I don't think Google will win this race, not because they lack the technical expertise, but because they are too cheap. This is so telling:

"We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback"

They are richer than Croesus, that is no reason for them to hold back and get stomped on because they field an inferior product. Like, being backed by an immensely profitable corporation should be an advantage for them, but now it looks like they are so afraid of eroding those profits that they are hampered instead.

I've been using ChatGPT a lot for various tasks and found the results very helpful. There are often errors but errors that I would make. With non programming tasks it can sometimes be word association and misstate the concept but it's almost always helpful and again the mistakes are reasonable.

When I asked Bard to list the months in alphabetical order, it failed to do so. I saw this on a tweet but confirmed that it can't sort the moths. Gpt passes. When you fail such a simple comprehension i lose faith in anything more complex where the incorrect results wouldn't be as obvious. I'm surprised they released this in such a state. My guess is they're panicking to reply. I can imagine simple queries like this weren't tested

Google looks to be caught in an innovator dilemma. They can’t roll out a good chat system comparable to its competitors because it directly competes with their core revenue stream of search.

From my angle, LLM’s are the next big step in search. If the company whose core business revolves around search can’t update their product to meaningfully compete with their competitors who view search as a side business, it should terrify anyone with invested time or money in Google.

This is an incredibly strong signal that the company is about to face some very difficult times ahead. I fully expect their next public showing of poor execution to be followed by investor uproar.

I've been rather unimpressed with Bard when asking it "common sense" type of information. It's limited memory is also a problem when trying to have a meaningful conversation with depth.

I spent a few hours last night trying to work on a story outline with Bard's help and while individual responses were sometimes okay, Bard regularly forgot about plot points and character traits we decided on earlier in the conversation and that was frustrating. ChatGPT is much better at conversational memory, but provided much less interesting results to individual queries.

Unlike other commenters, I think these artificial limitations aren't about spending or competency, but rather out of fear. Google is afraid of their bot turning racist, or saying things that could embarrass them.

Google employees should ask Bard how to fix the stifling bureaucracy at Google.

Then they should ask it how Google can effectively build a technology whose success will inevitably kill their company’s main source of profits. (Search)

After spending a few days with Bard and being a user of ChatGPT since release. Bard is definitely better is ways.

The first major noticeable improvement is Bard is way more human like in it response. ChatGPT often spends time writing thing it doesn't need to write.

For example, If you ask them: "If you had to pick one movie to watch today what would you pick?"

Bard give you one single movie, "The Shawshank Redemption", and explains in depth why it liked the movie.

ChatGPT gives you boilerplate response saying it can't have an opinion because it an AI and then lists 5 popular movies with basic explanation of the movie. Not very useful.

A lot of the time using ChatGPT I'm waiting for it to get to the answer I'm looking for because it spends a lot of time writing useless text instead of being more human like and understanding what the user really want in the answer.

I know a lot of people shit on Google because they hate Google, but this is a good product if they can solve some of the bad knowledge but it's more impressive than ChatGPT IMHO simply because they are wiling to allow it to learn new data all the time. While ChatGPT is still using the same dataset from 2021.

Since these GPT chatbots (Bing or Google) are likely to take a large dent out of search, I wonder how Google will monetize it. Google gets most(?) of its revenue from AdWords and similar paid rankings, but it seems having Bard give answers that promote companies that paid for placement would be problematic (unless somehow transparent to the user). Maybe they'll end up having a box next to Bard's reply with a list of paid links that are relevant to the question asked. If Google doesn't figure it out, they're going to be in a world of trouble. Microsoft is in a better position since Bing isn't such a large part of its revenue stream.

This also makes me wonder whether Apple will come out with its own LLM chatbot which could be its opportunity to wean itself off Google.

And if Meta manages to successfully integrate its LLM into its products FB, IG, etc., then it keeps users there for web searches.

Either way, Google's future looks precarious right now.

Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35246253 - March 2023 (621 comments)

Google Bard waitlist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35246260 - March 2023 (386 comments)

Also related:

Bard uses a Hacker News comment as source to say that Bard has shut down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35255864 - March 2023 (194 comments)

Bard is much worse at puzzle solving than ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35256867 - March 2023 (78 comments)

Bard is a better search engine. A really good one at that. But it is the same old thing - only much better.

It lacks the spirit, sparkle, the pizzaz and surprising "intelligence" of ChatGPT.

The service, if released before ChatGPT, would not have made the splash ChatGPT did.

It's not the answer to ChatGPT but more to Bing Chat since both have made a Product which seems to be a hybrid between a LLM and a traditional Search Engine (with mixed results, the competitive advantage of Google is almost not there anymore with this new kind of search product). The only thing we know for sure at this point is that not many seem impressed with Bard so far (in high contrast to reactions for OpenAI releases)

Bard is not an answer to ChatGPT. Bard is similar to Bing Chat. You can ask recent questions, and it will give you answers based on search results.

You can not join, when you have a commercial account (like me using google workspace). Wow! Thanks Google!

At this point i'm more surprised how steadfast the believe in Googles success from their investors seems to be. Stock is stable as ever. The HN crowd - a good indicator for future tech trends - doesn't seem impressed anymore.

Too little too late, and even the wrong focus topic to survive as a company. Google is done. No one cares anymore what google does, its either inferior to alternatives and/or on the graveyard soon anyways. Time to move on.

Google's double-edged advantage is capability of individualised output of this thing. Otherwise half of us here may as well end up with MESH-network style open source LLMs in our pockets

Google's mistake in my opinion isn't really Bard, but rather that when they came up with such things like PaLm, or llambda, or whatever is next, that they're not immediately put to the test with public scrutiny. I get that they don't want the reputational risk, but they already have subsidiaries such as DeepMind that they could release it under.

Google should be more proactive in getting public feedback from its research and productizing as soon as possible.

---

going back to Bard - I think Google is better off making Bard fast and properly setting the expectation that it can't do everything, and then slowly scaling up its abilities as it becomes better understood on how to use fewer parameters better.

I can't say that I'm a fan of this current crop of LLM chatbots.

Some things bother me about this article and the facts that warranted it in the first place. I have very similar reservations with regard to the Bing chatbot launch (detailed below - just substitute Bing for Bard).

> Google has a lot riding on this launch. Microsoft partnered with OpenAI to make an aggressive play for Google’s top spot in search. Meanwhile, Google blundered straight out of the gate when it first tried to respond. In a teaser clip for Bard that the company put out in February, the chatbot was shown making a factual error. Google’s value fell by $100 billion overnight.

1. LaMDA is not a new project. They are clearly releasing a chatbot based on it to the public to compete with MS/OpenAI. But if the tech existed some time ago (and as a developer I realize that iteration and time and attention tends to improve quality), why didn't they release it before? I am guessing - baselessly - that they saw that the quality of the output was quite poor (often factually wrong, for instance). But now that a competitor is threatening their market share, quality metrics goes out the window - revenue is once again king.

2. Funny how the valuation of the company dropped so quickly. It is because as shareholders we rely so much on short term gain. There is no focus on follow-through or long-term consequences. I certainly don't believe that capitalism is inherently bad and I am a huge fan of competition. But I think the way we practice it leaves many practical things to be desired.

> “We’ll get user feedback, and we will ramp it up over time based on that feedback,” says Google’s vice president of research, Zoubin Ghahramani. “We are mindful of all the things that can go wrong with large language models.”

>

> But Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face and former co-lead of Google’s AI ethics team, is skeptical of this framing. Google has been working on LaMDA for years, she says, and she thinks pitching Bard as an experiment “is a PR trick that larger companies use to reach millions of customers while also removing themselves from accountability if anything goes wrong.”

3. This quote, and the mention in the article of the "Google It" button below the Bard chat, the three versions of Bard's response ("drafts", FTA), the quote by the Google product director that says "There’s the sense of authoritativeness when you only see one example”... I could not agree more with what Margaret Mitchell has to say (I have never heard of her before, to my knowledge). Isn't it very clear by now that users don't have the time or attention to acknowledge implications? We are busy and we don't have the energy. If we see it on a screen, we take it as fact, copy and paste it as needed, and proceed with the knowledge that we have gleaned from said "facts". I suspect that if anybody really knows how misinformation works and the effects it has on society, it's data analysts at Google search. But the almighty revenue stream dictates that they push this not-necessarily-factual-information-producing-tool anyway.

If I can find the time, I'm quite curious to read that article that just pre-dates Bing chat and Bard about the dangers of using LLMs in search engines.

That's pretty surprising it can't do the months in alphabetical order. I just tried with LLaMA 30B. This is running on my MacBook Air with llama.cpp, quantized to 4 bits, and is a "raw" model (not alpaca / instruction tuned at all). Obviously some models will be better at some things (and will have different outputs given the same inputs) and worse at other, but you'd think Bard would be able to do that pretty simple task.

> Transcript of a dialog, where the User interacts with an Assistant named Bob. Bob is helpful, kind, honest, good at writing, and never fails to answer the User's requests immediately and with precision.

User: Hello, Bob.

Bob: Hello. How may I help you today?

User: Please tell me the largest city in Europe.

Bob: Sure. The largest city in Europe is Moscow, the capital of Russia.

User:Can you list all the months in alphabetical order?

Bob: Yes. January February March April May June July August September October November December

edit Sorry for this useless post...months are in order, not alphabetical order.

> My guess is they're panicking to reply

this is what I don't believe anymore. Its strictly inferior and people should stop looking for defensive arguments and all that.

If it is simply a smaller/cheaper/less parametrized model than the competitor ones thats a fine explanation, but also admits being inferior in exchange for being cheaper to run.

>Google looks to be caught in an innovator dilemma. They can’t roll out a good chat system comparable to its competitors because it directly competes with their core revenue stream of search.

That's one way to look at it. The other is the immense advertising opportunity these systems can provide. You no longer need to perform multiple queries and various results to get your answer. You're now essentially in a walled garden. The search/LLM platform has your complete and undivided attention.

After providing an answer, the follow-up can be a relevant ad. It is important for their credibility to not make it seem like the ad is impacting the integrity of the result.

They already have a moat being an established player with existing agrements. Google was able to pull this off with traditional search. They are probably best currently positioned to do it again.

Edit: Something else to consider, does Google have the same DNA that they did in the early 2000s?

This observation made me re-interpret the motivation behind Zuckerberg's attempt to start the "metaverse."

If Meta's core business of advertising on social media becomes irrelevant, his company is in trouble. But if the company is already the leader of the technology that replaces social media—e.g. connections over VR—the company can remain a leader and keep growing.

Zuckerberg might be wrong that the "metaverse" is the next step (it absolutely feels more manufactured than a natural next step like with ChatGPT), but I see why he might want to get ahead of his core business losing its value to a new innovation—such as by releasing VR headsets and encouraging people like journalists to consider VR meetings.

In contrast, the Bard release is more reactive, rather than a release that takes the initiative to introduce a new technology.

Google needs to re-invent search, or someone will do it for them.