Bard Extensions

[replwoacause]

Can someone in the know explain how Bard could be as bad as it is, considering Google has been investing in AI for as long as they have? I thought they were earlier than most to begin serious work on AI? How could Bard suck this bad?

[cdata]

The answer is some combination of two phenomena:

1. The Innovator's Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

This is the premise that a mature incumbent will usually fail to respond fast enough to disruptive innovations by an upstart because their organization is optimized to continue providing existing customers sustaining improvements to the products they are already paying for.

2. The Coordination Headwind (https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/)

This is the premise that cross-functional coordination difficulty grows superlinearly as the organization scales.

The relative influence of these phenomena is a matter of debate. And, there may be other factors at play.

But, the mix of needing to respond (against organizational incentives) to a disruptive innovation while also trying to align long-established factions, product teams and PAs - many with a motivation to have an outsized influence over the new effort - within the organization presents a Herculean challenge.

[josh2600]

The answer to why BigCo can’t outcompete startup is always the same.

In BigCo you have ego that blocks authentic artistic critique. There are traditions. There are rules. We learned our lesson last time.

In the best organizations, artistic critique is a time-honored tradition passed down from the elders to the padwans. Young Jedi learn how to navigate the matrix with the blessings of their ancestors.

Unfortunately, hacking culture in a big org is outré. What made Apple special was that Steve Jobs created many hidden micro cultures within his asylum that allowed so many unorthodox experiments, some of them even worked out.

Maybe you have some other examples of people who have been able to hold a core business and build the next iteration many many times successfully? They’re rare birds.

Edit: for clarity, Google could have a killerAI product in a year if they would kill their ego. Demis Hassibis (I think that’s how you spell his name, sorry) the CEO @ DeepMind can absolutely build the thing they want, but they’d have to give him carte Blanche, and they won’t.

[ars]

I put all questions to both Bard and chatGPT. The exact same words.

Bard is almost always better.

For example try: "why does my hole saw have a spring over the drill bit?"

Bard is correct, chatGPT makes up nonsense. (There's no such thing as "pilot bit extension spring", and the rest of the reply makes little sense as well.)

https://chat.openai.com/share/485a6968-6379-4f64-87b3-6c1575...

https://g.co/bard/share/01c5bb4bf540

[lacrimacida]

Google has good research. Bard is half baked therefore not a great product as of now & not sure if or when. Maybe they were under so much pressure from openai that they indeed rush released it, way before it had to be seen out by public eyes. To me it seems/feels in beta

[amf12]

Most likely the difference in training datasets. There is a reason why authors have sued OpenAI but not Google.

[0xDEF]

Bard is better than ChatGPT-3.5.

They are worse than GPT-4 because nobody other than OpenAI (and their free Azure credits) have been willing to throw $100 million in training a single LLM.

[ionwake]

I’m not surprised by my experiences many years ago when trying to use google to support my small app that hit the front page of HN. Not only did they take my app offline giving me no recourse for help thus destroying my momentum , it was because I had “upgraded” my server hosting. Apart from this being funny and ironic what was worse is when I mentioned it a year or so later google engineers came out of the wood work on Hn to accuse me fibbing and making a big deal out of something that they clearly had no relation to. I think it was a because they were scared they might be linked to the incident and it would give them a poor performance metric. It was super creepy but made me understand that the organisation is just vast with little concern for the places where innovation comes from and full of selfish gatekeepers worried about looking bad. I have nothing against the company and the good it’s done for me and the world I still rather like it, but I understand that like all good companies without careful attention to respecting the little guy and allowing care and checks through its structure to root out social issues it’s destined to always lag behind. Just my 2 cents and if anything reminds me of what a terribly difficult task I would have if I was a ceo of my own company ( if it were large ).

I think most large companies have the same problem and the only solution is to literally test different teams with how they handle specific case studies. It would require alot of careful planning and studying but it would be the only way to resolve such problems. An alternative would be to have an anonymous feedback that is constantly pushed onto customers and constantly checked and mined for insight. if was a major company I would hire myself or someone who had my experiences to do this. But I’m already retired/funemployed lol. Sorry for the rant.

[guestbest]

For creative writing, I prefer Bard over the other ones for a few reasons. First off, it’s free with any Gmail account and secondly it has draft (3) that I can compare. It may not seem like much but I have a creative workflow and like it much more than Bing AI. I’ve been trying to use GitHub copilot and it is a lot less reasonable to use for technical work. But throwing an idea at Bard is kind of fun once you get in to promoting

[davidmurdoch]

Bard:

> simply type the name of the product that you want to access after the "@gmail" prompt. For example, to access Google Docs, you would type "@gmail docs".

Me

> @gmail docs

Bard

> Unfortunately, Bard Extensions is still under development and currently doesn't support full integration with Google Docs through Gmail.

[RandomThrow321]

Where did you see that? It seems this is integrating two extensions together, I'm curious how that would work. I asked it "@gmail summarize my last 5 emails" and that worked decently.

Edit: Actually, I'm not completely certain how the "@<extension>" syntax works. Are the results limited to that app?

[adaboese]

I've tried using it for generating articles based on provided fact sheet, and it somehow managed to invent a bunch of facts while referencing the fact sheet, without directly mentioning anything in the fact sheet. This is just so bad compared to OpenAI 4 or even 3.5.

How is that possible given that some of the smartest people work for Google?

[voiceblue]

The "extensions" link just leads to the bard homepage if you haven't both logged in and accepted terms.

[davidmurdoch]

If you arre logged in and gave accepted the terms but your primary Google account is a workspace account that doesn't have bard enabled it also redirects.

[jay_kyburz]

I'm logged in and accepted and it just takes me to my standard bard prompt.

[topsycatt]

Hey I work on that! I can only share information that's already public unfortunately, which isn't much beyond what's on that page...

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Any word on the (public) timeline for Gemini?

[janalsncm]

Not bad. It’s limited in what it can do but I would probably check Bard if ChatGPT went down.

I have the “AI search” extension enabled in Google search as well and it’s pretty unreliable. Seems like half of my coding questions it hallucinated some function that doesn’t exist.

But if Google release Bard in its current state a year ago most people probably would be using it now, even if it’s inferior.

[worewood]

I've used it to find flights and it was actually really nice. I didn't have a destination for my vacation so I asked for flights for cities at least X km away from me and costing at most Y, in the next Z months. It promptly answered.

[RandomThrow321]

I've had success with it. The integration with other google services could be a killer feature, but I think it needs some more polish and control. For example, right now it can't add an event to your calendar. I'd think it could at least generate a link to create one. It sort of seems like they're being overly cautious when compared to the way ChatGPT was launched.

[devbent]

> Seems like half of my coding questions it hallucinated some function that doesn’t exist.

I've actually seen AI search and ChatGPT 4 hallucinate identical fake command line parameters to a program.

It was ... rather sus.

[dwwoelfel]

I'm impressed. I asked it "How much is a flight from San Francisco to the rapid & blitz tournament over Christmas?" and it figured out which tournament I was talking about and showed me ticket prices.

https://g.co/bard/share/7966410c42af

ChatGPT also figured it out, but Bard is much better at displaying information: https://chat.openai.com/share/ba5d5acc-7b40-46e1-ada5-74b4a6...

[addandsubtract]

Ugh, I tried Bard too, but wasn't as impressed. Granted, I had a specific request with a stop-over for a couple of days, but it wasn't able to complete it, only the first leg. A follow-up question then prompted it a look-up a round trip flight for the 2nd leg.

[sandwichbop]

Surprised to see this here, was just reading about it on the bard page a few minutes ago since I been killing time waiting for chatGPT to come back up for Plus Users. I think it would be really cool if we could get a Bard extension for Google Colab, maybe some integration with the Colab Pro would be really interesting analogous to the Data Analysis Plugin

[elashri]

Google Colab pro already provide AI auto-complete (like github copilot) and bard like experience already. [1]

[1] https://colab.research.google.com/signup

[raybb]

Can bard actually create a calendar event for me yet or does it still just say that it will then not actually do anything?

[cipherself]

Nope, it can't create the events.

does it still just say that it will then not actually do anything?

It will now say:

  I can't directly create calendar events for you, but I can help you create a 
  calendar event description. Please provide me with the following information so 
  I can create a detailed description for you:

  * Event title
  * Event date and time
  * Event location
  * Event attendees (if applicable)
  * Event description
  * Any additional notes or reminders
  
  Once I have this information, I can provide you with a calendar event 
  description that you can then add to your calendar.

And if you provide that information, it'll just format it, add a few tokens and just display it to you.

[vikingbeast]

I once asked it to page an on-call engineer. Hopefully they haven't wired that functionality up now.

[foogazi]

Pretty wild seeing it summarize my emails

[robwwilliams]

Looks like a link to pure ad copy BS.

[jdeaton]

> Extensions are unavailable while your Bard Activity is off.

bummer, guess I wont be using it

[haolez]

Just checked out Bard for the first time because of the OpenAI outage. It sucks. It feels worse than GPT-3.5 with worse reasoning and instruction following. This is embarrassing for Google.

EDIT: Just to be clear: I want it to be good. It's unfortunate that it's underwhelming.

[dr_kiszonka]

It is not terrible for finding information about, say, Python tools for working with time series. I use it when Bing Chat (Copilot?) fails.

[m3kw9]

It’s cheesy af, you don’t have to wonder why it’s still in beta

[Havoc]

Palm 2 is still discounted to zero right?

Anybody know till when that’s likely to last?

[vongomben]

How are doing you use bard from mobile?

[moneycantbuy]

can bard be an adblocker on chrome?

[RandomThrow321]

I love it.

"provide me a rendered html page with the most relevant links and descriptions for a given topic, completely free of advertising"

[webappguy]

Bard is utter junk. I used to proclaim to everyone how it had its place as an equal tool in my daily AI tool chest specifically for web browsing. When they updated it and said I could access YouTube transcriptions etc it never really could and still can't. It hallucinates far more than any other llm premium model like Claude or Perplexity. Thus far they better get their s** together for Gemini or they're toast and this is coming from somebody who uses AI llms all day long for half a year

[Valgrim]

Okay so after 8 months, after being released in 48 languages and 238 countries, for some reason, Bard still isn't available in Canada?

This has to be a joke.

[okdood64]

Blame your government. And I don't mean that in a hostile way. People need to temper their expectations when using a product that is in the crosshairs of their government. Alphabet and Meta aren't startups and they have tangible regulatory obligations.

[parker_mountain]

Google says "regulatory uncertainty". It sounds like they're unhappy with Canadian regulators. Be thankful your government is giving them enough grief.

[zitterbewegung]

OpenAI has the luxury of being something like a startup while google really doesn’t want to make a project that costs them.

I use OpenAI as a tool but there is so much information that is inadvertently captured your regulators are doing the right thing.

[starshadowx2]

The Canadian government is picking a fight with Google, Meta, and others right now so that's likely why Google is withholding something like this to help create some pressure.

[mkoryak]

Maybe it doesn't know how to speak Canadian yet?

[praylee]

I always wanted to say the same thing. I don't understand why chatgpt doesn't have the "regulatory issue" at all.

[paulddraper]

They're afraid of the Canadian government.