How My Apes Doing

Neato, but not necessarily useful and certianly no real business case!

For months, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Discord Inc. have run an invitation-only chat for heavy users of Bard, Google’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. Google product managers, designers and engineers are using the forum to openly debate the AI tool's effectiveness and utility, with some questioning whether the enormous resources going into development are worth it.

“My rule of thumb is not to trust LLM output unless I can independently verify it,” Dominik Rabiej, a senior product manager for Bard, wrote in the Discord chat in July, referring to large language models — the AI systems trained on massive amounts of text that form the building blocks of chatbots like Bard and OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT. “Would love to get it to a point that you can, but it isn’t there yet.”

“The biggest challenge I’m still thinking of: what are LLMs truly useful for, in terms of helpfulness?” said Googler Cathy Pearl, a user experience lead for Bard, in August. “Like really making a difference. TBD!”