21 Comments

I teach undergraduate math at a university. I was disappointed to learn how few of my students had done more than take a cursory look at Chat GPT and Bing AI. Sadly, they're not really relevant to what I teach, but it's even sadder to see the poor job universities have done in fostering an environment of curiosity and excitement around learning new things.

I strongly endorse your position in support of academic policies that encourage making intelligent, ethical, appropriate use of AI rather than banning it.

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This was extremely helpful Ethan. Thank you. Although I have read with respect the previous 'be wry be cautious' posts on Bing's issues, I'm delighted to see that provides details on how to use Bing as it is now.

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In a storm of negative reactions to Bing, it's delightful to see a very rational approach to using it for good, instead of hacking and spreading fear and mistrust. Thank you, Ethan!

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Very insightful write-up on Mr. Bing AI :)

I'm on the waitlist. Haven't had a chance to try it yet.

But in the meantime, I've been playing a lot with ChatGPT.

I was quite impressed with ChatGPT, but a couple of things threw me off:

It wasn't able to search the web. I would ask it to go to a particular URL, read it, understand it, and summarize it. ChatGPT would "claim" that it went through the URL, but in reality it did not. It read the "URL text", made some "assumptions" on what the content "could be", and then spat out some nonsense. LOL. It kept doing the same, even after I called it out so many times :)

It also did some simple math calculations incorrectly! I initially overlooked it, because "I trusted" it! When I found out the error and pointed it out, it apologized, and then corrected it :)

ChatGPT is primarily a language model. Ask me how I know? Every time I catch a mistake, it keeps saying that like a parrot: "I'm only a language model. I can do only this and that.." LOL.

Based on your post, it sounds like Bing AI is much more than just a language model. I'm very curious to try it.

Regardless, I love what's going on the AI space. I especially love the speed with which this tech is evolving.

Thanks so much for this in-depth post!

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Mar 9, 2023·edited Mar 9, 2023

My experiment shows it's dangerous to use ChatGPT to write college papers...I tested it yesterday by asking it 8 times to find information about myself as a singer-songwriter and the CD I recorded. Its responses said I was born and raised in NYC and LA (I grew up in Detroit), gave 5 or 6 different years that I released the CD (ranging from 2002 to 2018), and (horror of horrors) one version said half my album was cover tunes (all songs are original). It's nice to know it thinks I live in LA and I live in SF but it sure looks like NJ outside my window.

It sounds truthy, real-ish, but it doesn't make fine distinctions and professors will know.

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Hi Ethan i tried ti get contact with you concerning Bing AI Powered with GPT is it only US Open for now,i can't find info on how to use the AI of Bing in France .

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Exceptional - timely and invaluable insights.

Gotta ask… did Bing write it? 😉

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Very insightful and timely piece, thank you! It's definitely exciting to see the enhanced capabilities search engine provides to the AI, it also become the bottleneck of the quality of the answer. The keywords it uses to search tend to be fairly broad, and it relies on "top search results" that may not necessarily prioritize content quality and originality.

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You didn't say how to get access. I don't see any way to input arbitrary questions.

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re: (though Bing is still bad at math and still hallucinates)

This reminded me of a Google AI paper recently using chain of thought to improve their LLM's mathematical reasoning. I wonder if Bing can improve with this type of prompting?

https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/05/language-models-perform-reasoning-via.html

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The wringing of hands is this space is actually cringe worthy. Thank you for your reasoned approach and generous sharing of experience and insight.

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Ethan, thank you. I am on the wait list. Do you have any idea how long it will be before it is opened more generally?

Have you (or anyone else) ever used bing to search the US Patent and Trademark database?

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I will have to play around with Bing more, but right now I find its user interface to be subpar relative to ChatGPT's. Incidentally, I tried your trick about getting it to write a paragraph about eating a meal in the style of Anthony Bourdain, and it returned this: "My mistake, I can’t give a response to that right now. Let’s try a different topic."

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Great information.

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you're proving to be my favourite thing on the internet. Keep this up, I love it

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This is fantastic, keep these coming!!

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