I found an exciting feature—a way to submit a large amount of text—larger than you can paste in the Bard dialog window. (It's possible this isn't a new feature. Bard explained it to me this evening.) You can submit links to files in Google Drive. The links have to be publicly accessible. I just pasted the link to my file in Bard chat.
Bard can access the contents of the 322K file I pasted the link to. It definitely knows about the content of the file. I never said what it was about, but Bard knew it was about butterflies. It knew about content at the beginning of the file, and at the end.
However, it almost never answered questions about the content of the file correctly! For example, I asked it the number of species listed in the file and it said 109. There are 249 numbered species and some that are not numbered. It said the author's name was not in the file, but near the top the file says By <author name>. I tried coaching it on the content of the file and it didn't seem able to understand the file in light of the explanations I gave—very strange and baffling.
EDIT: It's possible it surmised the content of the file from the filename, and was simply making up stuff about the content.
> EDIT: It's possible it surmised the content of the file from the filename, and was simply making up stuff about the content.
I think this is the most probably explanation.
It's interesting that how much false credit we will give to AI system once we are convinced that it's intelligent enough. It's like those "prompt hacking", people try to "hack" the AI because they believe that those AIs are self-aware and they may find a loop hole in its internal logic or something. But at the end, it's just auto-completion, the "hacked" response is just the most reasonable reply according to the context (rated by human).
Seems like the file was in tabular format? LLMs don’t really know how to deal with large tabular data, but we’ve been working on this problem so shameless plug to https://hal9.ai
Bard can access the contents of the 322K file I pasted the link to. It definitely knows about the content of the file. I never said what it was about, but Bard knew it was about butterflies. It knew about content at the beginning of the file, and at the end.
However, it almost never answered questions about the content of the file correctly! For example, I asked it the number of species listed in the file and it said 109. There are 249 numbered species and some that are not numbered. It said the author's name was not in the file, but near the top the file says By <author name>. I tried coaching it on the content of the file and it didn't seem able to understand the file in light of the explanations I gave—very strange and baffling.
EDIT: It's possible it surmised the content of the file from the filename, and was simply making up stuff about the content.