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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#451

Post by coredog64 »

deltree7 wrote: post #402
alain94040 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Delusional to think Ads work only on Keywords. Where there is human attention, there will always be ads. The more context, the better ads.

There’s a smaller surface are for ads in a targeted chat session. At present, Google can show me ads on the results page. Each subsequent result that I view is an additional slice of my attention.

It’s possible that Google can deliver a few targeted ads, but what if they can’t? What about the rest of the market that’s now gone? Possible that all those missed opportunities remove the ability to discover price.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#452

Post by kerpotgh »

daveidol wrote: post #86
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.

That's one of the big problems with these types of AI - piggybacking on everyone else's work, typically with no attribution _whatsoever_.

Google brings visitors to your site for free or no one would find it in the first place. You can always robot opt out and then your information is “secure”.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#453

Post by firebaze »

chipgap98 wrote: post #105
andrewstuart wrote: post #60

Lotus 123, Borland and Wordperfect were at the top of the software world. They failed to make the transition to GUIs/Windows. Microsoft missed the arrival of the web. Microsoft also missed the mobile revolution and ended up with zero mobile operating system market share. Internet Explorer, having vanquished Netscape, declared "job done" and stopped developing the web browser further, only to be cast to irrelevance fo…

Microsoft feels like an outlier on this list. They are thriving right now. Also, there are still many categories of things that ChatGPT-like bots can't help with yet, such as shopping. I think we're still very early in this cycle. That doesn't mean Google will succeed, but it feels premature to be writing their obituary.

This is probably true, but I honestly wonder why. Windows is a commodity as far as I understand, which you can get for free with not-so-hidden tricks, which are also apparently approved by Microsoft themselves.

O365 etc. survive due to corporate inertia (Excel), but I wonder if growth stems from new customers vs. big, large customers growing and requiring more licenses while actively looking for replacements.

Azure is good, sure, but AWS is better (yeah, the console) and google will probably do anything to not go into irrelevance in this area, so they're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I still have MS stock (with a large payoff atm), but I honestly wonder when it's time to sell.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#454

Post by coredog64 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #306
killjoywashere wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think most people realize how much infrastructure separates something like ChatGPT from Google-scale deployment. OpenAI isn't suddenly building transoceanic fiber and datacenters near most major population centers. They aren't signing production-ready contract vehicles with most major OEMs and governments. And in the gap it would take a new entrant to acquire 10% of those assets, Google has 100,000 engineers…

You don't need to own your own datacenters to do this, anymore than someone like Netflix (who run on Amazon cloud) does. I'm sure any of the cloud providers would happily take the money of any company that had the $$$s to pay for it. The barriers to entry really don't seem that great... the tech behind ChatCPT is well understood and multiple similar things already exist from various companies.

AIUI, Netflix runs a lot of their business in AWS, but content streaming isn’t something they host in AWS.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#455

Post by nestorD »

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…

Retrieval-based models have a number of strengths that make them particularly important from my point of view:

- as said they can be updated with fresh information on the fly,

- they can give you sources for their results (meaning that you can fact-check the output!),

- they achieve similar performances for significantly smaller models (as long as you have a large dataset to retrieve from) meaning that they could run locally on consumer hardware (coupled with a large dataset on disk or the ability to read information from internet).

If I were to spend a significant amount of time building my own language model, it would be retrieval-based and try to preserve those properties (in particular the ability to run on consumer hardware, enabling developers to run models locally has proved to be a game changer when stable diffusion came out).

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#456

Post by ghaff »

notahacker wrote: post #394
ifyoubuildit wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I think this could be a feature. Things on the internet have a life cycle. After a while they can be altered to fit various agendas or just drowned out by seo nonsense. Seeing an immutable snapshot in time mi…

For a chatbot, it's a feature. For the large proportion of search queries that are "give me context for $newsitem", "what is $latestthing", "what is $celebrity up to", "can you solve my problem with the latest version of x" it's a show stopping bug (frankly Google weighting established content higher in most contexts is already an issue for the last of those queries: Googling error messages etc). And at least all the…

I'm not sure if, from the perspective of consumers, it's a feature or a bug. Sort of the only thing keeping ChatGPT or equivalent from being a massive blogspam creator that puts mostly young writers cranking out content for pennies out on the street is that it can only create relatively evergreen content.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#457

Post by visarga »

amelius wrote: post #223
daveidol wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the big problems with these types of AI - piggybacking on everyone else's work, typically with no attribution _whatsoever_.

Yet you better cooperate otherwise you won't get any visitors at all.

Nobody owes you visitors.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#458

Post by rchaud »

moffkalast wrote: post #435
jjeaff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially good for users initially. But I can't see how anyone will be incentivized to create and post content for Google to scrape if they won't have any traffic from Google. It could actually be a huge benefit in some ways if it chokes out the content mills. However, something tells me that they have little to no overhead compared to the people who actually toil away to post good, original content.

This may actually be fantastic for the web. The current incentives are terrible anyway: cheat, scam and SEO your way to the first search result page and then do whatever since you'll get visits and decent ad revenue regardless of content. Most people that make good content don't make it for money anyway. Did people back in the pre-google days think "oh I'd make this site but gosh darn there's nobody to pay me for it"…

> Did people back in the pre-google days think "oh I'd make this site but gosh darn there's nobody to pay me for it".

Google is a huge part of the reason the old web doesn't exist anymore. Artisanal websites cannot compete for visibility against corporate websites that have staff dedicated to figuring out SEO tricks from every imaginable source: page speed, HTTPS, image compression, meta tags.

The hobbyist back then didn't need to know all this. Today, not having HTTPS alone can cause your site to be hidden from search, even if it is read-only. In that kind of world, only the infinitesimally small minority will bother to make a website on their own dime.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#459

Post by rchaud »

dizzydes wrote: post #46

> Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search Despite this blog obviously being written for Wall St, this line is key. This is why anyone is going to struggle to compete with Google in AI. Google Search is used so widely and its taxonomy of meaning so vast already that once they flip this on they’ll be unstoppable. (Assuming any rate of improvement whatsoever as we search.) I’m not mentioning all other learning da…

> that once they flip this on they’ll be unstoppable. (Assuming any rate of improvement whatsoever as we search.)

Unstoppable as measured by what? More ad revenue?

They're already the #1 search engine due to two decades of general goodwill and a decade of monopoly power in mobile.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#460

Post by visarga »

woeirua wrote: post #411
armchairhacker wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

News sites can reword information from other news sites, AI can train on reworded web text. It will keep the information but not learn the exact original expression, as it should be. Copyright protects expression, not ideas.
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