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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#531

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#532

Post by HDThoreaun »

relaxing wrote: post #346
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess a couple of reasons: 1) Because it is disruptive. Things may get shook up, and Google may not end up in as exclusive position as they are currently in. There's risk. 2) Because it's not obvious how advertising would fit in with a conversational interface. Google may stay as #1 search/answer engine, but would revenue be adversely affected?

Banner, sidebar, in-line, interstitial, modal… what advertising modes wouldn’t work on conversational interface?

None of those would work with a chatGPT like search platform. Search ads work because they're largely indistinguishable from the organic content. You search google and get a million links, the first few are ads. The entire model of chatbots is completely different. So the only truly effective way to advertise on a chatbot is to make the response itself into the ad. But would people use such a service, or would they move to another one that just uses banner ads which monetize at much lower rates? If chatbots completely replace the current search ecosystem Google will be forced to either lose huge market share or make much less money per search.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#533

Post by vagabund »

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.

Like what? Basically every research breakthrough from industry has come through Google.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#534

Post by mark_l_watson »

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

Thanks for mentioning perplexity.ai - I had not seen it before. I asked it a rather detailed question about myself and it provided good responses with references. It handled a follow up question very well also. Well done!

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#535

Post by notahacker »

ghaff wrote: post #456
notahacker wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think [Chat]GPT's output is very well represented in blogspam pages I've seen recently, so consumers get the worst of both worlds: just because it's too out of date to properly answer your question directly doesn't mean it can't help other people generate filler text that outranks pages with the answer in web search...

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#536

Post by mochomocha »

dubcanada wrote: post #496
coredog64 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You completely ignore the fact that companies will show ads everywhere, there is no reason that they would not try to inject ads into chat. "Here is the answer to your question about oranges. But did you know Tropicana is made from 100% real orange juice?" "A project manager is a ... Often the software project managers use is Zoho Projects for the best agile sprint planning" If they can put ads in it, there will be a…

"Native advertising 2.0"

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#537

Post by veec_cas_tant »

rchaud wrote: post #398

Anybody remember how we used to learn new words and build our vocabulary? Perhaps it went something like: "What does this word mean"? "Look it up in the dictionary" "Why can't you just tell me??" I remember the hassle of looking things up in a paper dictionary. Over the long term, it massively helped improve my ability to not just recall a simple definition, but also learn new words, as they were adjacent to what I w…

> Instead of a group of links that you'd personally evaluate and mentally rank in terms of usefulness (thereby building your own bullshit detector over time)...

This sounds an awful lot like email's "Spam" folder, an AI driven bullshit detector that I am particularly fond of.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#539

Post by airtonix »

pffft8888 wrote: post #530
jiggawatts wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So my question is, how hard of a problem is that with LLMs? I get the sense that LLMs are trained on a very large data set all at once, but that it is difficult to incrementally update them with new data. It's the opposite. Getting an LLM to learn the basics of grammar and paragraph-level language structure is the "hard" part. Once you have that, further fine-tuning, specialisation, or other incremental changes are…

It's not about "Well behaved." All we're teaching it is our biases.

[dead]

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#540

Post by RangerScience »

jiggawatts wrote: post #512
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…

> So my question is, how hard of a problem is that with LLMs? I get the sense that LLMs are trained on a very large data set all at once, but that it is difficult to incrementally update them with new data. It's the opposite. Getting an LLM to learn the basics of grammar and paragraph-level language structure is the "hard" part. Once you have that, further fine-tuning, specialisation, or other incremental changes are…

Hmm. Do you also need a way to "forget" things?

Like - hmm. I could see taking a snapshot after the grammar/language stuff is in, and then every N weeks retraining on the current web, adding in something about recentness, but that doesn't seem like "continuous" training.

I'd imagine "continuous" training would be, well, going on continuously, all the time, but that would mean that, to include "recentness", something would have to change with the weights that were from that "old" stuff, which sounds an awful lot like the human process of "forgetting".

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