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Comment by webappguy | Hacker News Reader

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

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Just tried it, and yeah — it's pretty bad. It first told me that OpenAI's latest model is GPT-3 and only budged to 3.5 after follow-up questions.

I mean, isn't retrieving up-to-date and accurate information from the internet the whole Google's thing?

LLMs don't retrieve anything unless there's infra in place so that they can go and do that. It's called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and it's still pretty new enough that it hasn't been integrated in all workflows. There was a bunch of copy early on claiming LLMs "read the internet and find you results" but it's weaselly wording and was until remarkably recently complete BS.

Bard has had access to Google caches since launch. I asked it about my 8-follower Twitter account and it quoted my first Tweet and the registration month correctly. It also hallucinated my gender and described me as "a popular figure in the French-speaking Twitter community" (because my name is a French word, I guess).

Thanks, I know. I built RAG systems with vector databases and related infra. And yes, that's exactly what it claims to do, even with "results verified by Google" in the interface.

I've been using Bard since it came out. Its trajectory, in my opinion, has been "pretty shitty" → "pretty good" → "completely shitty".

It's probably not going to become interesting until their Gemini model debuts and Bard is transitioned over to it.

Which open AI would you suggest the layman use?

Mistral OpenOrca is about as good as GPT 3.5 imo

https://huggingface.co/Open-Orca/Mistral-7B-OpenOrca https://ollama.ai/library/mistral-openorca

For a surprising general purpose local chat experience: OpenHermes 2.5 - Mistral 7B

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