a rarefied world. It's far better at
| writing than most people I know. and i suspect it's
| (sadly) better at logic/ math than many people, which, i
| fully admit isn't saying much.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Also, ChatGPT _isn 't smart_. It is very good at stringing
| words together, a facility which, when over-developed in
| humans, is not generally termed "smart". We reserve that
| sort of term for the capacity to reason, something ChatGPT
| has absolutely no capability for.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Can you show that humans aren't just language models?
| fatjokes wrote:
| Yeah but for Bing the fact that it wasn't porn is a step up for
| their rep.
| Salgat wrote:
| The difference is that people have been using ChatGPT for months.
| It doesn't have as much to prove as Bard, which we know nothing
| about.
| labrador wrote:
| Right, and I think the expectation was the Google had something
| much better. When they showed they didn't... A lot of "I am
| disappoint"
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It pretty much collapsed the narrative that Microsoft was
| behind in AI.
| foobazgt wrote:
| How does Microsoft integrating OpenAI's software
| demonstrate its own AI prowess?
| Salgat wrote:
| Microsoft has been a billion dollar investor of OpenAI
| since 2019. They also exclusively licensed GPT-3 several
| years ago.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Do people really expect correct answers? No idea about Bing, but
| ChatGPT is a language model, not an encyclopaedia
| omnicognate wrote:
| From a search engine, the first major commercial application
| two of the largest tech giants have decided to apply this new
| technology to? Why yes, yes I do.
|
| From LLMs, no. Not at all.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| Some of these statements are subjective: the vacuum cleaner is
| quiet. Maybe the marketing material says that, but the internet
| not?
|
| Or "this company has a website".. well it depends.. maybe it had
| one? A human might also tell the wrong thing.
|
| Was in an argument with a co worker today, who said ChatGPT is
| useless because some things it says are wrong.
|
| But my counter argument: that is exactly what humans do: they say
| wrong things.
|
| The model is useful because overall it is right. Just like humans
| are. Children also say weird things, even adults do. It's about
| combining knowledge. You might still say something wrong: but
| then you learn....
| davtho wrote:
| It's so wild that cost of creating crap has gone to zero.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Microsoft learned from its mistakes as a monopoly trying to
| manage everything under one brand umbrella. Google is still
| acting like a monolithic enterprise which is holding them back
| from key acquisitions and taking risks.
| revskill wrote:
| Kubernetes with complicated configurations is a failure to me
| (Simplicity should be the goal, not a big piles of yaml
| configs). The issue is not what's inside Kubernetes, why stop
| there ? Make things simpler to use, why not ?
| DannyBee wrote:
| +1
|
| I always find it amusing that people think "breaking up" google
| or similar will make it anything other than more efficient.
|
| The baby bells were wildly more efficient at monopolization
| than mama bell, and have achieved more of it than the original
| company ever could.
|
| Breaking things up may cause disruption, and the disruption
| slows them down somewhat short term, but in a lot of cases, the
| constraints make the resulting businesses _more_ effective in
| the end.
| rvz wrote:
| So we are no better off with the AI snake oil that was announced
| by Microsoft and OpenAI then. If you can't even trust the results
| from a hallucinating search engine chatbot, then it is quite
| frankly a worse solution, especially as not only it is unreliable
| but it is very untrustworthy to be used as a search engine due to
| these problems. It would have to take more than that to disrupt
| search engines like Google.
|
| Microsoft and ClosedAI, sure know how to generate hype and
| attempt to reboot their 'Scroogled' campaign again, which that
| amounted to nothing; just like this also would.
|
| If OpenAI REALLY wanted to permanently disrupt Google they should
| release GPT-4, ChatGPT and all the AI models as open-source,
| otherwise someone else would release a competing equivalent for
| them that will disrupt both Google and OpenAI.
| DannyBee wrote:
| FWIW - There is no evidence OpenAI cares about "winning"
| against Google at all.
|
| (Microsoft, yes, OpenAI, no?)
| we_never_see_it wrote:
| No amount of Google funded PR campaign can stop MS now. Google's
| days are numbered.
| pphysch wrote:
| I would wager this current PR blitz was initiated by MS, not
| Google. First we had a burst of narratives about "Google search
| sucks". Then ChatGPT appears with much fanfare. Then Bing AI
| appears. We get a very overblown narrative about Bard getting 1
| fact slightly wrong (like literally every other LLM) and
| falsely being linked to a 8% drop in GOOG (the real cause was
| simply Bing AI announcement).
|
| Managed narratives all around.
| giobox wrote:
| There was more to the Bard issues than this. The live Paris
| demo in which the demo phone couldn't be found live on stage
| (!!) is one of the worst large scale public presentations
| I've seen in a while, like Tesla Cybertruck window smash bad.
| At least the Cybertruck was there though!
|
| There were really two big mistakes Google made in the unveil
| - the incorrect result and the "missing" phone. The latter is
| wild for a Google sized org, imagine if Apple didn't have an
| iPad or iPhone on hand to demo a next generation iOS feature
| at a public keynote in front of the media. I'd love to know
| what the real story behind the lost demo phone is.
|
| This all adds up to look like a rushed response, which of
| course it was.
|
| > https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/in-
| pa...
| pphysch wrote:
| The "demo got it wrong" narrative was about the Bard
| announcement, not the mismanaged Paris event. Moving the
| goalposts.
| giobox wrote:
| The Paris demo was part of the same announcement on the
| same day? Both contributed to the large drop in the stock
| and both are evidence of a rushed response to the MS
| announcement.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| This thread on mastodon was interesting. I assume this is not due
| to ChatGPT but an existing search sampling algorithm.
|
| Asking bing "what is the human population on Mars":
|
| https://mastodon.social/@jhpot/109859745864083061
|
| And then this reply was notable as well:
|
| https://neurodifferent.me/@ZoDoneRightNow/109860796225392633
|
| The site sampled in the above reply [1] appears to be a nonsense
| content farm probably generated with GPT-2 (it is repetitive and
| the date on the Mars post is 2021, though I know blog post dates
| can be set to anything).
|
| If true it would mean that Bing has been serving up GPT-generated
| nonsense for some time, and now they're going to add another
| layer of nonsense on top of that.
|
| As someone said in the replies "it's just bullshit all the way
| down".
|
| I agree with others who have said these companies have no
| (stated, tested) plan to ensure these systems don't spill lies
| and nonsense. It's possible that will be harmless but this is
| doubtful, and either way I do not feel good about these companies
| rushing to push out a half baked product.
|
| To my amateur understanding it seems like LLMs are like the
| language center of our brain, in that they can take abstract
| multi dimensional ideas and turn them in to words. But we have
| other portions of our brain that actually handle logic and memory
| and produce the ideas to verbalize. It seems like LLMs are
| missing this piece. Crude analogy I know, but I think LLMs could
| be fantastic when paired with a more complex system, and the rush
| to deploy them as-is may be counter productive.
|
| [1] https://tsam.net/what-is-the-population-of-mars/
| [deleted]
| extesy wrote:
| I asked Bing Chat the same question and the response was much
| better:
|
| > As of today, the human population of Mars stands at zero.
| There are no humans living on the surface of Mars, only rovers
| and landers. Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the
| second smallest planet in the Solar System. It has a very thin
| atmosphere and a cold and dry climate. Mars is governed by the
| Martian Congressional Republic in the fictional universe of The
| Expanse, but not in reality. Some websites may give false or
| misleading information about the population of Mars, such as
| 4.8 billion or 2.5 billion people, but these are not based on
| any scientific evidence or credible sources.
| curiousmindz wrote:
| Note that this answer is from "old Bing". It has nothing to do
| with the GPT-enhanced new Bing:
|
| https://oslo.town/@matt/109864320071232564
|
| The main hints to spot new Bing are: The logo and the feedback
| buttons.
| anonyfox wrote:
| Microsoft has proven skills in building/launching/supporting
| products, and clear capabilities to cater things into the
| enterprise/B2B market, including customer support for all levels.
|
| Google lacks all of this, and all their successful products the
| last decade were from acquisitions or leftovers from the 20%
| creative time era.
|
| Now Microsoft integrates an already loved tool (that is known to
| have these flaws!) into their products, and is celebrated to do
| so.
|
| While google somehow tries to keep the image of technical
| superiority up, failing to launch something again. Probably some
| combination of Schadenfreude and/or sincere hope of a new
| technical era and/or the hope that ultimately the "be evil"
| company falls down and makes room for innovation instead of
| trying monopolize the web.
| unxdfa wrote:
| _> Microsoft has proven skills in building
| /launching/supporting products, and clear capabilities to cater
| things into the enterprise/B2B market, including customer
| support for all levels._
|
| I take offence at this. They tell everyone 6 months before
| something is launched how good it's going to be, release crap
| and spend a year fixing it, then it limps along in a bug ridden
| mess for years while their reps (via partner support / connect)
| make promises about fixing stuff that will never be kept and
| then it gets evolved into another product or rebrand or
| shitcanned or all your cases get disposed of when they change
| how they're structured internally.
|
| Been working for MS partners and enterprises that use their
| crap for 25 years. This is the status quo and no one complains
| too hard because they assume this is right and normal. It's
| not.
| anonyfox wrote:
| I never said I like all their products, but you just
| described how microsoft absolutely nailed the enterprise
| business here.
|
| > use their crap for 25 years. This is the status quo and no
| one complains too hard because they assume this is right and
| normal
|
| isn't that quite an amazing feat? this is what I mean. and
| tbh there is no sign that it will stop in the near future
| actually - again the opposite of googles future.
| dmonitor wrote:
| The most crucial part of their release cycle is bundling the
| bug ridden mess with another successful product so that
| people are compelled to use it. Why use Slack? Outlook comes
| with Teams.
| unxdfa wrote:
| That's only because if they did charge for it, no one would
| use it.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Having used both Slack and Teams, I don't see how one is
| substantially better than the other.
| Tostino wrote:
| Honestly, agreed. The hate I see for teams on here is a
| little over the top. I just as annoyed with Slack day-to-
| day as I was with Teams when we were on that.
| unxdfa wrote:
| I use both. I dislike both. Electronic version of
| shoulder tapping.
|
| I really miss just having O365 and Zoom and getting work
| done.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Why use slack or zoom, teams does both and costs nothing to
| the business, users might be a different story, but users
| don't decide spend, executives do and it's easy for them to
| understand the money argument which is who microsoft is
| selling to.
| geogra4 wrote:
| microsoft is impossible to dislodge because of the office
| monopoly.
| lovich wrote:
| My past few jobs have all been 100% gsuite, I don't think
| Office is the same monopoly it used to be
| unxdfa wrote:
| Yeah we're a Microsoft centred company and we don't even
| use Office. Everything goes in Google Docs or Confluence
| .
| fatjokes wrote:
| No. Microsoft has proven skills in building enterprise
| relationships so that CTOs force their companies to use
| whatever Microsoft builds no matter how crappy.
| rambojohnson wrote:
| that ship has sailed.
| demarq wrote:
| Microsoft had a launch and that's what counts
| paulpauper wrote:
| Why does Microsoft keep trying to compete with search. 2 decades
| of endless money and time wasted. At least it cut its losses with
| the Zune. Microsoft has tried every possible gimmick to entice
| people to use Bing..all have failed. This has to be driven by ego
| and sunk cost fallacy if nothing else.
| ccouzens wrote:
| Because even though it has less users than Google, it is
| profitable
| dopeboy wrote:
| Search is the entry gate to an ecosystem. You capture attention
| in a highly frequent, highly sticky action, and historically
| profitable area - you are set up to land and expand (gmail,
| gcal, etc).
|
| Google took Microsoft's lunch. Windows used to be that entry
| gate and they're looking to reclaim it. I think it's a sound
| strategy.
| cush wrote:
| Google's desktop market share peaked in 2018 and has very
| slowly and steadily declined since. There's absolutely no
| reason for any company in the search game today to sit idly by
| while this happens. There's a massive opportunity to jump in
| and differentiate.
|
| Because the market is so incredibly huge, and Google has ~90%
| of it, even one or two percent on desktop alone amounts to
| billions of dollars of revenue.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora...
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-
| market-....
| blihp wrote:
| Because as more attention/money goes to other tech ecosystems,
| it weakens their position in the market. The computing world
| used to revolve around Windows/Office, now it's increasingly a
| tangential legacy player. It used to be that you bought a
| Windows PC to run Office and other Windows apps. These days
| it's just the way they get to the web for many... and only on
| desktop/laptop devices. Microsoft knows they have to remain
| relevant or their future will increasingly look like Intel's.
| simplyinfinity wrote:
| I don't get this sentiment `AI is wrong! OMG WE'VE BEEN LIED TO!`
|
| Is anyone REALLY thinking that AI will respond with 100% correct
| facts? Because in my mind it's the same as google/microsoft/etc
| search results. The response is just a summary of the "knowledge"
| it has based on the content it was trained on.
|
| Also, is it realistic to expect AI to be correct about everything
| it spits out?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Microsoft appears to believe they can market with a message
| extremely close to "Our AI technology will provide you with
| 100% accurate facts and summaries", and then apologists (like
| your post) come along and say "well, come on, nobody really
| thinks that".
|
| No, it's not realistic to expect AI to be correct about
| anything, especially when that "AI" isn't built to give a fuck
| about correctness. But tell that to the proponents of "chatgpt
| everywhere".
| zaptrem wrote:
| Which part of this prominent message at the top of every
| BingGPT says the quote you ascribe to MS?
| https://imgur.com/a/vkPG6ZL
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Which part of "suprises and mistakes" is covered in this
| announcement text?
|
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-
| sear...
|
| Also, user feedback is not going to improve the LM
| behavior.
| jakear wrote:
| Q: Which part of "suprises and mistakes" is covered in
| this announcement text?
|
| A: "Our teams are working to address issues such as
| misinformation"
|
| Q: Also, user feedback is not going to improve the LM
| behavior.
|
| A: finalModel = prospectiveModels.sort(m =>
| m.averageUserFeedback)[0]
|
| (Not the exact implementation, obviously. But if you
| think data can't improve AI models... I don't know what
| to say)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Fair enough, I missed the line about work on
| misinformation.
|
| However, AFAIK, there is no AI-field wide consensus about
| sensible ways to address this, and no conviction from
| anyone that there are any reliable techniques. So it's
| nice that they have "teams working" on it, but IMO that
| doesn't justify deployment of clearly flawed technology
| for this purpose.
|
| Data from users ("It was wrong") is hard to incorporate.
| A scheme like the one you propose basically implies using
| users as literal testers, which wouldn't matter so much
| if this was a UI/UX question. Instead, users will be
| given garbage, a few of them will find out, a few of
| those will leave feedback. This is not a sane model for
| improving the behavior of a language model.
| jakear wrote:
| > there is no AI-field wide consensus about sensible ways
| to address this, and no conviction from anyone that there
| are any reliable techniques
|
| Oh no, an open problem! Better just give up. Certainly
| don't allow anyone in the public to be involved in
| finding a solution. Much better to have an internal team
| stumbling around in the dark for years then force their
| product out when a different company comes along who was
| willing to develop in the open and has moved much faster
| accordingly.
|
| > A scheme like the one you propose basically implies
| using users as literal testers
|
| Users are literal testers, that's why the product is out
| now. Some users are being given garbage, some of them are
| finding out, and some of them are leaving feedback. That
| user flow is occurring at a measurable rate.
|
| In the future, different models will be made. They will
| be given access to different "oracles" (in the
| computability theory sense), and these oracles will
| change their behavior. They will be able to do things
| like query {the web, wolfram alpha, python, prolog, etc.}
| and provide cited sources in responses. However, it's not
| enough to add the oracle. You must also verify the oracle
| improves the user's experience. This is done by comparing
| the measured feedback rate with/without the oracle(s).
| chucksta wrote:
| This reads the same as "what did you expect of full self
| driving? Of course there are technical limitations." A lot of
| people have an expectation that AI is "smart" based on popular
| culture, relatively very few realize what we have currently is
| word prediction not intelligence of some sort
| abm53 wrote:
| I think one of the clear lessons of ChatGPT is that the line
| between word prediction and intelligence (for some
| definition) is somewhat blurry.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| To predict sentences correctly the model learned human
| knowledge and its relations.
|
| It correctly predict, you need intelligence. This model
| encodes human knowledge in its huge neural net.
| chucksta wrote:
| I'm not saying its not impressive or doesn't contain logic
| and facts and knowledge, i'm saying people generally
| understand the word intelligence to mean one thing, and
| this doesn't meet that understanding.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| > relatively very few realize what we have currently is word
| prediction not intelligence of some sort
|
| Honestly this impresses me most. The fact that we have word
| prediction and it can still be very useful (in my
| experience). You're right people don't understand it; hell i
| don't either, fully. Nevertheless it is shockingly useful for
| being nothing more than an autocomplete over existing
| information.. in my view.
|
| Even if all we could add to the service is the ability to
| cite sources of information - ie to validate for ourselves
| statements more easily - then i think it would be a huge leap
| in interfaces.
|
| Being able to put a chat interface over content seems wholly
| unique to me. I'd love to explore the depth of complex inputs
| like the entire LOTR series as a chat. To discuss, learn, and
| grow on existing content. I don't care about intelligence; i
| just want the ability to mitigate confidently-incorrect. If
| that's even possible.
| bioemerl wrote:
| That's because these things are way more than word
| prediction.
|
| Their job is 100 percent to predict the next word, but
| saying that hides what you have to do in order to predict
| the next word
|
| In a factual database? You have to repeat facts.
|
| In a logical database? You have to learn logic.
|
| In a database containing only good chess moves? You have to
| learn to make good chess moves.
|
| Train any AI model in a strong enough way and it will pick
| up donation knowledge along the way. Yes, it's predicting
| words, but it's using that knowledge to do it.
|
| It's by no means perfect, but do not underestimate the
| potential here, and remember that reductive definitions
| (it's just x) can make most great things seem bad or
| mundane.
| abm53 wrote:
| Right, it's (very roughly speaking) an approximation to
| an algorithm which maximises the probability of the
| entire response by factorising the distribution as a
| sequence of conditional distributions.
|
| If the approximation works, and the training data is
| coherent, it will produce coherent responses.
|
| The surprising thing to me is that this does work so much
| of the time.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Self driving cars are supposed to drive themselves. That's
| their entire goal.
|
| LLMs are not supposed to answer knowledge questions. They are
| not knowledge bases. The fact that everybody, including their
| developers insist on using them that way is just absurd. Are
| we in a Kafka novel?
|
| That's the equivalent to complaining that the self driving
| cars you rented didn't deploy your marketing message
| effectively, so their AI must be bonkers.
| ericsoderstrom wrote:
| What are they supposed to do then?
| hbrn wrote:
| > LLMs are not supposed to answer knowledge questions
|
| I googled for a knowledge question and wasn't able to find
| an answer.
|
| Then I used ChatGPT and it produced a surprisingly
| satisfying (opinionated and correct) response.
|
| I was able to successfully extract value by treating LLM as
| knowledge base, what exactly is absurd about it?
|
| (to be fair, I asked ChatGPT the same question today and
| this time it returned a bland "it depends" non-answer).
| [deleted]
| chucksta wrote:
| And intelligence is part of the acronym, what it is and
| what the masses understand it to be are two completely
| different things.
|
| Barely anyone is calling them LLM, its always AI.
| [deleted]
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| AI doesn't even pretend to get anything 'right'. As far as I
| understand it produces statistically common phrases related to
| the subject words.
|
| I asked for a chemical bond description of caffeine. It began
| with the formula C8H10N4O2, then proceeded to blather about the
| number of bonds of this type and that. Getting absolutely
| everything wrong, egregiously wrong.
|
| I believe it was just spouting chemistry-sounding verbiage from
| other descriptions of chemical bonds of other substances.
|
| AI doesn't 'look things up' or 'disgorge something it's heard'.
| It makes shit up wholesale from fragments. Always spouting it
| out with complete confidence.
| fleddr wrote:
| A lot of ChatGPT responses are presented as factual, with
| confidence. And it's ChatGPT, not "search random results GPT".
| And it's AI, which has the word "intelligence" in it.
|
| When you deploy a tool as such, you're asking for it.
| sometimeshuman wrote:
| The most dangerous communicators are those who/that make
| assertion with a confidence tone that is not in proportion to
| their knowledge level.
|
| A good start would be to get rid of ChatGPT's "Sure!" opening
| word. It's giving me real garbage at times with the implied
| confidence of certainty.
| sometimeshuman wrote:
| The most dangerous communicators are those who/that make
| assertion with a confidence that is not in proportion to their
| level of certainty.
|
| A good start is to get rid of ChatGPT's "Sure!" opening word.
| It's giving me real garbage at times with the implied
| certainty.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| The search results show you websites. They don't claim to be
| true, they just show you things that are related to what you
| searched for.
|
| How can you not see the difference?
| valeg wrote:
| MS rides a hype wave more skillfully.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| My self lore is that Google has an AI way more powerful than
| open.ai, but they won't release it because sometimes it can be
| coaxed into saying something that might be considered offensive
| by some.
|
| So instead they have been working with the diversity team for the
| last year trying to get it certified as "Not racist, LGBTQ+
| friendly", while still having it have some degree of
| functionality. I'm only half kidding here.
|
| Maybe this will finally wake up the board to ditch Sundar, and
| onboard someone who is more tech and product focused.
| amelius wrote:
| Why aren't governments stepping in? A false-information tool used
| by the masses is potentially dangerous.
| [deleted]
| outside1234 wrote:
| Of course it did - this whole technology is AI hallucinating
| about facts. This is exactly what the math tells us it will do.
|
| It is not a "fact generating" technology - it is a "scaffolding"
| technology to make it easier to fill in the boilerplate of the
| answer -- but not the answer itself.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's in vogue to hate Google at the moment - so everyone's just
| going to pretend it doesn't matter that MS had errors sometimes
| because "something, something Google sucks now."
| siva7 wrote:
| I don't think that's an accurate description of the current
| state. It generates facts but those need to be evaluated by
| experts since tech can error as likely as a human.
| rany_ wrote:
| > This is exactly what the math tells us it will do.
|
| Technically it hallucinates on basic math as well. So a fitting
| choice of words :)
| jron wrote:
| Just wait until the GPT dataset includes an infinite amount of
| GPT generated SEO garbage. If you thought searching for
| relevant data couldn't get any worse, prepare yourself for the
| post-GPT mass hallucination.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And if you think _that 's_ bad, it's only going to get worse
| when those GPT-generated SEO sites get indexed by crawlers
| and fed into future versions of GPT as input.
| jron wrote:
| That's exactly what I mean and it is inevitable without
| halting all non-human verified updates to the dataset going
| forward. There are two worlds now, pre-GPT and post-GPT. In
| the pre-GPT world you have human error and in the post-GPT
| world you have human error and machine error compounding ad
| infinitum.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| Openai released a tool to detect if a text was generated
| by an ai[0]. They probably already thought about this and
| are trying to stop it from happening
|
| [0] https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier
| fleddr wrote:
| Not to mention a rebellious anti-AI counter culture that
| will intentionally feed it nonsense.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Ah, what's old is new again! truthiness: a
| truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for
| something not because of supporting facts or evidence, but
| because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be
| true.
| hanselot wrote:
| Is nobody tired of the "look over there tactics"? Isn't the point
| that every ai will be capable of producing errors? How could
| something designed and implemented by subjective beings not
| contain implicit bias? How are we expecting ai to be any more
| reliable than humans? It's already way way better at making art I
| could only dream of ever getting an artist to commission. It's
| also quite decent at writing code if you treat it as an intern. I
| don't care about the errors, I have 9 years experience and I
| still make massive errors. Nevertheless it impresses me how the
| state of the art moved so exponentially. Its an arms race now.
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