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Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

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Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#351
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is only "truthy", however. The algorithm will happily give you information that sounds true, but is actually wrong. And if it's wrong even 1% of time, you will still need some way to verify its claims.

This sounds like experts criticizing Wikipedia, before it dominated. Mostly true and mostly accurate information is useful beyond what we normally think. Remember how people use to criticize the newspapers? They'd say they read an article on a subject they new something about and were shocked at how bad it was. Then they'd conclude that the rest of the news was just as bad. What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of…

> What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information.

That's an interesting take, and one I haven't heard before. My main squeamishness with bad journalism, and even worse, with chat gpt, is not truth-content, but rather sourcing.

If you know the source, you can account for its biases, or, your reader can do so. As such, well-sourced quotes of complete nonsense tend towards adding to the sum total of truth in the world, because it was true that somebody said it, and their perspective is part of what's interesting in whatever event you're discussing.

If you scrub the data of its sources (like journalists do routinely, and chatgpt does by necessity) important information is lost.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Googler here. 20% Time is a myth and always was. Yes, occasionally someone would talk about "their 20% time" but it was rare, and usually just meant "spending a few hours on something else." Admittedly, once in a while someone really did spend 20% of their time on something else, and management was not allowed to complain. Once, in about 2006-07, I was at a table with about 8 software engineers and asked for a…

How much of that is googles fault and how much of that is that it’s hard to have a good idea for a personal project and follow through with it? When I was in my 20s all my friends (young single kid less, so plenty of free time) would often TALK about wanting to do a project but few ever did. I wouldn’t be surprised if for most people the marginal sense of accomplishment and meaning is just higher by working on their…

> it’s hard to have a good idea for a personal project

There was actually a 20% marketplace page, where projects seeking 20%-ers would advertise. It wasn't necessary to have an idea yourself.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#353
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example, Facebook Messenger has become almost completely unusable on Android phones because the OS keeps killing the process despite the user specifically telling it to don't. I'm not 100% convinced that this is by accident.

I thought phones had hooks for notifications n stuff regardless of if the app was open. Shouldn’t that cover most things you care about in the background? Am I wrong or is this different for Android (I’ve only used apple)?

Well for a messages app it either needs a background service polling the server for new messages or it needs to use Firebase Cloud Messaging. AFAIK, FCM is essentially a service running on your phone that receives messages from Google's servers and forwards them to your apps. And backend servers can send messages to those Google servers.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#354
Sundar's weakness is the cause of this, and unfortunately Page and Brin have never been extraordinarily effective executives. Google's early product and culture was fantastic for building one has emerged as one of the most powerful network effects in the web, but nobody can doubt the unbelievable mismanagement of Google X, Google Brain, DeepMind, countless other cancelled products.

The answer is a new executive who gets it.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#355
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether I got in a bad A/B test group or something - I tried Spotify after Rdio shut down but no matter how much training I gave it the recommendations kept going back to the same pop albums they were promoting. It was very weird to see after reading all of that echonest guy’s blog posts about the cool things they were doing.

Somebody I know also had this issue at one point. In his case it was girlfriend which also used his account (but apparently without creating playlists or hearting anything, idk).

In my case I imported my Rdio history so it’s possible that something went wrong with a difference between loading albums & seeding the recommendation engine. It was really weird because I was expecting better based on most of the other users I knew.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not comparable. Wikipedia has always had a strict policy on citing sources. ChatGPT can't cite sources by design, because its answers are based on synthesis.

It wouldn't be too hard to program at least gpt3 to basically take a chatGPT answer, go to google, scrape results and verify if the chatGPT answer was factual or not and maybe give it a score or rating of factual-ness.

If it’s that easy why don’t you do it? You’ll be printing money

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#358
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody I know also had this issue at one point. In his case it was girlfriend which also used his account (but apparently without creating playlists or hearting anything, idk).

In my case I imported my Rdio history so it’s possible that something went wrong with a difference between loading albums & seeding the recommendation engine. It was really weird because I was expecting better based on most of the other users I knew.

Talking about Discover Weekly playlist: I think the recommendation engine is mostly based on what you actually listen to. When I listen for a week to emo rap, I get emo rap recommended in the next one.

I think song/album radio is not exactly based on your taste, but on what spotify considers similar.

Try making a playlist with your favorite songs and press "enhance" or "playlist radio" to see recommendations based on that context.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'd say they both put all their eggs in one basket & let that basket deteriorate. Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? So they have a monopoly product that is something like a 2 sided market (advertisers & search users) where both sides hate using it..

Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? Google's unwillingness to show any results older than Taylor Swift' last breakup song made me switch to DuckDuckGo. It was a bit rough at first, but in time Duck turned out to be just as good as Google, and sometimes better for the sorts of thing I search for. Then, about four or five m…

Brave search has been surprisingly good for me. I actually had it find me something Google was failing to find for the first time yesterday. Normally I have to occasionally try a Google search for nuanced topics, but this time it was the opposite.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#360
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you verify that ChatGPT’s answer is accurate (it often enough isn’t), if not by googling?

You could use any search engine, and just gather 'decent' results -- scrape the first 3 results and compare using a new instance of a language model to tell you what's inaccurate in the first one based off the fine tuning data.

I'm wondering what happens when most people start using chat bots and stop using search. There'd need to be a big shift from using user's navigation as a signal and for search engine to determine the quality and authority of the content.

How would the next gen web be? Would people even create webpages anymore? How would these be funded if people aren't navigating to these sites and just using chatbots.

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