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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#711

Post by TaylorAlexander »

lumb63 wrote: post #669
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google was also one of the first companies to fire an AI researcher for what he said about the AI he developed. If you are thinking of the guy who said the LLM was alive, Timnit Gebru was earlier and she was fired from their AI ethics team for levying fair criticism of their work in a research paper [1]. I find that situation more of an indictment of their compromised AI ethics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ti…

Thanks for sharing. This is about what I would have expected from Google, so it’s nice to see my assessment was accurate. I’d say that focusing on racism after firing someone for their work on AI (un)ethics was tone deaf, but it sounds more like selective hearing.

I am not sure whose focus on racism you are referring to. There is indeed a problem with white people in google management having "selective hearing' when people of color speak up, which in this day and age is considered a form of racism. It is the duty of those in power to unlearn their biases and treat everyone with respect and professionalism. We should not make excuses for powerful white people failing to respect the work of people of color. (I do not mean to suggest you are doing so, but I am uncertain what you mean by "selective hearing".) It is my personal opinion that a white researcher would not have been treated this way, and an examination of the role of race in this situation is certainly appropriate. The fact that Gebru was subject to racist harassment after this event is also worthy of examination as we consider the way that our society responds to people like her sharing their views.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#712

Post by summerlight »

xtracto wrote: post #545

At this point, Microsoft should do whatever it can to make a deal with Apple to place a ChatGPT powered platform in the iPhone/i Devices. Most of the people using "computers" nowadays do it through mobile phones, and Google has a strong grip in that market with Android, with only Apple giving them some competition. Thus the only platform where Microsoft could really compete is in iOS. If Microsoft + Apple could get t…

Why would Apple accept such proposals? Google/Apple duopoly has been very convenient for both companies and removed lots of business uncertainties for them. This is not just mere trust; their established business structures strongly incentivize not to trespass other's territory. Inviting MS to the party would make lots of disruption in this space and Tim's personality doesn't seem to like such things.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#713

Post by motoxpro »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #532
relaxing wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I'd argue that it it give Google even more capacity. Just one more place to advertise.

I'd say your answer is an "advertisement" for ChatGPT. The parent AND the grandparent didn't mention OpenAI. This is how you could advertise in answers.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#714

Post by Zachsa999 »

Chat as a search engine will fail for several reasons. It requires creativity, it's inaccurate with much nich information, and it's slow. There is many reasons to use AI chat technology, but as a search engine replacement it fails completely.

Google search is objectively easier to use, and safer. You can view the website and judge for yourself the integrity of the content. It's slow, because every query that is better on ai chat has to be generated.

However, I am really excited to have a new google toy on my search bar to use when those times come. I hope they put it in the foreground,band offer at least a basic free tier.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#715

Post by rushingcreek »

throwaway1851 wrote: post #657
rushingcreek wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://phind.com (YC S22) uses LLMs grounded in internet contexts to answer questions. There's an interesting tradeoff between grounding LLM answers in web contexts and answering questions from parametric memory like ChatGPT. The former is more accurate and verifiable, but the latter can be more creative and specific to you. We will have both of those answers soon. (Disclaimer: I am the co-founder).

Hi. I remember reading a question answering paper from Google in 2021 that concluded there was little evidence that models were actually grounding the generated answers in the contexts. Do you know if this problem has been solved?

Ah yes, it's this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06332.

With recent advances in alignment, this problem has gotten much better. Furthermore, the LLM used in that paper is only ~400 million parameters, which is orders of magnitude smaller than models being used for this task today.

Scale + alignment has been the solution so far.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#716

Post by jvolkman »

Mystery-Machine wrote: post #547
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…

Google cannot make a good SMS app for Android. They will never be able to launch a simple chat bot. What they will launch will be a monstrosity. The only Google AI product that people will use is any AI embedded within their existing apps and services...which is a great thing, but I wouldn't bet on Google being able to launch any new product that would have a decent UX.

What issues do you have with the modern Messages client on Android? I think it's great.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#717

Post by vineyardmike »

dan-robertson wrote: post #528
eklitzke wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1. How much did it cost to train ChatGPT/GPT3? The only estimate I’ve seen was not enormous in the grand scheme of things (eg more money than I have but less than Google have stuck down the back of the sofa). I think that number didn’t count training precursor models or paying for people to come up with the models/training data/infra. 2. Don’t Google have specialised hardware for training neural networks? If the cost…

1. We don't know the exact cost, but its well into the millions. When Microsoft invested in OpenAI, it did so in the form of ~$500M in azure credits, so they're expecting at least that much in compute spend. Another company estimated that GPT-3 alone cost the equivalent of $4.5M in cloud costs (ignoring OpenAI's other models).

2. Yes. Yes they will/are developing custom silicon that will likely be a significant advantage here. GPU costs were always crazy, and many companies are designing AI chips now. Even the iPhone chips have custom AI Cores. We'll see if Azure releases AI co-processors to aid them...

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#718

Post by dietr1ch »

Zachsa999 wrote: post #714

Chat as a search engine will fail for several reasons. It requires creativity, it's inaccurate with much nich information, and it's slow. There is many reasons to use AI chat technology, but as a search engine replacement it fails completely. Google search is objectively easier to use, and safer. You can view the website and judge for yourself the integrity of the content. It's slow, because every query that is bette…

I think chat is a good fit for refining search queries, but yeah, we already got too good at figuring out keywords to search, which makes writing a question seem a lot more work.

Maybe writing search queries in the form of a question will help people that didn't grew up using the very early search engines.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#719

Post by oldgradstudent »

dwighttk wrote: post #164
oldgradstudent wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In recent years I have to use quotes much more aggressively and use verbatim search almost all the time. Google is getting less and less helpful.

Do quotation marks do anything for you?

Quotes enclosing an expression search for an expression rather then the words (they have to appear together). And quotes enclosing a single word make that word more likely to appear verbatim.

But as long you don't select verbatim search, these are more of a recommendation to Google.

Just observations, not sure how reliable. YMMV.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#720

Post by 29athrowaway »

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…

If you are looking for news and recent events, LLMs are useless.
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