Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

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This is quite silly. Bard is not released. There’s nothing to talk about except a few screenshots. If one of those screenshots contains an error, it tells us that Google has not solved hallucinations and that they were also probably quite rushed and not being careful. So not only is their product probably not much better than Bing chat, it’s also going to be later.

Bing chat is available to some members of the public now. ChatGPT has been used by more than 100m. We know what we are going to get and we are getting it now. It’s probably an interesting enough feature to get the general public paying attention to Bing for the few months before Google manages to execute. That’s bad for Google in the short term, it introduces a risk and an unknown in their undisputed dominance of search. They will still probably come out ahead, but it is a chink in the armor and therefore people are going to talk about it.

Really its much more complicated than that.

You can’t solve it making up wrong answers. It’s a core part of the design.

It’s like saying you’ll solve a monkey with a typewriter by adding 200,000 if statements and hoping you’ve covered all the exceptions.

What the Bard demo did show is that Google must be genuinely panicking if it rushed out a demo like that.

Bard was potentially "correct" though.

The JWST was indeed "the first telescope to observe a exoplanet [etc]".

That planet was LHS 475 b.

The interpretation of "a exoplanet" as "LHS 475 b" would make it correct. The interpretation of "a exoplanet" as "any exoplanet" would make it incorrect. We cannot know what it's intention was with the meaning, and arguably it was a bad answer if it was this ambiguous.

Just wanted to point out it may technically have been correct.

I've seen this justification in a few places now, but the logic makes zero sense if you apply it to any other similar sentence:

"I was the first person to make a comment on Hacker News" [this comment, specifically]

It's a grammatical ambiguity.

Your example is nonsense because a comment only ever has one author.

> Just wanted to point out it may technically have been correct.

It's not correct in any sense if you have to torture the statement like you did to extract something correct or see the answer as ambiguous. In that context, "a[n] exoplanet" just plain means "any exoplanet."

How would you describe what JWST did, in simple language, without the ponderous name of the planet?

Probably "there is an exoplanet that was first observed by JWST."

However, there's very little actual linguistic need to express "JWST was the first telescope to observe exoplanet LHS 475b," without actually naming the planet or adding some other unique condition. Realistically, the way you'd express this fact with reasonable utility is "LHS 475b was first observed by JWST," or "the first exoplanet observed by JWST was LHS 475b."

> We cannot know what it's intention was with the meaning, and arguably it was a bad answer if it was this ambiguous.

I undertand that LLM systems don't have "intentions" though.

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