Bard is an early experiment,
an experiment experiment,
early experiment.
Yes,
*** Xiao is in charge of Google's new experiment,
an A I chatbot called Bard and after a few days of testing it out myself,
I can understand why she's stressing that experiment point for those just tuning into the A I
Wars.
Bard is Google's answer to open A I S chat GP T and its step sibling,
Microsoft's Bing chat bot.
You can type in queries and it spits out human like answers.
It can be amazing until you realize some of the answers are just wrong.
Is Bard.
A search engine,
Bard is really a compliment to search.
We think of it as a creative collaborator that people can use to further their ideas and
to feel their imagination.
OK.
Fine Bard is not a search engine,
but you inevitably ask it search like questions like who are the main
characters in Seinfeld and what do they do?
The answers come in fast,
often faster than Chat C P T or Bing,
but some are just wrong.
Most would agree.
George's main profession was not a struggling writer.
He was definitely not a struggling comedian,
Jerry definitely didn't work at Pendant publishing.
Why did Bard so confidently say the wrong jobs for these Seinfeld
characters at the heart of Bard is a large language model,
large language models are trained on publicly available information.
And then they're just sort of statistically predicting what you know,
next word to,
to add to the sentence.
And as a result,
sometimes it makes these mistakes,
it's hallucinating that string of words,
hopefully you click thumbs down on that and said this is not exactly correct.
And that's the way that we are able to really improve.
Bart.
Bart is not alone in factual errors.
I've seen lots in bing and chat GP T though the two of them wouldn't dare mess up
Seinfeld trivia.
The bigger issue I have with Bard is that it often doesn't show its sources,
Bard is trained on lots of publicly unknown information on the internet
and on the internet.
There's lots of information about things like Seinfeld and common topics.
We do show a sources link when there is a direct citation that
the content is coming from.
But a lot of the output itself is really being generated by the model.
One of the big questions,
what types of data were these systems trained on?
What websites news sources did it learn from?
Most of them?
Almost all of them are trained on publicly available information and
further we augment it with our understanding of high value,
high quality source information to make Bard more accurate is
Gmail data included in that Gmail data is not included in Bard.
We talked a little bit about truth and things that are not true.
Why you put it out there at all?
The technology is ready.
People are excited,
people want to engage and discuss and learn what the technology does at
the same time,
you know,
a lot of the work is not just in the LM itself,
but in all the safeguards and safety protections that we put in place
to get to the point where we feel comfortable enough to put an experiment to the world.
Bard does have a Google It button so you can get taken directly to Google results if you want more
information.
And it does say responses may be inaccurate while using Bard.
I've noticed it is cautious and limited compared to chat GPT and Bing.
It can often remind you that it's a large language model and can't answer whatever you've just asked.
It feels like you're holding barred on a very tight leash,
restricting it from doing things and different responses.
Why you're calling it a leash?
I actually think of it as safeguards and guard rails.
Like this is a powerful technology.
We want to make sure that we understand,
you know how to bring it in a responsible way to people opening.
I doesn't have a search business.
Microsoft has a very small search business and they don't have a lot to lose by putting out a chat bot that maybe
people use to search is that part of the calculation in Google's
limiting of this tool.
What we do is take cutting edge technology and bring it to users hands and make their lives
helpful.
We need to do that in a safe and responsible way with a new technology like this.
And that's how we're doing it.
And does it disappoint the team or was it expected that people are sort of saying Bart is
boring?
I actually think we feel really good that Bard is being
safe and actually people are finding those guard rails and they're bumping up against
those things when people are testing things that are sort of,
you know,
trying to push the boundaries.
Experiments don't always work.
Like when I asked it for my own bio Stern is a graduate of Union College.
True and holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Not true,
but thank you Bard.
But in this case,
Google seems committed to a future where we talk to our computers in more natural
ways when I was growing up watching Star Trek or,
you know,
Marvel movies where Tony Stark is talking to his A I and his helmet,
like,
I think that is a sci fi dream that is like something that humans are very
fascinated with that having an A I that can speak to you naturally or,
you know,
converse with you that said you know,
people can take L MS and tune them towards personas or
characters.
You know,
that's not what we're doing with Bard in the near term.
She assures me that the experiment will get better and bolder.
My last dis party note is,
um,
that it learns more about Seinfeld.
It's a wonderful show we'll get on that right away.