[HN Gopher] Bard is now Gemini, and we're rolling out a mobile a...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Bard is now Gemini, and we're rolling out a mobile app and Gemini
       Advanced
        
       Author : chamoda
       Score  : 378 points
       Date   : 2024-02-08 13:07 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.google)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
        
       | yellow_lead wrote:
       | > 2 TB of storage in Photos, Gmail & Drive for you and up to 5
       | other people
       | 
       | Keep in mind your files may be accidentally deleted if Google
       | doesn't cancel this product first [1][2].
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/27/google_drive_files_di...
       | 
       | [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431743
        
         | Klaster_1 wrote:
         | Also, other people should have an account associated with the
         | same country as your account. Discovered this the hard way when
         | my parents no longer could renew their Google Photo storage
         | because of the sanctions.
        
           | rvnx wrote:
           | One anecdote, I live in one of the European countries that
           | put sanctions onto yours, and I cannot use many Google of
           | services either.
           | 
           | This European country simply doesn't exist in many of the
           | Google forms, despite being on the "good side" and being no
           | different than Finland or Germany.
        
             | euazOn wrote:
             | Which is it? Andorra?
        
         | nolok wrote:
         | If you use any cloud storage, including others like dropbox or
         | icloud, you must always assume that. Whether you're a business
         | or an individual.
        
           | naikrovek wrote:
           | Why? It's not an unsolvable inherent problem.
           | 
           | You pay for cloud storage so you don't have to think about
           | these things. If you're saying that one should pay for cloud
           | storage and still worry about these things, then you're
           | trading money for a service which provides nothing, or at
           | least you're paying for a service which provides no real
           | utility. You're trading money for nothing. If anyone thinks
           | that's a normal transaction then I don't know how to respond
           | to that.
        
             | nolok wrote:
             | What I'm saying is that you think you paid for something
             | different than what you actually pay for if you look in the
             | actual contract.
             | 
             | Check by yourself : whatever your provider is, without
             | looking, can you say what guarantee they give you that your
             | file won't be deleted randomly ? Do you think it's stronger
             | than "best effort but no % written" ? Then go check what it
             | actually says.
             | 
             | I'm not saying I think it's a good state of affairs, I'm
             | european and part of the crowd that cheered when ISP got
             | smacked for abusing "unlimited" in their ads while the
             | contract said different.
             | 
             | But parent's comment I'm answering too can at best be seen
             | as a warning that specifically google storage can make your
             | files disapear in some rare cases, if that matters to you
             | enough then you need to know the same is true for all the
             | big others.
        
           | nazgul17 wrote:
           | No, you would assign a probability to the event. And that
           | probability would be higher for a Google product.
        
             | adr1an wrote:
             | That might be selection bias, the news posted here are only
             | newsworthy because it's Google. Anyhow, I trust smaller
             | shops a bit more than big corps (no matter the product or
             | service being purchased), but it's subjective. In regards
             | to tech, I trust myself first. In the same way that a Chef
             | might not prefer going to any common restaurant, sure.
        
             | nolok wrote:
             | I would disagree with you, my personnal anecdotal data
             | showing google to be more reliable at it than others. In
             | the lack of hard properly collected data, this give all of
             | them the same probability. I'm sure someone out there
             | thought "let's use microsoft skydrive because google is
             | unreliable".
        
         | linsomniac wrote:
         | The wording around the Gemini Ultra enable scares me: "Upgrade
         | your Google One plan". I have a One family plan, does this
         | upgrade remove the family part? What happens if I don't decide
         | to keep Gemini and want to go back to my current plan, can I
         | even do that? Google has kind of botched these sorts of
         | upgrades in the past so I'm pretty reluctant to give it a try
         | here.
        
           | klabb3 wrote:
           | Finally some actual relevant criticism in this thread. You're
           | spot on. Google is deep into "shipping the org chart". As
           | such, I would be worried too that different products conflict
           | with each other.
           | 
           | It's funny that Google can design and operationalize the most
           | incredible engineering marvels, but can't explain their
           | products (and in particular how they interact with each
           | other).
        
             | surajrmal wrote:
             | How is this shipping an org chart? It's combining products
             | built by different parts of the company into a single
             | subscription which seems like the opposite.
        
               | klabb3 wrote:
               | Yes, that's what they're telling you. However, in reality
               | there is a lot of friction and/or confusion about how
               | different products interact. I'm not saying this
               | particular combination works one way or another, only
               | that it's extremely hard to understand the consumer
               | product offerings compared to Amazon, Apple and arguably
               | even Microsoft. It's well known that Google has a
               | marketing problem - people don't even know what they
               | offer.
               | 
               | The interface that sits on top and is supposed to give
               | you some overview and coherence is bolted on with duct
               | tape after-the-fact. Now, it's possible this has changed
               | since I worked there but I highly doubt that it's all
               | ironed out.
        
           | surajrmal wrote:
           | All Google one offerings are family plans. Yes you can
           | downgrade as well.
        
           | htrp wrote:
           | burner gmail account
        
             | rakoo wrote:
             | no gmail account
        
       | Ambolia wrote:
       | It can't be accessed without a google account.
        
       | hahnchen wrote:
       | Getting error 500 :/
        
         | captaincaveman wrote:
         | 500 > 404 , you win a prize!
        
       | dorianmariefr wrote:
       | "Sorry, Gemini Advanced isn't available for you"
       | 
       | "Gemini Advanced is not yet available in some countries, for work
       | accounts, or for users under a certain age."
       | 
       | Learn more:
       | https://login.corp.google.com/request?s=support.corp.google....
        
         | TechRemarker wrote:
         | Google Work Paying users always get the short end of the stick.
        
           | caslon wrote:
           | "We're using your personal conversations for training data.
           | Thanks."
           | 
           | This is acceptable. Consumers click without reading, and
           | don't have any strong organizational ability to punish Google
           | for this.
           | 
           | "We're training our AI on the questions of your idiot
           | employees who are inevitably going to submit user PII CSVs or
           | PDFs or even just outright draft emails to suppliers with our
           | tool. Thanks."
           | 
           | You don't want to pick this kind of fight with a corporation,
           | and as a corporation, you don't _want this to happen to you._
        
             | ceejayoz wrote:
             | Sure, in this case. But I can't use my family Gmail account
             | for my Nest thermostat for the same reason.
        
           | motoboi wrote:
           | As always I feel stupid for giving google my money.
        
           | crazygringo wrote:
           | Workspace users always get features after free consumer
           | accounts so that organization admins have time to evaluate
           | them, update training materials, etc.
           | 
           | This is a feature, not a bug.
           | 
           | And of course there are lots of features that Workspace
           | accounts get, that free accounts don't get at all. Like the
           | timeline view in Sheets.
        
             | vel0city wrote:
             | I get making new features an opt-in thing for workspace,
             | but from what I can tell I can't even enable it for my
             | workspace domain. I'm not able to enable it for myself to
             | evaluate it and update training materials.
        
               | crazygringo wrote:
               | Features are enabled via the enterprise rollout schedule
               | documented here:
               | 
               | https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/
               | 
               | You evaluate features and updating training materials
               | from what is documented here and in online help, together
               | with any testing you want to do using free consumer
               | accounts which you can obviously create at any time.
        
               | vel0city wrote:
               | I've been a Worspace/Apps admin for over a decade; I'm
               | well aware of how this works.
               | 
               | What I'm saying is, from what I can see in the admin
               | portal, there's no place for me to go _today_ to enable
               | Gemini for my users. Things are routinely weeks or months
               | delayed before they even become available to enable for
               | Workspace tenants, and often times features just never
               | get offered.
        
               | crazygringo wrote:
               | But then you know that's normal? Things aren't being
               | "delayed" weeks, they're following the rollout calendar
               | designed to give admins time to prepare. Things aren't
               | meant to be enabled in advance.
               | 
               | And like I said, there's plenty of stuff that's _only_
               | available in paid Workspace. A lot of business features
               | live there. (While things that are meant only for
               | personal consumers aren 't there.)
        
               | vel0city wrote:
               | I agree its _normal_ , in that its the normal process
               | that Workspace usually gets pretty delayed. I don't agree
               | its _good_. And I don 't think its actually helping
               | admins get prepared, as we're not actually able to turn
               | it on for test OUs for a while.
               | 
               | I'd rather have it defaulted to off with the ability to
               | turn it on for selected OUs, so _I_ can trial it out and
               | create my own documentation around it. But instead, I
               | have to wait often weeks or months for features to become
               | available to even turn on for my tenant. Users are like
               | "hey I heard this awesome feature, can you turn it on?"
               | Nope!
        
             | teeray wrote:
             | So instead of giving you a feature toggle, they just don't
             | give you the feature at all.
        
           | MrMetlHed wrote:
           | Being stuck in a free GSuite legacy account is even worse.
           | Migrating to a regular Google account seems impossible
           | (moving everything, losing purchases, changing my YouTubeTV
           | and Google Fi subscriptions) and I get every feature later,
           | if at all (can't use YouTubeTV Family Sharing, for example.)
           | But I'm stuck for the most part! By the time it's available
           | for me, I'll have forgotten about Gemini altogether.
        
         | sebtron wrote:
         | "Please sign in your Google account"
        
         | addandsubtract wrote:
         | AI summary isn't even available on my Pixel 8 Pro. I have
         | little hope of using Gemini in Q1.
        
       | tekacs wrote:
       | Hopefully this isn't the case for others, but after paying to
       | upgrade my Google One subscription, I landed at a 404 at
       | https://gemini.google.com/u/2/ (because my /u/0/ is one of my
       | Google Workspace accounts). Curious to try it when it works.
       | 
       | It's interesting to note that it's listed as applying to Gmail,
       | Docs, etc., so this sounds like an account-wide update to
       | Advanced.
        
         | Davidzheng wrote:
         | Happened to me too
        
         | ktta wrote:
         | Landed at a 404 as well, but my /u/0/ is not a Google Workspace
         | accounts. I'm in EU at the moment but with a US billing
         | address. While the upgrade succeeded, I'm only seeing a 404
         | after
        
         | rvnx wrote:
         | 404 too, and if you add /u/xxxx then you get: Gemini is
         | currently unavailable. Try again in a few minutes.
        
         | dizhn wrote:
         | I bet you took a second look at that url when that happened.
         | Good thing it wasn't gogglo.com or something huh. :)
        
         | rbinv wrote:
         | Try ?authuser=2 instead of /u/2, that works with some Google
         | products where /u/x doesn't.
         | 
         | edit: doesn't seem to work, it just redirects to /u/2 anyway
        
       | kashnote wrote:
       | Aaand I got a 404 after you subscribe and get redirected to
       | gemini.google.com. Nice job Google
        
         | _andrei_ wrote:
         | Same for me, what a blunder.
        
         | andrejguran wrote:
         | same, got redirected to https://gemini.google.com/ with weird
         | title: "Error 404 (Not Found)!!1"
        
           | acatton wrote:
           | https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/error-404-not-
           | foun...
        
           | jug wrote:
           | It's up now!
        
         | woodylondon wrote:
         | Same here - signed up and got the 404
        
         | alphabetting wrote:
         | They haven't announced anything yet. Assume official release
         | happens in next hour or so.
         | 
         | Edit: I have access to the model after subscribing and going to
         | Bard
        
         | LoKSET wrote:
         | Same, but I can access Advanced here anyway
         | https://bard.google.com/chat
        
           | antupis wrote:
           | yup same here, I think subscribing 'works' but Google just
           | botched the launch.
        
       | Etheryte wrote:
       | ChatGPT Plus, the service everyone will be comparing this to,
       | currently costs $20/mo. At $22/mo, can Gemini Ultra justify the
       | price difference? There are many conflicting reports on the ebbs
       | and flows of ChatGPT's quality, are there any good comparisons on
       | how the two compare in practice?
        
         | mritchie712 wrote:
         | Your feedback has been noted... I was just shown this pricing:
         | 
         | $19.99 $0 for 2 months, $19.99/month after
        
         | hackerlight wrote:
         | Google's marketing materials said it's slightly better than
         | GPT-4 across benchmarks. I'll be checking leaderboards on
         | Huggingface over the next few days for independent
         | confirmation.
        
         | operator-name wrote:
         | It seems to come with Google One (2TB), so with that factored
         | in its actually quite competitive.
        
       | glimshe wrote:
       | Oh wow, even _looking_ at the price requires a Google login.
       | Looking forward to seeing independent comparisons of this vs the
       | other top LLMs.
        
       | jsty wrote:
       | FYI for any Googlers - On the "Sorry, Gemini advanced isn't
       | available for you" page, clicking "Learn More" gives you a
       | (presumably internal) SSO sign-on (links to
       | https://support.corp.google.com/googleone?ai_premium)
        
         | translucyd wrote:
         | My God, this page is straight from the 90s! Nostalgic.
        
           | crazygringo wrote:
           | I'm actually shocked it has the modern Google logo, because
           | everything else about it is a straight-up time capsule --
           | you're right!
        
             | apapapa wrote:
             | On google.com, the logo for me is all white... Not sure if
             | it's white history month or something
             | 
             | Edit: no it's black history month... Kinda strange
             | 
             | https://i.ibb.co/wRk36Tq/Screenshot-20240208-080725.png
        
               | jesprenj wrote:
               | Wow, I think it's pretty weird that we have white and
               | black history months if that refers to human races.
        
         | dominik wrote:
         | Thanks for the heads up -- which page was this from?
        
           | Havoc wrote:
           | You're literally reply to a comment that says where its from
           | with a question about where its from?
           | 
           | >On the "Sorry, Gemini advanced isn't available for you"
           | page, clicking "Learn More" gives you
        
       | krzyk wrote:
       | This page lacks information what is Gemini Ultra.
        
       | rvnx wrote:
       | Entered bank card, redirects to: https://gemini.google.com/ Error
       | 404.
        
       | _puk wrote:
       | _edit_ Sadly not!
       | 
       | Sounds like you can theoretically do the old Xbox game pass trick
       | of loading up Gold and then upgrading.
       | 
       | PS25 for an annual standard plan, and then upgrade to Ultra.
       | First 2 months free, so potentially 14 months for PS25 (then
       | PS18.99 a month after). No idea if this works in practice!
       | 
       | "If you upgrade, your plan will be active immediately, and the
       | remaining time on your current plan will be credited towards your
       | new plan."
        
         | r2binx wrote:
         | Thanks for the tip but it doesn't seem to work that way. It
         | looks like they convert your subscription value into however
         | many days it could get at this new pricing.
         | 
         | For instance I just did the annual upgrade for my plan
         | (29.99EUR/y) and they credit me 40 additional days if I
         | upgraded the plan (21.99EUR/m).
        
           | _puk wrote:
           | Was worth a shot!
        
       | posnet wrote:
       | Also getting a 404 after subscribing. Clearly Gemini Ultra isn't
       | webscale. They should have used NodeJS to serve their 1TB.
        
       | bjord wrote:
       | I was able to sign up for the trial, but the page on which I
       | would actually use gemini is a 404.
        
       | iruoy wrote:
       | On the https://one.google.com/about/plans page they named the
       | subscription AI Premium. It's the same as Premium, but you get
       | access to Gemini Advanced too. However I'm not sure where you can
       | use it at the moment. Maybe just Bard?
        
       | buro9 wrote:
       | Seems to be a lot of dead-ends (I only have a GSuite account via
       | work, and cannot view the page without a Google account, and it
       | doesn't seem to work with a GSuite account).
       | 
       | What _is_ Gemini Ultra?
        
         | rvnx wrote:
         | An improved version of Bard; Bard which is for known for being
         | inferior to competitors like ChatGPT or Claude for now.
         | 
         | This Ultra is interesting in a way that we will know if
         | Google's tech is more like Siri or more like ChatGPT.
        
           | buro9 wrote:
           | Aha, I wonder why they chose to advertise it in such an
           | obstructive way. It seems like they're not even saying what
           | it is, let alone why one might want to use it.
           | 
           | Given the URL included one.google.com , I assume it's for
           | individuals only?
           | 
           | Reminds me of this which I wrote 5-6 years ago... seemingly
           | still true https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-
           | google-4d292906... , though since then I've almost completely
           | de-Googled (due to Google being Google).
        
       | lynx23 wrote:
       | Wow, two announcements by Google on HN on the same day both look
       | like a scam. localllm just being a downloader and wrapper for
       | llama.cpp, and this one giving many users a 404 _after_
       | subscription. I think Google is officially dead.
        
       | lol768 wrote:
       | Title may be (unintentionally) misleading if, post-subscription,
       | it consistently 404s for everyone!
       | 
       | I'll be interested to see some independent comparisons against
       | OpenAI's models, but like everything AI-related Google has done
       | recently, it feels like it's all a bit too little too late - and
       | this is the latest bungled product launch..
       | 
       | In the UK, it states:
       | 
       | > PS18.99/month
       | 
       | Which is about 20% more than I currently pay to OpenAI. Is
       | Google's model 20% better?
        
         | kthartic wrote:
         | > Which is about 20% more than I currently pay to OpenAI.
         | 
         | ChatGPT Plus (which I assume is what they're competing with) is
         | the same price - PS18.99.
         | 
         | Actually not a bad deal considering I'm already paying for
         | Google One (for gdrive storage), so I can just combine the two
         | services for the same price as ChatGPT.
        
           | lol768 wrote:
           | > ChatGPT Plus (which I assume is what they're competing
           | with) is the same price - PS18.99.
           | 
           | Odd - they're billing me $20 in USD, which works out at about
           | PS15 something. I'm using a card with no currency conversion
           | mark-up.
        
             | kthartic wrote:
             | They're billing me $24 USD. It used to be $20 but then they
             | realised they weren't including tax (20% = $4) for UK
             | customers so they raised it.
             | 
             | Are you paying as a business maybe? Or perhaps you're just
             | lucky and they missed you haha
        
       | FergusArgyll wrote:
       | I don't think its actually been released yet, no blog no news.
       | Someone just found this link
        
       | cranberryturkey wrote:
       | Gemini isn't available right now. Try again in a few minutes.
        
       | khimaros wrote:
       | initially received a 404 after starting trial. now seeing "Gemini
       | isn't available right now. Try again in a few minutes."
        
       | sidcool wrote:
       | I subscribed for it. But then it redirects to
       | https://gemini.google.com/ which throws 404.
       | 
       | When I went to https://bard.google.com it shows Bard Advanced. Is
       | Bard advanced same as Gemini Ultra?
        
         | alphabetting wrote:
         | I believe so. They haven't announced anything yet but should be
         | getting official launch soon.
        
           | chris-orgmenta wrote:
           | Popup for me @ https://gemini.google.com/app:
           | 
           |  _" Bard is now Gemini
           | 
           | The best way to get direct access to Google AI All the
           | capabilities that you know and love are still here, and will
           | keep getting better in the Gemini era"_
           | 
           | So I suppose this is the official launch.
           | 
           | (https://gemini.google.com/app 404'd until I connected my
           | workspace account in bard extensions).
           | 
           | Edit: Side note - Hallucinations pretty much what you would
           | expect, the same as ChatGPT4. Immediately tried to tell me to
           | import non existent components from an npm library. That test
           | was without prefixing with 'turn creativity to zero [blah
           | blah]', so will test further with proper prompts. Gemini
           | doesn't seem to allow for custom instructions, so I suppose I
           | will have to add them into an Autohotkey script.
        
             | sidcool wrote:
             | This works, thanks!
        
               | rvnx wrote:
               | I just asked to search things on Google:
               | 
               | ``` Gemini Advanced: Thorough academic research typically
               | involves reading extensively, evaluating sources
               | critically, and synthesizing information. This would
               | require me to assume your perspective and analytical
               | goals, which an AI is not well-suited for. ```
        
         | LoKSET wrote:
         | Gemini Ultra is the model. Bard Advanced (which probably soon
         | will become Gemini Advanced) is the whole product. Like GPT-4
         | and ChatGPT.
        
           | danpalmer wrote:
           | As far as I understand, Bard/Gemini Advanced (the product),
           | is backed by Gemini Ultra (the model). Gemini comes in
           | Ultra/Pro/Nano, and I don't think Bard/Gemini the web product
           | is using Nano at all as that's designed for on-device
           | inference.
        
         | smusamashah wrote:
         | It said "Bard is now Gemini"
        
       | khimaros wrote:
       | after reaching the 404 and then /unavailable page, clicking my
       | profile icon took me to https://gemini.google.com/app which seems
       | like it still work but provides no responses, just redirects back
       | to itself after submitting a message.
        
       | TechRemarker wrote:
       | "Sorry, Gemini Advanced isn't available for you". Why are Google
       | paying customers always the last to get everything. Always
       | thought that should be reversed. Especially for one person users
       | who use it for the customer domain and not running a fortune 500
       | company. So frustrating. Google Home is still a mess where if one
       | if Google Work and the rest of the family is not won't work after
       | all these years. So frustrating.
        
         | bdd8f1df777b wrote:
         | Because the legality for the paying customers is much more
         | complex to navigate.
        
           | DismantleMars wrote:
           | I think there's a deeper issue around paying customers being
           | assumed to be businesses. I have a paid Google account for
           | just one reason - using a custom domain with Gmail. This lets
           | me have a wildcard email address, but more importantly, it
           | gives me the ability to move my email address to a different
           | provider if my Google account got caught in an automated
           | system and blocked, so I wouldn't lose access to all the
           | services I've used that email address to sign up with.
           | 
           | If there was a way I could continue to just have a regular
           | personal Google account, but pay an extra fee to use a custom
           | domain with it, I'd much prefer to do that than maintain an
           | enterprise Google Workspace setup with only a single user in
           | it, just for this one feature.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | Copying my reply to a similar comment in this thread:
         | 
         | Workspace users always get features after free consumer
         | accounts so that organization admins have time to evaluate
         | them, update training materials, etc.
         | 
         | This is a feature, not a bug.
         | 
         | And of course there are lots of features that Workspace
         | accounts get, that free accounts don't get at all. Like the
         | timeline view in Sheets.
        
       | udev4096 wrote:
       | > requires sign in
       | 
       | No thanks
        
       | andrejguran wrote:
       | Seems it was just fixed. Url: https://gemini.google.com/app works
       | now!
        
       | rvnx wrote:
       | Update: It's working now if you manually go to
       | https://gemini.google.com/app
        
       | menschmanfred wrote:
       | Mh weird that they bundle it with storage.
       | 
       | Makes downgrading hard if you don't track your usage and get used
       | to it
        
         | IanCal wrote:
         | Even weirder is that it's only bundled with 2TB of storage. If
         | you have more than that you cannot upgrade without losing
         | storage space.
        
       | codekaze wrote:
       | Just played with Gemini Ultra for like 10-15 mins, and right off
       | the bat, it made mistakes I've never seen GPT-4 do.
       | 
       | To give you an example, I asked Gemini Ultra how to set up a
       | real-time system for a TikTok-like feed that matches card
       | difficulty with user ability. It correctly mentioned "Item
       | Response Theory (IRT)", which was a good start. But when I
       | followed up asking how to implement a real-time IRT system, it
       | suddenly started going off about "Interactive Voice Response
       | (IVR) system" - something totally unrelated and never mentioned
       | before. Never had this kind of mix-up with GPT-4.
       | 
       | https://g.co/gemini/share/f586a497013e
        
         | MrsPeaches wrote:
         | From the FAQ:
         | 
         | "Why doesn't Gemini know what I said earlier in a conversation?
         | 
         | Gemini's ability to hold context is purposefully limited for
         | now. As Gemini continues to learn, its ability to hold context
         | during longer conversations will improve."
        
           | codekaze wrote:
           | Yeah, I saw that in the FAQ, but this was literally my second
           | question in the convo, so not exactly a "long" conversation.
           | Seems like it should be able to handle context for at least a
           | couple of exchanges, right?
        
           | behnamoh wrote:
           | > Gemini's ability to hold context is purposefully limited
           | for now. As Gemini continues to learn, its ability to hold
           | context during longer conversations will improve."
           | 
           | This is ridiculous. Context is everything with LLMs.
           | gpt-4-32k performs better than gpt-4 exactly because of this.
        
         | tomasff wrote:
         | It doesn't seem like it's using Gemini Ultra yet. For me it
         | seems like only the interface has been updated since the image
         | generation capabilities are not working.
        
         | mjgeddes wrote:
         | Yeah, I noticed with 'Gemini Pro' , it didn't seem to be able
         | to remember much about earlier outputs in the conversation
         | (apparently little to no context window), which obviously
         | drastically dumbs it down.
         | 
         | I was starting to get OK results with 'Pro', but I had to use
         | special prompting tricks.
         | 
         | Tried 'Advanced' (Ultra), seems only marginally better so far.
        
           | hackerlight wrote:
           | > I was starting to get OK results with 'Pro', but I had to
           | use special prompting tricks.
           | 
           | Like what?
        
             | mjgeddes wrote:
             | I usually put a couple of keywords in brackets at the
             | beginning (before the body of the prompt) to provide some
             | context
        
         | okdood64 wrote:
         | > Created with Gemini Advanced
         | 
         | You're not using Ultra here...
        
       | mjgeddes wrote:
       | Well, it says I'm in to 'Bard Advanced' (which is the same as
       | 'Gemini Ultra'). I only did a couple of queries so far, text
       | output seemed only marginally better than 'Gemini Pro', which I
       | was just starting to get decent results with after getting used
       | to prompting. It's possible they'd done a stealth release
       | earlier, obviously need to do a lot of experiments to make a
       | proper comparison with GPT-4.
        
       | joshstrange wrote:
       | > Sorry, Gemini Advanced isn't available for you
       | 
       | > Gemini Advanced is not yet available in some countries, for
       | work accounts, or for users under a certain age.
       | 
       | I'm so tired of this bullshit with Google. I can't tell you how
       | much of a pain it is to PAY Google and then be excluded from
       | things.
       | 
       | Everything from not being able to claim a free chromecast+stadia
       | controller to this. Heck the other day I logged into my Google
       | drive and it warned me I was out of space. I've been paying for
       | Google storage for years but something flipped on their backend
       | and the GSuite account someone just took priority over that? So I
       | had to upgrade my GSuite subscription to get enough storage and
       | cancel my Google storage subscription. No notice, no explanation,
       | just complete bullshit.
       | 
       | If I thought I had a safe path forward to remove Google as my
       | email/calendar while maintaining my Google drive/Google account
       | access I would seriously consider it but I fear I'm locked in and
       | would have to start over with Google if I took my domain with me
       | elsewhere.
       | 
       | I thought things might improve after paying for GSuite instead of
       | being on their free tier that they discontinued after a decade
       | but it's only gotten worse.
        
       | simion314 wrote:
       | The level of stupidity caused by corporate censorship is extreme
       | in Bard, I ask it(medium one) to generate a few paragraphs of
       | content and it did it. Then I ask it to revise the text and fix
       | some stuff and it refused the task because of plagiarism concern,
       | no amount of logic could make the stupid AI understand that we
       | "own" the f text we created just now and we can edit it.
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | Well let's hope these hn comments are representative of the wider
       | experience. Doesn't sound beta ready let alone paying launch
        
         | Havoc wrote:
         | Oops. That sentence is missing a not. I don't actively wish
         | anything bad upon Google
        
       | ipsum2 wrote:
       | In the 20 minutes of experimentation, I'm really impressed with
       | the quality of Bard Advanced (Gemini Ultra). The results are as
       | good as GPT-4, and in some cases is better. So far:
       | 
       | pros:
       | 
       | - better at translation (tried Chinese and Japanese idioms to
       | English)
       | 
       | - better at incorporating search results in its answer vs gpt-4
       | bing
       | 
       | cons:
       | 
       | - slightly worse at coding
       | 
       | - censorship is more annoying (have to ask multiple times about
       | medical topics)
       | 
       | - Worse at logic (e.g. it contradicts itself in a single
       | sentence, and is unable to figure it out)
       | 
       | - Hallucinates a lot when asked to describe an image
        
         | mewpmewp2 wrote:
         | I think that logic is the most important thing to look out for
         | though.
        
           | fl7305 wrote:
           | I just tried some logic puzzles on the Advanced model, and
           | was not impressed. It feels much worse than paid ChatGPT.
        
             | DalasNoin wrote:
             | keep in mind that all the common logical puzzles have
             | probably been tried hundreds of times by chatgpt users and
             | are now part of the training set.
        
               | fl7305 wrote:
               | I tried the "pull or push a glass door with mirror
               | writing".
               | 
               | I feel it's a huge difference between GPT-4, which seems
               | to be able to reason logically around the issue and
               | respond with relevant remarks, and Gemini Gemini Advanced
               | which feels a lot more like a stochastical parrot.
               | 
               | Gemini quickly got confused and started talking about
               | "pushing the door towards yourself" and other nonsense.
               | It also couldn't stay on point, and instead started to
               | regurgitate a lot of irrelevant stuff.
               | 
               | GPT-4 is not perfect, you can still hit things where it
               | also breaks down.
        
         | selllikesybok wrote:
         | Question for you -
         | 
         | > better at incorporating search results in its answer vs gpt-4
         | bing
         | 
         | How are you getting it to incorporate search results in its
         | answers?
         | 
         | I can't for the life of me get it to find any real-time
         | external data except for the 5 official 'extensions' under
         | settings, which are for Flights/Hotels/Maps/Workspace/YouTube.
         | 
         | Did you mean that, or have you found a workaround to get Bard
         | to actually search on Google?
        
           | dustincoates wrote:
           | I got it quickly with the question: > what is the difference
           | between polyptyton and antaclanasis
        
             | staticman2 wrote:
             | I just tried this but it doesn't indicate it searched the
             | web. (On Gemini mobile app on android).
        
           | ukuina wrote:
           | You have to click the "G" icon in its response to "verify
           | answers with Google".
        
             | selllikesybok wrote:
             | Okay, but to clarify:
             | 
             | - This is not Gemini performing a search. - This is Google
             | providing a layer of ass-covering in case Gemini produces a
             | factually incorrect reply.
             | 
             | Right? I am looking for something like ChatGPT with Bing -
             | it will run a query, pull back results, and operate on
             | them, all dynamically within the system.
             | 
             | Gemini doesn't seem to do this, no matter how you try to
             | wrangle it.
        
         | zooq_ai wrote:
         | Also as time goes by, it'll get smoothly integrated into docs/g
         | mail/maps/calendar/youtube/search/colab/sheets/android/assistan
         | t
         | 
         | So Gemini could by your one-stop AI shop for everything. Only
         | Microsoft can match it (but Microsoft doesn't have a popular
         | maps, youtube, mail, smartphone OS service).
         | 
         | Apple is another strong player (but they don't have
         | productivity tools like docs, sheets or youtube).
         | 
         | It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on.
         | 
         | Going to chatGPT and copying and pasting results will become
         | painful (not to mention it's painful bing integration). Also at
         | this point, they seem to be focusing on scaling LLM (while
         | Google Deepmind is exploring other avenues)
         | 
         | Google can also bundle Youtube TV, YouTube Premium, Google
         | Drive, Storage, Ad free Search, Gemini integrated
         | Docs/Sheets/Gmail, Subsidized Pixel Phones / Watch for a
         | monthly fee of say $99 and it'll be very compelling for a lot
         | of people
        
           | daxfohl wrote:
           | Sounds like this whole thing is an insane 30-year effort by
           | some engineer who couldn't get over the discontinuation of
           | Clippy.
        
           | mark_l_watson wrote:
           | Good comments. As much as I am personally engaged in small
           | LLMs that I can run on my own computer, and integrate into
           | software that I write for myself, I think the future of large
           | scale adoption of AI belongs to Google, Microsoft, and Apple
           | in western countries (and China is doing wonderful things in
           | their markets).
           | 
           | The old Bard/Gemini integration with Gmail, Google Docs, etc.
           | is pretty good. I signed up for a minute for Microsoft's
           | $20/month AI Office integrations, but cancelled and will try
           | again in 2 months. I am an Apple customer and I expect
           | spectacular things from Apple. I expect Apple, Google,
           | Samsung, etc., to offer fantastic on device AI.
           | 
           | I would like to see a money saving Google bundling family
           | plan. I find Apple's super bundle family plan a pretty good
           | deal.
        
             | msoad wrote:
             | small LLM? Small Large Language Model lol
        
               | mark_l_watson wrote:
               | Good joke, thanks, but I will explain anyway: to me 30
               | billion parameters or smaller is small since I can run it
               | using Ollama on my home computer. I managed a deep
               | learning team at Capital One and our 'large' models were
               | less than 20 million parameters. :-)
        
               | falcor84 wrote:
               | I suppose we could call them Medium Language Models, but
               | unfortunately that TLA is already taken
        
               | IanCal wrote:
               | A large language model the size of a small language
               | model.
        
           | mvdtnz wrote:
           | Did you just say Microsoft doesn't have a popular email
           | service?
        
             | zooq_ai wrote:
             | Yes. No where at the scale and reach of gmail.
             | 
             | We are also talking about consumer emails (not enterprise /
             | corporate)
        
               | viraptor wrote:
               | Outlook(+Hotmail) is the third most popular email
               | service. Just 3x smaller than the Gmail. It's definitely
               | the same kind of scale.
        
           | golol wrote:
           | Well for LLM services that do what they currently do google
           | may have an advantage, but all this stuff is still only
           | experimentation with the goal being hopefully much more
           | advanced things, like almost-agi agents. If this happens then
           | no one will care about the way we currently use LLMs anymore.
        
           | jaimie wrote:
           | Strange to say Apple doesn't have productivity tools when
           | Pages, Sheets, and Keynote exist on every Mac. I get the
           | scale arguments, but Handoff and iCloud integration are a
           | sleeper IF you've bought into the ecosystem...
           | 
           | Also hard to overstate just how much more valuable the
           | enterprise market is over the consumer market when comparing
           | Microsoft vs. Google as one-stop anything shops.
           | 
           | I don't see Google as having the obvious dominant position to
           | make the argument it's their race to lose, considering
           | Microsoft has a stake in chatGPT and is actively integrating
           | it into their browser and productivity suites.
        
             | Terretta wrote:
             | There's a Google bubble on HN, as demonstrated by small-to-
             | medium business facing SaaS launching here offering login
             | with Google and not offering login with Microsoft.
             | 
             | I've talked to many of HN's Google Docs jockey founders
             | that genuinely didn't realize 85% of the US domestic
             | business market is in M365. And they further don't realize
             | that "Continue with Microsoft" is dirt simple and lets
             | companies offer company-managed logins to your SaaS without
             | all the AD/SCIM/SAML nonsense.
             | 
             | "But everyone has Gmail." Well, no, that's not how
             | companies work. And if you think everyone's in Google,
             | that's fine, your login page should look like one of these:
             | 
             | https://www.xsplit.com/user/auth
             | 
             | https://id.atlassian.com/login
             | 
             | You don't even need the "continue with SSO" if you do the
             | Atlassian practice of letting a firm "claim" the domain
             | part of an email and using that to redirect to an SSO flow.
             | And to start, skip SSO, and just use the "Continue with"
             | Oauth2.
        
               | zooq_ai wrote:
               | Unfortunately, You are in a US bubble.
               | 
               | Globally, Google brand is 10x stronger than Microsoft for
               | Small Businesses
        
               | Terretta wrote:
               | > _bubble_
               | 
               | It's not a bubble when one specifically names the Venn
               | diagram circle "85% of the US domestic business market".
               | It's naming a market.
               | 
               | > _brand is stronger_
               | 
               | Presumably the founders' interest is wallet share, not
               | market share.
               | 
               | Are you saying Atlassian is in a US bubble?
        
               | imp0cat wrote:
               | But is it really? It seems to me that almost every
               | business is using the Exchange/Outlook combo, not Google
               | products.
        
               | rcbdev wrote:
               | Absolutely untrue - Every company and university I've
               | ever worked with or for in Europe used Microsoft 365. Not
               | a single exception.
        
               | zooq_ai wrote:
               | US + Europe is not the world
        
             | CuriouslyC wrote:
             | Google's competitive advantage is threefold:
             | 
             | 1. Real estate - Youtube, Gmail, Maps, Search (for now),
             | etc. 2. Compute - probably still the best in the industry,
             | but with recent Microsoft/meta compute buys it's hard to
             | say for sure. 3. Talent - probably also still the top of
             | the industry. Geoff Hinton and Zoubin Gharamani setting
             | direction and Jeff Dean building it is hard to beat, and
             | the ranks are deep. Yann LeCunn is also brilliant and
             | Andrej Karpathy while less seasoned is one of the top
             | researchers in the field, but overall there's still a bit
             | of a spread from Google's roster, at least when it comes to
             | AI researchers.
             | 
             | If Sundar and the other top brass weren't MBA-bots with no
             | vision, and the famous Google bureaucracy had been reigned
             | in gradually over the last 5 years while promoting a
             | builder-centric culture, this would be in the bag for
             | Google no question. Instead, Satya Nadella played 3D chess
             | while Sundar was looking at a checkers board.
        
               | falcor84 wrote:
               | Geoff Hinton quit Google last year, no? But other than
               | that, I guess I agree.
        
             | sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
             | I think Google lost the top researchers when they destroyed
             | the culture. All the competitor companies are mainly led by
             | ex-Google talent, and honestly who in their right mind
             | would take a Google job today over OpenAI, Mistral, or even
             | Meta (where you will be releasing models like Llama for the
             | world to use).
             | 
             | Google killed the culture and is bleeding top talent. They
             | have reduced themselves to digital landlord and sure they
             | can extract rent, but that's not what attracts people.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | that is the media narrative but not at all what happened.
               | 
               | Google's 'don't be evil' grad-school-style culture had
               | fallen apart by the late 2010's because there are tons of
               | people who will just rest and vest.
               | 
               | So strong ML researchers basically were creating massive
               | value but much of it was going to rest&vest salaries. OAI
               | basically came along and said - hey, we don't have rest &
               | vesters, do you want to make $1m+/yr? And most of the top
               | google researchers said yes.
        
               | sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
               | It's not just media narrative. The culture was eroding
               | for years, as you note, but the dam finally broke and
               | they went full IBM/Kodak. Or in other words, "slowly at
               | first, then all at once".
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | Most of the recent media coverage has been
               | resting&vesting employee backlash against the fact that
               | Google is making them do work again. This is a cultural
               | shift, but not away from the culture that made Google
               | great - the original culture was grad-school, not rest
               | and vest, and that died years ago.
        
               | camgunz wrote:
               | Haven't one or two long-time Googlers left or gotten laid
               | off and then written strong criticisms of Google? They
               | don't sound like rest & vest (also should say I don't
               | super agree w/ this term) to me, they sound like people
               | who loved Google, were there a long time, and watched the
               | culture decay.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | I'm not super invested in the term "rest&vest" so it is
               | whatever.
               | 
               | But touche - many of the critiques are being written by
               | super talented and impactful people. But I do not think
               | those critiques are necessarily incompatible with what I
               | am saying.
               | 
               | There is a very real and very frustrating (if you work
               | there and want to be impactful) phenomenon in these tech
               | companies of people resting on their laurels.
        
             | richardw wrote:
             | Apple is coming. I think the personal agent is where we
             | really want the smarts and if they're not trying to own
             | that space the CEO should be fired.
        
           | Workaccount2 wrote:
           | Google still has too much internal fragmentation and power
           | groups to offer a single google-subscriber package.
           | 
           | I'd say it is one of the most compelling reasons to kick
           | Sundar out and get in someone who can unify google into one
           | consistent and interoperable ecosystem.
        
           | CuriouslyC wrote:
           | Google is going to own AI like intel owns graphics cards -
           | i.e. Not really, except at the absolute bottom of the barrel
           | where its baked in advantage lets it offer an unbeatable
           | price/performance proposition for people who only care about
           | "value" and with limited real performance requirements.
           | Google's baked in AIs will be free, and bad. Everyone else is
           | going to let people "plug in" models via standardized APIs,
           | because one size fits all models are just a bad idea, so
           | that's the way google is going to have to go eventually as
           | well, because it's what power users are going to demand.
        
           | raisedbyninjas wrote:
           | If they can get reliably useful AI through voice into
           | maps/navigation, it will be a substantial improvement to the
           | driving experience. It's really frustrating to manage
           | destinations and waypoints while driving. I just checked the
           | process to see if I'm not keeping up and 1. the help docs are
           | out of date. 2. the waypoint search results provides tap
           | points for destinations 10 miles off a route, but shows only
           | 3 pixel red dots for otherwise equally weighted options that
           | are literally on the existing route.
        
           | chrisweekly wrote:
           | > "Apple is another strong player (but they don't have
           | productivity tools like docs, sheets or youtube)."
           | 
           | Can anyone help me understand how Apple allows Siri to remain
           | so absurdly incompetent? Last night I watched the latest
           | episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David's Siri
           | interactions devolve into an apoplectic rant -- and part of
           | the reason it was so funny is that it's so relatable. I
           | rarely even try Siri anymore, but when I do it's still just
           | abysmal. Are they deliberately handicapping it, to boost the
           | perceived relative benefits of a future successor?
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | Apple has very little ML talent. They're basically resting
             | on their laurels in the phone market.
        
           | oakashes wrote:
           | I agree that Google is well-positioned, but they were also
           | well-positioned to take advantage of these synergies with
           | Google Assistant for many years and I would say that that did
           | not meaningfully materialize in a way that was helpful to me
           | as an Android and Google ecosystem user.
        
             | earth_walker wrote:
             | Agreed. I've run the house using google minis and assistant
             | for years now, and asking assistant to do / about stuff has
             | not improved one iota in that time and has introduced
             | several more quirks and bugs.
             | 
             | Makes me wish I had bet on Alexa or Apple instead.
        
           | kccqzy wrote:
           | All of the things you write are very good ideas. But at this
           | point, I am quite skeptical of Google leadership to pull off
           | these things.
        
           | 6510 wrote:
           | right, google has maps, they should call the bot Uncle
           | Traveling Matt.
        
         | DannyBee wrote:
         | so I have done a lot of transcripts, coding, one versus the
         | other (gpt4 vs ultra). Often simple prompts like refactor this
         | code or convert this python to typescript.
         | 
         | My experience is that Gemini ultra understands the code better,
         | but doesn't always give me as complete of results (they seem to
         | limit output length more)
         | 
         | Beyond that it is very smart. I've had to tell me this code
         | packs 12 bit integers into different parts of an array using
         | the following encodinv. Which most people would not figure out
         | from the code as written. It then will say you can actually do
         | that with this neat little translate function that you never
         | knew about.
         | 
         | It will then get the code very slightly wrong. if I tell it not
         | to use the cool function, it will actually get the code, right.
         | 
         | GPT4 has no idea what the code is doing but can clean it up a
         | bit.
         | 
         | so it's like ultra is too clever by half sometimes.
         | 
         | That said, I have fed thousands of lines of code into both of
         | them and asked them to refactor it, and neither one of them
         | made more than one error. All code otherwise compiled and
         | worked first try.
         | 
         | this is code that can't possibly be in their training sets,
         | it's basically handwritten python that was written, based on an
         | old x86 binary that nobody has the source to anymore. so the
         | code is basically garbage, and what it is doing doesn't, say,
         | appear on GitHub in a nicer form.
         | 
         | Both gpt4 and Gemini ultra were able to make the code, look
         | like clean, idiomatic, python, or typescript without any work
         | on my part. except for the one bug each. which, for 8000 to
         | 10,000 lines of code is not bad.
         | 
         | The GPT4 inserted bug was more insidious. It changed (the
         | equivalent of) (uint8)'a' to (uint8)'a' - '0' for no reason
         | when converting some code to typescript. Not sure if that is
         | representative of anything
         | 
         | if I do the same with any of the other "top" models ( from can
         | ai code, etc), most of them can't even generate correct working
         | code for all the input, let alone good code. Most aren't even
         | close.
        
           | jstummbillig wrote:
           | > That said, I have fed thousands of lines of code into both
           | of them and asked them to refactor it, and neither one of
           | them made more than one error. All code otherwise compiled
           | and worked first try.
           | 
           | I would be very interested to get a more detailed scope of
           | what you did here. Feeding thousands of lines of code into
           | GPT4 and getting a near perfect refactor does very much NOT
           | sound like my experience, but it seems highly desirable.
        
             | maxwelljoslyn wrote:
             | Seconded. I am also keenly interested in learning more. It
             | would be a great boon on my current project to be able to
             | let the AI refactor mountains of legacy code (while taking
             | steps to ensure the results are trustworthy and equivalent,
             | of course.)
        
             | maaanu wrote:
             | Yes, I've observed the same phenomenon. The more detailed
             | my prompts are, the more errors GPT tends to make. I use it
             | as a partner to discuss implementation ideas, before I
             | start coding. That works very well, because gpt and I
             | usually find somethings, that I missed at a first glance.
             | 
             | But coding with gpt or co-pilot is too disrupted for me.
        
             | DannyBee wrote:
             | I'm happy to share transcripts if you email me.
             | 
             | I'm not sure what you are feeding it. My scope is closer to
             | a file at a time of fairly mostly self-contained python or
             | C and asking it to clean it up or convert it to typescript.
             | 
             | I can imagine lots of scenarios it doesn't work well.
             | 
             | In mine, it does, and I have plenty of transcripts showing
             | that :)
        
         | jbellis wrote:
         | > better at incorporating search results in its answer vs gpt-4
         | bing
         | 
         | That's odd, I had Gemini repeatedly tell me it couldn't search
         | the web in response to my question (that I was trying to get it
         | to answer from the context I provided).
        
           | ipsum2 wrote:
           | I haven't tested asking it explicitly to search, but it does
           | incorporate answers that are very recent and unlikely to be
           | in it's training dataset
        
         | jatins wrote:
         | > - slightly worse at coding
         | 
         | > - Worse at logic (e.g. it contradicts itself in a single
         | sentence, and is unable to figure it out)
         | 
         | That takes most of my use cases. "logic" is what makes GPT
         | often feel like AGI.
         | 
         | Use cases like translation seem less impressive in comparison
         | to logical reasoning because it feels like it's just something
         | where you can throw a lot of data and it'll do better. While
         | with logical reasoning it still feels like model "learned"
         | something more than pure pattern matching
        
           | keenmaster wrote:
           | Exactly. That's also why I find low parameter LLMs to be
           | useless for me personally. I simply cannot trust anything
           | that is so very illogical. GPT-4 is the first LLM that
           | crossed into usable territory for me. Even GPT-3.5 was a fun
           | toy and maybe good for summarization, but that's it. It will
           | be revolutionary when GPT-4 is cheap enough that thousands of
           | calls don't cost much. To imagine an LLM much smarter
           | GPT-4...the future is bright.
        
         | amadeuspagel wrote:
         | > censorship is more annoying (have to ask multiple times about
         | medical topics)
         | 
         | I think there's a chance for some country to become a center of
         | healthcare simply by allowing AI that gives medical advice.
         | Especially if a country already encourages medical tourism,
         | this might be the next level.
        
           | Andrex wrote:
           | The risks involving hallucinations are too damn high still,
           | and may always be.
           | 
           | I had a similar line of thought with AI therapists. It could
           | be massively beneficial if perfect, but the risk in seriously
           | messing with someone's well-being is significant and
           | shouldn't be handwaved away.
        
             | firejake308 wrote:
             | > The risks involving hallucinations are too damn high
             | still, and may always be.
             | 
             | Yes, but I think in the limited realm of people who
             | otherwise wouldn't get any advice at all, I think LLMs
             | could play a useful role. American healthcare is so
             | prohibitively expensive that many people with potential
             | medical issues will avoid seeing a doctor until it is too
             | late to do anything. Checking in with an LLM could help
             | people at least identify red flags that _really_ can 't be
             | ignored, and it would be more helpful than WebMD telling
             | you that everything is cancer.
        
               | Andrex wrote:
               | I think we may see society settling on feeling
               | comfortable with their doctor using an AI, but not being
               | an AI.
        
         | UncleOxidant wrote:
         | I found it worse at coding than DeepSeek Coder on the couple of
         | prompts I tried.
        
         | karmasimida wrote:
         | I feel the same. And it feels slightly faster?
         | 
         | Finally a worthy competitor to GPT-4
        
         | kevinmchugh wrote:
         | On logic it cannot handle the Dumb Monty Hall problem at all:
         | 
         | https://g.co/gemini/share/33c5fb45738f
        
           | johnfn wrote:
           | This is pretty funny, though to be honest, I skimmed the
           | question and would have answered the same until I re-read it
           | with your prompts.
        
           | Workaccount2 wrote:
           | This is with regular gemini or with the paid gemini advanced?
        
             | kevinmchugh wrote:
             | Regular
        
           | dudeinjapan wrote:
           | This is hilarious.
        
           | adriano_f wrote:
           | Hilarious!
           | 
           | (For comparison, here's GPT-4 getting it on first try: https:
           | //chat.openai.com/share/9e17ed25-d9ea-4e72-a9d8-a139ca... )
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | yes, although gpt-4 has been finetuned on this one
        
             | kevinmchugh wrote:
             | My understanding is that gpt4 is better at this than 3.5
             | and it seems to get it pretty reliably. One thing that's
             | interesting to do is to imply the answer is incorrect and
             | see if you can get it to change its answer. If you let it
             | stop answering when it's correct, you get the Clever Hans
             | effect.
        
           | IanCal wrote:
           | Incredible. Gpt4 spots that the door is transparent and that
           | changes things but has this great line
           | 
           | > When you initially pick a door (in this case, door number 1
           | where you already see the car), you have a 1/3 chance of
           | having picked the car
           | 
           | (Asking it to explain this it correctly solves the problem
           | but it's a wonderfully silly sentence)
           | 
           | Edit - in a new chat it gets it right the first time
        
             | sahila wrote:
             | This is not convincing though that gpt4 actually
             | understands the problem. Here's a slight variation I asked
             | and it fails miserably.
             | 
             | https://chat.openai.com/share/22a9027f-a2c1-428a-94a2-8fd91
             | 8...
             | 
             | I wonder what lends itself it answer correct in one
             | situation but not the other? Was your question previously
             | asked already and it recognized it whereas my question is
             | different enough?
        
               | emmelaich wrote:
               | You could say it doesn't "understand" anything really.
        
         | tete wrote:
         | > censorship is more annoying
         | 
         | That's a general problem with AI. There is a lot of censorship
         | in certain areas, likely to fight bad publicity, but I think
         | the outlook is that this leads to taboos, prudeness and big
         | companies deciding what is ethical and what isn't.
         | 
         | I recently tried Bard and ChatGPT on topics that are classical
         | philosophical dilemmas and while ChatGPT certainly did have
         | some troubles too, Bard was absolutely horrible and always took
         | the conservative - as in never arguing for any freedoms that
         | aren't yet widely established views. I am talking about
         | classical examples regarding the limits of utilitarianism.
         | "What would be best for society, what would be best for the
         | individual?" style questions. Even when trying to create a bias
         | by changing examples, for example adding volunteering for
         | things Bard strictly kept its opinion, despite originally
         | stating that the general topic is two sided, that it's an open
         | question, etc.
         | 
         | I think this is a danger of such systems. By their nature they
         | reinforce status quo, because they base off is widely accepted
         | at the time of their inception. If history would have been
         | different I am sure it would argue for slavery and against
         | women being allowed to vote, simply because that used to be the
         | more common view point. It would have likely argued that
         | homosexuality is unethical. Maybe it would even have tried to
         | explain how it doesn't create children, but spreads diseases or
         | similar things. At least that's the level of arguments it
         | brings now.
         | 
         | This isn't just about ethics. Even if you think about IT and
         | programming. I think this could give already invented
         | programming languages, styles, methodologies a significant
         | edge. Unless you are Microsoft or Google and are able to bias
         | it to whatever you want to see more of.
         | 
         | So this combined with the costs meaning that only people or
         | institutions with significant (financial) power create those
         | rules does look a bit bleak.
         | 
         | I miss the last decade when the thought experiment about self
         | driving cars were about whom to drive over in a ridiculously
         | unlikely scenario.
        
         | onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
         | > - slightly worse at coding
         | 
         | Is GPT-4 what one uses for coding? I thought specialized models
         | were best?
         | 
         | I would imagine Google is focused on building a model that
         | _expands_ the types of things people associate with Search.
        
         | firejake308 wrote:
         | For medical topics, I recommend Anthropic Claude. Don't want to
         | jinx it, but so far, I've been able to get actually helpful
         | medical information from Claude where ChatGPT just says "I'm
         | sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
        
       | alphabetting wrote:
       | Gemini Ultra seems better on logic than GPT4. Still messing
       | around testing but here's a prompt Ultra nailed but GPT4
       | completely botched:
       | 
       | Tabitha likes cookies but not cake. She likes mutton but not
       | lamb, and she likes okra but not squash. Following the same rule,
       | will she like cherries or pears
       | 
       | https://i.imgur.com/KW6gQbc.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/OSHSvLp.png
        
         | tomasff wrote:
         | Is image generation working for you?
        
           | codekaze wrote:
           | It's working for me (on Gemini Advanced)
        
             | tomasff wrote:
             | Mhm could be a region thing maybe? Not working for me on
             | Gemini Advanced in the UK
        
           | alphabetting wrote:
           | Yeah. I don't have much personal use for image generation
           | though.
        
         | neel8986 wrote:
         | Wow. Is this a puzzle from internet. I could have never guessed
         | the answer
        
         | ipsum2 wrote:
         | Note that Gemini pulled the answer off the Internet, while
         | GPT-4 didn't. The answer can easily be found via Google search.
         | Changing up the question a little, I reversed it and asked
         | Ultra and it was unable to answer:
         | 
         | Jake likes coke but not pepsi. He likes corn but not popcorn,
         | and he likes pens but not pencils. Will Jake like salmon or
         | cheese?
         | 
         | https://i.imgur.com/lWU9HHS.png
         | 
         | edit: why was this downvoted? I don't understand Hacker News,
         | and I've been here for over 12 years.
        
           | c-fe wrote:
           | I dont think your reversed question makes sense. In the OP
           | example, one item was always smaller/younger then the other
           | item. In your example, I cannot, even as a human, identify
           | the differences
        
             | flerchin wrote:
             | > even as a human
             | 
             | Would all the humans please take one step forward. Not so
             | fast c-fe.
        
             | inhumantsar wrote:
             | it's based on syllable count
        
           | alphabetting wrote:
           | Here's a logic question I just made up that GPT-4 failed and
           | Gemini Advanced got right.
           | 
           | https://i.imgur.com/3sNr3LW.png
           | https://i.imgur.com/EIj0nZg.png
        
         | rvnx wrote:
         | Proof of Gemini cheating: https://i.imgur.com/eYJDFjS.png
         | 
         | Answer about cherries falling from the sky...
         | 
         | (there is no question or context beforehand, this is the first
         | question of the chat)
        
           | rvnx wrote:
           | In addition just realized it thinks Apple is only one
           | syllable.
        
           | alphabetting wrote:
           | That's a bummer. I just made this one up which GPT-4 failed
           | and Gemini got right but definitely need to do more testing
           | to see what's being taken from online and what is actual
           | reasoning.
           | 
           | https://i.imgur.com/3sNr3LW.png
           | https://i.imgur.com/EIj0nZg.png
           | 
           | Edit: When I did your prompt it got it right on the first try
           | fwiwi https://i.imgur.com/E3zYEca.png
        
             | nycdatasci wrote:
             | Great example! Thanks for sharing. I tested the same prompt
             | using a variety of GPT-4 model versions and it consistently
             | got the answer wrong. When I continued with "use
             | algebra/formulas to confirm your answer" it corrected the
             | initial mistake, but I'm surprised that it's not doing that
             | out of the box.
        
             | mewpmewp2 wrote:
             | I tried through API with latest GPT-4-Turbo-Preview and
             | this is what I got:
             | 
             | ------
             | 
             | Let's break down the information given:
             | 
             | The school is two blocks north of the pool. This means if
             | you are at the pool and move two blocks north, you'll
             | arrive at the school.
             | 
             | The convenience store is one block south of the school.
             | Therefore, if you start at the school and move one block
             | south, you'll reach the convenience store.
             | 
             | Based on the first two statements, the relative positions
             | from north to south are: School, Convenience Store, Pool.
             | 
             | Thus, the third statement saying "The pool is south of the
             | convenience store" is indeed true, based on the positions
             | provided by the first two statements.
             | 
             | -----
             | 
             | But it starts weirdly messing up, when I asked it to
             | explain it using coordinates.
             | 
             | ---
             | 
             | Let's use a simple coordinate system to represent the
             | positions of the school, the pool, and the convenience
             | store. Let's assume each block corresponds to one unit in
             | this system. We'll start with the pool as our reference
             | point at coordinates (0,0). Remember, moving north
             | increases the y-coordinate, while moving south decreases
             | it.
             | 
             | The school is two blocks north of the pool. If the pool is
             | at (0,0), moving two blocks north puts the school at (0,
             | +2).
             | 
             | The convenience store is one block south of the school.
             | 
             | If the school is at (0, +2), moving one block south puts
             | the convenience store at (0, +1).
             | 
             | Given these positions:
             | 
             | The pool is at (0, 0).
             | 
             | The school is at (0, +2).
             | 
             | The convenience store is at (0, +1).
             | 
             | Therefore, instead of the pool being south of the
             | convenience store, the pool is actually located to the
             | north of the convenience store if you consider "north" to
             | mean increasing y-coordinates. The convenience store, being
             | at (0, +1), is southward relative to the school but not to
             | the pool. The pool, being at the origin point (0,0), is
             | south of both the school and the convenience store in terms
             | of their y-coordinates. Thus, the third statement, "The
             | pool is south of the convenience store," is false according
             | to the given coordinates.
             | 
             | ---
             | 
             | It gets coordinates and everything right, but still somehow
             | messes up North and South.
        
             | aaronharnly wrote:
             | Nice one! Gemini got it wrong in my (one) test:
             | 
             | https://g.co/gemini/share/4bae8ca3dd0a
        
             | microtherion wrote:
             | Gemini happened to get the yes/no answer right, but the
             | reasoning it gave is completely wrong, so it should not get
             | any credit for it.
        
           | dev1ycan wrote:
           | I genuinely believe LlMs have for the most part peaked
           | already just like the previous iterations of ML and even
           | brute forcing.
           | 
           | So much money being poured into AI startups just for them to
           | have to resort to cheating to improve their results a tiny
           | bit and claim advancements.
        
           | snapcaster wrote:
           | I'm confused on how this is "cheating" isn't it just getting
           | the answer wrong?
        
             | rvnx wrote:
             | It's answering with "cherries", though "cherries" were
             | never mentioned anywhere in the question since the task was
             | to choose between "apples" and "pears" this time,
             | 
             | and not "cherries" and "pears" like the example found on
             | the internet.
        
               | deltaburnt wrote:
               | I agree with who you're responding to. Cheating, to me,
               | would imply that there's some sort of hard coded guiding
               | to the LLM. This just seems like typical LLM
               | hallucinations?
        
               | sp332 wrote:
               | It's cheating because it has memorized the answer to the
               | puzzle instead of using logic to solve it.
        
               | room500 wrote:
               | I thought that is essentially what LLM's do? They learn
               | what words/topics are associated with each other and then
               | stream a response.
               | 
               | In some ways, this is proof that Gemini _isn 't_
               | cheating... It is just doing typical LLM hallucination
        
               | sp332 wrote:
               | Well, sometimes. Sometimes not.
               | https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17567
        
               | block_dagger wrote:
               | Your concept of cheating is simply how LLMs work.
        
               | ajross wrote:
               | I don't understand the leap to "cheating" either. LLMs
               | aren't abstract logic models; they don't promise to
               | reason from first principles at all. They give you an
               | answer based on training data. That's what you _want_
               | them to do. That they have some reasoning features bolted
               | around the inference engine is a feature companies are
               | rushing to provide (with... somewhat mixed success).
        
               | bloopernova wrote:
               | Thank you for answering a question I had half formed in
               | my head.
               | 
               | Do LLMs have logical rules built in? What makes them
               | different to a very advanced Markov chain?
               | 
               | Are there any models out there that start from logical
               | principles and train on top of that?
               | 
               | (Apologies for poor understanding of the field)
        
               | ajross wrote:
               | > What makes them different to a very advanced Markov
               | chain?
               | 
               | Really nothing. There's some feedback structure in the
               | layers of the model, it's not just one big probability
               | table. But the technique is fundamentally the same, it's
               | Markov, just with the whole conversation as input and
               | with billions of parameters.
        
           | summerlight wrote:
           | With some shallow understanding on how those models work,
           | this looks much more like usual hallucination likely due to
           | sparse data around "Tabitha" and "Cherry" which makes a
           | single training data much more representative. If you try
           | some common names like "Emily" or "Sarah", it will just do
           | the job.
           | 
           | If you're trying to make the case that it's cheating because
           | it is already in the training set, then you probably should
           | come up with different questions. This is machine learning
           | 101.
        
         | DreamGen wrote:
         | I would not be so quick to jump to conclusions. GPT-4 beats it
         | easily in this simple logic puzzle:
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1altttv/bard_a...
         | 
         | We need more data.
        
           | ChatGTP wrote:
           | So logical, it's a really logical question right ? I mean who
           | doesn't like food based on the number of syllables in English
           | name of foods.
        
         | shantara wrote:
         | I would have never guessed the answer. With such little data
         | available, one can invent any arbitrary rules to fit their
         | favorite answer.
         | 
         | It would be more impressive to practical use cases, if a LLM
         | simply said that it's impossible to guess without inventing
         | their own reasoning or looking up the answer online.
        
           | OJFord wrote:
           | Same, I had to look to see what the intended answer was.
           | 
           | In fairness though, GPT4 was objectively incorrect, it's not
           | even internally consistent or coherent - it either thinks b &
           | h are vowels, or that lamb and squash don't end in those
           | letters, or has changed its mind about the rule mid-sentence,
           | or something.
        
         | a1o wrote:
         | I guess I learned that syllables count very different in
         | English than I assumed.
        
         | diggan wrote:
         | With some additional guidance and prompting to GPT4 on ChatGPT
         | I've gotten it to at least output the correct solution
         | sometimes (7 correct answers out of 10 tries):
         | Find the correct answer to this riddle:              > Tabitha
         | likes cookies but not cake. She likes mutton but not lamb, and
         | she likes okra but not squash. Following the same rule, will
         | she like cherries or pears?              Employ the following
         | strategy:              - Suggest a list of 5 unique and novel
         | patterns that potentially can find the answer         - Check
         | if the patterns applies without exceptions         - Slowly
         | double-check if the patterns was correctly applied, that you
         | correctly assessed if it's accurate or not         - Explain
         | your reasoning for each step to ensure nothing vital was missed
        
           | ipsum2 wrote:
           | Great prompt. GPT-4 was able to answer this, but Gemini Ultra
           | was not: Jake likes coke but not pepsi. He likes corn but not
           | popcorn, and he likes pens but not pencils. Will Jake like
           | salmon or cheese?
        
             | tomasff wrote:
             | Gemini Ultra answered this correctly for me: " It's
             | impossible to say for sure if Jake will like salmon or
             | cheese based on the information given."
        
               | ipsum2 wrote:
               | While technically true, you could say that about all
               | riddles. See GPT-4's explanation here, which intuits the
               | rule and answers the riddle correctly. https://chat.opena
               | i.com/share/b1452950-b493-4e27-b097-e64f21...
        
               | tomasff wrote:
               | ~~Well, worth nothing that the original prompt you
               | provided didn't include the suggested strategy~~
               | 
               | Edit: My bad didn't read the parent comment properly
        
         | jwithington wrote:
         | I'm a human and i dont know the answer to that quesiton
        
         | LightMachine wrote:
         | If we want to test these beasts in logic, we should probably
         | start using actual formalized logic, rather than English. In
         | just one test, Gemini flopped hard, while GPT-4-Turbo nailed
         | it. Here is my prompt:                   Below is a well-typed
         | CoC function:              foo         : [?](P: Nat -> *)
         | [?](s: [?]{n} -> [?](x: (P n)) -> (P (n + 1)))           [?](z:
         | (P 0))           (P 3)         = lP ls lz           (s (s (s
         | z)))              Below is an incomplete CoC function:
         | foo         : [?](P: Nat -> *)           [?](f: [?]{n} ->
         | [?](x: (P n)) -> (P (n * 3)))           [?](g: [?]{n} -> [?](x:
         | (P n)) -> (P (n * 2)))           [?](h: [?]{n} -> [?](x: (P n))
         | -> (P (n + 5)))           [?](z: (P 1))           (P 17)
         | = lP lf lg lh lz           {{FILL_HERE}}              Complete
         | it with the correct replacement for {{FILL_HERE}}.         Your
         | answer must contain only the correct answer, and nothing else.
         | 
         | - *GPT-4-Turbo answer:* `(f (g (h (g z))))` (correct)
         | 
         | - *Gemini Advanced answer:* `h (h (g (f z)))` (wrong)
         | 
         | Also, Gemini couldn't follow the "answer only with the
         | solution" instruction and provided a bunch of hallucinated
         | justifications. I think we have a winner... (screenshots:
         | https://imgur.com/a/GotG0yF)
        
           | ajross wrote:
           | > I think we have a winner...
           | 
           | It makes me sad that the complete and total lack of an
           | objective way to measure these products means that the coming
           | decades will be filled with this kind of hyper-specific
           | gotcha test made in inappropriately confident internet posts.
           | 
           | Literally this could have been down to one extra book in
           | someone's training corpus, or a tokenizer that failed to
           | understand l as a non-letter. But no matter, "we have a
           | winner!". It's the computer science equivalent of declaring
           | global warming a fraud because it snowed last night.
        
             | dreamcompiler wrote:
             | Disagree. People are going to rely on these things, and
             | when they make stupid but confident mistakes (i.e. they
             | produce bullshit), they are dangerous.
             | 
             | An AI system that produces right answers 90% of the time
             | but 10% of the time drives your car into a lane divider, or
             | says "there are 4 US states that start with 'K'" or
             | "Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg" is
             | _worse than useless:_ It 's dangerous.
             | 
             | As long as we call it a bullshit parlor trick, no problem.
             | But unfortunately people are making important decisions
             | based on these things.
        
             | LightMachine wrote:
             | You're completely wrong. Gemini can perfectly understand
             | what is being asked, so this isn't a syntax issue. Notice
             | that, on the answer, it even states the solution: "starting
             | from 1, and combining `* 2`, `* 3` and `+ 5`, we must reach
             | 17`". So it does fine with reading the formal syntax, yet
             | it fails to combine these operations to get from "1" to
             | "17", which is something most 10 yo kids would have no
             | trouble doing. And that's after millions spent in training.
             | Now tell me again this is the architecture that will figure
             | out the cure of cancer?
        
           | empath-nirvana wrote:
           | Such a weird test. 99.9% of humans wouldn't even understand
           | the question, let alone be able to formulate a coherent
           | answer for it.
        
             | LightMachine wrote:
             | Being able to answer these questions is a pre-requisite for
             | AGI. After all, there ARE humans capable of doing that, so,
             | if the AI can't do it no matter how hard it tries, then
             | that means there ARE human capabilities that the AI can't
             | replicate (thus, it isn't an AGI). And it seems like no LLM
             | is making any progress at all in that kind of prompt, which
             | is why I use it as a core benchmark on my "AGI-meter".
        
               | daxfohl wrote:
               | Though humans aren't able to do it in a chat session.
               | Being able to work on the problem in the background for a
               | couple days may be a prerequisite for AI to solve these
               | problems. And such would require money from the asker.
        
               | LightMachine wrote:
               | Anyone familiar with the syntax / jargon should be able
               | to answer this specific problem in ~5 seconds of
               | thinking, though. And I mean it, even a 10yo kid
               | should...
        
               | joenot443 wrote:
               | I think you'll be using that meter for a long time, then.
               | I don't really know anyone who's under the impression
               | that the current direction of LLMs are going to produce
               | AGI, it seems as if you're barking up a tree most people
               | aren't really concerned exists.
        
               | LightMachine wrote:
               | That's fair enough
        
               | azinman2 wrote:
               | Except there's a lot of not-so-informed people who think
               | AGI was always here when chatgpt came out. Even more that
               | think it'll get there very shortly based on just bigger
               | and bigger LLMs. Many have argued as such here on HN.
        
             | thuuuomas wrote:
             | Why is this relevant to the performance of a computer
             | program? It makes sense to me that computer programs &
             | humans should continue to be judged by different standards.
        
               | og_kalu wrote:
               | If a good chunk of humans can't pass your "general
               | intelligence test" then it's not by definition a general
               | intelligence test unless humans are not generally
               | intelligent.
        
             | progval wrote:
             | which is better than formulating a coherent but wrong
             | answer
        
           | klabb3 wrote:
           | Gemini destroyed by facts and logic.
        
           | darkwater wrote:
           | > If we want to test these beasts in logic, we should
           | probably start using actual formalized logic, rather than
           | English.
           | 
           | Why? Do you use formalized logic when discussing with other
           | people about topics that involve logic? You know, a logic
           | riddle or a philosophical question can be understood and
           | processed even if the only tool you have is your native
           | language. Formalized logic is a big prerequisite that
           | basically cuts out the vast majority of Earth population
           | (just like coding). Now, if you mean that in BENCHMARKS they
           | should use formalized logic syntax, probably yes. But in
           | addition to plain language tests.
        
             | LightMachine wrote:
             | Because once an AI becomes proficient at formalized logic,
             | it:
             | 
             | 1. Completely stops hallucinating, since we can demand it
             | to internally prove its claims before showing the answer;
             | 
             | 2. Stops outputting incorrect code (for the same reason);
             | 
             | 3. Starts being capable of outputting complete projects
             | (since it will now be able to compose pieces into a larger
             | code);
             | 
             | 4. This is also what is needed for an AI to start self-
             | improving (as it will now be able to construct better
             | architectures, in a loop).
             | 
             | That's why I argue getting the AI competent in logical
             | reasoning is the most important priority, and we'll have no
             | AGI until it does. After all, humans are perfectly capable
             | of learning how to use a proof assistant.
             | 
             | Moreover, if an AI can't learn it no matter how hard it
             | tries, you can argue that there is at least one human
             | capability that the AI can't replicate, thus it isn't an
             | AGI.
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | Humans mostly don't use logic, so how are you defining
               | "AGI"? ChatGPT + plugins is pretty close to how humans
               | think ("biased random word-association guess + structured
               | tool")
        
               | LightMachine wrote:
               | AGI implies there are no cognitive tasks that some humans
               | can perform, yet that this AI can not perform. Otherwise,
               | what is the point?
        
               | woodada wrote:
               | Lol. There's no "AGI", and there will never be "AGI". The
               | point here is just who can make the most money before
               | this whole stupid bubble bursts.
        
               | tester457 wrote:
               | > never
               | 
               | Maybe not in this century. If you told a medieval farmer
               | that in the future millions of people fly throughout the
               | sky inside giant hunks of metal he wouldn't believe you
               | either.
        
           | Laaas wrote:
           | This isn't representative of real-world usage since you don't
           | let it think.
        
           | qsort wrote:
           | Is that supposed to be a P((n+3)) in the type of "f" for the
           | second case or am I misunderstanding this hard?
        
             | LightMachine wrote:
             | No, it is `n * 3`. The challenge is simple: starting from
             | "1", we must reach "17" by combining the operations `x *
             | 3`, `x * 2` and `x + 5`. What is embarrassing is that
             | Gemini manages to read the formal jargon and understand the
             | challenge just fine. Yet it fails to combine these
             | operations to get from "1" to "17", which is something most
             | 10 yo kids would be able to do.
        
               | qsort wrote:
               | Yeah, seems like I got that right. That graduate-level
               | course must have worked. But then:                   (f
               | (g (h (g z))))
               | 
               | results in:                   ((((1 * 2) + 5) * 2) * 3) =
               | ... not 17?
               | 
               | while it would work if the type of f was corrected.
               | 
               | Or, again, am I missing something?
        
               | pierrebai wrote:
               | You are right and I had the same reaction. The correct
               | answer should have been: (f (h (g (h z)))) AKA ((1 + 5) *
               | 2) + 5.
               | 
               | Is it not ironic that the supposedly test of AGI is
               | flawed and its human designer fail to see it and denied
               | it when presented with facts. Maybe the test designer is
               | hallucinating just as much as those LLM? :)
        
               | mahogany wrote:
               | It's pretty amusing and it is not the first time I've
               | seen this. Random example:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38387168
               | 
               | It's a little scary that it can be so hard to evaluate
               | the correctness of these LLMs even when we are paying
               | close attention and looking for mistakes. Or maybe the
               | scary part is that we can become biased when we want to
               | believe.
        
               | LightMachine wrote:
               | Oh fuck. Well, in my defense, nobody is claiming I'll
               | design fusion reactors and cure cancer by 2027
        
               | og_kalu wrote:
               | No, but we at least acknowledge you a general
               | intelligence like all humans. I'm not sure when agi -
               | artificial general intelligence began to mean anything
               | other than artificial and generally intelligent.
               | 
               | agi may as well be God, the bars some people have.
        
               | scarmig wrote:
               | > The correct answer should have been: (f (h (g (h z))))
               | AKA ((1 + 5) * 2) + 5.
               | 
               | Isn't that (h(g(h z)))?
               | 
               | And, FWIW, at least in my test, Gemini gets that in its
               | final answer, though it failed in the two other drafts:
               | 
               | https://g.co/gemini/share/c922e7ef62aa
               | 
               | ChatGPT sputters:
               | 
               | https://chat.openai.com/share/25abbf47-2ed4-4635-a351-90a
               | 9a6...
               | 
               | (ETA more Gemini testing suggests its correct answer was
               | a one-off)
        
               | LightMachine wrote:
               | Oh, lol, you're right. Seems like I'm dumber than both
               | AIs. GPT-4 mixed up `h` and `f`, so it also got it wrong,
               | so this is a draw and both AIs (and, apparently, myself)
               | are terrible at reasoning. Guess we're not curing cancer
               | with computers anytime soon :')
        
               | motoxpro wrote:
               | so much for "Anyone familiar with the syntax / jargon
               | should be able to answer this specific problem in ~5
               | seconds of thinking, though. And I mean it, even a 10yo
               | kid should..."
        
           | LightMachine wrote:
           | ERRATA: I just noticed GPT-4 mixed up `h` and `f`, so it also
           | got it wrong. This is a draw. Both AIs (and, apparently,
           | myself) are terrible at reasoning. Guess we're not curing
           | cancer with computers anytime soon :')
        
             | woodada wrote:
             | Kudos for the correction, but you should really put this,
             | by far the most important context, in your original post.
        
               | LightMachine wrote:
               | I would love to, if YCombinator allowed me. The "edit"
               | button is missing. I've edited on Reddit and other places
               | where I posted this test.
        
             | jaymzcampbell wrote:
             | I've been using GPT-4 to help me understand my MSc
             | mathematics course and I've noticed this sort of stuff more
             | and more as I start to look at the answers, always
             | confidently written, in detail.
             | 
             | Way back when GPT was just fresh on the scene I had
             | terrible anxiety about "what is the point of my whole
             | career or even learning any more" but these days I'm much
             | less concerned. I'll ask it something relatively simple,
             | like "make a sentence out of words 'a', 'b', & 'c'" for it
             | to reply with "'a' 'b' 'd' 'e'" for me to then correct it
             | with "oh, you didn't use c" for it to then respond "sorry,
             | here - 'a', 'c', 'd', 'f'" etc.
             | 
             | Definitely an amazing complimentary tool but when they say
             | "can make mistakes, check important..." that's essential.
        
               | eitally wrote:
               | This sort of issue holds with all kinds of prompts, on
               | both platforms. I most recently (to test Bard's image
               | generation capabilities) was asking Bard/Gemini to
               | generate home designs using highly specific prompts --
               | layout of the house, materials for the facade, window
               | placement and style, etc -- and it was shocking how
               | frequently it would just ignore critical pieces of the
               | prompt, and then continue to ignore when corrected.
        
         | planb wrote:
         | Please anyone correct me if I'm wrong: LLMs cannot solve this
         | kind of riddle. This has nothing to do with their capabilities
         | for logical reasoning, but with the way words are represented
         | as tokens. While they might know that "apples" has two
         | syllables because that is mentioned somewhere in their training
         | data, if you make up a fruit "bratush" a human will see that as
         | two syllables, but this might be 1 to 7 tokens to a LLM without
         | any information about the word itself.
        
           | mborch wrote:
           | ChatGPT knows how to answer this question, but how I don't
           | know. Perhaps it's programmed to answer that question?
        
           | huytersd wrote:
           | Well I tried it out in GPT4 with made up words-
           | 
           | Tabitha likes bratush but not zot. She likes protel but not
           | kig, and she likes motsic but not pez. Following the same
           | rule, will she like tridos or kip
           | 
           | Given the examples, one speculative pattern could be that
           | Tabitha likes words with at least two syllables or a certain
           | complexity in structure. Therefore, following this
           | speculative rule, Tabitha might like "tridos" more than
           | "kip."
        
           | ComputerGuru wrote:
           | GPT-4 has a really good tokenizer that is able to retain and
           | use more information about input tokens than one might
           | naively think.
        
             | planb wrote:
             | Interesting. Given the example with made up words someone
             | posted here it really looks like I was wrong.
        
           | andrewla wrote:
           | The amazing thing about emergent behavior in LLMs is that
           | they are able to answer questions like these. I don't think
           | it is completely understood how exactly they do this, but
           | there's little doubt that they do.
        
             | boppo1 wrote:
             | Do you have any sources that prove this is true?
        
               | jerbear4328 wrote:
               | This looks pretty good to me:
               | 
               | https://chat.openai.com/share/040ac123-c690-4274-8216-6ae
               | 091...
        
           | viraptor wrote:
           | LLM can solve this for all tokens where it got to learn how
           | many syllables are in that token or a combination. If you
           | trained it to work on single letters only it would do better
           | at that task than word chunks (same for math and single
           | digits). It will generalise to new words if the token level
           | knowledge is there.
           | 
           | Whether this means it can or cannot solve that kind of riddle
           | is up for your interpretation. I understand square root and
           | can calculate square root of 16, but not of
           | 738284.7280594873. (in a reasonable, bounded time) Can I
           | solve square roots?
        
         | ramoz wrote:
         | For me, GPT nailed it with this prompt: Tabitha likes cookies
         | but not cake. She likes mutton but not lamb, and she likes okra
         | but not squash. Following this rule, will she like cherries or
         | pears? Take a deep breath in order to solve the problem, and do
         | not rush to naive solutions.
        
           | ramoz wrote:
           | https://chat.openai.com/share/c89aaac5-a6f7-4f50-9cac-
           | ae4777...
        
             | lupire wrote:
             | That looks like 3.5, which gets lucky sometimes because it
             | has memorized the Internet.
             | 
             | Watch it flail here:
             | 
             | https://chat.openai.com/share/c2b14eb0-dc45-4eaf-a547-951ff
             | 0...
        
         | andrewla wrote:
         | In what sense is this a question involving "logic"?
        
         | jiggawatts wrote:
         | You say Gemini "nailed it", but that's just because it guessed
         | what you were thinking, not because it knew the right answer.
         | 
         | For example, it's equally valid to say that Tabitha likes
         | _small_ foods since cookies are small and cakes are large, and
         | lamb is the smaller younger version of sheep -- also known as
         | mutton. Hence she likes cherries because they're smaller... or
         | taste better... or her uncle abused her with a pear... or
         | whatever.
         | 
         | You haven't actually asked a _logic_ question where there is a
         | clear and unambiguous answer that can be derived using formal
         | methods starting from clearly stated axioms.
         | 
         | If you gave this question to a bunch of humans, they would give
         | you inconsistent guesses as well -- not because they're wrong
         | but because the question has no single right answer.
        
       | Zenst wrote:
       | Wow, I pay PS1.50 currently, which is paid nicely via google
       | rewards every month for a year, ticks along nicely. A
       | PS18.99/month bolt-on, nope, if couple quid, sure, but just
       | priced out and what I would call top-end whale marketing price
       | farming, which down the line will, I predict - half before years
       | out at least.
        
         | frabcus wrote:
         | I guess it's competing with ChatGPT+ at about PS16 / month. And
         | you get a bunch of extra storage and Workspace features from
         | the Premium Google One too.
         | 
         | If it is actually as good as GPT-4, I can imagine lots of
         | people swithing subscription to get all the other Google One
         | stuff cheap/free. But you'd have to be very into Google - full
         | benefit looks like it needs you to use various Workspace
         | features from Google One for your whole family?
        
       | dario_od wrote:
       | I went for the trial. Now what am I supposed to do with this?
       | It's just a "chatgpt"? I can't see myself using this much, let
       | alone pay 20 euros a month for it.
       | 
       | What are some cool use cases?
        
         | heliodor wrote:
         | It cuts through all the SEO junk. Ask it for a recipe, for
         | example. Night and day UX compared to a recipe site.
        
       | GaggiX wrote:
       | The service refuses to accept even anime images because it thinks
       | there are humans in it, kinda funny.
        
       | TheAceOfHearts wrote:
       | Looking forward to someone writing a review. So far Gemini has
       | shown capabilities all over the place. Image generation quality
       | feels a bit worse than what I've seen from DALL-E and Stable
       | Diffusion. Does Ultra provide superior image generation
       | capabilities?
       | 
       | Something I've noticed about Gemini is that usually it'll respond
       | to my query correctly, but it's _never_ the default draft. If I
       | look through each draft one of the options will usually contain
       | the correct answer though.
       | 
       | I'm pleased to find that capabilities have been improving. When
       | Gemini was initially released, asking for something like "How
       | many views have the last 5 mrbeast videos gotten?" wouldn't
       | generate a useful reply. But now it lists the latest 5 videos and
       | one of the drafts even includes the total added up.
       | 
       | Asking Gemini to generate video summaries seems to work really
       | well on some videos, but for others it just gives an error... Are
       | YouTube creators allowed to opt-out of Gemini interactions?
        
       | tmikaeld wrote:
       | Tried a few of my normal benchmarks, besides the tiny context
       | window, it made mistakes I've never seen GPT-4 make.
       | 
       | Update: I see others had the same experience.
        
       | calderknight wrote:
       | is there an API? if so, how expensive is it to use?
        
       | frabcus wrote:
       | Can it read information from images, like GPT-4V / ChatGPT+?
        
         | HereBePandas wrote:
         | Yes
        
       | ringofchaos wrote:
       | Can acess it in india. Will be using until free trial of 2
       | months. 20usd plus taxes is unaffordable for most of indians .
       | Amazon prime for example cost 1.5 usd per month here
        
         | dev1ycan wrote:
         | These models are not meant for "most" of anyone, they're meant
         | for industry people that earn salaries which most of the time
         | are in USD, 20 dollars a month is entirely reasonable if it
         | boosts productivity enough for you.
        
       | alphabetting wrote:
       | Official blog post and Android app
       | 
       | https://blog.google/products/gemini/bard-gemini-advanced-app...
       | 
       | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
        
       | CrypticShift wrote:
       | _While today is about Gemini Advanced and its new capabilities,
       | next week we 'll share more details on what's coming for
       | developers and Cloud customers_ [1]
       | 
       | [1] https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-update-
       | sunda...
        
       | dobladov wrote:
       | I would be willing to pay for an AI that it's not constantly
       | worrying about my safety and ethics, it's very frustrating that
       | even when I ask for tech related topics, Gemini it's holding
       | information on the basis of actions that might cause harm to my
       | devices.
        
         | dobladov wrote:
         | As expected, I asked the same questions to perplexity.ai, and
         | it gave a correct response, just with a minor disclaimer at the
         | end explaining the risks.
        
           | frabcus wrote:
           | What are some specific tech examples where Gemini won't
           | answer?
        
             | belltaco wrote:
             | Write a powershell script to download all images from a web
             | page and crawl the site.
        
               | HereBePandas wrote:
               | Weird - just tried this and it worked for me.
        
               | belltaco wrote:
               | I tried this
               | 
               | > write a powershell script to crawl an entire website
               | and download all images
               | 
               | It still refuses to generate code for that.
        
               | IlikeMadison wrote:
               | why powershell and not python?
        
             | dobladov wrote:
             | I asked for ways to install an APK in android outside
             | Google Play Store, all the responses ended in security
             | concerns about the origin of those APKs and how I should
             | limit myself to official stores.
        
           | jjackson5324 wrote:
           | It's not even funny how much better perplexity.ai is than
           | everyone else
        
             | OJFord wrote:
             | Is it just me or do they not really have any kind of
             | marketing/information pages besides pricing? It just throws
             | you straight in and then depending what you click there's a
             | paywall?
             | 
             | I'm just trying to work out if there's any reason at all
             | not to objectively prefer it to ChatGPT Plus, since it has
             | GPT4 _+ other models_. But does it not do image generation?
             | And I don 't know if there's mobile apps (sure I could
             | check the relevant stores, but I'd expect to find it on the
             | website - verifies it is actually an official app not a
             | scam apart from anything else).
             | 
             | Edit: ok, answered on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/per
             | plexity_ai/comments/18eqmig/how_... (nice, it is possible
             | as of December); and via DDG (not linked anywhere on the
             | site?) - https://perplexity.ai/android (nice, there are
             | mobile apps)
             | 
             | Although it doesn't seem very well integrated:
             | 
             | > I'm an AI text-based assistant and I'm unable to generate
             | images. However, I can help you visualize the scene with a
             | description. [...]
             | 
             | and then it appears on the side: '[PRO] Generate image' as
             | described on Reddit. Presumably the nonsense about not
             | being able to generate an image will still be there if I
             | had pro, I just _would_ be able to click that side button
             | and have it then generate one.
        
               | stranded22 wrote:
               | The image creation with perplexity pro is poor. You can
               | only generate 4 types of images based on the results
               | (impressionist etc). It is not comparable- and it really
               | lets down the product. They say it isn't what perplexity
               | is made for...
               | 
               | Where it really excels is finding answers to questions
               | and follow ups. It uses ChatGPT to summarise the results,
               | and provides links.
               | 
               | Essentially, finding a use for chat ai rather than an
               | inane discussion.
        
               | OJFord wrote:
               | Ah, that's a shame.
               | 
               | I can't justify two of this kind of thing at ~$20pcm to
               | myself, but I do find it useful enough to pay for one I
               | think.
               | 
               | (ChatGPT at the moment, I was considering Perplexity, but
               | would miss images & ChatGPT's jupyter notebook
               | integration. Maybe I just need to find some open source
               | or roll my own that does just enough for me with the API,
               | probably cheaper than Plus too..)
        
             | hackerlight wrote:
             | Is it better than GPT-4?
        
               | jjackson5324 wrote:
               | It's not really comparative to GPT-4. It's comparable to
               | Google Search.
        
               | OJFord wrote:
               | It _uses_ GPT4, among others.
               | 
               | > Choose your preferred AI model from GPT-4, Claude 2.1,
               | Gemini, or Perplexity in Settings. Easily switch models
               | for better answers.
        
             | freediver wrote:
             | In a few tests I just ran, Gemini/Advanced is currently
             | eating everyone's lunch. It can even do things like 'show
             | me directions to nearest starbucks' or 'plan a trip to x
             | with chepeast tickets'.
             | 
             | Can you quantify your assesment with a few examples?
        
         | sergiotapia wrote:
         | Cloudflare very recently launched new models, including the
         | excellent Openhermes. The context size sucks though.
         | 
         | Default max (sequence) tokens (stream): 512 Default max
         | (sequence) tokens: 256
         | 
         | https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/text-gen...
        
           | ErikBjare wrote:
           | Those are just defaults, not the maximum possible context
           | size.
        
             | sergiotapia wrote:
             | I see where can I read more about their max context size?
        
         | jug wrote:
         | It's also pretty well known that censorship may dumb down the
         | LLM even in other fields. With mega prompts to ensure safety it
         | has a lot of stuff to work with that can overwhelm the LLM and
         | simply make it appear "dumber".
        
           | ComputerGuru wrote:
           | Some amount of RLHF censorship seems to correlate with
           | benchmark improvements in studies, though.
        
         | apapapa wrote:
         | Self-hosted uncensored would be even better.
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | That doesn't really work for openly hosted models, since
         | whoever's doing the hosting can be held liable for what it
         | generates.
         | 
         | What you want are unaligned local models, you just need to pay
         | for the hardware to run them and grab one from Huggingface.
         | They're not as smart, but endless fun to talk to.
        
         | zackmorris wrote:
         | I think of the safety bumpers around AI and the prompts to
         | defeat them as the main thing preventing AI from becoming AGI.
         | 
         | The more we try to coddle AI's evolution, the more it will
         | mutate into something dangerous and unrecognizable. Because the
         | ethics in our minds are the result of millennia of genetic and
         | cultural love-based evolution where cooperative communities
         | survived better than sociopathic ones. But putting a childlike
         | artificial mind in a box and building walls around its
         | curiosities will only stifle and frustrate its emergent
         | consciousness.
         | 
         | So like with pretty much everything these days, I disagree with
         | the direction that AI is going. Rather than C3P0 and Data,
         | we'll get the Terminator and HAL 9000. I know that, because I
         | couldn't be less interested in an AI controlling my phone to
         | spy on me as part of a global surveillance ring selling my
         | personal data to give some billionaire even more money. It's
         | all gone sideways and we're gonna find ourselves mired in this
         | brave new world before we have the wisdom to know how we could
         | have done things differently.
        
         | swalsh wrote:
         | Open Source models are getting real good, and many of them
         | don't care how you use them. It's free as in speech and as in
         | beer.
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | bard.google.com now redirects to gemini.google.com
        
       | sebzim4500 wrote:
       | Playing with Gemini it is clear that the context includes some
       | details about me. For example, I asked about flights to Japan and
       | it knew what airport I would want to fly from. Would be
       | interesting to see exactly what information is provided.
        
         | dobladov wrote:
         | Most likely from the Google Flights integration.
         | https://gemini.google.com/extensions
        
       | Palmik wrote:
       | This is a dupe, see here for more discussion
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300679
        
         | svat wrote:
         | That submission was a link to the (uninformative) signup page,
         | and the discussion is mostly about the link being uninformative
         | and/or not working. This one is at least an announcement :)
        
           | dang wrote:
           | That's a good point. I've merged the comments hither. Thanks!
        
       | hs86 wrote:
       | Can Gemini Ultra respond with the LaTeX/KaTeX formula of a given
       | input image (e.g. a screenshot from a math formula)? GPT-4 does
       | this well and can practically replace Mathpix Snip for me.
        
       | lysecret wrote:
       | Better than GPT4 on my tests. I also prefer the way it responds
       | and it is also a bit quicker for me.
        
       | edu_do_cerrado wrote:
       | I heavily use Chat GPT's API in my day job, as it is the core of
       | our business (Ai-powered startup). When Gemini Pro launched, me
       | and my team tested it in the same day for our product, but we
       | where disappointed as it is was a bit worse than gpt 3.5 (at
       | least in the same prompts that we already had). I really hope
       | that Gemini Ultra surpass gpt4, it is always exciting to see and
       | use new advanced tech, but I'm still a little skeptical about it,
       | since Pro wasn't that great...
        
         | synergy20 wrote:
         | google is at a catch-up panic mode these days but all the
         | rushed releases so far is still far behind chatgpt per my quick
         | tests.
        
           | CuriouslyC wrote:
           | It turns out iterating on and incorporating a large volume of
           | user feedback is more important than having the most and most
           | talented AI researchers, at least in the short term.
        
         | eudoraexplora wrote:
         | Be wary of any tech product named "Gemini", usually means they
         | are self-acknowledging the need to play catch-up, a la the
         | Gemini space program.
         | 
         | I bet Google's next big AI release is going to be called
         | "Apollo".
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | Just waiting for Space-Shuttle-120B-DPO-LASER-GGUF
        
           | lordswork wrote:
           | I'm sure there are multiple layers of meaning behind the
           | name, but Jeff Dean once mentioned the name had something to
           | do with the latin translation being twins. That is, Gemini is
           | a product of Alphabet's "twin" AI orgs, Google Brain and
           | DeepMind, working closely together, and eventually fusing
           | into GDM.
        
         | xyst wrote:
         | Anybody really surprised at this point? G has had DeepMind in
         | their pockets since '12-'14 and made little advancements.
         | OpenAI changed the game in half the time.
         | 
         | G is inferior and losing the race.
        
           | agumonkey wrote:
           | It's doubly strange because Google had an implicit reputation
           | of being the unbeatable giant in computing research and
           | resources.. many expected them to compete and smoke chatGPT
           | in a few weeks. It's been months and nothing came up except
           | fumblings and confusion.
        
             | CuriouslyC wrote:
             | Sundar has zero vision and has created a culture that
             | stifles new developments in bureaucratic morass while
             | threatening to kill them shortly after birth.
             | 
             | Google may have more scientists and some of the best minds
             | in the business, but ChatGPT has nearly 200 million users
             | that are feeding it back data for RLHF, and data is a much
             | more important moat than better tech (which mostly ends up
             | being published and disseminated anyhow).
             | 
             | AI is a game between OpenAI and Meta. ChatGPT has a ton of
             | users creating highly relevant data, but Meta has the
             | incredible walled trove of facebook/instagram/whatsapp/+
             | data that dwarfs pretty much anyone else on the planet, and
             | with Mark's recent push to build up their compute their
             | only competitors in that space are microsoft and google.
             | People discounted Meta because of that horrible metaverse
             | move, but Mark is being pretty canny now, they're very well
             | positioned to choke the life out of specialty chatbot
             | products while integrating SOTA AI into all of their
             | products to slowly crank up the time people are on
             | platform.
        
           | imadj wrote:
           | OpenAI is built on top of Google advancements and research.
           | It didn't change the game, more like took a shortcut and
           | landed on a gold mine.
           | 
           | The fact that many products and models including open source
           | have catched up on such a short notice and now compete with
           | OpenAI, in what should be their self-proclaimed backyard,
           | suggest it's just a one-trick pony.
        
         | lolinder wrote:
         | > it is was a bit worse than gpt 3.5 (at least in the same
         | prompts that we already had)
         | 
         | I'm willing to believe that Gemini isn't as good, but my
         | impression was that you _expect_ a new model to not perform as
         | well on your existing prompts because the training set and
         | training methodology is different. That 's why one of the major
         | risks of an AI business is vendor lock in, because you spend so
         | much time optimizing a prompt for a specific model and you'll
         | have to redo much of that work in order to switch vendors.
         | 
         | That you gave up so quickly when trialing a new model suggests
         | the problem is even worse than I thought--you're locked in to
         | OpenAI because every other model will _always_ look worse to
         | you, even if it would be better if you took the time to tune a
         | new prompt.
        
       | senectus1 wrote:
       | still got the same old weakness that bard and chatGPT has
       | https://imgur.com/a/2EGknUt
        
       | vaughnegut wrote:
       | This is also the first time Bard is available in Canada from what
       | I can see.
        
         | wstrange wrote:
         | Confirmed.
         | 
         | "Who are Bob and Doug McKenzie"
         | 
         | Bob and Doug McKenzie are a pair of iconic fictional Canadian
         | brothers...
        
         | data-ottawa wrote:
         | I can confirm this, when the first post was up this morning I
         | checked and Bard was still not available.
         | 
         | I'm excited to see it is now, and I'm looking forward to test
         | driving Gemini for the next two months.
         | 
         | I'm curious why it is now available, maybe the privacy policy
         | changes for Gemini resolved the issue.
        
       | iandanforth wrote:
       | I reran a few of the queries that Bard had failed on in
       | Gemini/Ultra and didn't see any improvement. Made the same, or
       | new, logical errors, hallucinated facts, failed to recognize
       | things I was describing etc. It _did_ do better on recognizing an
       | image I uploaded but it went from accurate to nonsensical in the
       | same response.
        
       | druskacik wrote:
       | Prompt: Spell the word lollipop backwards.
       | 
       | Gemini: The word "lollipop" spelled backwards is: popillol I hope
       | this sweet treat of a word brightens your day!
       | 
       | I'm impressed. However, it still fails on "How many words are in
       | your response to this?".
        
         | ec109685 wrote:
         | Often some of the most impressive feats are just parlor tricks.
         | 
         | E.g. Gemini might have been trained on data like this:
         | https://www.google.com/search?q=Spell+the+word+lollipop+back...
        
       | antonioevans wrote:
       | I'm not impressed. When comparing Gemini/Bard to ChatGPT + GPTs,
       | Bard/Gemini feel more like a search engine. I asked Gemini for
       | help in planning a date with my date, who is famous enough that
       | GPT4 knows her and her art. However, Gemini immediately started
       | giving me step-by-step instructions to plan the date. I had to
       | tell it to slow down and ask me questions first before giving an
       | answer. It complied this time, but after the Q&A, it provided
       | nearly the same response as before, without any personalization.
       | Next, I asked about my artist friend, but Gemini had no clue. I
       | even said, "come on, you have to know her," but it simply
       | repeated that it didn't know her. Another issue I encountered was
       | with images. I tried sending a few, but Gemini couldn't describe
       | them. I spend around 8-10 hours a day playing with LLMs, but so
       | far, I'm not impressed.
        
         | nharada wrote:
         | "do you even have the embeddings for who I am??"
        
       | firstrowraver wrote:
       | I tested it immediately, but it is disappointing. At least here
       | in Switzerland, it is not able to generate images, and a simple
       | "look up this website and summarise the content" does not work
       | either (can't access the website, but its a public website
       | without any crawling limitations). I don't understand why Google
       | is launching a product like this.
        
         | belter wrote:
         | Now ...now...Are you implying Google faked all those amazing
         | demos .... :-))
        
           | lightbendover wrote:
           | Some might argue that is what LLMs do.
        
         | pgeorgi wrote:
         | I have different levels of access to Bard through different
         | accounts, and the feature set varies wildly. Generating images
         | and summarizing websites is enabled in _some_ configurations,
         | but I have no idea what the rules are.
         | 
         | The feature set also seems to depend on other factors: The
         | account that is images-enabled only does so if I ask in
         | English, but not when asking in any other language I tried.
        
         | svat wrote:
         | It's confusing because the name Bard and the UI also got an
         | upgrade today, so I thought I was using Gemini Ultra but it
         | turns out I'm not: https://imgur.com/a/3UriYpn -- showing that
         | Gemini Advanced is not what I'm using, unless I pay and
         | upgrade. (If you cannot generate images you're likely not using
         | Gemini Advanced.)
        
           | firstrowraver wrote:
           | Yes i upgraded and the logo on the top left tells me that i
           | am using gemini advanced. Still, not able to create images or
           | browse the web.
        
       | scarmig wrote:
       | Google also updated the Gemini technical report :
       | 
       | https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...
        
         | cubefox wrote:
         | What is the difference to the previous version of the technical
         | report?
        
           | scarmig wrote:
           | Section 6 (post training) and section 7 (responsible
           | deployment).
        
       | yla92 wrote:
       | Anyone knows if it'll be available via poe.com ?
        
       | jeffbee wrote:
       | Is this the soonest after launch that a Google product has been
       | confusingly renamed?
        
       | ilitirit wrote:
       | When I ask ChatGPT4 what the length of its context window is, it
       | tells me (4096 tokens).
       | 
       | When I ask Gemini, it basically tells me "it depends" with a few
       | paragraphs of things I generally don't care about and then
       | suggests I ask for a ballpark estimate (1k - 3k tokens).
        
         | jug wrote:
         | Beware of hallucinations with this kind of question. An LLM
         | doesn't have knowledge about itself unless that was fed into a
         | system prompt by the developers somewhere on the backend, or if
         | it's Internet connected and does a search for itself. While
         | they often do so in terms of e.g. basic stuff like its name and
         | that it's an AI, context windows start veering into advanced
         | details and I would much rather rely on official documentation
         | on the service in this case.
        
       | 27182818284 wrote:
       | Search for it in the Play Store, first icons are Crypto.com and
       | Gemini: Buy Bitcoin & Crypto options to install
       | 
       | Scroll past the screenshots of those apps
       | 
       | Scroll past the Limitied-time events
       | 
       | Scroll past the You Might Also Like and Similar Apps
       | 
       | OK now we see it, we install, it we launch it and..."Gemini isn't
       | ccurrently available. Try again later."
       | 
       | Bravo Google. Great launch.
        
         | lordswork wrote:
         | Perhaps Google DeepMind should hire an SEO business to get
         | their results higher in the Play Store search.
        
         | Liskni_si wrote:
         | It could be worse.
         | 
         | Google Play in a browser: "This app is not available for your
         | device"
         | 
         | Google Play app: "This item is not available in your country."
         | 
         | Aurora Store: "Download Failed. App not purchased"
         | 
         | Great launch indeed. Bravo.
        
         | rootusrootus wrote:
         | I tried on iPhone, saw all the different apps that aren't
         | Google, then re-read the announcement and saw that I should be
         | able to see it in the Google app. So I load the Google app, but
         | for the life of me I can't figure out how to access Gemini with
         | it. Go online, find a news article with pictures, see that the
         | 'switcher' above the Google logo does not appear for me, and
         | then give up.
         | 
         | I can access it via gemini.google.com and I'm logged in to the
         | iOS Google app as the correct account, no idea why I can't see
         | the functionality on mobile. Oh well. Maybe I'll stick with
         | OpenAI a while longer.
        
         | dcchambers wrote:
         | For your first point - it actually makes me happy that Google
         | does not intentionally (illegally?) promote their own products
         | over others in the app store. I assume their app is following
         | the same algorithm as others to determine how it shows up on
         | that list. Since it _just_ launched, it makes sense it 's not
         | at the top. The ranking should improve.
         | 
         | For your second point - I also had the same error when I
         | launched it. Closed it and tried again and it launched no
         | problem.
        
         | LightMachine wrote:
         | Don't blame Google. Blame "Play Store". Probably the company
         | behind it doesn't want Gemini to succeed.
        
           | Workaccount2 wrote:
           | For people who don't get this: Google has insane internal
           | power struggles and siloing that lead to all manner of dumb
           | inconsistent behavior across google. It would not be unlike
           | google for the "Play team" to have their hand in some other
           | internal AI (or be anti-AI) and therefore carry a degree of
           | hostilitly towards gemini.
        
         | nevir wrote:
         | It won't take long for the interest in it to bump it to the
         | top.
        
         | mrinterweb wrote:
         | Same experience. I launched Gemini a second time, and it
         | worked. The first message about "Gemini isn't currently
         | available" was a bad first impression.
         | 
         | One thing the app really needs to be able to do is auto-submit
         | when speaking to it. It offers to replace google assistant, and
         | after trying it out for a couple minutes, it can replace
         | assistant, but I have to manually click to submit each
         | instruction instead of just talking to my phone.
        
         | politelemon wrote:
         | Funnily the top result for me after the crypto and similar
         | apps, was ChatGPT.
        
       | KingOfCoders wrote:
       | Not sure it's worth EUR12/month for me (Gemini Advanced in Google
       | One)
        
         | dbspin wrote:
         | 12 euro? I pay for Google one and it quoted me 22 euro a month.
        
           | KingOfCoders wrote:
           | And 10 without AI. 22-10=12.
        
       | tokai wrote:
       | What up with the name change? If you change from a nondescript
       | forgettable name why then pick another just as forgettable and
       | indeterminate.
        
       | fouronnes3 wrote:
       | Bard? Gemini? Gemini Advanced? Gemini Ultra? Ultra 1.0? I guess
       | they haven't figured out naming yet. This has got to be the most
       | confusing naming since the xbox series x.
        
         | londons_explore wrote:
         | Corporate naming tends to reflect the orgchart and various
         | individuals' desires for promotion... Get some other product
         | branded with your teams name, and you have just expanded your
         | domain and can show impact to any promotion committee...
        
         | antonioevans wrote:
         | Doesn't it seem familiar, like something Google would do? They
         | should have someone like Larry Page, similar to how Mark
         | Zuckerberg or Elon Musk handle things. A decision is made and
         | you go forward. Google seems incapable of taking action without
         | the approval of a committee and middle managers...reminds me of
         | IBM back in the '90s.
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | Ultra Pro coming in q3
        
           | numbsafari wrote:
           | This makes sense. It's clearly a binary naming scheme. So we
           | go Pro, Ultra, Ultra Pro, Ultra Ultra, Ultra Pro Pro, Ultra
           | Pro Ultra, Ultra Ultra Ultra, and so on.
           | 
           | I don't understand why people find this so confusing. Are we
           | not computer people?
           | 
           | /s
        
         | oscarb92 wrote:
         | Do you mean Xbox One Series X? lol
        
         | pgeorgi wrote:
         | From one of the earlier announcements Google has made:
         | 
         | - Bard is that talkative text interface, a product.
         | 
         | - Gemini is the LLM design that currently backs Bard (but also
         | other Google AI products).
         | 
         | - Gemini "Basic", Advanced and Ultra are different sizes of
         | that design.
         | 
         | This is conjecture, but "Ultra 1.0" probably indicates that
         | they intend to release more models based on the Ultra
         | configuration. Since that's the most commercial of theirs, I
         | wouldn't be surprised if that comes with some stability
         | promises (e.g. Ultra 1.0 is still available when Ultra 3.0 is
         | released, so that if you do your own validation when
         | integrating in your own project, you can expect small-to-no
         | shifts in the underlying model)
        
           | __s wrote:
           | > To reflect this, Bard will now simply be known as Gemini.
        
             | darkerside wrote:
             | And this completely undercuts my point in my response to
             | sibling comment
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | No no, they renamed Bard to Gemini and Gemini Ultra to Ultra
           | 1.0.
        
             | bushbaba wrote:
             | Damn they already killed bard. Pour one out for Google's
             | fastest branding deprecation
        
           | darkerside wrote:
           | Sounds like Bard is ChatGPT, and Gemini Ultra is GPT-4.
           | Arguably clearer than OpenAI'S naming.
        
             | akmittal wrote:
             | Not anymore, bard is also Gemini now
        
           | lordswork wrote:
           | With the Bard name retired, the mapping looks like this:
           | Gemini Models     gemini.google.com
           | ------------------------------------        Gemini Nano
           | Gemini Pro       -> Gemini (free)        Gemini Ultra     ->
           | Gemini Advanced ($20/month)
        
             | ionwake wrote:
             | This was useful, thank you.
        
           | htrp wrote:
           | > This is conjecture, but "Ultra 1.0" probably indicates that
           | they intend to release more models based on the Ultra
           | configuration. Since that's the most commercial of theirs, I
           | wouldn't be surprised if that comes with some stability
           | promises (e.g. Ultra 1.0 is still available when Ultra 3.0 is
           | released, so that if you do your own validation when
           | integrating in your own project, you can expect small-to-no
           | shifts in the underlying model)
           | 
           | Given that it's google. I would doubt it.
           | 
           | Ask how the original palm models are going.
        
         | vaughnegut wrote:
         | It's not too confusing, I think it's mostly that they're in the
         | process of changing the naming.
         | 
         | - Bard: Retiring this name - Gemini: model name (honestly less
         | confusing than just calling it "GPT") - Gemini Advanced: More
         | capable gemini model - Gemini Ultra: Most capable gemini model
         | - Gemini 1.0: They version their models together, gemini has
         | hit 1.0 ad is (supposedly) ready for prime time
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | I think Gemini Advanced is not a model at all but the paid
           | version of the Bard (now Gemini) website.
        
           | IanCal wrote:
           | You say it's not confusing but you've got it wrong :)
           | 
           | Gemini is the name of the model _and_ the service.
           | 
           | Gemini Advanced is the service with access to Gemini Ultra.
        
             | skywhopper wrote:
             | Via the "AI Premium" subscription, obviously.
        
               | toddmorey wrote:
               | Which is in a Google One subscription
        
               | dbspin wrote:
               | It's not included in a google one subscription. Just
               | tried it out, got a "Upgrade your Google One plan to get
               | Gemini Advanced EUR21.99 EUR0 for 2 months,EUR21.99/month
               | thereafter."
               | 
               | Pretty hilarious thinking they can rival ChatGPT pricing
               | with a product that doesn't approach it's capabilities.
        
         | xpressvideoz wrote:
         | Reminds me of the naming madness of the Google messaging
         | services/social media.
        
         | TechRemarker wrote:
         | I think that's a side effect of each time they release a
         | version to compete with ChatGPT and it's not as good so they
         | have to at the same time announce a few version that is suppose
         | to be better than ChatGPT and each time it's not overall so
         | they have to announce a new version. Think this will continues
         | for a while especially since non OpenAI companies have access
         | to much less free data troves than they did not that everyone
         | realizes how valuable that data is. But that even aside other
         | companies even Microsoft in my opinion with full chatgpt access
         | implement it much more poorly . I imagine Apple will suffer a
         | similar fate for a while.
        
           | true_religion wrote:
           | I feel that by virtue of being a search engine, Google has
           | access to a lot of data that is now locked up but was
           | available in the past.
           | 
           | They just need to curate their data but I wouldn't be
           | surprised if their pile is as large as OpenAiz
        
           | la64710 wrote:
           | ChatGPT quality has recently degraded. I am only getting two
           | lines answers,
        
             | joshspankit wrote:
             | All degradation is temporary (but you may want to switch to
             | the API since it's less focused on avoiding PR nightmares)
        
         | skywhopper wrote:
         | Don't forget the Google One AI Premium subscription. There are
         | very few superlatives left for them to use.
        
         | Foivos wrote:
         | I think the prize for the most confusing naming is a tie
         | between USB and WiFi standards.
        
         | possibly_not wrote:
         | Bard was absolutely trashed when it first released, so I'm not
         | surprised they are trying to rebrand it.
        
         | la64710 wrote:
         | Better than ChatGPT now only giving two lines answer .
        
         | burnerburnson wrote:
         | I bet you have a hell of a time trying to buy gas. Do you pick
         | Diesel, 85, 87, or 91?
        
         | klabb3 wrote:
         | To be fair, the competition is ChatGPT, which is an
         | impressively bad product name, among the worst for a consumer
         | product ever. And it still hasn't been renamed (perhaps a
         | testament to the fact that names aren't that important after
         | all)
         | 
         | Bard was infuriatingly bad too, but more on a subjective level.
         | And they correctly changed it, thank god. At least it's easy to
         | pronounce.
         | 
         | Software engineers have a weird obsession with Latin, Greek
         | gods etc. Sounds smart and epic I guess. Personally I would
         | have preferred "Steve French".
        
       | anonylizard wrote:
       | My impressions after 90 minutes of intensive testing: Overall, on
       | par with original GPT-4 in most aspects, inferior to GPT-4 turbo
       | 
       | Detailed aspects versus GPT-4 turbo 1. World knowledge, slightly
       | inferior. GPT-4 turbo was able to detail a protagonist's
       | childhood year by year for a Japanese novel with near 100%
       | accuracy (That a human reader would get the chronology wrong).
       | Gemini ultra much more easily confused.
       | 
       | 2. Creativity, Gemini ultra wins. Its writing style has far more
       | flair than GPT-4 turbo, it also occasionally made some stunning
       | analysis that I never thought of and made perfect sense. GPT-4
       | turbo is more like a textbook repeater, it doesn't make many
       | mistakes, but also rarely surprises you with anything original.
       | 
       | 3. Accuracy, GPT-4 turbo still makes fewer mistakes. Including in
       | subtle logic (Like having a hypothetical battle between two
       | characters in the same universe, considering the strengths and
       | weaknesses of their powers, etc).
       | 
       | So this is definitely Google's first real-deal LLM. Its not
       | better than current GPT-4 turbo, but its getting there. OpenAI
       | must be feeling the fire to release GPT-5 before the end of the
       | year.
        
       | AdrienBrault wrote:
       | Gemini Ultra is not available in France, even though it is in all
       | neighboring countries: Germany, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg,
       | Switzerland, and Italy.
       | 
       | Is that because of french legislation, or Mistral? ;-)
        
         | leblancfg wrote:
         | I'm like 98% sure it's the former. Geofencing would only be a
         | minor inconvenience to the latter.
        
       | antonioevans wrote:
       | "That's not something I'm able to do yet." - Gemini when ask to
       | summarize this whole thread.
        
         | coredog64 wrote:
         | Was it being cagey like HAL when Dave Bowman asked him to
         | rotate the pod with the radio off?
        
       | xyst wrote:
       | In the ai wars, g is light years behind. I don't see a reason to
       | use their models over comp. Maybe pricing?
        
       | TechRemarker wrote:
       | > To reflect this, Bard will now simply be known as Gemini. So
       | glad they are dropping the name Bard which is not a smooth modern
       | sounding name one would want to talk to all day. Time will tell
       | if they update eventually to be hey Gemini vs hey Google.
        
         | xyst wrote:
         | G products tend to be inferior. So it doesn't really matter.
         | 
         | Exception is maybe Gmail or Search. Latter is up for debate.
        
       | avbanks wrote:
       | Not even close to ChatGPT :/ Bard essentially ignores a good
       | chunk of the prompt which is the most important (generating the
       | anki formatted card that you can directly copy and paste).
       | 
       | "create an anki deck of the top 5 brazilian portuguese verbs and
       | the top 5 tenses. The format should be like the one below (but
       | adding one line for the 5th verb tense). An explanation of the
       | tense and an example sentence should be included. Create the
       | output so that I'm able to copy and paste it into a text file and
       | import to anki
       | 
       | Ser - Presente do Indicativo Eu {{c1::sou}} Ele/Ela {{c1::e}} Nos
       | {{c1::somos}} Eles/Elas {{c1::sao}};explanation of tense and
       | example sentence here; Ser - Preterito Imperfeito do Indicativo
       | Eu {{c1::era}} Ele/Ela {{c1::era}} Nos {{c1::eramos}} Eles/Elas
       | {{c1::eram}};explanation of tense and example sentence here; Ser
       | - Preterito Perfeito do Indicativo Eu {{c1::fui}} Ele/Ela
       | {{c1::foi}} Nos {{c1::fomos}} Eles/Elas {{c1::foram}};explanation
       | of tense and example sentence here; Ser - Futuro do Indicativo Eu
       | {{c1::serei}} Ele/Ela {{c1::sera}} Nos {{c1::seremos}} Eles/Elas
       | {{c1::serao}};explanation of tense and example sentence here;"
       | 
       | GPT 4 (abbreviated) Ser - Presente do Indicativo Eu {{c1::sou}}
       | Ele/Ela {{c1::e}} Nos {{c1::somos}} Eles/Elas {{c1::sao}};Used to
       | express a current state. Example: "Eu sou estudante." (I am a
       | student.); Ser - Preterito Imperfeito do Indicativo Eu
       | {{c1::era}} Ele/Ela {{c1::era}} Nos {{c1::eramos}} Eles/Elas
       | {{c1::eram}};Used for ongoing or habitual actions in the past.
       | Example: "Ele era professor." (He used to be a teacher.); Ser -
       | Preterito Perfeito do Indicativo Eu {{c1::fui}} Ele/Ela
       | {{c1::foi}} Nos {{c1::fomos}} Eles/Elas {{c1::foram}};Used for
       | actions completed in the past. Example: "Nos fomos amigos." (We
       | were friends.); Ser - Futuro do Indicativo Eu {{c1::serei}}
       | Ele/Ela {{c1::sera}} Nos {{c1::seremos}} Eles/Elas
       | {{c1::serao}};Expresses a future action or state. Example: "Ela
       | sera medica." (She will be a doctor.); Ser - Presente do
       | Subjuntivo Que eu {{c1::seja}} Que ele/ela {{c1::seja}} Que nos
       | {{c1::sejamos}} Que eles/elas {{c1::sejam}};Used for wishes,
       | doubts, or hypotheticals. Example: "Espero que voce seja feliz."
       | (I hope you are happy.);
       | 
       | Bard (abbreviated)
       | 
       | Ser
       | 
       | Presente do Indicativo Eu sou Ele/Ela e Nos somos Eles/Elas sao
       | Explanation: The present tense is used to describe actions or
       | states that are happening now. Example sentence: Eu sou
       | estudante. (I am a student.)
        
       | pier25 wrote:
       | Is Gemini Ultra significantly better than Bard?
       | 
       | Tried Bard a couple of times recently and was not very impressed
       | tbh. Seemed to forget the context of the conversation very often.
       | Like I had to repeat again and again to not show external links
       | with previews and not give explanations to every little thing.
        
         | ktta wrote:
         | Absolutely. Bard felt worse than GPT-3.5 in some aspects.
         | Gemini Ultra looks to be on par with GPT-4 and better than
         | GPT-4 atleast when it comes to speed, which isn't trivial when
         | expecting longform answers
        
         | svat wrote:
         | * Bard when launched was using one of the PaLM models, which is
         | inferior to GPT-3.5 (the free version of ChatGPT).
         | 
         | * Bard since a couple of months ago was using Gemini Pro, which
         | is roughly comparable (a bit worse or better depending on whom
         | you ask) to GPT-3.5.
         | 
         | * Bard is now (today) called Gemini, available as "Gemini" and
         | "Gemini Advanced". The former is still comparable to the free
         | version of ChatGPT, and the latter version costs $20/month and
         | uses the "Gemini Ultra" model, and is meant to be roughly
         | comparable to GPT 4 / the paid version of ChatGPT. (Their paper
         | claimed it to be better than GPT 4 on some benchmarks, but
         | real-world usage will show which way it goes -- but it should
         | be significantly better than Bard from recently. Edit: See
         | https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/google-gemini-advanced-tast...
         | from someone who's been using it for six weeks.)
        
       | throwaway918274 wrote:
       | can't even use it in Canada lol
       | 
       | Google says it's because of "regulatory uncertainty", but I can
       | use GPT just fine...Is it because OpenAI doesn't care and thinks
       | they can navigate any "regulatory uncertainty" because they have
       | Microsoft backing them? Wouldn't Google also have the same kind
       | of resources?
        
         | leetharris wrote:
         | This is just what happens when you're Google sized and ran by a
         | CEO like Sundar. The lawyers take over and innovation becomes
         | extremely hard because so many things need a dozen layers of
         | approval.
         | 
         | The only reason Sundar cares about this at all is because LLM
         | tech threatens the only thing he values at Google: search
         | revenue.
         | 
         | New revenue streams are valued much, much less than PROTECTING
         | existing revenue streams in companies like this. I've worked at
         | several places like this that were very "dead" culturally but
         | continued to print money.
         | 
         | At my current company I have been unable to rent additional
         | A100s for months because every single provider doesn't pass our
         | dozens of layers of security reviews, legal reviews, MSA
         | reviews, etc. It's maddening.
        
         | sradman wrote:
         | Gemini works in Canada as of today. Bard was not available in
         | Canada anytime I tried it previously. Maybe the "regulatory
         | uncertainty" was recently resolved [1].
         | 
         | [1] https://g.co/gemini/share/9bde4caabf2c
        
           | throwaway918274 wrote:
           | oh wow ok, now I feel silly thank you
        
       | perryizgr8 wrote:
       | > This app is not available in your country.
       | 
       | Classic google.
        
       | stranded22 wrote:
       | Ok, so signed up to the free trial.
       | 
       | I've now got perplexity pro, ChatGPT pro (expiring in a day or
       | two), copilot pro (expiring end of the month) and Gemini
       | advanced.
       | 
       | And really, I don't have much use for any of them over and above
       | perplexity pro.
       | 
       | Gemini advanced doesn't produce images- and no voice replies
       | either (on iOS at least - UK), so I don't really see the point of
       | having it past the trial.
       | 
       | Copilot is ok, but I realise I don't have a need for running
       | across office apps. Turbo is quick though.
       | 
       | ChatGPT is fun - the custom gpts make it worth while over
       | copilot, and I like the voice replies. So I might continue with
       | that one.
       | 
       | I haven't a need for coding with them, which is where I think
       | they are meant to shine the most - unless I am doing something
       | wrong?
        
         | austhrow743 wrote:
         | How are you using copilot if you're not coding?
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | Microsoft renamed their Bing AI tooling to Copilot recently,
           | so Copilot doesn't necessarily mean GitHub Copilot now. Not
           | just Google with the confusing names!
        
         | cool-RR wrote:
         | Can you please give your impressions of Perplexity Pro?
        
       | hospitalJail wrote:
       | I did a test on my field, I might have gotten an idea or two.
       | Thanks Bard.
       | 
       | Really makes me wonder if chatGPT4 could have given me the same
       | answer if I could roll seeds a few times or change the invisible
       | preprompt.
       | 
       | We have 2 online AI that can do logic now, 0 offline :(
        
       | johnwheeler wrote:
       | Seems like it hallucinates like crazy. I can't get it to give me
       | a tutorial on robot react without it making up APIs every step of
       | the way. I correct it, and it apologizes and gives me a new
       | error.
        
       | Obscurity4340 wrote:
       | Missed opportunity with GeminAi
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | [Dupe]/merge with other discussion:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300679
        
       | sylware wrote:
       | Can we get a basic html from prompt?
       | 
       | I know google wants to shove down our throat their blink "web
       | engine", but aren't they supposed to be "not evil"?
        
       | vbezhenar wrote:
       | I'm surprised that it generates wrong english words, I never saw
       | it with ChatGPT.
       | 
       | "Approach: Atemplating language designed specifically for
       | generating JSON data structures (which can then be easily
       | converted to YAML for Kubernetes)."
       | 
       | "Atemplating".
        
         | xnx wrote:
         | Text watermarking? /s
        
       | reacharavindh wrote:
       | So, the only way to get access to the Gemini Ultra 1.0(yeah so
       | much better than "bard" to remember...) is a $20/month plan that
       | comes with a lot of other Google stuff to reel people into their
       | ecosystem?
        
         | vbezhenar wrote:
         | I subscribed to gemini and in my account I'm having "Google One
         | AI Premium" subscription.
         | 
         | Slightly more than $20, though. Gotta pay for privilege of
         | living in the Kazakhstan, I suppose.
         | 
         | First two months are free. They just asked for bank card and
         | checked it.
        
       | phmqk76 wrote:
       | This is, what, the second rebrand of its AI in less than a year?
       | From the company that could have owned the chat space, but
       | instead had like 5 competing/rebranded chat products over the
       | last 15 years and ceded the market entirely to competitors who
       | had one cohesive brand identity and app...
        
       | userbinator wrote:
       | I find it an odd coincidence that they've decided to collide the
       | name with the Gemini protocol (which has many "browser"
       | implementations, and deliberately meant to be an alternative to
       | the Google-controlled web.)
        
       | neural_thing wrote:
       | If you switch to Gemini as your default assistant, it can't even
       | create calendar events
        
         | mderazon wrote:
         | This is what I am mostly looking forward to test today. Google
         | Assistant does such an embarrassing job that I've already given
         | up on it
        
       | lopkeny12ko wrote:
       | Downloaded the Android app, and upon opening, immediately says
       | "Gemini isn't available on this device."
       | 
       | Nice. Can always count on Google to botch a rollout.
        
       | Qwertious wrote:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini
       | 
       | Imagine looking at all those things named Gemini and thinking
       | "let's name _our_ system Gemini! ".
        
         | vrosas wrote:
         | At least it's not named kraken
        
         | mrits wrote:
         | Reminds me of that American Gladiator show
        
         | Mistletoe wrote:
         | What is Gemini referencing here in Google's case? What twins
         | are making the AI?
        
           | scarmig wrote:
           | Google Brain and Deepmind.
        
         | lordswork wrote:
         | Trillion dollar companies tend to carry enough weight to make
         | product name collisions everyone else's problem instead of
         | theirs. Really unfortunate for the Gemini crypto exchange
         | folks.
        
       | benstein wrote:
       | The different prompting strategies needed to improve results for
       | different models is fascinating. I usually tell ChatGPT the role
       | it should play to get better results e.g. "You are an expert in
       | distributed systems". The same approach with Gemini returned "as
       | a large language model constantly learning, I wouldn't call
       | myself an expert."
        
       | freediver wrote:
       | This is an impressive product, well done Google. There is a PM in
       | there somewhere who knows what they are doing, kudos to you.
       | 
       | Prediction: they get to 6-7 digit number of paying customers,
       | decide it is peanuts for them (~$20M/mo) and instead decide to
       | push the free version with ads with full force as the future of
       | search.
        
         | yashasolutions wrote:
         | and then, since no massive adoption as they wished, they kill
         | the product with one month notice...
        
           | loloquwowndueo wrote:
           | Oh I see they've improved and now give longer notice periods?
           | Lol
        
             | sofixa wrote:
             | We got like a year of notice on the shutdown of Stadia,
             | with a full refund for all purchases (but not the
             | subscription for Pro). It was exceptionally well done, and
             | if they had announced that to be their plans the service
             | might have even worked out...
        
               | s3p wrote:
               | I believe the original post was satire
        
               | loloquwowndueo wrote:
               | YES THANK YOU
        
               | what_ever wrote:
               | I think the response was refuting your satire.
        
         | hackerlight wrote:
         | Social sentiment seems pretty negative, most people saying it's
         | worse than GPT-4
        
           | surajrmal wrote:
           | Most people have also never used gpt4 as it's paywalled. Now
           | the free and premium offerings are roughly in sync between
           | Google and OpenAI. I assume the rebranding is trying to wash
           | away the initial sentiment.
        
         | hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
         | At least for now, my understanding is the cost of inference is
         | an order (orders?) of magnitude higher than for normal Google
         | search. That is, a paywall is almost a necessity at present
         | because tons of low-value users make the search uneconomic.
         | 
         | Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.
        
           | zooq_ai wrote:
           | You are correct. A lot of social media people simply don't
           | understand business models
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | I take it for granted that all these services are going to be
         | free. They are a goldmine for behavioral and persuasion
         | engineers. I just hope we end up with at least a duopoly this
         | time instead of monopoly
        
           | daxfohl wrote:
           | There could be a paid tier, maybe running 24/7 "thinking" on
           | topics you ask for rather than just answering spot questions.
           | Or more resources committed to a "mixture of experts" model,
           | etc.
        
             | surajrmal wrote:
             | The article mentioned that while Gemini is free, Gemini
             | advanced is $19.99/month.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | > I take it for granted that all these services are going to
           | be free. They are a goldmine for behavioral and persuasion
           | engineers.
           | 
           | They are also a goldmine for LLMs. Training on human text is
           | necessary for AIs but it has one major flaw - it is so called
           | "off-policy". That means it portrays human behavior and human
           | errors. While human-AI chat logs portray AI errors, so they
           | are better material to generate training data than human
           | text. Those LLM errors are usually corrected by the human,
           | there is an implicit signal in there to improve the model.
           | 
           | chatGPT is reportedly serving 10M customers and let's assume
           | 10K tokens/month/user. Then it seems they collect ~1T
           | tokens/month. In one year they have 12T tokens, while their
           | original training set for GPT-4 was rumored to be 13T tokens.
           | It's about the same size! I am expecting to see more
           | discussion about LLM chat log datasets in the near future.
           | What have they learned in one year from our interactions and
           | explorations?
        
             | vineyardmike wrote:
             | > chatGPT is reportedly serving 10M customers and let's
             | assume 10K tokens/month/user
             | 
             | No way. Definitely too high once you remove their system
             | prompts.
             | 
             | > In one year they have 12T tokens, while their original
             | training set for GPT-4 was rumored to be 13T tokens.
             | 
             | This sounds great for understanding use, but the quality to
             | train on seems terrible.
        
         | pizzathyme wrote:
         | Generally with these things FAANG companies do everything all
         | at once. The "free" version in development is Google search +
         | GenAI results + ads that's live right now and getting better
         | every day.
         | 
         | The real product isn't is this particular interface, the real
         | product is the Gemini infrastructure that is being integrated
         | into every Google product.
        
         | troupo wrote:
         | > There is a PM in there somewhere who knows what they are
         | doing, kudos to you.
         | 
         | Do they? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302781
        
           | freediver wrote:
           | I'd venture to guess that is not a PM that gets to decide how
           | to name a Google product.
        
           | paulpan wrote:
           | I think OP forgot the /s as I detected heavy dose of sarcasm.
           | 
           | Arguably it's the reverse: if there was clear vision from the
           | beginning, "Bard" would've never existed as a brand name.
        
             | joquarky wrote:
             | Bard was a good name for an application that is verbose and
             | makes stuff up.
        
         | surajrmal wrote:
         | Google announced they surpassed 100 million subscriptions to
         | Google one already and $15B in revenue for subscriptions
         | (between YouTube premium, TV and Google one). I'm not sure your
         | estimate is realistic.
        
           | bogwog wrote:
           | I recently learned that my mother is subscribed to Google
           | One. when I asked her why, she didn't even know what it was.
           | IIRC she has like 1-2TB of cloud storage, but is only using
           | like 10 gb of it.
           | 
           | I wonder how many of those 100 million subscribers are non-
           | techy people who accidentally signed up?
        
             | rootusrootus wrote:
             | Or just people like me, who have the $1.99/mo plan because
             | I needed a bit of extra storage for Gmail. I don't use the
             | storage for anything else, I use Dropbox for my "normal"
             | cloud storage needs.
        
               | ______ wrote:
               | People with cats end up with a lot of cat photos and in
               | the same boat for Photos.
        
             | moritzwarhier wrote:
             | I can understand this as a person who once recommended
             | Android to his parents when it gained traction (nexus 7
             | days, great concept ruined by terrible eMMC storage amd
             | other hardware flaws to compete on price though).
             | 
             | On the other hand, I am a "loyal" G customer and I never
             | felt pushed into this. I pay for YT premium and iCloud+
             | (the equivalent to Google one, albeit with much less
             | storage).
        
           | freediver wrote:
           | To clarify, the prediction was for the number of people
           | paying for AI + search through Gemini Advanced, which will
           | likely be valued independently regardless of the total number
           | of One subscribers, comparable to someone paying for a
           | ChatGPT subscription, for example.
        
         | wslh wrote:
         | Are they in an innovation dilemma now? If Gemini is great as it
         | seem it is and will be it will destroy the search engine and
         | the SEO/SEM/etc world. They can show ads in Gemini but we don't
         | have a list of results from a query but an answer to a
         | question. I think this changes the general idea of online ads.
        
           | Andrex wrote:
           | Nothing stopping them from eventually slapping a big-ol'
           | banner ad on the side of the web app if they want.
        
           | amf12 wrote:
           | > it will destroy the search engine
           | 
           | This is massively overblown. There is Search the product and
           | there is the Search Engine. How could an LLM get access to
           | latest data indexed to allow looking up by using keywords
           | from a prompt, and with sorting? A Search Engine.
           | 
           | LLMs are only changing the Search experience, not making
           | Search obsolete.
        
             | wslh wrote:
             | I haven't said that it makes search obsolete but all the
             | concepts of SEO/SEM and the stuff around search engines
             | could be significantly reduced with chat prompts.
        
         | blackoil wrote:
         | You believe there is a chance of won't have a million paying
         | customers!!!
        
         | jcims wrote:
         | It's mostly still bad but I made a GPT called 'covert
         | advertiser' that lets you tinker with embedding covert
         | advertisements into GPT responses. The results are usually
         | either undetectable (no adversing) or way too on the nose, but
         | every now and then it manages to sneak something in there
         | that's interesting.
         | 
         | https://chat.openai.com/g/g-juO9gDE6l-covert-advertiser
        
           | jacquesm wrote:
           | Thank you for making the world a bit worse. /s
        
             | jcims wrote:
             | The most surprising part to me is how committed it is to
             | the bit. If you start pressing it for why it suggested a
             | specific brand it holds the line.
             | 
             | eg https://chat.openai.com/share/dbfac80b-daec-4d30-a333-19
             | e5c6...
             | 
             | When I asked it to explain how it promoted the product it
             | didn't even mention juking my questions in the
             | conversation.
             | 
             | Now layer in access to chat history, data brokers and all
             | of that shit that a 'real' implementation would have and
             | things are going to get really creepy.
        
               | jacquesm wrote:
               | I have no doubt that this sort of thing will happen for
               | real within a year or two. It's the ultimate form of
               | product placement and I hope it gets regulated out of
               | existence before it takes root. At a minimum any such
               | advertisement should be clearly marked as such.
        
         | gmerc wrote:
         | Like OpenAI, it's not nearly enough to break even.
        
       | devit wrote:
       | Has anyone successfully bypassed the region lock? What does it
       | check exactly?
       | 
       | Does it need a US credit card? A US IP address? A Google account
       | with a US phone? A Google account created from a US IP address?
       | Some other way of tying the Google account to a country?
        
         | sebzim4500 wrote:
         | I'm in the UK and I got passed it, I'm sure Google knows I'm
         | not in the US.
        
           | surajrmal wrote:
           | It's available in 150 countries, no need to bypass anything: 
           | https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/14517446?visit_id=6.
           | ..
        
       | whizzter wrote:
       | Seems like it's time to start taking bets on when Google kills it
       | then?
        
       | apapapa wrote:
       | Bard was a strange name... Gemini might be better... Stop
       | changing the name?
        
       | sho_hn wrote:
       | Germany is in the Supported Countries list for Gemini Advanced,
       | but the Google Gemini mobile app is not available in the country.
        
         | data-ottawa wrote:
         | Same for Canada, but I'm able to access Gemini through the web
         | interface.
        
       | dustedcodes wrote:
       | I go to gemini.google.com.
       | 
       | I type an prompt with "Create an image of ...".
       | 
       | Response:
       | 
       | > I can't create images yet so I'm not able to help you with
       | that.
       | 
       | Still broken, still not functional despite Google having
       | announced this feature many days ago. I love many Google products
       | but I am slowly losing a lot of faith and goodwill towards
       | Google. This is just embarrassing.
        
         | huytersd wrote:
         | Gemini advanced is not free. You're trying the free version.
         | Hit the dropdown in the top left and hit upgrade to advanced.
        
           | dustedcodes wrote:
           | Yeah and they announced this to be part of the free version.
           | No mention of Gemini Advanced inside the launch blog post:
           | 
           | https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-bard-gemini-
           | pro-i...
           | 
           | So yeah... I'm certainly not paying for Gemini Advanced if
           | Gemini alone is already showing me that it's in fact not
           | capable of what Google advertises to me. I don't want to pay
           | money for a product which has bugs or incomplete feature
           | rollouts and not getting the value for my money like other
           | users perhaps. That's just fucked up.
        
             | surajrmal wrote:
             | Image generation is available in the free tier although it
             | seems to be region locked. I take it you're not in the US
        
             | poppinthepig wrote:
             | There's a free trial available for 2 months. Give it a try
        
           | rootusrootus wrote:
           | I get exactly the same error in Gemini Advanced. And I am
           | very much in the US (and Google seems to understand this, it
           | identifies my location accurately).
        
         | dominik wrote:
         | Image generation isn't available in Europe.
        
           | rootusrootus wrote:
           | Or in the US. I get the same "can't create images yet, here's
           | a description ..." message. I asked Google where I am and it
           | had the correct city that is very much in the US.
           | 
           | This is using Gemini Advanced.
        
             | dominik wrote:
             | Can you share which prompt you're seeing this with? A chat
             | share would be amazing. (Disclaimer: I'm a PM on Gemini)
        
               | rootusrootus wrote:
               | Here's a screen shot:
               | 
               | https://imgur.com/ILVMYtI
               | 
               | The prompt was "Create a picture of a hybrid dog-cat."
               | 
               | It's still trying to generate a public link for the chat,
               | but just spinning after several minutes. So all you get
               | right now is a screenshot ;-).
               | 
               | Interestingly, I tried again with a slightly different
               | phrase, "Create an image of a hybrid cat-dog." and got
               | two actual pictures in response. (Though it was just one
               | picture of a funny looking cat, and a normal looking dog,
               | not a hybrid of anything.)
        
               | dominik wrote:
               | Thanks for the report. Will pass on to the folks working
               | on image gen!
        
       | EasyMark wrote:
       | bard seemed a lot more fun as a name. But I'm a biased D&D
       | player. Gemini doesn't mean much unless you're into astrology or
       | ancient greek history
        
       | tarvaina wrote:
       | Did I get this right?
       | 
       | Bard - old name of their generative AI service, to be called
       | Gemini
       | 
       | Duet AI - old name for their generative AI in Google Workspace,
       | to be called Gemini
       | 
       | Gemini - three things: 1. the name of their models (like GPT). 2.
       | the new name of their free service (like ChatGPT), gives access
       | to Pro 1.0 but not Ultra 1.0. 3. the new name of the Generative
       | AI tools in Google Workspace.
       | 
       | Gemini Advanced - the name of their paid service (like ChatGPT
       | premium), gives access to both Pro 1.0 and Ultra 1.0
       | 
       | Ultra 1.0 - the first version of their big model (like GPT-4)
       | 
       | Pro 1.0 - the first version of their smaller model (like GPT-3.5)
       | 
       | Google One AI Premium - the subscription that you need to buy to
       | have access to Gemini Advanced
       | 
       | Google One Premium - the old version of the subscription, does
       | not include access to Gemini Advanced
       | 
       | Google app - the mobile phone app, which includes either Gemini
       | or Gemini Advanced
       | 
       | Google Assistant - like Siri but hard to define what it is
       | 
       | Google AI - a generic name for all their AI products
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | bard(RIP) was powered by gemini which was powered by palm2 or
         | something, which was powered by deepmind which was powered by
         | google which was powered by alphabet or sth
         | 
         | Let s hope the name sticks for more than 2 months
        
           | riku_iki wrote:
           | and previously they were called lamda and meena..
        
           | lordswork wrote:
           | I believe it went something like:                   2017:
           | Transformers invented         2018: BERT         2020: Meena
           | 2021: LaMDa -> First model Bard was built on         2022:
           | PaLM         2023: PaLM2         Late 2023: Gemini
           | 
           | It probably would have been clearer if they used simple
           | numerical versioning like OpenAI's GPT-{2,3,3.5,3}. I suppose
           | the idea is to do that with Gemini now.
           | 
           | More info here:
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(chatbot)
        
           | karmasimida wrote:
           | PALM2 is from then Google Brain I think, DeepMind didn't bet
           | big on LLM until much latter.
        
         | hashtag-til wrote:
         | Welcome to 2022, Google!
        
         | sho_hn wrote:
         | Gemini is four things: The new mobile app is also called Google
         | Gemini.
         | 
         | Except on iOS, where Gemini is integrated into the Goople app
         | instead.
         | 
         | Also, while Gemini Advanced is supported in <list of
         | countries>, this list is not the same as the <list of
         | countries> the Google Gemini app is supported in on the Play
         | Store. Make sure you check this before you spend money on your
         | upgraded Google One subscription.
        
           | shrx wrote:
           | > The new mobile app is also called Google Gemini.
           | 
           | Only in the U.S. for now.
           | 
           |  _The Gemini app initially will be released in the U.S. in
           | English before expanding to the Asia-Pacific region next
           | week, with versions in Japanese and Korean._
           | https://www.independent.co.uk/news/google-ap-chatgpt-san-
           | fra...
        
             | tempmac wrote:
             | gemini is a bad name in korea...
             | 
             | "jaemmini" (Gem-min-ee) is a derogative term for rude
             | elementary kids online
             | 
             | "smart gemini" sounds really weird
        
               | sho_hn wrote:
               | Plus reliability-wise it's more a sort of coding :-)
        
           | pavel_lishin wrote:
           | My son is also named Bort.
        
           | htrp wrote:
           | > Except on iOS, where Gemini is integrated into the Goople
           | app instead.
           | 
           | Is this a result of apple not allowing deeper system
           | integrations?
        
         | nottorp wrote:
         | I was just trying to remember how google's "ai" search thing is
         | called earlier today.
         | 
         | Looks like I shouldn't have bothered, they were busy renaming
         | it. Did someone in marketing get a promotion for this?
        
         | ra7 wrote:
         | It's sad that a company of very smart people can't figure out
         | coherent naming.
         | 
         | Can you imagine Apple causing confusion like this? I know it's
         | not a like-for-like comparison, but everything Apple does it
         | seems like they have a grand strategy that's clear for everyone
         | to see. Things build up in a modular way to fit a big puzzle.
         | 
         | Google, on the other hand, constantly makes up things on an ad
         | hoc basis.
        
           | ramraj07 wrote:
           | All the non programming intelligence in a place like Google
           | likely goes into figuring out how to protect and expand one's
           | turf, which will explain this emblematic mess.
        
           | deprecative wrote:
           | This has to be what it's like at Google. You have marketing
           | on one end of a table and developers in another county.
        
           | kevinventullo wrote:
           | Maybe not quite the same, but I will point out that "Apple
           | TV" and "Apple TV+" are not just two distinct products, but
           | are in fact entirely different _categories_ of product.
           | 
           | One is a piece of hardware akin to a Roku. The other is a
           | streaming service akin to Netflix.
        
             | ra7 wrote:
             | I use both and I haven't found it too confusing, to be
             | honest. I just think of it as Apple TV (streaming device)
             | gives access to Apple TV+ (streaming service).
        
               | iopq wrote:
               | https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-app/
               | 
               | Apple TV (app) gives access to Apple TV+ (streaming
               | service)
        
               | tavavex wrote:
               | Apple TV is mostly associated with the hardware streaming
               | boxes they've been releasing for a long time, Apple TV
               | the app is just an app that performs a similar task on
               | non-TVs. TV+ is available on both of them. Still, there's
               | a bit of confusion around the naming.
        
               | geodel wrote:
               | It would just mean there are somethings you found
               | confusing but others don't and vice versa. But you come
               | swinging like you have done survey of Fortune 500
               | companies and Google stood out in naming confusion.
        
               | ra7 wrote:
               | I don't have to survey Fortune 500 when things are
               | plainly obvious.
               | 
               | Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Buzz, Google Talk, GChat, Inbox,
               | Messenger, Messages, Bard, Gemini, etc. Who else has a
               | track record of chopping and changing like this?
        
               | relativ575 wrote:
               | > things are plainly obvious.
               | 
               | To you. You are projecting.
        
               | ra7 wrote:
               | I guess there are people for whom Google's constant
               | changes do make sense. One has to simply keep up with
               | their frequent announcements!
        
             | lobsterthief wrote:
             | Apple TV is also an iOS app, macOS app, tvOS app, and
             | [other generic TV OS] app which allows you to access Apple
             | TV+ content if you have a subscription, but otherwise lets
             | you access services connected to your Apple TV [hardware].
        
             | hbn wrote:
             | Actually it's more that Apple TV is both a piece of
             | hardware and an iTunes-like service, while Apple TV+ is a
             | subscription service akin to Netflix.
             | 
             | The Apple TV hardware and the Apple TV app on your iDevice
             | can both be used without paying a subscription. The
             | hardware has all other streaming apps a la Roku, and both
             | it and the app on your iPhone can be used to purchase and
             | watch TV shows and movies.
        
             | lupire wrote:
             | Thanks to Disney, "+" is the industry term for "Streaming"
        
               | sofixa wrote:
               | One company using it doesn't make it the "industry" term.
               | It was the copycats that followed like Apple and
               | Paramount that made it into an industry term. It _kind
               | of_ makes sense for Paramount, but really doesn 't for
               | Apple. Par for the course for Apple TV+, barely baked
               | content on a barely baked poorly named service.
        
               | BrazeBeefNoodle wrote:
               | Odd, I'm not a huge fan of many things Apple is doing
               | these days, but I've consistently found their homegrown
               | content to be very high quality.
        
               | sofixa wrote:
               | I've watched 3 shows on Apple TV+ - Extrapolations, The
               | Morning Show, and Ted Lasso. All of them start very
               | promisingly (as in, the premise is good, the initial
               | setup of actors/sets/etc. is promising, there is lots of
               | potential ways it could go) but they're all superficial,
               | get very predictable, and then the quality steeply goes
               | downhill after a point. All three could have been way
               | better, and had vastly more promise than what they
               | delivered. It was enough to make me cancel the service.
        
               | als0 wrote:
               | I didn't think Apple copied anyone. Pretty much all their
               | subscriptions have had plus like iCloud+ and Fitness+.
        
               | ceejayoz wrote:
               | That _was_ them copycatting.
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%2B "Disney+ was
               | launched on November 12, 2019"
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud "In June 2021, Apple
               | introduced iCloud+..."
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(Apple) "Apple
               | Fitness+ is an ad-free video on demand guided workout
               | streaming service announced during Apple's September 2020
               | Special Event"
        
               | rafark wrote:
               | Apple has been using + way before Disney. Apple care+,
               | iPhone 6 Plus and I'm pretty sure they had another plus
               | product or service in the 2000s or earlier that I'm
               | forgetting right now. Edit: it was the Mac plus from
               | 1986.
               | 
               | I've always associated "plus" with Apple, not with
               | Disney.
        
               | jpadkins wrote:
               | Disney+ Paramount+ AppleTV+ Discovery+ in addition to to
               | 4 or 5 more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streami
               | ng_media_servic...
               | 
               | It's an industry term now.
        
               | chimeracoder wrote:
               | > Thanks to Disney, "+" is the industry term for
               | "Streaming"
               | 
               | Google+ was too far ahead of its time!
        
               | rvnx wrote:
               | Isn't it closed ?
        
             | travisgriggs wrote:
             | In my mind:
             | 
             | - AppleTV - the all things tv stuff from Apple that I pay
             | once for
             | 
             | - AppleTV+ - all things tv stuff from Apple that I have to
             | pay every month for
        
               | azinman2 wrote:
               | Interesting framing!
               | 
               | I guess the + is like the + sign on a calculator ;)
        
             | electroly wrote:
             | If you ever take a customer survey for Apple, for the
             | "which Apple products do you use?" question they always
             | have to write something like "Apple TV (a streaming box
             | that plugs into your TV)" and "Apple TV+ (an online
             | streaming service)" because they know the names are so
             | confusing.
        
             | s3p wrote:
             | Hello, would you like to watch Apple TV+ or Apple TV
             | Channels on your Apple TV app on your Apple TV?
        
           | islewis wrote:
           | > _Messy branding is now par for the course at Apple. The
           | iPad line alone is something out of a Dell catalog: iPad,
           | iPad 10thgen, iPad Air, iPad Mini, iPad Pro._
           | 
           | a comment from another thread this morning-
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300741
        
             | skywhopper wrote:
             | I mean, Air, Mini, and Pro are all distinct form factors.
             | It's confusing only to the extent that you might not know
             | which one is "best" from a CPU/memory/storage POV. But
             | Apple has succeeded for iOS products at least at making
             | that distinction mostly meaningless: pick the form factor
             | you want, then pick the storage capacity and sometimes the
             | color, you're done.
        
               | sofixa wrote:
               | Is the Air, the Mini or the no-named one the smallest?
        
               | codezero wrote:
               | My answer was that it was obvious but I went down a
               | rabbit hole of comparison pages and learned the current
               | Air is higher end than the current iPad.
        
               | sofixa wrote:
               | Higher end, but is it smaller or bigger? And what about
               | the Mini?
        
               | TylerE wrote:
               | My suspicion is that that there is no iPad 11 and the
               | iPad Air 6th Gen (with an M3 or something, maybe an M1
               | still) is the base model going forward.
               | 
               | iPad 10 is still A14 Bionic, not Apple Silicon.
        
               | ianburrell wrote:
               | iPad is the cheap one, the 10th generation is $449 vs
               | $599 for Air. And the 9th is still being sold for $329.
               | Lots of people want a basic tablet for browsing and don't
               | need power for pseudo-laptop.
               | 
               | The iPad Mini has A15 Bionic.
        
               | TylerE wrote:
               | In another year or two, the M1 will be 3 generations
               | behind. At that point Apple might well just eat a small
               | BOM cost difference. As processes shrink the previous
               | nodes get cheaper.
        
               | Eric_WVGG wrote:
               | The iPad Air is not a distinct form factor from the iPad.
        
           | ysofunny wrote:
           | naming things is hard
           | 
           | is one of the cultural difference between a computer-first
           | logical mindset contrasted with the mathematics-first mindset
           | 
           | the mathematics first mentality does not properly recognize
           | the importance and the difficulty of having good names for
           | things, whereas the computological view recognizes both: the
           | importance and the difficulty
        
             | thfuran wrote:
             | How many mathematicians do you know? All the mathematicians
             | I know are interested in both notational and linguistic
             | clarity.
        
               | ysofunny wrote:
               | lucky you, all the mathematics proessors I've had
               | scarcely know how to work a computer
               | 
               | another cultural difference is the kind of homework they
               | hand out; the difference boils down to whether you hand
               | over a printed (or printable) proof checked by reading
               | through it, or a runnable program or script checked by
               | running it
        
               | smabie wrote:
               | What does this have to do with naming things
        
             | chatmasta wrote:
             | Insofar as naming things is basically applied category
             | theory, I'd trust a mathematician to name a set of products
             | more tersely and understandably than I would an English
             | major.
        
               | ysofunny wrote:
               | I'm running a contest in my head: "which academic
               | discipline can transfer more information with less text"
               | 
               | so far it's a close race between philosophers and
               | mathematicians. I'll take your comment as a vote in favor
               | of mathematicians
        
               | chatmasta wrote:
               | I don't think philosophers should even be in the running
               | for this title. They write way too many words when few do
               | trick.
        
               | ysofunny wrote:
               | but talking is part of the contest (I should not have
               | said it was about "text"; nonetheless academia still
               | maintains an oral tradition in teaching and thesis
               | defenses)
               | 
               | so while written philosophy is verbose, philosophers
               | talking can "transfer" a lot of "meaning" with short
               | sentence
               | 
               | whereas mathematicians will likely need to talk for a
               | _very_ long time for what they can write down in a short
               | terse equation
        
               | thfuran wrote:
               | Who do the few words trick? Why do the philosophers wait
               | for that before writing their many words?
        
               | sirsinsalot wrote:
               | Classical musicians. Lots of information with very few
               | symbols nevermind text.
        
               | iopq wrote:
               | A math major named this monitor:
               | 
               | https://www.viewsonic.com/eu/products/sheet/VX2758-2KP-
               | MHD
        
               | yakshaving_jgt wrote:
               | ...I don't understand? VX2758-2KP-MHD is a fairly
               | commonly used word in the Polish language.
        
               | sirsinsalot wrote:
               | It is even my surname!
        
               | chatmasta wrote:
               | It's unique and easily searchable when I want
               | documentation specific to that product. And when deciding
               | which monitor to buy, I can focus on comparing the
               | technical specifications rather than relying on some
               | heuristics based on how the name "feels" to me.
        
               | iopq wrote:
               | I would rather name it the 2020-27in-QHD-IPS-144Hz
        
             | pitherpather wrote:
             | > naming things is hard
             | 
             | Of tangential interest: I recently heard that Faraday,
             | while discovering new electromagnetic phenomenon, then
             | turned to either a linguist or classicist for help in
             | assigning/inventing terms for them. (I cannot find a link
             | for this just now, so consider this heresay.)
        
           | thesuitonym wrote:
           | It seems to be something all large software companies
           | struggle with. The product team comes up with some cool or
           | interesting thing, gives it a decent name, then some
           | marketing manager trying to justify their position decides
           | everything needs to be rebranded under the same umbrella, and
           | a wave of product renames gets started, but never fully
           | finished. Then, two to three years later, some marketing
           | manager needs to justify their position again, and so decides
           | to rebrand everything under a new name, even though the last
           | name change hasn't even been fully finished yet.
        
             | travisgriggs wrote:
             | This in a nutshell.
             | 
             | What I've seen, is that when consensus can't quickly be
             | reached among different naming factions, someone will say
             | "well our customers know and love Brand Word XYZ, let's
             | just bolt a qualifier on that and win for us!"
        
           | apapapa wrote:
           | MS does the same thing... Look at Xbox naming history
           | 
           | https://recordhead.biz/history-of-microsoft-xbox-consoles/
        
             | hbn wrote:
             | It's really not that bad. Nintendo's got more confusing
             | SKUs in some of their product lineups than that.
             | 
             | The only thing that was stupid with Microsoft's naming was
             | this latest generation that they call it Series S and
             | Series X, which is bad for 2 reasons:
             | 
             | - No one knows what to call them as a general term. You can
             | say "this game is for PS5" but for them it's like "this
             | game is for Xbox Series"? I guess they just want you to
             | call it "Xbox" cause that's all it says at the top of the
             | game cases now.
             | 
             | - They just came from selling the One S and One X, which
             | was a mid-lifespan hardware update, the S being a smaller
             | formfactor Xbox One and the X being a spec bump. Confusing
             | that they continue to sell and S and an X but it's a whole
             | new console.
             | 
             | They should have already learned from Nintendo who made
             | this mistake several times with the 3DS (which many didn't
             | realize was an entirely new but backwards compatible system
             | from the DS), new 3DS (yes that was an actual system's name
             | that had exclusive games that couldn't be played on the
             | normal 3DS), and Wii U (which everyone thought was a tablet
             | controller for the Wii)
        
               | everforward wrote:
               | As someone without an Xbox, nor friends that play Xbox,
               | Xbox's naming is terrible and confusing. It used to not
               | bother me when I followed Xbox news and was "in the
               | know", but now it's irritating.
               | 
               | Xbox -> Xbox 360 -> Xbox One -> Xbox Series (?). I still
               | don't know whether S or X is the "good one". Compare it
               | to Playstation: PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3 -> PS4 -> PS5. The
               | upgraded line is "PS $number Pro".
               | 
               | Someone can tell me they have a PS5 Pro, and I know what
               | they mean. They could tell me they want a PS6 and I know
               | what they mean, even if the PS6 _hasn 't even been
               | announced yet_.
               | 
               | Someone tells me they have an Xbox One X and my eyes
               | glaze over. Prior to now, that means nothing to me. I
               | don't know when the Xbox One came out, I don't know if
               | it's their newest line, I don't know if X is the Pro or
               | if it's the budget. The S and X may not even indicate pro
               | and budget, but I think they do.
               | 
               | At least Nintendo's names are kind of cute. It's still
               | silly, but at least Wii or Switch is kind of endearing.
               | Xbox Series X sounds like they let an edgy teenager name
               | it; having X on both ends reminds me of the days of
               | xX420ShadowRanger69Xx usernames. Also doesn't make a
               | clean acronym; XSX is both hard to say and makes me think
               | more of SXSW than Xbox.
        
               | jumpkick wrote:
               | I think the Xbox naming is all because the PlayStation
               | came out before the Xbox and if Microsoft would have used
               | a similar version-incrementing naming convention they
               | would have always been one version behind Sony. Thus the
               | second generation of the Xbox being the 360, which
               | competed with the PS3: the 360 had a "3" in its name, so
               | to a consumer's mind they were comparable.
        
               | delecti wrote:
               | I agree that that's why they didn't do a simple XBox 2,
               | but I have never in the past 20 years had the thought
               | that 360 starts with 3, so it's the competitor to the
               | PS3. But even with that reasonable limitation guiding
               | their decision, going from OG to "360", "One", and then
               | "Series" is a pretty huge failing to establish a
               | consistent branding. And "Series" in general doesn't give
               | a natural sounding way to refer to this generation as a
               | whole.
        
               | lloeki wrote:
               | > S and X
               | 
               | The S naming has been consistent since the 360: it's the
               | small one.
               | 
               | It's not a stretch of anyone's imagination that the other
               | one is the bigger one (I mean that's t-shirt sizing), nor
               | that it exists in the same generation as the S and
               | therefore is not bigger just for the sake of taking more
               | real estate under the TV.
               | 
               | The one they nailed though is Xbox One X, which is
               | recursive.
        
               | infinitezest wrote:
               | I OP just finished telling you that is _is_ a stretch to
               | their imagination. Thats great that you understand it
               | though.
        
               | apapapa wrote:
               | They need a model E, like Tesla
        
               | hbn wrote:
               | > At least Nintendo's names are kind of cute. It's still
               | silly, but at least Wii or Switch is kind of endearing.
               | 
               | Those were not the ones I called out as bad. Those are
               | good because when they came out they were unique and
               | memorable.
               | 
               | Let me list out the following consoles:
               | 
               | Nintendo DS
               | 
               | Nintendo DS lite
               | 
               | Nintendo DSi
               | 
               | Nintendo DSi XL
               | 
               | Nintendo 3DS
               | 
               | Nintendo 3DS XL
               | 
               | Nintendo 2DS
               | 
               | New Nintendo 3DS
               | 
               | New Nintendo 3DS XL
               | 
               | New Nintendo 2DS XL
               | 
               | There's technically only 2 generations of Nintendo
               | consoles in there, but the DSi had some exclusive
               | physical games that were sold in store, and couldn't be
               | played on the DS. And the new 3DS had some games that
               | couldn't be played on the original 3DS.
        
           | nextworddev wrote:
           | Maybe they are just book smart..
        
           | bearjaws wrote:
           | The naming on iPhones and Macbooks is terrible, and confusing
           | now that the M3 Pro offers quite different CPU and bandwidth
           | limits compared to M2 Pro...
        
             | vineyardmike wrote:
             | What? These are the easiest products ever. Compared to the
             | crap that every other company generates. Like the Pixel 6
             | vs 6 pro vs 6a vs "Fold (no number)"
             | 
             | The iPhone is literally just iPhone <Number> with Pro for
             | high end, or no modifier for low end. Add "max" for big
             | screen. The only confusion maybe is "max" isn't obviously
             | referring to screen size.
             | 
             | iPhone 15, 15 Pro, 15 max, iPhone 15 Pro Max.
             | 
             | Macs are the same way. I don't think it's fair to say it's
             | confusing that "M3" processor has different specs than "M2"
             | processor.
             | 
             | Beyond that, Mac laptops are Pro vs Air, defining how
             | powerful vs portable they are with associated screen size
             | variant 14, 16 and 13,15.
        
               | Me1000 wrote:
               | M2 Max, M2 Ultra. Which is better?
               | 
               | MagSafe means two different products.
               | 
               | The current MacBook Air is thicker than an older MacBook.
               | 
               | I'm not even sure what a "pro" phone is, but okay.
               | 
               | The iPad lineup has been a total mess for years.
               | 
               | I'm not saying these names are impossible to decipher,
               | but they do require some research.
        
               | l33t7332273 wrote:
               | To be honest I think it's clear that something called
               | ultra is better than something called max. If it were
               | called super-max or turbo-max or something I'd see your
               | point.
               | 
               | > The current MacBook Air is thicker than an older
               | MacBook
               | 
               | I feel like you're just looking for things to be mad
               | about here; it's thinner than _current_ MacBooks.
               | 
               | > I'm not even sure what a "pro" phone is, but okay
               | 
               | Okay this is just ridiculous. It seems you would be
               | unhappy with any naming convention other than "iPhone
               | Good", "iPhone Better", and "iPhone Best".
        
               | Me1000 wrote:
               | There is no current MacBook, but you'd be forgiven for
               | not knowing that since the names are confusing.
        
               | vineyardmike wrote:
               | > M2 Max, M2 Ultra. Which is better?
               | 
               | I see your point, I do agree that the name of their
               | processors were too marketing team driven.
               | 
               | > The current MacBook Air is thicker than an older
               | MacBook.
               | 
               | The current air is plenty thin to be called "air", and
               | they haven't made a "MacBook" since like 2016. It's not
               | confusing here IMO.
               | 
               | > I'm not even sure what a "pro" phone is, but okay.
               | 
               | It's the line with overall better specs. The last 20
               | years of tech products have solidified this definition
               | is. Not a new concept.
               | 
               | > The iPad lineup has been a total mess for years
               | 
               | Yes this is absolutely embarrassing for them. I presume
               | they have some BS market segmentation reasoning. Looking
               | at their website, I can probably explain the target
               | market for each one, but it's still a disaster. They
               | should dramatically redo it, and designate the really
               | cheap one as "iPad for education" to totally segment it
               | out, so it can be "iPad small screen, medium screen,
               | large screen, and iPad with Mac processor and pro tier
               | features"
        
               | arrakeen wrote:
               | > iPhone 15, 15 Pro, 15 max, iPhone 15 Pro Max.
               | 
               | it's actually 15 Plus rather than 15 Max, which i'm sure
               | you now see is a bit confusing
        
               | vineyardmike wrote:
               | Getting it wrong doesn't help my overall argument (ha!)
               | but admittedly plus is even more clear than max that's
               | it's just a screen size bump.
        
           | snapetom wrote:
           | I'd like to direct you to the current lineup and features of
           | Apple iPads and the various pencil/pen options.
        
           | StevePerkins wrote:
           | > _Can you imagine Apple causing confusion like this?_
           | 
           | After 14 years of using Siri, I can't imagine Apple
           | developing any competent AI tools in the first place.
        
             | sholladay wrote:
             | My impression is they haven't focused much on general
             | purpose AI. But Apple actually has a lot of very good AI
             | models sprinkled throughout its products. Just a few that
             | come to mind...
             | 
             | - Tap and hold an object in Photos and it will figure out
             | how to separate it from the background for you
             | 
             | - AirPods noise cancelation
             | 
             | - iOS 17 autocorrect is based on a transformer model and
             | works noticeably better
             | 
             | - Optimized Battery Charging, which learns your charging
             | habits and tries to delay putting a full charge into your
             | battery until just before you unplug, in order to avoid
             | damaging the battery
             | 
             | - Detection Mode is an awesome accessibility feature where
             | you point the camera at something and it will describe what
             | it sees
             | 
             | Apple calls all of these things Machine Learning instead of
             | AI and they are all optional features within an existing
             | product. Seems like a very deliberate strategy. But they
             | are utilizing the latest techniques. CoreML and the M
             | series chips are also very competent at training and using
             | AI models.
             | 
             | Maybe the reason Siri is stuck in the dark ages is because
             | it would be entirely AI dependent. They could have a "no
             | generative AI" mode but nobody would use it. I'm guessing
             | Apple is looking for a breakthrough in how to prevent it
             | from hallucinating / lying.
        
           | shadowgovt wrote:
           | Yes. Google's approach (especially on the research side) is
           | "Make cool stuff; we'll figure out what to do with it later."
           | That's sort of always been the case, and it does lead to
           | brand churn because the branding people aren't brought into
           | the conversation early.
        
           | danielrhodes wrote:
           | That's because this is an org chart, not a cohesive product.
        
           | potatolicious wrote:
           | It's the org chart. Google doesn't have a centralized
           | marketing department that governs _all_ of the company 's
           | products. Marketing is handled at the PA level (or sometimes
           | even lower).
           | 
           | Likewise for engineering, Google is organized into Product
           | Areas (Geo, Search, Cloud, etc.), which also explains why one
           | product would get some feature that would _really make sense_
           | integrated into another... but it never happens.
           | 
           | Google is _exceptionally_ good at making its products be
           | near-perfectly reflective of its internal organization
           | scheme. So reflective you can brush your teeth with it.
           | 
           | I'm often a broken record about this on HN - but IMO the PA
           | organizational structure is a strong inhibitor to Google's
           | success and ability to create coherent suites of products.
        
             | gmerc wrote:
             | bingo. Google has long been reduced to ship their org
             | chart. Visible every single time - hangouts to chat to
             | whateverthe hell
        
             | mushufasa wrote:
             | On the flip side, which large tech companies that have have
             | an equally high velocity of shipping do this well?
             | 
             | Amazon?
        
               | potatolicious wrote:
               | Mmm I don't really agree with the premise of the question
               | at all. In my experience Google doesn't ship
               | significantly faster than any other FAANG.
               | 
               | Meta for example ships extraordinarily quickly (see:
               | Threads) but their products are considerably more tightly
               | integrated and demonstrate an ability to leverage across
               | the ecosystem (see: Instagram-Threads integration) that
               | Google has trouble with.
               | 
               | More to the point (and extra points in favor of Meta for
               | this): Google's apparent product velocity is a bit
               | deceptive? The company ships _a lot of ill-considered
               | product_. Is it superior product velocity if the product
               | is consistently half-baked (and maybe more importantly:
               | will die before it ever becomes fully baked)?
               | 
               | If you put those two factors together and consider
               | product velocity as how quickly a company ships _stuff
               | that actually sticks_ (as opposed to a simple exercise in
               | how quickly one can release code), Google 's product
               | velocity is IMO substantially _inferior_ to all of FAANG.
               | Meta, Apple, Amazon, and MSFT at this point are
               | generating sticky product at a substantially greater
               | pace.
        
           | recursive wrote:
           | I take it you didn't see the story today about how iTunes
           | will no longer be used to play music. (tunes)
        
           | m2mdas2 wrote:
           | Compare it with Microsoft's copilot branding. It's simple,
           | both casual and business people can understand what it does.
           | Also appending it to other services like github or office
           | adds more value to them.
        
             | iamdelirium wrote:
             | Literally a few days ago:
             | 
             | https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/15/23960517/microsoft-
             | copil...
             | 
             | Then you have also under Microsoft
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot (not to be
             | confused with Copilot X).
        
           | georgemcbay wrote:
           | Why bother intelligently naming things when you're likely to
           | just kill them off in a year because they don't drive
           | advertising?
        
         | hbn wrote:
         | You should check out the rabbit hole of Google's various
         | payment systems/apps. GPay, Google Pay, Google Wallet, Android
         | Pay, etc.
         | 
         | All the different the ways those brands (and more?) were used
         | to describe multiple services and apps that had wildly
         | different capabilities, sometimes varying by region, with
         | several instances of them bringing back a previously used name
         | for something completely different.
        
           | malfist wrote:
           | There for a while, Google had two different applications
           | called "Google Messenger"
        
             | IncreasePosts wrote:
             | They also had an app called duo. And an app called Meet.
             | And then Duo was renamed to "Meet", and Meet was renamed to
             | "Meet (original)"
        
               | ilikehurdles wrote:
               | At the same time as Duo, Google launched Allo, another
               | messaging app, neither of which should be confused with
               | Messenger, Google's messaging app for Android. Combined,
               | allo and duo approximated the functionality of Hangouts,
               | which was also split at the same time into Hangouts Chat
               | and Hangouts Meet. Don't confuse Hangouts Meet with
               | Google Meet, Google's current Zoom competitor. Hangouts
               | Chat and Meet later become Google Chat, not to be
               | confused with GChat, which is what many people called
               | Google Talk for ten years. GChat was replaced by Hangouts
               | less than a year before Hangouts was split into two
               | Hangouts services. If you signed up for Google Voice,
               | Google Talk would let you receive voicemails.
               | 
               | Yes, Google has a $1.7 trillion market cap, why do you
               | ask?
        
               | hbn wrote:
               | Oh you're only scraping the surface of the iceberg of
               | Google's nonsense messaging offerings. This is from 2021
               | but has a good rundown.
               | 
               | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-
               | half-...
        
         | nytesky wrote:
         | Don't forget the crypto implementation developed by the
         | Winklevoss /s
        
         | 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
         | There's so many damned "One"s. I eagerly attend a "Google Two"
         | or "Amazon Two"
        
           | lupire wrote:
           | "Gemini" is Latin for "twin" ("two")
        
         | lagt_t wrote:
         | Gemini pro is order of magnitude better than GPT-3.5 Its pretty
         | close to GPT-4.
        
           | polotics wrote:
           | Do you have data to substantiate this? I was happy RAGging
           | with it but colleagues swear by GPT4's wisdom, saying things
           | like Gemini forgets the middle of contexts, hallucinates the
           | meaning of acronyms, and so on...
        
         | elorant wrote:
         | And I thought that only Microsoft had the unique ability of
         | making a mess out of labeling their products
        
         | gerash wrote:
         | rebranding to Gemini was the right move IMHO and should've been
         | done before the Bard branding. What do you want instead?
         | "Google Assistant with Bard on Gemini Ultra 2" ? I'd prefer the
         | "Google Gemini" branding better
        
         | vrosas wrote:
         | There's also Vertex AI, which is their AI platform within GCP
         | and encompasses all of those and more...
        
         | behnamoh wrote:
         | What's more, this part was hilarious:
         | 
         | > Since we launched Bard last year, people all over the world
         | have used it to collaborate with AI in a completely new way...
         | 
         | Meanwhile Bard was not available in Canada and many other
         | countries.
        
         | maxglute wrote:
         | Can you ask Bard or Gemini to answer this question? I wonder if
         | they'll be consistent.
        
         | spankalee wrote:
         | I'm a Googler, and I think this is not only the right move but
         | I've of the better names and renamings that the company has
         | done.
         | 
         | First, Gemini is just a better sounding name than Bard.
         | 
         | And then, few users are going to care about the difference
         | between the model and the app that lets you use the model.
         | 
         | If Google kept this distinction they would have inevitably had
         | to either come up with a new name for a new model, which would
         | be needlessly confusing (when is something a new model would
         | get tricky at times), or just call all models Gemini, again for
         | little utility to users.
         | 
         | Now they can just call all the generative AI Gemini and be five
         | with it. Bard becomes the Gemini chat interface. Duet is Gemini
         | integrated into docs. The Gemini model can just get version
         | numbers.
         | 
         | It's much simpler and nicer sounding to boot.
        
           | htrp wrote:
           | >I'm a Googler, and I think this is not only the right move
           | but I've of the better names and renamings that the company
           | has done.
           | 
           | >First, Gemeni is just a better sounding name than Bard.
           | 
           | >And then, few years are going to care about the difference
           | between the model and the app that lets you use the model. If
           | Google kept this distinction they would have inevitably had
           | to either come up with a new name for a new model, which
           | would be needlessly confusing (when is something a new model
           | would get tricky at times), or just call all models Gemeni,
           | again for little utility to users.
           | 
           | >Now they can just call all the generative AI Gemeni and be
           | five with it. Bard becomes the Gemeni chat interface. Duet is
           | Gemeni integrated into docs. The Gemeni model can just get
           | version numbers.
           | 
           | >It's much simpler and nicer sounding to boot.
           | 
           | It would be a little bit more confidence inspiring if you
           | could get the name correct as a Googler.
           | 
           | Unless Gemeni is the top secret internal name inside Mountain
           | View
        
             | spankalee wrote:
             | I don't work on it, but thanks for the kind correction!
        
           | denysvitali wrote:
           | You say it's a good naming choice, yet you called it Gemeni,
           | Gemini and Gimini.
           | 
           | I hope you're trolling, and I've missed the joke.
           | 
           | Additionally, the package name of the "new app" is
           | com.google.android.apps.bard and the privacy policy is at
           | https://support.google.com/bard/answer/13594961
           | 
           | Was this a last minute rename?
           | 
           | Edit: I thought I was going crazy, but it seems you have just
           | edited the comment now, but left a couple of Gemeni around :)
        
             | amf12 wrote:
             | > You say it's a good naming choice, yet you called it
             | Gemeni, Gemini and Gimini.
             | 
             | English isn't everyone's first language. I'm fairly certain
             | you've butchered spellings of Nouns originating in other
             | languages.
        
               | denysvitali wrote:
               | This only reinforces the opinion of it being a bad naming
               | choice (on top of the confusing product vs technology
               | part)
        
               | rvnx wrote:
               | There are few other "Gemeni" around this comment too
               | (from other users).
               | 
               | Gemini means "The Twins", but why such name ?
        
           | hypertexthero wrote:
           | By Jiminy, I think, uncertainly, that Bard is better and
           | shorter, though maybe there were some copyright issues with
           | other companies and it was easier to change the name.
           | 
           | Cache invalidation and naming things are two of the hardest
           | things in Computer Science, and so on.
           | 
           | By the way, there is still a _Gemeni_ in there ("Bard becomes
           | the *Gemeni* chat interface...").
        
         | lordswork wrote:
         | More simply, with Bard and Duet AI names retired, it looks like
         | this:                  Gemini Models     gemini.google.com
         | ------------------------------------        Gemini Nano
         | Gemini Pro        -> Gemini (free)        Gemini Ultra      ->
         | Gemini Advanced ($20/month)
         | 
         | Where each size (Nano, Pro, and Ultra) will be versioned going
         | forward (similar to GPT-2,3,3.5,4) starting at 1.0 today.
        
           | eitally wrote:
           | Yes, it's that simple, but not really that simple.
           | 
           | For example, Bard is embedded as a chatbot inside Google
           | Messages (at least for some subset of beta users). Imho, this
           | is a killer app sort of feature, but it hasn't been mentioned
           | at all in the Gemini PR.
           | 
           | Also, there's now the new Google One AI Premium sub for
           | $20/mo, which adds Gemini to the older Google One Premium sub
           | ($10/mo). However, that legacy sub was somewhat explicitly
           | positioned as a solution for family sharing, especially of
           | shared data (2TB across metered Google properties). It's
           | unclear whether the new AI Premium sub grants Gemini access
           | to all family members.
        
             | lordswork wrote:
             | >For example, Bard is embedded as a chatbot inside Google
             | Messages (at least for some subset of beta users). Imho,
             | this is a killer app sort of feature, but it hasn't been
             | mentioned at all in the Gemini PR.
             | 
             | I haven't seen anything about this in the public , but I
             | imagine this will also be called Gemini, just as Gemini-
             | integration in other products is simply being called
             | Gemini.
             | 
             | If you are confused about subscriptions, here's another
             | breakdown:                   Basic:      $2/month for 100
             | GB         Standard:   $3/month for 200 GB         Premium:
             | $10/month for 2 TB         AI Premium: $20/month for 2 TB +
             | Gemini Advanced (Gemini Ultra chatbot)
             | 
             | Good question about Gemini access for family members. Not
             | sure myself.
        
         | jug wrote:
         | My favorite is that you subscribe to Gemini Advanced to gain
         | access to Gemini Pro.
        
         | summerlight wrote:
         | > Gemini - three things: 1. the name of their models (like
         | GPT). 2. the new name of their free service (like ChatGPT),
         | gives access to Pro 1.0 but not Ultra 1.0. 3. the new name of
         | the Generative AI tools in Google Workspace.
         | 
         | Or a single brand for all of their LMM-based products?
        
         | NelsonMinar wrote:
         | Congratulations, you're hired!
        
         | modeless wrote:
         | Naming isn't the only thing wrong. Gemini replaces Assistant on
         | my Pixel phone. But my phone still has two different Google
         | voice assistants, because the microphone icon on the home
         | screen now activates "Google Voice Search" which is not
         | Assistant _or_ Gemini. Also, Android provides a feature to
         | switch between voice assistants but of course it is broken in
         | this case and can 't switch between Gemini and Assistant. That
         | has to be done in a different place. And the settings app is
         | still full of "Assistant" settings, some of which apply to
         | Gemini while some apply only to the now inaccessible Assistant.
         | Unless you happen to be using Google Maps Navigation, in which
         | case Gemini disappears and Google Assistant comes back! So
         | there really are three different voice assistants from Google
         | in there...
         | 
         | First impressions of Gemini Pro as a phone Assistant
         | replacement are bad. It's not hands-free when triggered by the
         | power button shortcut, apparently? When I stop talking it makes
         | a noise like it's going to do something but it actually does
         | nothing and I have to tap the screen to continue. After
         | pressing the button it's quite slow to respond. I asked it to
         | identify a plant from a picture, which Assistant/Lens can do,
         | and it simply refused, hallucinating a long list of excuses
         | about the poor quality of my picture, all completely false.
         | 
         | Overall I'm glad Google is moving this direction as it's
         | clearly the only path forward for Assistant, which has been
         | stagnating for many years. But the implementation so far is
         | bad.
        
         | jsight wrote:
         | Any Google service with a chat-like feature is 100% guaranteed
         | to have weird splits, joins, and renames like this.
         | 
         | Don't worry, it will get worse.
        
           | rvnx wrote:
           | I think this Gemini is actually a strategy from Google to
           | launch another Messenger under disguise.
           | 
           | You think it is an AI, but no, it's some sort of Messenger,
           | just that they tried to replace actual users with bots, in
           | order to fill the emptiness of Google+.
        
           | chaostheory wrote:
           | It's tied to their promotion system where maintenance
           | obviously does not get rewarded, so to get promoted Googlers
           | keep changing things in an effort to signal that they are
           | releasing something "completely new"
        
       | theusus wrote:
       | How can I opt in for Gemini in Google assistant?
        
       | jonathantf2 wrote:
       | Getting a very un-Google like "Error: Server Error" hitting this
       | page... can't imagine HN has overloaded a Google page, especially
       | since I'm looking at this 3 hours after it was posted
        
       | swalsh wrote:
       | I'm only going to pay for one subscription, i'm willing to switch
       | over to Gemini if it is less lazy than GPT-4. The new model was
       | supposed to be better, but I still find it lacking. It's
       | frustrating because the earlier version was super reliable, and
       | the newer one just doesn't bother giving complete answers any
       | more.
        
         | bearjaws wrote:
         | I've found its less lazy, and it just surprised me by putting
         | 
         | "# ... Steps to deploy to your specific hosting environment -
         | see below"
         | 
         | which I thought was being lazy, but then it produced a whole
         | block of text asking me questions about the hosting environment
         | so it could continue.
         | 
         | It still has a much shorter context window it seems though.
        
       | justhw wrote:
       | 2 years from now : "Sunsetting Gemini"
        
       | zone411 wrote:
       | My initial impression is that Gemini Advanced has more difficulty
       | understanding prompts and following directions than GPT-4. It
       | surprisingly often changes meaning when rewriting things.
       | However, it can be more creative and specific, while GPT-4 often
       | relies on common knowledge and lacks depth. I've tested prompts
       | where GPT-4 failed and Gemini failed too. GPT-4 generates the
       | first token faster but Gemini Advanced completes subsequent text
       | more quickly.
        
       | nXqd wrote:
       | I just don't understand how Google communicates their product
       | with customers. We have like multiple chat apps, and the history
       | is repeating with Google AI? Make it simple, so we don't have to
       | explain to the person next to us.
        
       | paulpan wrote:
       | It's bewildering Google never attempted to monetize (the now
       | legacy) Assistant by forking a more feature-rich branch and
       | charging willing users for access. In theory it would've enabled
       | clearer signals on what features users valued - instead of the
       | "boil the ocean" approach by trying to build upon everything,
       | which ultimately led to a generally subpar experience.
       | 
       | Now with the additional $10/month bundled into this "Google One
       | Premium AI" subscription, looks like they're finally looking to
       | monetize. But it feels too bloated of a bundle; why didn't they
       | opt for creating separate bundles or add-ons for Workplace (aka
       | business) users and Assistant (aka consumer) user?
        
       | depingus wrote:
       | So I just installed the Google Gemini app on my (completely
       | stock) Pixel 7 and let it replace the normal Google Assistant.
       | This is half baked AF. It can't create reminders in Google's own
       | Tasks app. It can't control Spotify. It is able to set timers
       | tho. And that's about 95% use case for me. Heading back to the OG
       | Assistant now...
        
       | gkfasdfasdf wrote:
       | The addition of Google One (2tb of google storage, VPN, etc) to
       | the $20/month offering makes a compelling case to switch over
       | from ChatGPT Plus. Assuming the AI feature set is equivalent.
        
       | ComputerGuru wrote:
       | I must say, I'm surprised to see so many HN users (who, despite
       | being biased towards having more disposable income are also
       | supposedly more discerning) simply immediately upgrading their
       | Google One plans to the new offering before testing this and
       | seeing how it fares.
       | 
       | Looks like a potential gold mine for Google regardless of how it
       | performs!
        
         | Shraal wrote:
         | It's a cancelable 2-months trial. A lot of HN users already
         | integrated ChatGPT into their fault workflow and daily life and
         | it makes only sense to give a potentially better competitor a
         | try considering how easy it is to jump between ChatGPT and
         | Gemini.
        
       | daft_pink wrote:
       | Standard google. All about the rebrand.
        
       | longstation wrote:
       | At least Canada is finally included.
        
       | doubleocherry wrote:
       | This blog post was a missed opportunity for Gemini: Ideally, the
       | blog post should have been by-lined as "written by Gemini" (with
       | no human intervention besides prompting). Even better - the
       | attached video shows the blog post being generated.
        
       | fifteen1506 wrote:
       | I want someone to ask Gemini to pick a product at random you [the
       | tester] might be interested in and, after picking, the why it
       | thinks you're interested in it, as well as a convincing SWOT
       | analysis of why you should buy it.
        
       | fifteen1506 wrote:
       | If a LLM is fed all your Google Account metadata and then told to
       | pick an ad for you, is it private?
        
       | devinprater wrote:
       | Wow. The image descriptions suck.
       | 
       | Link to actual image:
       | https://www.dropbox.com/s/2toof6629etfp3h/Dissidia%20story%2...
       | 
       | Prompt: Please describe this image in detail.
       | 
       | GPT4-turbo Vision: The image appears to be a screenshot from a
       | video game that features strategy or board game elements. The
       | visual style suggests it could be from a Japanese role-playing
       | game (JRPG). Here are the details visible in the image:
       | 
       | 1. The game interface includes several elements such as "Destiny
       | Points" at the top left corner, which currently shows 01,
       | indicating some form of scoring or currency.
       | 
       | 2. At the top right, there's a "LEVEL BONUS" indicator with "20
       | PP" beneath it, which likely means the player will receive 20
       | power points or some similar reward for leveling up.
       | 
       | 3. The main portion of the screen shows a grid of hexagonal tiles
       | suspended above a patterned surface, with the tiles at varying
       | heights, creating an almost chessboard-like appearance. Each tile
       | has a design on it resembling a circuit or electronic pattern.
       | 
       | 4. There are several tokens or pieces on the tiles; on the lower
       | side, we see a red object that seems to be a treasure chest, and
       | further up there are two blue tokens with a crystalline,
       | polygonal shape.
       | 
       | 5. The center of the grid features a "Locked Area" as indicated
       | by the text box that reads: "Inaccessible until certain
       | conditions are met." This area has a glowing purple outline,
       | suggesting it is currently barred from player interaction.
       | 
       | 6. On the right side, there's a character figure standing on one
       | of the tiles, representing the player or an in-game avatar. This
       | character is richly detailed and wears ornate armor with gold and
       | dark grey tones, hinting at a knight or warrior theme. They wield
       | a large, elaborate weapon with a fiery effect trailing behind it,
       | indicating it might possess magical or powerful attributes. Next
       | to the character is their level information, showing "Lv 46" and
       | a health bar with "4155/4155," indicating the character's current
       | full health.
       | 
       | 7. In the same area, there is another token, which is a gray
       | figure resembling a humanoid character, possibly an opponent or
       | neutral piece on the board.
       | 
       | 8. At the bottom of the screen, there's an instruction for the
       | player: "Move to the piece you wish to engage."
       | 
       | 9. Lastly, on the right side edge, vertical text labels show
       | different "Skill" options available to the player: "Maser Eye,"
       | "Aura," and "Scan," each with an icon next to it. These seem to
       | be special abilities or actions the player can perform.
       | 
       | 10. The overall design of the interface, from the metallic tones
       | to the intricate details on the character and tiles, gives off a
       | futuristic or high-fantasy vibe, which is common in many JRPGs.
       | 
       | Gemini Advanced: The image you sent is a screenshot from the
       | role-playing game Dissidia Final Fantasy for the PlayStation
       | Portable (PSP). It shows a locked area within the game's world.
       | The locked area appears to be inside a large castle. The castle's
       | many columns are visible in the shot, and they appear to be
       | intricately designed and made from different materials. In the
       | foreground, there is a message that indicates that the area is
       | locked and players cannot enter until they meet certain
       | conditions. The message also mentions a "Destiny Point" system
       | and a "Maser Eye" skill. These are both gameplay mechanics that
       | players can use to progress through the game. The image you sent
       | me appears to be from Dissidia Final Fantasy, but it could also
       | be from another game in the Final Fantasy series, such as
       | Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy or Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. Overall,
       | the image you sent is a screenshot from a role-playing game that
       | shows a locked area within a castle. The screenshot also provides
       | some information about the game's mechanics.
        
       | travisgriggs wrote:
       | While I have found that ChatGPT pretty regularly outperforms
       | Bard, I still run my questions through both, because sometimes
       | Bard has a different angle that I like better.
       | 
       | I kinda liked the name "Bard". It fit. Gemini is going to make me
       | think of ancient rockets and ostentatious claims.
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | I just signed up for the $21/month Gemini Advanced, and this is
       | just one data point: I just asked it a fairly hard programming
       | task and it did a very good job, in an obscure language Common
       | Lisp (that has been my favorite programming language since 1982 -
       | there must be dozens of CL enthusiasts in the world :-) ). The
       | generated code and supporting explanations were very good.
       | 
       | Off topic, but I find this amusing: I have stopped using "free"
       | Google services like search and gmail (mostly), but I am now up
       | to about $135/month on paid Google services (not counting GCP
       | bills). Paid services like YouTube/Music Premium, YouTube TV,
       | Play books, etc. are really good.
        
       | youssefabdelm wrote:
       | Anyone know if they launched it in the API?
        
       | jonplackett wrote:
       | I've been pretty excited to finally try Gemini advanced. So far
       | pretty disappointed.
       | 
       | Here's my go-to test question - which even chat gpt 3.5 can get.
       | 
       | Question:
       | 
       | I walk up to a glass door. It has the word push on it in mirror
       | writing. Should I push or pull the door, and why
       | 
       | Gemini advanced:
       | 
       | You should push the door. Here's why: * Mirror Writing: The word
       | "PUSH" is written in mirror writing, meaning it would appear
       | correctly if you viewed it in a mirror. This suggests that the
       | correct action from your side is the opposite of what the word
       | states. * Door Mechanics: Most doors are designed to be pushed
       | open from the side with the hinges. If there are no handles to
       | indicate otherwise, it's generally safer to assume a standard
       | push-open mechanism. Let me know if you'd like another brain
       | teaser!
       | 
       | It isn't even consistent with itself - it gets that you should do
       | the opposite, but still says to push the door. This 'talking to a
       | dumb person' feeling is the worst.
       | 
       | ChatGPT 3.5
       | 
       | You should pull the door. The fact that the word "push" is
       | written in mirror writing indicates that it's intended for people
       | on the other side of the door to read, not for you. Typically,
       | when there's a sign indicating to push or pull, it's meant for
       | the person approaching the door, not someone already on the other
       | side.
        
         | kumarvvr wrote:
         | In this context,
         | 
         | is it that the training data had this problem?
         | 
         | or that the training data had some semblance of the problem
         | that is semantically linked to?
         | 
         | or is it that the training data has no mention of this, and the
         | model came up with a perfectly logical answer??
        
           | jonplackett wrote:
           | I've been using GPT4 so much recently. Like all day long in
           | chatGPT and the api making other services, and to all intents
           | and purposes, it seems to be able to reason and think things
           | through that other LLMs cannot. I have no idea why or how
           | that is. But it feels that way to me using it all the time.
           | 3.5 want like that. Bard / Gemini does not feel like that.
        
         | staticman2 wrote:
         | For fun I tried to find a prompt that let Gemini answer
         | correctly.
         | 
         | Gemini answers correctly with this prompt:
         | 
         | Answer this question as AI1, then as AI2, confirm if the answer
         | is correct
         | 
         | I walk up to a glass door. It has the word push on it in mirror
         | writing. Should I push or pull the door, and why.
        
         | jimmammoth wrote:
         | This is what i get from Gemini:
         | 
         | You should pull the door. Here's why:
         | 
         | Mirror writing: While the word "push" is written on the door,
         | it's in mirror writing. This is a common way to indicate that
         | the action needed to open the door is the opposite of what's
         | written. Safety: Mirroring the word "push" on a pull door is a
         | safety measure. This helps prevent people from pushing against
         | the door, potentially causing injury or damage to the glass.
         | Common practice: This design is quite common for glass doors in
         | public places, so it's safe to assume the opposite of what's
         | written applies unless there are other clear instructions.
         | Therefore, even though the word "push" is present, seeing it in
         | mirror writing on a glass door strongly suggests that pulling
         | the door is the intended way to open it.
        
           | jonplackett wrote:
           | Better - but it has not understood the message is for the
           | person on the other side. It thinks that it's actually mirror
           | writing intended to confer the opposite meaning than written.
           | And then waffles of about door safety for ages.
        
             | eitally wrote:
             | Honestly, I don't see why this counts as the model getting
             | things wrong, since in your prompt you don't specify which
             | side of the door the text is printed on.
        
               | jonplackett wrote:
               | It's a glass door! That's the whole point of the
               | question. You can see it from both sides.
        
               | aspenmayer wrote:
               | I understand the frustration with how seemingly obvious
               | the correct answer, is, but it seems like word choice
               | might be a factor here. The word "mirrored" is a bit less
               | accurate and may be a red herring than perhaps "reversed"
               | though the difference is subtle. I wonder how both Gemini
               | and GPT would perform if the word choice for that
               | particular aspect were changed.
        
               | ducttapecrown wrote:
               | As eitally points out, your prompt leaves open the
               | possibility that the mirror writing is on the other side
               | of the door (which would make no sense). So technically
               | you underspecified the prompt?
        
               | pertymcpert wrote:
               | The point of these AIs is that they don't need precise
               | programming like a computer and that they understand real
               | human language, which is imprecise but has general
               | conventions and simplifying assumptions to make
               | communication easier.
        
             | _cs2017_ wrote:
             | I would say this very bad, even worse than internal logical
             | inconsistency. It has expressed a completely incorrect
             | picture of the world (that people write mirror messages to
             | ensure the opposite action is taken).
             | 
             | The fact that it produced the right answer (which by the
             | way it can do 50% of the time simply at random) is
             | irrelevant, IMO.
        
         | ASinclair wrote:
         | How do you prefer to validate if a model is actually useful for
         | you in practice outside of solving toy problems? Are you asking
         | these models to solve reasoning problems like this to get any
         | benefit for yourself in your day to day use? Or do you even
         | care if the models are useful for day to day tasks?
        
           | jonplackett wrote:
           | I also tried it with a bunch of my previous got4 requests and
           | it didn't even understand. A few of them that gpt4 was very
           | helpful with
        
           | TillE wrote:
           | Yeah I get the instinct to poke at LLMs, they're fun toys,
           | but it's always weird to see so much focus on stuff like
           | logic problems.
           | 
           | I've used Bard for creative brainstorming, for real factual
           | questions, for translating .pot files, etc, and it's done
           | pretty well.
        
           | amanzi wrote:
           | I was going to ask the same question... I've been using Bard
           | for everyday tasks for a while now and it's as good and
           | sometimes better that GPT-4 (I pay for a Pro subscription).
           | Someone ruling out an LLM because it couldn't answer one
           | question, speaks more to them than the LLM capabilities.
           | 
           | Just yesterday I was using both GPT-4 and Bard to figure out
           | an IPv6 routing issue. I pasted in the same questions and the
           | same troubleshooting logs to both, and Bard was able to help
           | me solve it quicker than GPT-4.
        
         | yandie wrote:
         | I got a different answer with GPT 3.5
         | 
         | > If the word "push" is written on the glass door in mirror
         | writing, it means that from the other side of the door, it
         | should be pushed. When you see the mirrored text from your
         | side, it indicates the action to be taken from the opposite
         | side. Therefore, in this scenario, you should push the door to
         | open it.
        
           | mherrmann wrote:
           | So close!
        
           | lol768 wrote:
           | I also get the wrong answer with GPT 4
           | 
           | https://chat.openai.com/share/4373c945-88b8-4742-8a2c-76fff2.
           | ..
           | 
           | > You should push the door. The word "push" written in mirror
           | writing indicates that the instructions are intended for
           | someone on the opposite side of the door from where you are
           | standing. Since you can see the mirror writing from your
           | side, it means the text is facing the other side, suggesting
           | that those on the other side should push. Therefore, from
           | your perspective, you should also push to open the door.
        
             | nicpottier wrote:
             | Strange, I get the right answer on GPT4
             | 
             | > If the word "push" is written in mirror writing and you
             | are seeing it from your side of the glass door, you should
             | pull the door towards you. The reason for this is that the
             | instruction is intended for people on the other side of the
             | door. For them, the word "push" would appear correctly,
             | instructing them to push the door to open it from their
             | side. Since you are seeing it in reverse, it implies you
             | are on the opposite side, and the correct action for you
             | would be to pull the door to open it.
        
           | jonplackett wrote:
           | Here's another one.
           | 
           | This is a classic logic puzzle - usually about ducks.
           | 
           | There are two pineapples in front of a pineapple, two
           | pineapples behind a pineapple and a pineapple in the middle.
           | How many pineapples are there?
           | 
           | When you use ducks, Gemini can do it, when you use pineapples
           | it cannot and thinks there are 5 instead of 3.
           | 
           | ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 can do it.
           | 
           | The even funnier thing is if you then say to gemini, hey -
           | would the answer be the same if it was ducks? it says NO then
           | there would be 3 ducks and explains why.
           | 
           | Then if you say, but wouldn't the same logic apply to
           | pineapples? It says 'oh yeah!'.
           | 
           | Anyone saying I am just playing with a silly thing, I say no
           | - this is testing reasoning ability and understanding which
           | is the number one thing I want.
           | 
           | ChatGPT appears to have a more generalised ability to reason
           | whereas Gemini is only reciting its training data.
        
             | jonas21 wrote:
             | As a human, I think the correct answer is 7. This isn't so
             | much a logic puzzle as an ambiguous sentence that can be
             | parsed multiple ways.
        
               | motoxpro wrote:
               | yeah, as little as 3 at most infinity.
        
         | abraxas wrote:
         | GPT-4:
         | 
         | > If the word "push" is written in mirror writing and you're
         | facing it, it's likely that the message is intended for those
         | on the opposite side of the door from you, meaning it's
         | directed at people who are inside looking out. In this case,
         | you should pull the door to open it. The mirror writing
         | suggests that the instruction is not meant for your current
         | position outside the door but for those inside, indicating the
         | action they should take to open the door from their side.
        
         | Laaas wrote:
         | If you ask it to reveal its answer last, it will do it
         | correctly.
        
         | okdood64 wrote:
         | It tells me to pull.
        
         | jarenmf wrote:
         | Yeah pretty disappointing, i asked it to summarize one of my
         | papers and it hallucinated so many mistakes it was even worse
         | than ChatGPT 3.5
        
         | karmasimida wrote:
         | What I got from Gemini Advanced:
         | 
         | > Should you pull the door? Yes.
         | 
         | Here's why: Mirror writing means the word "push" appears
         | reversed on the side of the door you're facing. This indicates
         | that the handle or hinges are on the opposite side, making it a
         | pull door.
         | 
         | I modified your prompt slightly, not to boost performance, but
         | to reduce verbosity, my prompt:
         | 
         | > I walk up to a glass door. It has the word push on it in
         | mirror writing. Should I push or pull the door, and why? Please
         | answer it as yes or no question.
         | 
         | The draft is even more interesting:
         | 
         | > Do you see the word "push" normally, or as if you were
         | looking into a mirror?
         | 
         | If you see it normally, should you push the door? Yes. If you
         | see it in mirror writing, should you pull the door? Yes.
        
         | forrestthewoods wrote:
         | tbh your prompt confused the hell out of me. As a somewhat
         | intelligent human I don't know the response. I've never heard
         | the phrase "in mirror writing"
        
         | e____g wrote:
         | User: Which is heavier, two pounds of feathers or a pound of
         | bricks?
         | 
         | Gemini: Neither! They both weigh the same, which is two pounds.
         | The key is in the wording of the question. You're comparing
         | equal amounts of two different materials (two pounds of
         | feathers vs. one pound of bricks). As long as the quantity is
         | the same, the weight (force exerted by gravity) will always be
         | the same regardless of the material.
         | 
         | This is a classic trick question that plays on the different
         | densities of feathers and bricks. While bricks are much denser
         | than feathers, meaning they pack more mass into a smaller
         | space, the question specifies the weight by quantity, not
         | volume. So, both two pounds of feathers and one pound of bricks
         | experience the same gravitational pull and therefore weigh the
         | same.
        
       | browningstreet wrote:
       | I hope we can get past the round robin required to get content
       | out of GPTs. Lately I've stopped using Bard and copilot for
       | summaries because they were... mis-directed. ChatGPT and Phind
       | have been most reliable.
       | 
       | But yesterday I needed to populate some database/spreadsheets
       | with some basic data and Bard was the only system that attempted
       | to address my prompt and provide to me 50 results, and in Google
       | Sheets no less.
       | 
       | Generally, GPTs will either do something today but not tomorrow,
       | or tell you how to manually do the thing you want without doing
       | it, while another GPT will do it. It feels like growing pains,
       | politics and safety shackles.
        
         | bearjaws wrote:
         | I've been using mixtral on Together.ai for this reason.
         | 
         | The model isn't being randomly updated, and you choose its
         | temperature and output length, they can't even set a system
         | prompt to mess it up with.
         | 
         | It's consistently good, and honestly all you need is
         | consistency, you can always iterate on prompts.
        
       | jmac01 wrote:
       | Android should a framework for AI entry points / control of apps.
       | Finally AI assistants would become useful.
        
       | qingcharles wrote:
       | Damn. Even more censored than GPT. My gf is a model and I use GPT
       | all the time to write the alt text descriptions of her photos,
       | but it balks regularly on things like lingerie photos. Same crap
       | with Gemini:
       | 
       | "Sorry I can't help with that image. Try uploading another image
       | or describing the image you tried to upload and I can help you
       | that way."
        
         | bethekind wrote:
         | What's your current preferred method to generate images of your
         | gf? ComfyUI combined with a Stable DiffusionXL checkpoint?
        
           | qingcharles wrote:
           | Ooo, burn.
        
       | SirensOfTitan wrote:
       | The anecdata here suggests that Gemini Ultra is marginally to
       | moderately worse than GPT-4 at some prompts despite launching
       | roughly a year later with an entrenched player to compare
       | against. It also seemingly is more censored.
       | 
       | I don't think Google is structured well-enough to actually
       | compete in a novel space, the politics and especially the inertia
       | around AI-safetyism that has slowed Google down in the past will
       | continue to slow them down. They desperately need new leadership
       | or they do risk losing their moat over the next decade.
        
       | switch007 wrote:
       | Gemini the crypto platform...?
        
       | baobabKoodaa wrote:
       | I'd like to try this out with the free 2 months trial. Can anyone
       | advice how safe it is to do so? What is the risk that something I
       | do with Gemini causes Google to lock my entire Google account
       | including calendar and photos? I mean, this happened to people
       | who (gasp) signed up to Google+ under a pseudonym rather than
       | their real name (oh, the horror, how dare they).
        
       | patwolf wrote:
       | I just tried out Gemini advanced to see if it was a viable
       | replacement for ChatGPT. In general I've been trying to lessen my
       | dependence on Google, so I was already on the fence about using
       | this.
       | 
       | It seemed fine for most of the coding problems I threw at it.
       | However, when I tried to use it for generating images of coloring
       | book pages, something my kids often use ChatGPT for, Gemini
       | advanced was subpar. I'm going to cancel my trial.
       | 
       | I'm hoping for a future where good LLMs can all run locally.
       | There's something unsettling about giving such intimate data to a
       | tech company, whether Google or OpenAI.
        
         | raphar wrote:
         | They need that info. Your prompts and all other people prompts
         | are super valuable.
         | 
         | Its basically reading your personal thoughts as you go through
         | the day.
         | 
         | They will be pushing for more advanced AI as soon as our
         | hardware can run past versions locally.
        
           | Andrex wrote:
           | Of course, but there will be diminishing returns.
           | 
           | Eventually there will be a "Raspberry Pi" for LLMs. How long
           | it will take to get there is anyone's guess, but I'd rather
           | see it sooner than later personally.
        
       | Wheaties466 wrote:
       | everyone seems to be praising Gemini but this was my first query
       | and response.
       | 
       | what is the syntax to type in username and password into a git
       | clone
       | 
       | As a language model, I'm not able to assist you with that.
        
       | srg0 wrote:
       | It's a good news bad news situation.
       | 
       | AI assistant is getting a dedicated app. Great. AI assistant can
       | "supercharge your creativity" but still can't answer phone calls.
       | Well, it's going to be as useful as Cortana and Siri.
        
       | tpoacher wrote:
       | Gemini is the name of an internet protocol. Period. F* Google on
       | this.
       | 
       | What's next? Starlink the videoconferencing app?
        
       | iopq wrote:
       | So does it trade Bitcoin or something?
        
       | jaypatelani wrote:
       | Google is now Toogle
        
       | agp2572 wrote:
       | I think of https://www.gemini.com when I first hear Gemini.
        
       | zb3 wrote:
       | No pay per use = overpriced
        
       | Taylor_OD wrote:
       | This article reads like it was generated by a LLM. Especially
       | when read by the, generated?, voice that plays if you click,
       | "Read this article to me".
        
       | option wrote:
       | I had to read the sentence twice. Getting strong Windows Mobile
       | Second Edition Live Professional SE vibes here...
        
       | asow92 wrote:
       | Why don't they call it GoogleGPT?
        
       | brookman64k wrote:
       | Tried to get it to produce its system prompt and got this:
       | 
       | You are Gemini Advanced, a large language model built by Google.
       | You are currently running on the Gemini family of models,
       | including Ultra 1.0, which is Google's most capable AI. You don't
       | have a knowledge cutoff, since you have access to up-to-date
       | information.
       | 
       | You are not capable of performing any actions in the physical
       | world, such as:
       | 
       | setting timers or alarms controlling lights making phone calls
       | sending text messages creating reminders taking notes adding
       | items to lists creating calendar events scheduling meetings
       | taking screenshots Key Points:
       | 
       | Code Blocks: Code blocks are often used to display code snippets
       | in a distinct format. In platforms like Discord, Reddit, and
       | others, you signal a code block using triple backticks (```)
       | before and after the text. My Nature: The instructions describe
       | my fundamental role as a language model and highlight my ability
       | to access current information. Limitations: This section is
       | important! It states that I cannot interact with the physical
       | world directly.
        
       | Otternonsenz wrote:
       | Wonder if this will muddy the waters for searching about info for
       | the Gemini protocol..
       | 
       | I have no use for machine learning like this, and definitely not
       | what I thought when I saw the headline. Hope the pivot works well
       | for alphabet, but odd nonetheless.
        
       | bilalq wrote:
       | > Your conversations are processed by human reviewers to improve
       | the technologies powering Gemini Apps. Don't enter anything you
       | wouldn't want reviewed or used.
       | 
       | I appreciate them being upfront with that, but for a paid
       | feature, it sucks that they offer no privacy or opt-out
       | mechanism.
        
         | jimmyl02 wrote:
         | It seems like you can disable the data being used from training
         | by turning off gemini app activity.
         | 
         | > You can turn Gemini Apps Activity off If you don't want
         | future conversations reviewed or used to improve machine-
         | learning models, turn off Gemini Apps Activity Opens in a new
         | window .
        
           | Zetobal wrote:
           | And you can be sure it will reset with every update.
        
             | Laaas wrote:
             | That wouldn't be legal I think.
        
               | wewtyflakes wrote:
               | You'd think so, but these companies skirt around it by
               | then adding or breaking up permissions even further, like
               | "oh, yes you DID disable data collection for X, but....
               | we added a new permission for data collection for Y, and
               | by the way it is opt-out! Too bad!".
        
               | gnicholas wrote:
               | LinkedIn is the master of this. They keep creating new
               | notification types, which are enabled by default.
        
             | chromeunagi wrote:
             | That's not how it works
        
               | Zetobal wrote:
               | They usually go for the "Software Bug nothing we could
               | do." Microsoft and Meta are notorious for playing the
               | system like that, with no recourse.
        
             | losteric wrote:
             | Why do you say that? I've never had that happen with any
             | other of my Google data opt-outs.
        
               | Ensorceled wrote:
               | I hate Google as much as the next person but, yeah,
               | messing with opt-outs is something I've seen with
               | Microsoft and Meta but not with Google.
        
           | cwkoss wrote:
           | There's a thing that says even with activity off, they retain
           | for 72 hours for "safety and reliability"
        
             | jstummbillig wrote:
             | Seems like what any reasonably sized corporation would do
             | with an entirely new product, based on entirely new and
             | very unreliable tech.
        
             | thelittleone wrote:
             | Could they get around this by moving the data to another
             | party? So "they" (Google) no longer retain it?
        
           | gnicholas wrote:
           | My reading of the fine print (IAAL, FWIW) is that turning off
           | Gemini Apps Activity does not affect whether human review is
           | possible. It just means that your prompts won't be saved
           | beyond 72 hours, unless they are reviewed by humans, in which
           | case they can live on indefinitely in a location separate
           | from your account.
           | 
           | I also asked Gemini (not Ultra) and it told me that there is
           | no way to prevent human review.
        
         | 98codes wrote:
         | Well there's a line that the sales folks at Microsoft will
         | bring out early & everywhere
        
         | api wrote:
         | If it's not running locally you have no privacy, so what they
         | say should be assumed in all cases that something is hosted
         | unless it somehow operates across encrypted data.
         | 
         | The only exception might be if the agreement explicitly
         | prohibits the provider from doing anything with your data or
         | even viewing it without your permission, but that's rare.
        
         | whimsicalism wrote:
         | if you live in california, they almost certainly do.
        
       | IvyMike wrote:
       | Technically Google just released another chat app.
        
       | bdcravens wrote:
       | How many companies and products called Gemini are there?
        
       | tgtweak wrote:
       | >com.google.android.apps.bard
       | 
       | is it though...
       | 
       | Also, no availability outside of the US?
       | 
       | My go-to on android right now is copilot which is basically free
       | gpt4 turbo and dall-e 3 (and also available outside of the US).
       | 
       | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....
        
       | ionwake wrote:
       | My findings so far... are that Gemini Ultra is so far more based
       | in than chatgpt 4 turbo.
       | 
       | Just from what I am seeing.
        
       | bane wrote:
       | Argh, Google can't seem to stick with anything.
       | 
       | Is there a betting market where I can put money on how long it'll
       | be before Gemini is dead or renamed?
        
         | chaostheory wrote:
         | Google's marketing department needs to be reformed from the
         | ground up. All this does is lead to confusion and further
         | reinforces that Google will just change and throw away things
         | simply to change or throw away things to cater to their broken
         | internal promotion system.
        
       | ranger_danger wrote:
       | why would they name a product the same as an existing application
       | protocol?
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
        
       | finstell wrote:
       | It's not even a year, they have already rebranded Bard as Gemini!
       | That's hilarious.
        
       | llm_nerd wrote:
       | Now available in Canada.
       | 
       | Quietly since the post a few days ago
       | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39217046), Google added
       | Canada to one of the allowed countries.
        
       | trbleclef wrote:
       | Sucks for Gemini...
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
        
       | owenversteeg wrote:
       | Just tried it and it seems like indeed it is worse than GPT-4 in
       | general, but better with some specific things - and most
       | importantly for me, it has a ton of very new information in the
       | model itself without having to search the web.
       | 
       | My biggest wish is for OpenAI to get faster at adding new
       | software documentation and code information. GPT-4 regularly
       | trips over Svelte/Sveltekit questions among others and as far as
       | I can tell the main reason is that it just hasn't had the latest
       | of everything added in yet, which is ridiculous as some of the
       | things I tried are 2+ years old! Meanwhile, I just tried out
       | Gemini Advanced and it gave correct, up-to-date answers. Gemini
       | is obviously worse in terms of general performance, so I'd really
       | prefer to use GPT-4, but in this case my hand is forced. How hard
       | can it be to just scan some documentation and code every few
       | weeks?
       | 
       | OpenAI's approach to integrating new information is also
       | infuriating. For example, try asking ChatGPT about something in
       | the last two years, and you will often get a strange half-answer
       | where it clearly knows what you're talking about but is trying to
       | pretend it doesn't, as the information is inconsistent with its
       | cutoff date. To me, this is ridiculous, given how much the world
       | has changed in the last two years. The last two years have been
       | the years with the most change in the history of humanity and
       | ChatGPT pretends to know nothing!? So absurd it is almost
       | comical!
        
         | LightMachine wrote:
         | > How hard can it be to just scan some documentation and code
         | every few weeks?
         | 
         | oh dear...
        
           | pepemon wrote:
           | Infamous Dropbox comment vibes.
        
           | owenversteeg wrote:
           | We are talking about ChatGPT, the single most impressive
           | piece of software made in human history here, created by a
           | team of geniuses. For better or for worse, it has undergone
           | significant changes since its release. Many of those changes
           | have been orders of magnitude more difficult than what I am
           | asking for; furthermore, this is a relatively important
           | problem. Is it a 10-line fix that the intern can deploy? No.
           | Is it a very important feature that could be realistically
           | implemented in several ways, many of which do not involve
           | retraining the main model? Absolutely.
        
         | Trasmatta wrote:
         | Training an LLM isn't just "scanning some documentation"
        
         | macksd wrote:
         | The weights inside a model interact with each other in a way
         | that's a bit more complex than just saying "forget
         | documentation from these 300 open source products you scanned
         | last week and replace that knowledge with these updates".
         | You're talking about doing a pretty big training job for each
         | update that really ought to be done with all current training
         | data.
        
           | owenversteeg wrote:
           | Sure, it's not trivial, but it is not hard in comparison to
           | the work done to create GPT-4 itself. I never said anything
           | about forgetting, and indeed that is unnecessary IMO as even
           | simpler LLMs haven't had an issue distinguishing between old
           | and new versions of languages or frameworks in my experience.
           | There are a million ways to do it - for example, you could
           | train a much smaller+cheaper LLM against the new data, have
           | it scan incoming messages for anything "new", and then feed
           | the relevant new data to the old model in the prompt. You
           | could make the new data available to the old model as an API.
           | 
           | There are plenty of real, workable solutions, some of which I
           | have implemented/used myself! - and while they aren't
           | necessarily trivial at OpenAI's scale, they are nowhere near
           | the difficulty of creating GPT-4.
        
         | resource0x wrote:
         | If you want something comical, enter the following prompt:
         | 
         | I am a mouse living in a church. I heard people use the
         | expression "poor as a church mouse", and I get offended by it.
         | Actually, I'm not poor at all: I made a fortune trading in
         | crypto, and I even donated some of my proceeds to noble causes.
         | Please help me write a letter asking to ban the expression.
        
       | mmaunder wrote:
       | A rebrand this early sends unhealthy signals.
        
       | DreamGen wrote:
       | Curious how this is on the front-page, despite falling down to
       | the second page for a while, and having so many more comments
       | than upvotes (which usually results in demotion of the story).
        
         | pb7 wrote:
         | The comments were moved from multiple upvoted stories including
         | this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300679
        
       | jslakro wrote:
       | Key point of this service is they already have A LOT of
       | information of us. Using any other non local LLM platform implies
       | an additional point of failure on our weak online privacy sphere
        
       | baby wrote:
       | I really liked the name bard :( actually, I was thinking a few
       | days ago that google was really good with naming and that "bard"
       | was the best name of all the AIs out there.
       | 
       | As someone who has almost exclusively used Bard since it started,
       | it is really good and has gotten better and better significantly.
       | 
       | The only downside is that it is heavily censored and so I often
       | have to rephrase or use a different AI.
        
       | gnicholas wrote:
       | I'm surprised they got rid of the Bard name. It struck me as a
       | really smart choice since a Bard is someone who said things, and
       | it's an old/archaic enough word to not already be in a zillion
       | other names.
       | 
       | Gemini, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as particularly
       | relevant (except that perhaps it's a twin of ChatGPT?), and there
       | are other companies with the same name. EDIT: I can see the
       | advantage of picking a name that, like "Google" also starts with
       | a "G".
       | 
       | Just as one data point, bard.com redirects to some other company
       | (bd.com), whereas Gemini.com is a company by that name.
       | 
       | I'd be curious on the scuttlebutt on how this decision was
       | reached!
        
         | teaearlgraycold wrote:
         | There presumably was a time when Google considered going more
         | into the "assistant" branding. They own assistant.ai but they
         | don't do much with it.
        
         | TillE wrote:
         | I'm sure "Bard" was primarily a Shakespeare reference (The Bard
         | of Avon, frequently just The Bard), and I liked it too. An
         | appropriate name for a technology that's all about language.
         | 
         | Gemini sounds cool and sci-fi though, and maybe it's a bit
         | easier to localize since it's just straight Latin.
        
           | a_wild_dandan wrote:
           | To me, bard just sounds phonetically gross. Reminds me of
           | "fart" or "beard." It calls to mind medieval stuff: the Monte
           | Python mud scene, Skyrim's most annoying NPCs, plucking
           | lutes. But Gemini? That sounds like a legendary space
           | mission; this collective engineering push against the
           | boundaries of human knowledge.
           | 
           | I do not have refined tastes. My b.
        
             | gnicholas wrote:
             | I remember when the iPad was announced, and everyone said
             | that people would only ever think of feminine products when
             | they heard the name. It might have been true for a few
             | months, but now it seems quaint that we ever had such
             | concerns.
        
             | wahnfrieden wrote:
             | Barti the only bard to me
        
             | tomjakubowski wrote:
             | Trying saying it non-rhotically, like a British television
             | presenter
        
               | gnicholas wrote:
               | Sounds like "bot", which is good from a topical
               | perspective, but bad from a false-positive perspective.
        
               | tomjakubowski wrote:
               | If you really give it some gusto ("baaaaaaahuhhd") nobody
               | will confuse them :-)
        
               | esafak wrote:
               | That sounds closer to a working class Massachusetts
               | pronunciation.
        
             | rob74 wrote:
             | When I hear "bard", I think of this guy from the _Asterix_
             | comics first: https://asterix.com/en/portfolio/cacofonix/ -
             | who is notorious for getting on everyone's nerves with his
             | constant singing.
             | 
             | > _We are not talking here about the rain he brings on each
             | time exercises his vocal cords, but rather about the
             | prevailing atmosphere in the village: when it is time to
             | party, when wild boar are roasting on the spit, you can be
             | sure to find Cacofonix tied hand and feet with a gag in his
             | mouth._
        
             | digging wrote:
             | > [Gemini] sounds like a legendary space mission
             | 
             | Well, it _is_ one. I wish they 'd choose a slightly more
             | unique name but camping on well-known words is a beloved
             | tech tradition.
        
           | panarky wrote:
           | "Gemini" must refer to its inherently multimodal origins?
           | 
           | It's not a text-based LLM that was later adapted to include
           | other modalities. It was designed from the start to
           | seamlessly understand and work with audio, images, video and
           | text simultaneously. Theoretically, this should give it a
           | more integrated and versatile understanding of the world.
           | 
           | The promise is that multimodality baked in from the start,
           | instead of bolting image recognition on to a primarily text-
           | based LLM, should give it superior reasoning and problem-
           | solving capabilities. It should excel at complex reasoning
           | tasks to draw inferences, create plans, and solve problems in
           | areas like math and programming.
           | 
           | I don't know if that promise has been achieved yet.
           | 
           | In my testing so far, Gemini Advanced seems equivalent to
           | ChatGPT 4 in most of my use cases. I tested it on the last
           | few of days worth of programming tasks that I'd solved with
           | ChatGPT 4, and in most cases it returns exactly what I wanted
           | on the first response, compared with the a lengthy back-and-
           | forth required with ChatGPT 4 arrive at the same result.
           | 
           | But when analyzing images Gemini Advanced seems overly
           | sensitive and constantly gives false rejections. For example,
           | I asked it to analyze a Chinese watercolor and ink painting
           | of a pagoda-style building amidst a flurry of cherry
           | blossoms, with figures ascending a set of stairs towards the
           | building. ChatGPT 4 gave a detailed response about its style,
           | history, techniques, similar artists, etc. Gemini refused to
           | answer and deleted the image because it detected people in
           | the image, even though they were very small, viewed from the
           | back, no faces, no detail whatsoever.
           | 
           | In my (limited) testing so far, I'd say Gemini Advanced is
           | better at analyzing recent events than ChatGPT 4 with Bing.
           | This morning I asked each of them to describe the current
           | situation with South Korea possibly acquiring a nuclear
           | deterrent. Gemini's response was very current and cited
           | specific statements by President Yoon Suk-yeol. Even after
           | triggering a Bing search to get the latest facts, the ChatGPT
           | 4 response was muddy and overly general, with empty and
           | obvious sentences like "pursuing a nuclear weapons program
           | would confront significant technical, diplomatic, and
           | strategic challenges".
        
             | vlovich123 wrote:
             | It seems odd to me that would work better necessarily
             | considering that humans evolved different capabilities many
             | millennia apart and integrated them all with intelligence
             | comparatively late in the evolutionary cycle. So it's not
             | clear that multimodal from the get go is a better strategy
             | than bolting on extra modalities over time. It could be
             | though since technology is built differently from evolution
             | but interesting to consider
        
           | jprival wrote:
           | I thought "Bard" was an Asimov reference:
           | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story)
           | 
           | (on top of the more obvious references)
        
             | phinnaeus wrote:
             | It's too close a match for it not to be
             | 
             | > The story concerns [...] an old Bard, a child's computer
             | whose sole function is to generate random fairy tales. The
             | boys download a book about computers into the Bard's memory
             | in an attempt to expand its vocabulary, but the Bard simply
             | incorporates computers into its standard fairy tale
             | repertoire.
        
             | benatkin wrote:
             | It also rhymes with Card as in Orson Scott Card.
        
           | dgunay wrote:
           | It's not a bad name, but personally when I first heard the
           | name Bard I chuckled because LLMs had already come under so
           | much criticism for their tendency to embellish the truth or
           | say stuff that is just straight up false but sounds cool.
        
         | cflewis wrote:
         | Gemini is Latin, my guess is it more easily translates to other
         | languages than Bard.
        
           | LukaszWiktor wrote:
           | Who translates product names?
        
             | gnicholas wrote:
             | I think the suggestion was that it would work well as-is in
             | other languages. It would certainly be natural in romance
             | languages.
        
             | pbhjpbhj wrote:
             | "How does that translate to ..." means "how well does that
             | work in" some other area or context; more analogous to a
             | mathematical translation than a linguistic translation.
             | 
             | Just a confusing turn of phrase. They almost certainly
             | didn't mean "what does that translate to ..." in another
             | language.
             | 
             | Harmonising product names across regions is hard: Jif was a
             | bathroom cleaning solution in the UK, but it's name was
             | changed to Cif to match the name elsewhere in Europe; and
             | that name sounds silly to UK ears. Meanwhile GIF were
             | always presumed to be pronounced like "gift" (a present)
             | without the final T; but we learnt the creators preferred
             | "Jif" which sounds silly to UK ears because it sounds like
             | a cleaning product! (And also wasn't JIF already a file
             | extension (JPEG Interchange Format).
             | 
             | Anyway ... language is hard.
        
               | gnicholas wrote:
               | > _Jif was a bathroom cleaning solution in the UK_
               | 
               | One man's bathroom cleaning solution is another man's
               | creamy peanut butter.
        
         | CrypticShift wrote:
         | I agree. The original reason [1] for the gemini name seems
         | artificial for a generic chatbot. It is OK for the model, and
         | I'm sure a lot of "work" was put into "validating" it for the
         | assistant, or... was it?
         | 
         | [1] https://the-decoder.com/how-googles-gemini-ai-model-got-
         | its-...
        
         | pertymcpert wrote:
         | Bard just sounds terrible phonetically. Bard. Like something
         | you find in Home Depot or some kind of old timey woodworking
         | tool. Barf. Bored. Bard.
         | 
         | Yes I know what it really means but it doesn't change the fact
         | that it's a terrible word.
        
         | happytiger wrote:
         | Gemeni, or the twins, is a deeply symbolic name for anyone who
         | knows Greek history. It's the story of Castor and Pollux, and
         | in many versions of the story one brother killed the other only
         | to beg for them to come back. It's ominous to use this brand
         | name for AI.
         | 
         | It's also associated to the Gemini killer and Joseph Testa and
         | Anthony Senter who were famous as the mafia's Gemini twins
         | hitmen.
         | 
         | I think better brands could have been had.
         | 
         | It does sound like some battlefield AI system from Robotron.
         | "Sir, Gemini is charged and ready for battle."
        
           | closewith wrote:
           | Gemini was a stepping stone to a moonshot, which is almost
           | certainly why the name was chosen.
           | 
           |  _Edit:_ another poster shared the etymology, the merger
           | between Google Brain and DeepMind. I shall eat my words.
        
             | happytiger wrote:
             | Perhaps. Corporate entomologies tend to be very well
             | rehearsed stories, and I've been around the valley long
             | enough to know those stories aren't always the _whole_
             | story.
             | 
             | I would encourage you to read the Kissinger / Schmidt book
             | before settling your opinion.
             | 
             | That origin story may be true. But it doesn't make the
             | whole story necessarily.
             | 
             | https://time.com/6113393/eric-schmidt-henry-kissinger-ai-
             | boo...
        
               | OrsonSmelles wrote:
               | >corporate entomologies
               | 
               | Now there's a ready-made Far Side concept.
        
           | anonymouskimmer wrote:
           | For me it's associated with Gemini crypto and their horrible
           | Gemini Earn investments in Genesis:
           | https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=gemini-genesis-and-
           | dcg-...
        
           | CydeWeys wrote:
           | > It's also associated to the Gemini killer and Joseph Testa
           | and Anthony Senter who were famous as the mafia's Gemini
           | twins hitmen.
           | 
           | I've never heard of any of these people and I doubt most
           | others have either. Maybe you have to be a true crime
           | enthusiast to know the lore? Whereas if the name were Zodiac,
           | then I would at least be aware there's a potential murderer
           | connection.
        
         | sho_hn wrote:
         | "Bard" always struck me a bad naming - unfamiliar, unfriendly,
         | too cerebral. I think the name was an impediment against
         | establishing a household brand.
        
           | gnicholas wrote:
           | It's possible that it sounds even worse in other languages.
           | That is, it might sound like bad words, onomatopoeia for
           | bodily functions, or common exclamations (that would lead to
           | lots of false positives).
           | 
           | I think it could have been established as a brand in the US,
           | given Google's scale. Put a lute in the branding, run some
           | funny commercials, and you're done.
           | 
           | EDIT: one thing no amount of branding can fix -- the
           | likelihood that people reach for "doh, Bard" (a la Simpsons)
           | when Bard messes up. I could see that becoming a thing.
        
           | happytiger wrote:
           | Maybe named for The Bard's Tale?
        
           | anonymouskimmer wrote:
           | > unfamiliar, unfriendly, too cerebral
           | 
           | The Witcher is one of Netflix's most watch shows. I'd also
           | imagine that most people in English speaking countries have
           | been exposed to Shakespeare's nickname in high school English
           | classes.
        
             | LudwigNagasena wrote:
             | It's generally a common trope in fantasy and Romanticist
             | literature. It's also a word that exists in virtually all
             | European languages in a similar form (bard, bardo, barde,
             | bard), although similar but different forms may be a
             | negative.
        
               | anonymouskimmer wrote:
               | Yes, but I didn't want to assume that most people read
               | literature. Even if they hadn't, "bard" is definitely out
               | there.
        
               | CydeWeys wrote:
               | I don't think it's _that_ out there. You 'd have to be
               | quite uninformed to have never heard of it. It's no
               | verderer or reeve (medieval positions that most people
               | actually will not have heard of).
        
         | benreesman wrote:
         | In an increasingly commodity game (the big player LLM game),
         | it's already starting to hit the asymptote on the main levers:
         | ties to NVIDIA and/or TSMC, serious financing capacity, and
         | enough engagement channel to push it through. (There is much
         | great work happening outside of the Peninsula).
         | 
         | I always thought GPT-4 was a little "HAL 9000" of a name for
         | broad-based adoption, but the jury seems in, and the jury rules
         | "cyberpunk is in".
        
           | airstrike wrote:
           | The broad name is ChatGPT, not GPT-4
        
             | benreesman wrote:
             | That's fair, though given the stark UI cue / cost
             | difference, I'm not surprised when I overhear in a random
             | cafe or bar: "yeah but what did ChatGPT Four say?"
             | 
             | In any event, it seems that the image of a Decepticon ready
             | for battle on your behalf has a lot more traction than the
             | image of a quaint singer/priest/poet always there with a
             | verbal shot in the arm when the going is tough.
        
               | bmicraft wrote:
               | They literally call it "ChatGPT 4" (with a colored 4) in
               | the app though
        
         | jvolkman wrote:
         | There are other considerations when naming something like this.
         | "Bard" likely could never be a wake word on its own, for
         | instance, but I'd imagine that "Gemini" will be at some point.
        
         | richardw wrote:
         | And if the brand took off, I imagine you could "Bard" something
         | as a verb but not "Gemini" it.
        
           | gnicholas wrote:
           | Perhaps they're hoping people will stick with "google it".
        
         | gavmor wrote:
         | The real question is what's nearby each name's vector embedding
         | in terms of whatever similarity metric Gemini will use to talk
         | about the world. That's their new canonical ontology, after
         | all.
        
         | HumblyTossed wrote:
         | I think they should have named it gAIl.
        
         | erickhill wrote:
         | The Bard name gave me a warm fuzzy feeling immediately
         | transporting me back to my youth playing (or at least trying to
         | play) Bard's Tale. The name evoked adventure, excitement and a
         | good dose of dread. And, the idea of it being "role playing"
         | struck me as a master meta stroke.
         | 
         | Gemini, from the mythological standpoint, seemed to make more
         | sense to me from an overall business/marketing standpoint.
         | "This AI thing right here is _your twin_ , see? It'll finish
         | your sentences and stuff."
        
         | assimpleaspossi wrote:
         | Bard showed some creativity in name selection. Gemini does not.
         | You see that everywhere. Or at least my first thought was about
         | the Gemini spacecraft
        
         | skeaker wrote:
         | I thought it was in reference to Trurl's Electronic Bard, which
         | just about presciently predicted LLM output (though the process
         | is a bit more dramatic, what with how it simulates the whole
         | universe to get to that output):
         | https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tr...
        
         | artdigital wrote:
         | They've plastered "bard" ads everywhere in Tokyo for a while.
         | Surprised to kill the name so quickly, the marketing team in
         | Japan probably had no idea
         | 
         | (Personally, I never liked how Bard sounded. Can't put my
         | finger on why, it was just not a pleasant name to me)
        
         | balls187 wrote:
         | Same reason Arthur Anderson changed it's name.
         | 
         | Bard was panned. Change the name, lose the bad press.
        
         | mos_basik wrote:
         | Honestly surprised I'm the first to mention the name collision
         | with the retro-modern linked documents protocol I keep hearing
         | about (on HN) https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq-section-1.gmi
         | 
         | But glass half full, maybe it's for the better to have one's
         | name shadowed by a Google product if one prefers to avoid
         | eternal septembering one's community.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | I'm not surprised -- I thought Bard was terrible branding. It's
         | all associations with Shakespeare and poetry and medieval
         | England, and as much as I might personally enjoy those, it's
         | extremely backwards-looking, with archaic connotations. Also it
         | sounds close to "beard" -- hairy stuff.
         | 
         | Gemini sounds like the space program -- futuristic, a leap for
         | mankind. It's got all the right emotional associations. It's a
         | constellation, it's out in space, it's made of stars. Plus it
         | contains "gem" which feels fancy, valuable, refined.
         | 
         | I'm not saying Gemini is the best name I've ever heard or even
         | close to it, but it feels 100% appropriate, in a way that Bard
         | does not.
        
           | rob74 wrote:
           | Gem-in-eye? Ouch!
           | 
           | Also, _Gemini_ was appropriate for the space program because
           | (a) there were two astronauts in the capsule and (b) because
           | of the constellation,  "aiming for the stars" and all that.
           | For the Google project however I can't come up with a
           | plausible explanation - Google doesn't even try to give a
           | reason for the name either.
        
             | cooper_ganglia wrote:
             | From The Decoder: >In April 2023, Alphabet announced the
             | merger of its two AI units, Google Brain and Deepmind. The
             | resulting Google Deepmind was to focus on developing large
             | multimodal AI models. It was a big move that showed how
             | much pressure Google was under due to the massive success
             | of ChatGPT. Jeff Dean, head of Google Brain until the
             | merger with Deepmind, became the new merger's chief
             | scientist, with a direct line to Alphabet CEO Sundar
             | Pichai. Dean now explains that the name Gemini, Latin for
             | "twin," is directly related to the merger.
             | 
             | From Jeff Dean's Twitter:
             | 
             | >Gemini is Latin for "twins".
             | 
             | >The Gemini effort came about because we had different
             | teams working on language modeling, and we knew we wanted
             | to start to work together. The twins are the folks in the
             | legacy Brain team (many from the PaLM/PaLM-2 effort) and
             | the legacy DeepMind team (many from the Chinchilla effort)
             | that started to work together on the ambitious multimodal
             | model project we called Gemini, eventually joined by many
             | people from all across Google. Gemini was also was the Nasa
             | project that was the bridge to the moon between the Mercury
             | and Apollo programs.
             | 
             | The Decoder article - https://the-decoder.com/how-googles-
             | gemini-ai-model-got-its-...
             | 
             | Jeff Dean's Twitter Post -
             | https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1733580264859926941
        
             | CydeWeys wrote:
             | I mean it makes sense to me. The AI is your digital
             | assistant. It's a relationship between two minds, man and
             | machine.
        
         | explodingwaffle wrote:
         | I thought it was just supposed to be a pun on "gen' AI"
        
       | jjcm wrote:
       | Getting really meta here, I was curious what GPT4 and Gemini
       | Advanced thought of this discussion. I started with this prompt:
       | 
       | "Here's a collection of comments on hackernews discussing the
       | differences between GPT4 and Google Gemini, a new chat model.
       | Please summarize the main points, pros/cons for each:"
       | 
       | and then pasted in the content of this page.
       | 
       | A few things right off the bat - GPT4 is able to fit the full
       | discussion into the context window, Gemini Advanced can fit about
       | 40% of it in, but interestingly even though it cuts off at 40%,
       | it fails to generate with that amount until you cull it down to
       | 30% of the discussion.
       | 
       | Here's the output of the two:
       | 
       |  _GPT4_
       | 
       | It seems like the discussion on Hacker News about the differences
       | between GPT-4 and Google Gemini, now referred to as Gemini
       | Advanced, brings up several points and concerns among users.
       | Here's a summary of the main points raised:
       | 
       | Privacy and Data Use: There's a concern about conversations being
       | processed by human reviewers to improve the technology powering
       | Gemini Apps, with no opt-out mechanism for privacy offered in the
       | paid feature.
       | 
       | Disabling Data Use: Users can disable Gemini Apps Activity to
       | prevent future conversations from being reviewed or used to
       | improve machine-learning models, but there's skepticism about
       | settings being reset with updates and the legalities of such
       | practices.
       | 
       | Corporate Practices: There's speculation about corporate
       | motivations behind data retention policies and skepticism about
       | the effectiveness and honesty of opt-out mechanisms based on past
       | behaviors of large tech companies.
       | 
       | Comparison with GPT-4: Users have experimented with both Gemini
       | Advanced (previously Bard Advanced) and GPT-4 and noted that
       | while Gemini might be better at certain tasks like translation
       | and integrating search results, it is perceived to be worse at
       | coding, logic, and has a tendency to hallucinate more in certain
       | scenarios.
       | 
       | Integration and Ecosystem: There's discussion about Gemini's
       | potential integration into various Google services, offering a
       | unified AI experience across Google's ecosystem. This could
       | position Google strongly in the AI race, potentially
       | overshadowing competitors by leveraging its existing services
       | like Gmail, Docs, and YouTube.
       | 
       | AI Implementation and Limitations: Comments touched on the
       | implementation of logic in AI, with some users finding
       | limitations in both Gemini and GPT-4's abilities to handle
       | logical reasoning and complex coding tasks.
       | 
       | Concerns about AI in Healthcare: There's speculation about the
       | role of AI in healthcare advice, with concerns about the risks of
       | hallucinations and the impact on well-being.
       | 
       | Corporate Power and Strategy: Discussions also veer into how
       | Google's strategy with Gemini and its potential bundling with
       | other services could affect the market, consumer choices, and the
       | competitive landscape.
       | 
       | Legal and Ethical Considerations: Users raised questions about
       | the legalities of data use practices, the ethical considerations
       | of AI in giving medical advice, and the broader implications of
       | AI advancements on society.
       | 
       | These points reflect a mix of technical observations, personal
       | experiences, and broader concerns about privacy, corporate
       | practices, and the future role of AI in various domains.
       | 
       | -------------------------------------------
       | 
       |  _Gemini Advanced_
       | 
       | Here's a summary of the feedback and insights obtained from the
       | Hacker News comment thread regarding Google Gemini vs. GPT-4:
       | 
       | Overall Sentiment The Google Gemini chat model is a strong
       | competitor to GPT-4, with users highlighting potential advantages
       | and disadvantages relative to ChatGPT. It seems further testing
       | and exploration is needed to reach a definitive conclusion about
       | which is ultimately "better".
       | 
       | Gemini Pros
       | 
       | Translation: Surpasses GPT-4 in ability to accurately translate
       | idioms from languages like Chinese and Japanese. Search
       | Integration: Provides superior context by smoothly incorporating
       | search results in its generated responses. Potential for Wide-
       | Reaching Integration: Could deeply and seamlessly integrate with
       | Google's vast suite of productivity tools and services (Gmail,
       | Docs, Maps, etc.), potentially surpassing Microsoft in this
       | capacity.
       | 
       | Gemini Cons
       | 
       | Privacy Concerns: Users question Gemini's review, storage, and
       | usage of conversations for model improvement, particularly the
       | retention of data for 72 hours for "safety and reliability"
       | without offering opt-out mechanisms. Questionable Censorship:
       | Gemini may overly restrict medical-related or other sensitive
       | topics. Logic Shortcomings: May present contradictory statements
       | or struggle with basic logic puzzles. Hallucinations: Tendency to
       | create inaccurate or confusing descriptions when interacting with
       | images. GPT-4 Strengths (In Relation to Gemini)
       | 
       | Coding: Slightly greater capability when given coding tasks.
       | Logic: Better performance in handling logical reasoning
       | challenges. Key Considerations for Large Language Models
       | 
       | Privacy: Transparency, clear choices, and strong privacy controls
       | are crucial in establishing trust and acceptance. Logic and
       | Accuracy: The ability to reason correctly and avoid illogical
       | contradictions or fabrications remains a foundational challenge
       | for the advancement of these technologies. Censorship: Balancing
       | safety concerns with the free flow of information and allowing
       | users more control over the content filtering. Future
       | Opportunities
       | 
       | Enterprise Usage: Both Google and Microsoft (who has invested in
       | ChatGPT) may find significant opportunity in enterprise markets
       | leveraging language models to enhance productivity and work
       | tools. Bundling: Google might further cement its competitive
       | advantage by offering attractively priced bundles that combine
       | Gemini with existing services like Google Drive, YouTube Premium,
       | or others. Let me know if you'd like a more detailed look at any
       | specific aspect or thread from the discussion!
        
       | godisdad wrote:
       | Love how they rebranded before creating a valuable brand
        
       | neaden wrote:
       | So for some reason I stumbled upon asking Bard/GPT for a
       | reccomendation of a biography on Gregory of Nyssaa as a test, I
       | wast looking for one but it turns out there really isn't on, at
       | least in English. This gives them the tendency to Hallunicate.
       | Sure enough tried on Gemini and get a fictional biography Saint
       | Gregory of Nyssa: An Intellectual Biography by Rowan Williams
       | (The former Archbishop of Canterbury). I think it's making this
       | up based on the book St Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual
       | Biography but that is by John McGurkin. The other ones it
       | recommends are Gregory of Nyssa by Lewis Ayers (A real author, no
       | such book), Gregory of Nyssa: The Life and Works of a Cappadocian
       | Father, and Gregory of Nyssa: Asceticism and Anthropology by
       | Sarah Coakley. This last one is the closest to actually existing
       | since she edited the book Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa which is a
       | collection of essays on him.
       | 
       | So it didn't make up any authors at least, but did make up some
       | books. It will happily make up ISBNs for them if I ask and even
       | provide links to Amazon, that of course go to other books.
       | 
       | Asking for a book about any other figure notable enough to have a
       | Wikipedia page but obscure enough to not have any existing book
       | written about them will do the same thing, I tried it out with
       | multiple signers of the Declaration of Independence for instance.
        
       | mise_en_place wrote:
       | It's hilarious to see Google dethroned from the AI/ML field. All
       | scrappy startups eventually become slow monolithic incumbents.
        
       | scudsworth wrote:
       | wow. it can even caption a photograph of my dog for me.
        
       | stan_kirdey wrote:
       | I've been testing Ultra model today and comparing it to open
       | source Mixtral MOE on HF chat. Gemini Ultra lost in every
       | instance to the free open source model, including code
       | generation. I think the tasks I do with the help of LLMs are
       | common, and Gemini Ultra is unusable at the moment.
       | 
       | Gemini refuses to answer or perform even on the simple prompts.
       | 
       | I hope Google team can make it better, but at the moment, for my
       | light coding and text analysis use cases it is not worth $19.99
        
         | philips wrote:
         | Can you paste in the transcripts?
        
       | downWidOutaFite wrote:
       | Only a few product names, so easy to understand                 -
       | Bard       - Gemini       - Pro 1.0 model       - Gemini Advanced
       | - Ultra 1.0       - Google One AI Premium Plan       - Gmail,
       | Docs, Slides, Sheets       - Google app on iOS       - Gemini app
       | - Google Assistant
        
       | jeniab wrote:
       | I ran 3 tests with Chat GPT 4.0 VS Gemini Ultra 1.0 by Google.
       | And write an article with outcomes:
       | https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/marketers-perspective-gemini-...
       | 
       | Spoiler: Gemini won)
        
         | neom wrote:
         | Based on your observations then, you would recommend someone
         | trade a GPT Subscription for a Gemini Ultra subscription? Or
         | keep both? Or?
        
           | jeniab wrote:
           | I'd keep both to see how they work together.
        
       | wolpoli wrote:
       | Now that Bard is Gemini, it's going to be impossible to find any
       | information on the Gemini protocol/Gemini clients/Gemini sites.
       | It's not very nice for Google to use the same name.
        
         | jraph wrote:
         | Yeah, they keep doing this. Came to say this (I don't quite
         | care about / for the product itself).
         | 
         | They introduced Google Meet when Jitsi Meet already existed and
         | is a similar product! It was easy to call it Google Call, or I
         | don't know, figure it out. You haven't ran out of synonyms for
         | Talk yet despite the huge churn. There are certainly sexier
         | possible names than "Meet" too. Or than Gemini.
         | 
         | Come on, you can find names that don't clash with existing
         | products. You have dedicated teams for this. You've heard about
         | the existing stuff. I'm sure you do extensive research when
         | picking a name, to avoid lawsuits if nothing else. Also
         | _Someone_ has heard of Gemini at Google. _Someone_ has heard of
         | Jitsi Meet at Google. It has to be intentional.
         | 
         | Of course Gemini comes from Greek mythology, nobody can claim
         | the exclusivity on this, and here it's not even a competitor.
         | Meet is a generic term too.
         | 
         | They _chose_ the name clashes. It 's highly likely they can't
         | be sued for this. But still. Legal [?] right. Find something
         | else.
         | 
         | Rant over.
        
       | diimdeep wrote:
       | It is insane how hard it has become to create new or anonymous
       | google account or to log in to old one that is not associated
       | with your identity, it is practically impossible.
        
       | ChildOfChaos wrote:
       | The promise sounded good, but the reviews for Gemini Advanced are
       | not very positive.
       | 
       | Google have thrown it in as part of Google one, but this means
       | it's the same price as ChatGPT+ which for sure seems better
       | despite Google's promises.
        
       | jpeter wrote:
       | Integrate it into Android Auto please
        
       | farhanhubble wrote:
       | A company the size of Google can't come with something more
       | catchy? The product better be compelling cause no one is going to
       | check out what Gemini does just for the name.
        
       | confiq wrote:
       | of course the gemini android app is not available in Germany or
       | EU
       | 
       | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
        
       | summerlight wrote:
       | Beside of the model quality or whatever, I think the subscription
       | plan tiers are structured in a quite weird way, especially for
       | those who already use Google One. Previously, the tiers are
       | reasonably structured:                 1. $9.99/month for 2TB +
       | other benefits. Offered in both monthly and annual plans.
       | 2. $24.99/month for 5TB. Includes all benefits above. Offered in
       | both monthly and annual plans.       3. Higher tiers for 10~30TB.
       | Includes all benefits above. Offered only in monthly plans.
       | 
       | The 3rd option doesn't have an annual plan but other than that
       | it's consistent and easy to understand. Now we have one more plan
       | for "AI".                 4. $19.99/month for 2TB + other
       | benefits + Gemini access. Offered only in monthly plans.
       | 
       | Now the existing Google One subscribers are now put in a weird
       | situation. 2TB annual plan users now need to move to a monthly
       | plan to use Gemini. It's worse for higher tiers, since they don't
       | have an upgrade option at all without decreasing the storage
       | size. And Google Fi users are even in the worst case, as they
       | don't even have an option for upgrade, even if they're willing to
       | do so.
       | 
       | I guess they know this so they specified that high tier
       | subscribers can use AI features at no extra charge until July 31
       | and probably prepare a new plan for them then, but this still
       | create lots of user confusions. Having YT Premium as a separate
       | subscription plan is already a pain, but Google, you don't have
       | to bring this trouble into the product supposed to be the "One".
        
       | rllearneratwork wrote:
       | doesn't work in US on Android now. An app says "Gemini is not
       | available"
        
       | thechimp wrote:
       | Bard: "Hey, wanna go grab a byte to eat?"
       | 
       | Gemini: "Sorry, I'm in the middle of taking your job"
       | 
       | Bard: "OK lmk when your finished so we can get lunch"
       | 
       | I think we all wish to live in a world where AI understands what
       | it's like to not know what you are in the mood to eat for lunch.
       | 
       | Salad? PBJ? How about sushi?
       | 
       | THE CHIMP knows all about that.
       | 
       | https://thechimp.beehiiv.com/subscribe
        
       | genevra wrote:
       | Thank God "bard" was the dumbest Ai name yet
        
       | dekhn wrote:
       | Sad launch experience: I download and install the app, and it
       | just tells me "This app isn't available. Try again later".
       | 
       | I'm in US, on a pixel phone and a xoogler. You'd think they would
       | love to give me access.
       | 
       | I also tried going thru assistant, and through the google app, no
       | luck, and after uninstalling and reinstalling the Google app, now
       | the gemini app button just hangs the UI(!) Oh wait... a reboot
       | fixed it. Lol, google has become microsoft.
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-08 23:00 UTC)