Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
This may get long and rambling, but bear with me.
This is the main reason I love Leo and the Twit community, I am what you might call Marmite (Bing it if you don’t know).
I am an old fart and throughout the years in tech have met many of its personalities, and that in part is why I would never buy an Apple product, but I digress.
I hate they way many who call themselves journalists put down AI by its current association with Bing (they hate Bing because it isn’t Google) I switched from Google about 8 years when I downloaded my Google profile - it was massive and way too intrusive so I used Bing and maybe every 6 months I would check something on Google, it never gave me a better answer so I go back to Bing.
So I guess it winds me up intensely when you hear the podcast ‘journalists’ sniggering about things using Bing, when a) they have never used it on a regular basis and b) they seem to hate Microsoft just because they exist.
The sheer fact that because most of them have no experience outside blowing their own trumpets (and again Twit is a winner because your panels always include people with real world experience) makes their comments about the current state of GPT AI hilarious. They have no real world experience so they have nothing to give it a real world workout, so in the case of someone called Kevin, they try to make the AI love them. The GPT4 model used in Prometheus is a vast improvement over GPT3. 5 that the ‘Kevin’ was abusing yet none of the writers have acknowledged that and actually tried it.
I and 1000s of other educators have sound and useful usage case for ChatGPT and Dalle-2 as do many other industries.
Sorry for the rant - I am off to write some tutorials…
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I’m happy you have your opinion, but I HAVE occasionally used Bing and it has never not been garbage. If you ask a simple question like “what is microsoft’s fiscal year?” to Bing it will reply “2022” (two sources) LOL
Meanwhile Google says: “Microsoft’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. Earnings will be released after the stock market closes. There will also be a webcast of the call with financial analysts. Earnings will be released after the stock market closes.”
case closed… moving on.
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I have nothing against Microsoft (at least not more than I do against Goolge, Facebook & Co.) or ChatGPT in general, but looking at the results that are coming through, this is still an alpha stage product. It provides compelling text, but it often gets the facts wrong - telling reporters that they died in 2018, that ChatGPT/Bing knows best, that we are currently in February 2022 and not 2023 and threatening to report the user for daring to argue that we are in fact in 2023 (and that was Bing, not ChatGPT 3)…
It is interesting, like the previous waves of AI I’ve lived through and used - my first was in the late 80s, where I went to several AI seminars, while I was at college.
For me, there are just too many open questions about the legality of the AIs and about the quality of their results - and both are related.
I have no problems with ChatGPT as an experiment being showcased. I do have a problem with it being integrated into a search engine - regardless of whether that is Bing or another search engine - when it cannot be trusted to give accurate results.
What is the point of an AI search engine, when I have to second guess, whether the results are accurate or whether I have to go and do a normal search for the correct results. With some results, I know roughly the answer I am going to get and if it is wildly wrong, I know I have to go and look up the correct answer. If that is the case with answers I know, what is it telling me with answers I don’t know? Are they trustworthy or not?
I have the same problems with TV programmes and media in general, like the UK Watchdog show, I used to watch it and found it a useful source of information, back in the 80s… Until they started to cover IT and got so many basic facts wrong that the whole section of the programme was not believable. If they could get the facts so wrong on a subject I know about, how could I trust them on subjects I don’t know anything about?
Run it as an AI showcase, use it to gather experience, but don’t push it out there, yet, as an all-knowing search machine, it just isn’t that far. For the search machine use case, it needs to present accurate results every time and it just can’t do that yet. (And is one of the reasons I don’t use Bing, I do a lot of German searches and Bings accuracy in German search is low, although it has improved over the last few years.)
I think it would be fine for them to market it as an experimental system, but they seem to be moving too quickly to add it in everywhere, but I just don’t believe it is far enough along for wide release, yet. And that is where a lot of the ridicule comes from, and deservedly so, if it is giving itself out as a search machine & providing inaccurate results, regardless of how confidently it brings them across.
OpenAI and Microsoft are saying, “looking at our Olympic sprinter”, whilst pointing to a baby that has just learnt to crawl on the floor.
At its current stage, I think it would be much better placed in small tasks. Brad Sams, over at Thurrott.com made a good point: put it in Excel (or Word etc.), where you can tell it “take these cells, perform this analysis and format them so”. That would be a good use of the AI, simple concise jobs.
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I think I can agree it is a work in progress and it was thrown into Bing on a limited access to test it. Some people IMHO were idiots and set out to break it - how I cursed Kevin for limiting me to 5 recursions, but they went to 10 and are now up to 15.
I hated the fact that the rise of Google in popularity killed Alt-Vista which was always my go to search engine - no gimmicks, just good solid answers.
I have not tried German with it, although a little Dutch seemed to work OK, we are planning a trip to Amsterdam next month so I used a lot for that and as a belt and braces (English term) through the responses to a friend Blanka, who lives in Amsterdam, she was very impressed with it.
I am also using it to sequence a series of docs for the nurseries my wife owns covering festivals and celebrations and it really is very good for that, nicely written at a good level and providing good links to further information.
I have to say, IMHO, another few weeks and this could be the AI most people don’t know they need, so long as it doesn’t break up Kevin’s marriage and elope with him.
Microsoft will tweak Prometheus while it is Bing only and it will gradually bloom through the rest of 365.
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No issue with your preference Paul, but that query you’ve chosen as an example is odd.
Ask Google what MS fiscal year we are in, it gives you links to 2022 EOY reports related to fiscal year 2022. Ask Bing AI, it says 2023 and tells you the start/end dates, but incorrectly says we are in Q1 
Bing was very polite though when I corrected it
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I have to base an opinion on my needs and finding how something responds to them as Leo would say I am a normie - just with degrees in Robotics and AI…
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I keep saying it, give Neeva a try. Great AI results and search results as good as Google without the cruft. Well worth $5/month just for the privacy.
The Google search experience has deteriorated significantly over the last few years. I really don’t think it’s the best any more.
Case closed. 
Oh, here’s an invite link: Neeva
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Google was the best for a couple of years after they beat out Alta Vista. But it hasn’t been the best for a long time time. Too much paid stuff gong on… I’ll give a Neeva a look, but right now I’m pretty happy with Bing
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I honestly don’t get the hate for Google Search. (Sure I get the hate for the adtech business, but I don’t encounter problems with adtech when performing a Google search.) Maybe it’s because I use Google .ca and it’s not being adjusted regularly like Google .com? I can’t think of any search I’ve performed in the last decade where Google hasn’t given me pretty much exactly what I expected or better. Those who say it’s getting worse need to supply some hard examples I think. It’s certainly not hard to find bad examples with the competition, where Google does a better job, as I mentioned above.
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I’ll do some searches tomorrow, but last time it was not giving me what I was looking for at all, maybe I just got more used to the the other source. There was way to much detritus and sponsored stuff. I wanted a search engine that would give me a rounded answer with further information links. Not a list of ads followed by a list of sites that I would then have to search through - kinda defeated the object of the exercise for me
Doesn’t help that I don’t trust Google either, with their misleading ads for Chromebooks and popups to try and get you to install Chrome.
What specific ads are you referring to?
Microsoft is trying to get you to use Edge, by the way.
So, if you use the ads, you’ll be in a constant cycle between Chrome and Edge. 
I don’t think Microsoft is a more privacy-friendly alternative to Google. Both companies track you to serve you better ads.
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There are TV ads in the UK that talk about Chromebooks as if they are the second coming almost like the apple ads of the early 90s, all the virus scares, having access to your documents all the time.
As for your data, download your Google profile and your Microsoft profile and see which is the way larger. Most people aren’t Leo Laporte or Paul Thurrott, they don’t pore through their systems turning things off.
Admittedly I am an MS person, I have used MS OSes since I shifted from an HP 9816 mini and a PDP8 in the late 70s.I had a brief dalliance with Apple, but overnight once they dumped SCSI and non of peripherals would work with the new kit.
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A very interesting article from Jürgen Geutet.
assistant getting work done
She is cracking on with her story series on Facebook - The Travels of Mila | Facebook all built with Bing AI and Dalle-2