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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#411

Post by woeirua »

armchairhacker wrote: post #210
CabSauce wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good for users, potentially. But not good for the sites where google is sourcing the information.

I’d rather get my information without having to click on a site. I get the need for attribution but Google can cite the sources it gets it’s content from, and I don’t really care about losing ad money. But another issue is accuracy. Of course real sites aren’t always accurate, but they’re way more reliable than AI (and sometimes the site is ground truth like official docs so it can be trusted…unless…the official docs…

Customers may not care, but content producers absolutely will. Chatbot like interfaces that lead to "no-click" searches are going to get sued out of existence, OR are going to lead to the establishment of lots of paywalls that lead the chatbot to have blindspots about information behind them.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#413

Post by lotsofpulp »

chipgap98 wrote: post #243
lotsofpulp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Teams as a not negative example is very odd.

They have crushed Slack with Teams and it is the backbone of their enterprise offering. Am I missing something?

I am referring to the near universal opinion that Teams is shit software that is only worth forcing employees to use because it is free.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#414

Post by kitsunesoba »

ekanes wrote: post #263
wiremine wrote: post #232

I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be…

I think it's the first credible challenge to google's results in 2 ways. 1. People are typing questions into it and finding it hugely useful in ways that overlap with google. It just answers you, and you can ask clarifying questions, argue with it, etc. It's proving useful. 2. More subtly, the excitement around it seems to reveal that people are open to alternatives. For decades, alternative search engines haven't ma…

Its ability to synthesize answers with data from numerous sources is also game-changing and not something a traditional search engine could ever hope to do.

It’s not infrequent that googling for the intricacies of some badly-documented library turns up almost nothing useful, or the bits that are useful are scattered sparsely among the results, some of which are pages deep. It’s so much easier to ask ChatGPT to explain the struct, function, etc in question and have it pull the pertinent info from whatever corners it of the internet it found these things in. Even if it’s only 80% accurate it’s a massive time saver.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#415

Post by im3w1l »

wiremine wrote: post #232

I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be…

If anyone with a couple million dollars can create a great LLM-powered search engine then maybe Google's search engine division should be valued a couple million dollars.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#416

Post by alecco »

smoldesu wrote: post #134
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The announcement is probably targeting Wall Street more than any potential "user" (aka advertising target). The press was already bad - internal "code red" at Google due to panic that people saw ChatGPT as an alternative to search. Meta/FaceBook's head of AI, Yann LeCun, is in similar panic mode, issuing a non-stop torrent of tweets about how useless and unimpressive ChatGPT has... Presumably a reflection that FaceBo…

FWIW, Facebook's AI division has made some pretty insane contributions to the field relative to Google or Apple. I wouldn't disregard the stuff they're doing, even if I personally don't have a stake in Facebook or Meta's success.

If things keep the current trend, Deepmind, Meta AI, and many other remarkable labs will be this generation's Xerox PARC.

OpenAI and Stability-AI will be be Apple and Microsoft.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#417

Post by MuffinFlavored »

shawntan wrote: post #369
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #304

Question for AI experts out there: ChatGPT is awesome, but it is obviously hamstrung by the fact that it crawled the web at the end of 2021, so all of its data is essentially "frozen" and it doesn't "know" of any topics that occurred after 2021. Seems to me like the next "holy grail" in large language models is building a model that can be continually updated. If Google can achieve that, I think they could leapfrog O…

Like the earlier responses said, if it is retrieving information from an external data source, that would be a much easier way to update things. REALM ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.08909 ) comes to mind as an example of active work in this area. Updating a monolithic LLM seems like a harder problem at the moment, and probably would fall under the umbrella of "continual learning", though that sub-field would have their…

> Like the earlier responses said, if it is retrieving information from an external data source

I was under the impression it went through like a multi-month long ultra expensive training process involving many GPUs on terabytes of data "snapshotted" point in time.

Is it possible to do this at a smaller scale once a day at the end of the day with "all new content scraped from the Internet nightly"?

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#418

Post by eklitzke »

alain94040 wrote: post #388
wiremine wrote: post #232

I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be…

Those new language models are "Google killers" because they reset all the assumptions that people have made about search for several decades. Imagine that people start using those chat bots massively as a replacement for Google search. Then the notion of keyword disappears. Google AdSense becomes mostly irrelevant. Of course, Google is a giant today with a history of machine learning innovation. So they have a good c…

The point about the economics of running these models is an important one that slides under the radar a lot of times. The training costs for large language models like GPT are enormous, and the inference costs are substantial too. Right now things like ChatGPT are very cool parlor tricks, but there's absolutely no way to justify them in terms of the economics of running the service today.

Obviously this is all going to change in the near to mid future: innovation will drive down costs of both training and inference, and the models will be monetized in ways that bring in more revenue. But I don't think the long term economics are obvious to anyone, including Google or OpenAI. It's really hard to predict how much more efficient we'll get at training/serving these models as most of the gains there are going to come from improved model architectures, and it's very difficult to predict how much room for improvement there is there. Google (and Microsoft, Yandex, Baidu, etc.) know how to index the web and serve search queries to users at an extremely low cost per query that can be compensated by ads that make fractions of a cent per impression. It's not obvious at all if that's possible with LLMs, or if it possible, what the timescale is to get to a place where the economics make sense and the service actually makes money.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#419

Post by generalizations »

wiremine wrote: post #232

I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be…

Anyone else remember the beginnings of youtube? Google tried to compete with them, with their own Google Videos. It sucked - and I remember reading how the engineers running it couldn't even figure out why they lost. In the end, Google just had to buy their competition, because they couldn't figure out any other way to win.

They've tried to compete elsewhere, too, and I don't think they've ever been able to make a go of it outside their cash cow. The only thing they've really been able to do is 'search results + ads'.

I don't think they'll be able to modify that winning combo even in the slightest and still be successful. And in this case, they can't buy the competition. Micro$oft already did.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#420

Post by AlanYx »

jacooper wrote: post #364
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #304

Question for AI experts out there: ChatGPT is awesome, but it is obviously hamstrung by the fact that it crawled the web at the end of 2021, so all of its data is essentially "frozen" and it doesn't "know" of any topics that occurred after 2021. Seems to me like the next "holy grail" in large language models is building a model that can be continually updated. If Google can achieve that, I think they could leapfrog O…

There is already LLM search engines out there https://perplexity.ai

I like the way that site presents results to complicated questions, footnoted to supporting pages. I can absolutely see that being the future of search engine output.
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