Google Bard: Expensive and Disappointing? The Answer Is… Ads?
October 13, 2023
![Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[2]](https://arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t2-9.gif "Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[2]")
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Google seemed to have hit upon a great idea to position its chatbot above the competition: personalize the output by linking it to users’ content across their Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, YouTube, and other Googleverse accounts. Unfortunately, according to VentureBeat‘s Michael Nuñez, “Google Bard Fails to Deliver on its Promise—Even After Latest Updates.” After putting Bard through its paces, Nuñez reports the AI does not, in fact, play well with Google apps and still supplies wrong or nonsensical answers way too often. He writes:
“I stress-tested Bard’s new capabilities by trying dozens of prompts that were similar to the ones advertised by Google in last week’s launch. For example, I asked Bard to pull up the key points from a document in Docs and create an email summary. Bard responded by saying ‘I do not have enough information’ and refused to pull up any documents from my Google Drive. It later poorly summarized another document and drafted an unusable email for me. Another example: I asked Bard to find me the best deals on flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Google Flights. The chat responded by drafting me an email explaining how to search manually for airfare on Google Flights. Bard’s performance was equally dismal when I tried to use it for creative tasks, such as writing a song or a screenplay. Bard either ignored my input or produced bland and boring content that lacked any originality or flair. Bard also lacks any option to adjust its creativity level, unlike GPT-4, which has a dial that allows the user to control how adventurous or conservative the output is.”
Nuñez found Bard particularly lacking when compared to OpenAI’s GPT-4. It is rumored that Microsoft-backed project has been trained on a dataset of 1.8 trillion parameters, while Bard’s underlying model, PaLM 2, is trained a measly 340 billion. GPT-4 also appears to have more personality, which could be good, bad, or indifferent depending on one’s perspective. The write-up allows one point in Bard’s favor: a built in feature can check its answers against a regular Google search and highlight any dubious information. Will Google’s next model catch up to OpenAI as the company seems to hope?
Cynthia Murrell, October 13, 2023
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