Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia

mycyclopedia.co

31–40 of 54 posts

Re: Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia

#31

Also what value do we get compared to wikipedia?

No value. This is just another AI thingy. It's not real information. It can return something, but it doesn't know which things are real.

So you spent time building something that is actively less useful than what already exists in the world.

I don't mean to be rude by that but I just don't get it.

Re: Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No value. This is just another AI thingy. It's not real information. It can return something, but it doesn't know which things are real.

So you spent time building something that is actively less useful than what already exists in the world. I don't mean to be rude by that but I just don't get it.

You can build stuff just for fun...

Re: Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia

#35
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He literally just stated that he personally prayed to his God for them... you are the one evangelizing here.

Devil's (heh) advocate: the prayer itself matters and is a nice thought, but mentioning the recipient of the prayer makes it a soft pitch, which some might reasonably find unwelcome or awkward.

Or you could not over analyze a well intentioned attempt at comforting another and move on.

Re: Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia

#36
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's (heh) advocate: the prayer itself matters and is a nice thought, but mentioning the recipient of the prayer makes it a soft pitch, which some might reasonably find unwelcome or awkward.

Or you could not over analyze a well intentioned attempt at comforting another and move on.

I've prayed on this to Tlazolteotl, eater of sins, and have decided to disregard your comment as excessively meta.

Re: Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia

#37
post #32

AI generated encyclopedia kind of seems like a terrible idea. The entire goal of an encyclopedia is to get true (and hopefully unbiased) knowledge, which AI is known to be bad at, especially on the edges.

I found myself frequently using ChatGPT to learn about new topics. I prefer it over Wikipedia because when I don't understand something, I can just ask it and it can clarify it for me until I get it. However, I found the chat UI to be unideal for this sort of thing, so I created this website using a UX that is aimed at educational use.

Re: Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia

#38
post #10

Update: Sorry guys, but it seems the server has crashed due to a sudden influx of traffic, and I'm attending a funeral service at the moment so I don't have access to my laptop. Will try to get the site back up asap!

Sorry to hear you lost someone close to you. I’ve prayed that Jesus Christ provides comfort to you and others involved. Do what you need to do and we’ll look at the site whenever it’s back up. No rush. Edit: Forgot to add about the site crashing on heavy traffic. You might want to consider a CDN. Cloudflare is No 1 with a free option. StackPath was great but just shut down their CDN. I’m trying BunnyCDN now since it’…

Thanks, I appreciate the kind words

I'm just new to devops stuff because the things I usually build don't get that much traffic, and a single server did the job without the need for CDNs, load balancers, etc. I had to figure this stuff out just now over the past few hours to help the site cope with all the load.

Re: Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia

#39
post #17
post #13

We need an AI-generated encyclopedia - not for us, but for AI. It should have a trillion articles covering all known entities and concepts, written using RAG over the web. Controversial topics should report the controversy or the distribution of opinions. We can put this big synthetic text corpus in the training set of future models. Why? Because AI needs long form, in-depth texts to train on, and the web doesn't pro…

> the web doesn't provide it in sufficient quantity and quality Do you seriously think that "an AI-generated encyclopedia" would provide a better-quality training set? What would the "AI generator's" articles be derived from?

What about model collapse?

Re: Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia

#40
I searched for "David Bowie discography" and got "This topic contains or implies content that falls outside acceptable use guidelines."

Then I searched for "David Bowie". It slowly generated text, section by section. Much of its output was repetitive and slight. It generated a section called "Early Life and Career" and then "Birth and Childhood" with largely similar information. It then abruptly wrapped up the article ("Conclusion: David Bowie's first solo album, "David Bowie" (or "Space Oddity"), was a pivotal release...) with no information about what happened to David Bowie afterward. The actual text had many hallucinations. It said "Space Oddity" was Bowie's first album (it was actually his second), and said the album achieved fame with the Apollo Moon landing in 1972 (which happened in 1969.)

Maybe in a few years something like this will be viable. Right now, it seems inferior to Wikipedia in every aspect.

Post reply on HN