Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bard and new AI features in Search

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 1000 posts

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#631

Post by sangnoir »

richardw wrote: post #350
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…

OpenAI has had huge mindshare with students recently. Every (ish) kid who writes an essay or needs information summarised is hitting ChatGPT. Kids are where change happens, ask Facebook. They get on new things instantly - within days we were reading reports of kids writing essays with the latest tool. Young people are also naturally viral, sharing the cool new tool with entire classes. This is a marketer’s dream. You…

> OpenAI has had huge mindshare with students recently.

Clubhouse was once the new hotness - until it wasn't.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#632

Post by inimino »

ben_w wrote: post #600
inimino wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not even teaching it anything, all we're really doing is setting up a behaviorist training regime that lets it reproduce some of the biases of some of us, just well enough to squeeze through the Overton window that's acceptable to big corporates.

I think that counts as teaching.

Close enough, I'm just peevish about that word. Teaching is miles away from anything in ML or deep learning practice today.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#633

Post by ctvo »

paganel wrote: post #629
ctvo wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MS cannot deliver successful stuff on the web at scale. It's this type of confidence that you come back to HN over and over for. Let's ignore Azure, Office 365, and Microsoft's other online properties. In just video games: Microsoft owns and operates the Xbox network with over 100 million active monthly users[1]. That runs on the internet with all the features of a social network and more. I think they can deliver…

> Azure, Office 365 I explicitly mentioned the web, Office365 is not a successful web story. It is a successful enterprise story (afaik it is still wildly profitable for MS the company), but it is not a successful web story. Ditto for Xbox.

It doesn't fit your very niche definition of the web, that you still haven't defined explicitly. Let's try:

Is the web a consumer product that runs on the internet?

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#634

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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

Just tried perplexity.ai,and it's very impressive. It uses GPT-3.5 and Bing (so it says!), very well integrated. Will have to play with it some more, but this seems the perfect integration of search and chat!

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#635

Post by mrkramer »

jjcon wrote: post #273
brap wrote: post #206

I’m curious to hear why Google isn’t going to win in this AI arms race. The way I see it, Google: * is effectively the gateway to the internet, owning the most popular website in the world, mobile OS, and browser * has infinite LIVE data, both unstructured and structured (knowledge graph) * has infinite compute resources * employs the world’s best AI scientists and invests heavily in AI * has decade(s) of experience…

That may all be the case but then why has Google been failing to innovate and also maintain anything the past few years? The past fews years we’ve seen Google products die and deteriorate. Search has gotten worse, they’ve killed dozens of products and services (even ones that they promised would be around for the long haul). GPhotos is no longer free (after putting most competitors out of business). Google lack any i…

>GPhotos is no longer free (after putting most competitors out of business).

Maybe the putting most competitors out of business has something to do with GPhotos not being free? I think it does.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#636

Post by ux-app »

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.

the point was that Google Video sucked and wasn't able to beat YouTube.

Same story for Google+

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#637

Post by metta2uall »

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…

"Google killer" is hyperbole, but I think Google does have a challenge since chat-based search may be much harder to monetise & thus less profitable. One reason is because people are used to having ads on the search results page, but ChatGPT presents itself as a human advisor, and in this context I suppose people would be quite unhappy to have ads injected into their conversation.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#638

Post by paganel »

ctvo wrote: post #633
paganel wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Azure, Office 365 I explicitly mentioned the web, Office365 is not a successful web story. It is a successful enterprise story (afaik it is still wildly profitable for MS the company), but it is not a successful web story. Ditto for Xbox.

It doesn't fit your very niche definition of the web, that you still haven't defined explicitly. Let's try: Is the web a consumer product that runs on the internet?

> It doesn't fit your very niche definition of the web

What's niche about websites?

Leaving aside the snarky tone, I'll give you an example of how MS has continuously botched their web work for 20 years.

If I go on Bing Maps (which I'm actually using on one of my pet projects on account of their permissive licensing) and I type in my Bucharest street address the auto-completion thing works fine, which is a plus (Apple's is much worst at that), but then again their map web project ends up pointing me about 200-300 meters from where I actually live. Google Maps does it pitch-perfect, has done it pitch-perfect for years (I think there have been around 10 years since they've added exact address searches for Bucharest). Many other such cases.

Later edit: Forgot to mention, two of the closest POIs shown on Bing Maps have been closed for two years with other places having taking their place in the meantime. Again, GMaps has been almost instantaneous on putting that on their maps, MS seems to be a lot slower at that. That's what the web is all about, data that counts and that is of interest.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#639

Post by brigandish »

XorNot wrote: post #590
pffft8888 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The internet does not accurately reflect our biases. It is much cheaper online to post bad content, or hateful content, then "good" content. In real life, almost the opposite is true.

Doesn't that mean that the internet more accurately represents our biases because most of the time they're hidden by fear of social retribution?
Post reply on HN