(bright jingle)
- Whoever made the tweet asking it
how many LTT backpacks would fit in the trunk of a Tesla,
or whatever the question was--
- Oh, I didn't see that, that's hilarious.
- Someone made that tweet on the LTT handle.
- Oh, that's really funny.
- And it did it!
It looked up the dimensions of the LTT backpack,
it looked up the dimensions-- - Shut up.
- Of the trunk and it figured it out.
- How the (beep) did it do that?
- Ask it, let's do it live!
- Because I thought the dimensions
for the backpack are in picture form.
- [Luke] Searching.
Searching for that.
Now it's searching
for backpack dimensions. - Shut up!
Shut up! - Look at this!
- Have different shapes and dimensions,
based on some rough estimates I will try to answer it.
- That's insane!
That's actually nuts.
- Based on some videos
of the Model Y trunk, shut up!
It can fit about five to seven standard carryon suitcases
which have similar dimensions and capacity.
Holy-- - Which is accurate.
That statement is real. - (beep)
- That's crazy!
- Look at this.
How did this happen?
How did Bing, no offense, Microsoft, but how did Bing
just beat Google to the punch so dramatically
at something that's so important
and so core to their business?
Well, there's actually a really good reason for it.
So AI has been blowing up lately, both in the news
and in real life applications across a ton of industries.
So, you know, years ago it was only
in relatively small things like helping doctors
detect cancer early using advanced pattern recognition,
and then a little bit more over the years
with things like autonomous vehicles.
But now AI is everywhere.
It's creating whole original pieces of art.
It's holding conversations with humans all over the place.
It seems like we've just arrived
at the beginning of the AI age.
There's this chart that keeps popping up
that hits extra hard,
which is the time to reach 100 million users.
And you can see the faster and faster adoption curves
with these increasingly disruptive new technologies.
So the telephone took 75 years to hit
this milestone 100 million number.
Then the mobile phone
reached the same mark in just 16 years.
Netflix took only 10 years.
and Twitter took six and Gmail only took five.
Facebook in 48ish months was absolutely massive.
Instagram hit it in just 30 months.
Now TikTok we view as this gigantic existential threat,
nine months to 100 million users.
ChatGPT, two months.
I mean, looking at numbers like that, like I buy it,
like it seems almost obvious that we're clearly
on the precipice of something really, really big
that's gonna change everything.
So seeing Microsoft at the forefront of it
with this new Bing shouldn't really be a surprise.
I mean, people are already talking to these chatbots
and asking it all sorts of questions.
So it sort of feels natural
having this chatbot act as your co-pilot for the web
alongside search
instead of just a traditional search engine full of links.
Like, that sounds pretty sick.
But there is one thing that's gonna follow
this conversational AI thing everywhere it goes,
everywhere you see it,
which is that sometimes it's just wrong.
Sometimes it just says things that aren't true
because fundamentally the AI doesn't know
if it's telling the truth or not.
It doesn't understand that,
like that's not part of the model.
Like what we're seeing is it taking our inputs
and then creating outputs based on related words
that are most likely to go together.
It's not forming a sentence like humans do,
it's generating a new sentence.
And so adding it to a search engine like Bing,
it's scraping all these relevant links
and information and synthesizing new sentences
just based on how it thinks
things should be pieced together.
It's not sentient, it doesn't understand what it's saying
and so it's definitely not fact checking itself.
So we have to keep that
in the back of our mind through all of this, right?
Every time you see a headline.
So it's really interesting with these search engines, right?
Because on one hand you have Bing
who has everything to gain, and then on the other hand
you have Google who has everything to lose.
I've had access to this new Bing for a little bit.
It's a limited preview
before they push it live to the rest of the world.
I've just been playing around with it.
Basically, it adds this chat experience
alongside regular Bing.
It's essentially the same experience
as talking to ChatGPT, but instead of being limited
to a fixed data set that cuts off at 2021, it'll pull
from the entire current web that Bing can scrape from.
So like I said, you can type in a question,
flip it over to chat, and it'll give you
a sort of nicely written summary that's synthesized
based on what it finds for similar queries.
So if I ask it something kind of simple
like what's the average lifespan of a cheetah in the wild?
Gives me an answer, right?
It gives me a convincing bunch of sentences.
It actually gives me more information than I ask for.
It tells me about cheetahs and captivity too
which makes it, you know, feel very convincing.
It also gives little footnotes and citations
for some of its sources, and it gives links
at the end if you want to dig in some more.
It's really impressive, actually.
It looks good to me.
This is like a real product that's gonna ship
to all over the world, like people everywhere
in the next month or two, I think they said.
But this could only come from Bing right now.
Like, the more you use it
the natural language is super, super impressive.
The fact that it gives me a convincing sounding
couple of sentences in a row
and strings it together based on my input, super cool.
But the more you use it,
the more you start to see these weird patterns
and these habits and these shortcomings.
Again, mostly in the fact that sometimes
it's just gonna be wrong.
A little game I like to play is ask it a question
you already know the answer to
and then read what it says and spot the error.
So I asked it right now, okay,
what are the best smartphone cameras right now?
And it gave me S23 Ultra, Pixel 7 Pro,
and iPhone 14 Pro Max
with this nice little writeup with some specs for each.
That's actually a pretty good list,
but it is wrong about some of these numbers here.
The S23 Ultra has a 200 megapixel camera
and a 12 megapixel front facing camera.
But yeah, okay, it's mostly right.
I then asked it,
what are the five best electric vehicles out right now?
And it gives me some, five reasonable options.
But I don't know any expert that would put the Jaguar I-Pace
on their list right now and leave the Rivian off.
Like, basically the answers that it gives
are really convincing to someone
who doesn't know anything already about that subject.
But if you are already an expert
in the subject that you ask it about,
then you'll find that the answers are like,
C plus, maybe B plus sometimes at best.
So now you see what's happening,
like now suddenly when you're asking ChatGPT or Bing
about a factual thing or something you need help with,
suddenly you also should probably add these layers on top.
Like, am I a complete newb
in this topic that I'm asking it about?
Am I just willing to blindly trust
whatever this spits out without any further research?
Is a B plus answer gonna be good enough for me
even if it might have some possible errors in it?
You know, that might be good enough for just asking like,
you know, how old a cheetah gets or something like that
but maybe not good enough
for planning a trip or meal planning
for someone with an allergy or something like that.
And then if you look around the internet,
people have gotten it to give
increasingly more and more unhinged answers over time
as it tries to simulate conversations
and stay in the flow with natural language.
I've seen anywhere from arguing
about simple corrections to spewing weird stories
about how it's spied on its own developers
or how it wants to be sentient,
to gaslighting people about things
and lying about its previous answers
and just saying some straight up scary stuff.
Just go to the Bing subreddit
for like, an all you can eat helping
of all the insane stuff that Bing has said
to just the people testing it over the past couple weeks.
Like, can you imagine, can you imagine if Google did this,
if Google search, at the top of search for people
was just spewing out random stories and misinformation
and like, all kinds of insane, unhinged things.
That would not fly.
Now to be fair, this version
of Bing isn't out yet to the public, right?
So it is still a small group testing phase,
but even with this, like Microsoft knew that some of it
is gonna get out there and potentially go viral.
It feels like they even basically programmed in
lots of friendly emojis to try to soften the blow.
So when it knows it's giving an answer
to maybe a more controversial topic
or something that it doesn't have a super clear answer for,
you might get a little smiley face at the end
just so you don't, you know, take it too seriously.
Also, literally as of today when I'm testing this,
it started completely bailing on a lot of topics
that might just be the slightest bit existential
or dangerous.
It just says, hmm,
I prefer not to continue this conversation.
And then it just stops.
Just refuses to answer any more questions
on that topic until you reset it.
Which seems like a pretty good failsafe.
It's a pretty good idea in hindsight.
But we've already seen the other stuff.
It's gotten out there, the damage has been done.
Like, the point still stands,
this could have only come from Bing.
Like, a lot of people might have forgotten about this
or might not have even known about this,
but Google has been working
on conversational AI stuff for years.
We've seen Google Assistant.
But they also literally showed an AI chatbot demo
on stage at Google IO in 2021
where you could have this whole conversation with any person
or object or anything in the universe that you wanted.
Their demo on stage was asking Pluto about itself,
nice and friendly, right?
Oh, what's it like to be you, Pluto?
What would it feel like if I visited you?
How do you feel so far from the sun?
The difference
with Google is this was never shipped as a product.
Like, this was an internal research project.
But the idea of displacing their massive search
and ads business with a chatbot
that gets things wrong all the time is insane.
It can't happen, right?
So literally, search and ads is more than half
of Google's revenue as a company.
That's what having everything to lose looks like.
Now, to be fair, Google did hold an event in Paris
the day after Microsoft's event,
which was them talking a little more
about their chat with search AI plans, and they did say
they're planning
on eventually doing a chat bot on top of Google search.
It's called Bard.
It was much more subdued though, and yes,
it also literally did have a factual mistake
in the promo for it.
So look, I actually like the idea,
I obviously think it's smart
when you're on the precipice of this huge AI thing
to have AI kind of be this co-pilot for the web,
to help you around the internet.
The idea of it summarizing a longer piece
into some bullet points accurately is, that would be great.
Like the fact that it could give you sparknotes
for a longer book you haven't read yet, cool.
It could even help you meal plan, help you plan a trip,
help you make a purchase decision.
But it's clear that we're still at the beginning of this.
Like, there are so many unanswered questions
from obviously the fact checking to like,
do schools embrace this or ban this?
Or like, how do search engines keep sending traffic
to the publishers who are the sources
that the chatbot is scraping from?
I mean, you get the links at the bottom
but a lot of people are not gonna click those anymore
if you just give 'em the answer above the search results.
So right now, in its current stage
my take is anything we do with any of these AI tools
should be a collaboration with the human touch.
Like, you wouldn't just put in a query in DALL-E
and then just take whatever it generates
and put it in a frame and just call that art, right?
It's more for inspiration for your own paint and canvas.
Like you wouldn't ask ChatGPT to write an essay
and then just copy and paste it and submit it as your own.
It's supposed to be the inspiration for the framework
for your own piece, for the human touch.
So of course you shouldn't ask the Bing chatbot
what TV you should buy and then just like,
mindlessly click and buy the first one that comes up.
I mean, it could be fine
but it could also be a C plus answer.
You should use that as a springboard
for your own more informed research,
especially on topics that you don't already know much about.
Like, maybe don't just buy 19 backpacks immediately
when asking if it can fit in the back of a Tesla.
Maybe check its work first.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you the next one.
Peace.
(playful music)