[boringuser2]

Bard is garbage even compared to 3.5.

OpenAI doesn't have any competitors, their only weakness that we've seen is their ability to scale their models to meet demand (hence increasingly draconian restrictions in the early days of the ChatGPT-4).

It makes perfect business sense to address your weak points.

[caddemon]

I've heard such mixed things about Bard lately, I wonder if it depends on the application one is trying to use it for?

And yeah there's definitely good reason to work on scalability but they are charging such a cheap rate to begin with, it seems like there could be a middle ground here. Increasing the cost of the full compute power to the point of profitability and leaving it up as an option wouldn't prevent them from dedicating time to scalable models.

I suppose they have a good excuse with all the press they've drummed up about AI safety though. Perhaps it might also serve as an intermediate term play to strengthen their arguments that they believe in regulations.

[boringuser2]

It seems like google has been pumping Bard as a competitor to ChatGPT, but every time I use it for trivial tasks, it completely hallucinates something absurd after showing only a modicum of what could be perceived to be "understanding".

My mileu is programming, general tech stuff, philosophy, literature, science, etc. -- a wide berth. The only sample I probably don't have it representative for is producing fiction writing or therapy roleplaying.

Conversely, even 3.5 is pretty good at extracting what appears to be meaning from your text.

[mcny]

The next time it gives you a wrong answer and you know the correct answer, try saying something like “that is incorrect can you please try again” or something like that.