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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#561

Post by bbor »

mrkramer wrote: post #557
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…

>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. Look up the term "native advertising", that should help you in understanding how online ad ecosystem w…

How so? How does native advertising solve the problem of diminishing volumes of keyword searches? How does it even relate to search ads?

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#562

Post by thehappypm »

pleadthefifth wrote: post #510
pphysch wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Google phone can instantly translate almost any foreign language, embedded in an image, without an internet connection. Pretty sure that was not a thing 8 years ago. If/when Google embeds an (local and/or lightweight) Bard model into every Pixel phone, that will be a game-changer.

While cool, that's a feature, not a product. Sundar has not led the company on any new products that have succeeded. The chat apps failed, Meet/Hangouts/whatever lost to Zoom, Stadia got cancelled, etc. All their current cash cows made their names before him. At least he didn't oversee the introduction of Google Plus, though.

He’s leading Google Cloud to strong growth, which is more important than something niche but innovative like Stadia.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#563

Post by adastra22 »

RangerScience wrote: post #553
pffft8888 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ehh. From what I've seen in a lot of places - MIRI, AI + prisoner's dilemma experiments, moral philosophy, life - there do seem to be the categories of "clear good behavior" and "clear bad behavior" even if there are also really big categories of "unclear good/bad behavior". In other words, while sure, some "well behaved" is "passing on our biases", there does (IMO) seem to be a big chunk that's "universally well beh…

Nothing in morality is universal.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#564

Post by volkk »

layer8 wrote: post #303
volkk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder what kind of downstream effects on the ad click industry this will have. would kill for it all to die and be reinvented in a different, more personalizable and clever way

People will still visit websites that provide entertainment, social media, shopping, services, web applications, source material, porn, etc. Enough opportunity for clickable ads.

isn't the vast majority of ad market surfaced via google?

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#565

Post by mrkramer »

generalizations wrote: post #419
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…

Google already has a trackrecord of beating Microsoft. Do you remember Windows Phone? Well Google made Android in response to Windows Phone + Bing threat not in response to iPhone.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#566

Post by smoldesu »

vagabund wrote: post #533
smoldesu wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook was first to the punch on AI photo tagging and facial recognition in their systems, but they also did a lot of foundational research on GANs and self-supervised learning. Plus, they do a lot of other tangential research around language and life sciences that might not get funded otherwise.

Some of it is marketing bullshit, but Facebook seems to have a genuine interest in pushing the field forward. Admittedly Google is also not the best example though, seeing as they're the Tensorflow maintainers :p

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#567

Post by shawntan »

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…

Grammar is surprisingly easy to learn from unstructured data, to an extent. (source: I spent a lot of my PhD doing this kinda thing.)

Continual learning seems to be a tough problem though, from what I'm seeing of my friends working on this problem. Like I said in another comment, just doing gradient updates form new data is fraught with problems. RL has a bunch of techniques to mitigate issues that arise with that, but I think it's still an active area of research.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#568

Post by mrkramer »

gretch wrote: post #509
generalizations wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Disclosure: work at google YouTube was founded in ~2005. Google bought it in 2006. It is now 2023. YouTube has spent 2 years as its own company and 17 as part of Google. Try to remember what YouTube functionality was in 2006. It was very different and has grown a lot. The narrative that Google doesn’t know how to innovate YouTube doesn’t add up.

YouTube was grabbing lots of attention and with the attention comes ad revenue so it made perfect sense for Google to buy YouTube and scale it up. YouTube grew into something exceptionally valuable for both the Google and the people who use it.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#569

Post by [deleted] »

vitorgrs wrote: post #554
jw1224 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT 4? I didn’t even think they’d announced v2 yet. Source?

I also though that was silly, as we are very early on 3.5 yet. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/microsoft-bing-... But the leaked Bing Chat feature indeed does show things that for now ChatGPT don't have.

[deleted]

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#570

Post by joe_the_user »

tiborsaas wrote: post #488
joe_the_user wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broadly, yes. Current AIs (LLMs etc) haves succeeded as brute-force prediction at it's lowest level. Of course there are many refinements here but this basic situation has meant that adaptive learning, updating, doesn't really work for this particular approach (as others mention). The thing about this is if competition forces Google and Microsoft to offer a full ChatGPT style interface, they are going to be using a v…

> they are going to be using a vast amount of cpu cycles and thus energy. This is going to be costly and potentially environmentally destructive How much CPU do you think Google currently utilize? OpenAI is a relatively small company compared to Google and they can keep their services (barely) afloat. AI at scale is indeed server intensive, but probably nothing like what we already have. Also, new chips designs might…

How much CPU do you think Google currently utilize?

Lots and if they serve a ChatGPT interface, it will be N times as much as now since each will be to an LLM and involve a back-and-forth. What is N? 3, 10, 100?

OpenAI is a relatively small company compared to Google and they can keep their services (barely) afloat.

OpenAI has negligible income. They're effectively financed by Microsoft. I don't how much serving ChatGPT to the world costs but it's fairly expensive per transaction. It can't not be, since it's calling a model with billions of parameters.

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