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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#911

Post by fauigerzigerk »

nostrademons wrote: post #832
acdha wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has already taken a lot of heat from increasingly keeping people on the search results page rather than sending them to the content providers. Chat interfaces are going to take that problem to the next level since they not only present someone else’s content but do it without linking to them. At some point that destroys the web as sites move behind paywalls. Google or Facebook giving you less revenue is still…

That's not really a problem for the adoption or economic viability of ChatGPT, though. At some point, it hoovers up all the knowledge of the Internet, encodes it into its model, and then - the model just stagnates as content providers stop providing content. That's not a big deal for it - it'll continue to be the primary place people go for answers even when the source material has thrown in the towel and decided the…

Once all competing language models and providers have hoovered up all the existing knowledge and can do similar things with it then margins for that part of the story will shrink rapidly.

It will all be about access to new information, access to customers (such as advertisers) and access to users attracted to other aspects of the platform as well.

I think producers of new content and their distribution platforms will have a lot of leverage. Youtube, Facebook, TikTok, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, traditional publishers and perhaps even smaller ones such as Substack and Medium, are all gatekeepers of new original content.

I think Google is best positioned to make the economics work. Unfortunately, they don't appear to have the best management team right now. They keep losing focus. Perhaps the danger of their core business getting disrupted will focus their minds.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#912

Post by ElFitz »

brookst wrote: post #787
ElFitz wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine no one actually reads web sites. Instead a blog post to share an opinion, I'll probably want to make sure my opinion gets picked up by the language model. How do I do that? Computed knowledge may render many websites and blogs obsolete. Realising that has made me wonder why I should bother write anything publicly accessible online. Aside from pure altruism and love for my fellow human, or some unexplainable…

Some of us find that writing things down helps us form and test opinions. And hopefully there will always* be a market for new explanations of novel ideas, before they are well enough understood for LLMs to do a better job. * I figure I’ve got about 25 years left, so always = 25 years. Good luck, kids.

It definitely does. But if I'm never going to be able to get feedback of any sort on them, or even know if anyone read it, why should I bother with hosting and maintaining it online? This use case can be solved for using a pen and paper. Or a notes app.

> Good luck, kids.

Thanks!

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#913

Post by jerrygoyal »

bzbee10 wrote: post #874

Here's a concrete scenario: StackOverflow makes money because people go to it for answers to their questions. The answers are provided by people who write them because they get points for providing good answers, that they use for reputation points to get good jobs. It's an ecosystem. Everybody profits. Now Google scrapes the contents, and provides a service where you just ask your question and it gives the best, most…

> Where does Google gets its information now? The feeder pipeline has died.

The bar has raised now. People will ask the questions on SO whose answers they couldn't find from anywhere else including AI.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#914

Post by literalAardvark »

hypothesis wrote: post #703
kolinko wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The motivation for writing a blog post may be the same as when blogoslhere originally started - for your community to read it.

I’m afraid that we will be drowning in synthetic blog posts. Same goes for comments section…

We're already drowning in very high quality synthetic comments. In fact the high quality is the best way to recognize them... What the actual users post is trash, and then all of a sudden there's a huge thread of very educated users having a conversation that just happens to plug a product.

There will be some shifts for sure, but I'm not convinced that they'll be that large, since we're already pretty screwed on the signal to noise ratio of the www.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#915

Post by literalAardvark »

29athrowaway wrote: post #720
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…

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

For the next six months... At most. Efficient model updates are already in the pipeline, and the only reason there's a learning cutoff is probably AI ethics.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#916

Post by ben_w »

pffft8888 wrote: post #821
inimino wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I agree. The Web is unbiased (as a reflection of the views of average web users, though that is itself a bias) or at least it mostly is (certainly was in the early days) and reflecting that evenly would be politically untenable. However we use "bias" normally in a much looser way, and if you want to define bias relative to some agreed-upon standard of truth, now you have a definitional (and political) problem. Mo…

I define bias as not treating all political and philosophical opinions equally. If one is picked over the others, that is bias. I saw this bias and made many records of it in case of ChatGPT.

By that definition it's not possible to be unbiased, because moral relativity is itself a position.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#917

Post by badestrand »

eclipxe wrote: post #434
badestrand wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what am I missing? Why would a chatbot like ChatGPT disrupt Google vs forcing Google to simply evolve. Because it's not clear yet whether anyone else can currently develop a chatbot interface as capable as ChatGPT. For many ChatGPT is already replacing a lot of Google searches so G needs to hurry.

For many? Citation needed. Yes there is a lot of hype, but is it really replacing a lot of Google searches, if so is that your anecdote or is there data here?

Yes, sorry that's an anecdote of me and everyone I know that has tried ChatgGPT. Obviously in the grand scheme of things this is nothing, but if other early adopters behave similarly it is a great threat to Google because if it catches early adopters then everyone else will follow after a while.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#918

Post by literalAardvark »

killjoywashere wrote: post #267
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…

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…

And they literally published the transformer paper back in 2017. I doubt that their next move was to go on vacation for 6 years.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#919

Post by addandsubtract »

jerrygoyal wrote: post #913
bzbee10 wrote: post #874

Here's a concrete scenario: StackOverflow makes money because people go to it for answers to their questions. The answers are provided by people who write them because they get points for providing good answers, that they use for reputation points to get good jobs. It's an ecosystem. Everybody profits. Now Google scrapes the contents, and provides a service where you just ask your question and it gives the best, most…

> Where does Google gets its information now? The feeder pipeline has died. The bar has raised now. People will ask the questions on SO whose answers they couldn't find from anywhere else including AI.

Correction: the AI will ask the questions it couldn't find a high enough confidence answer to. We are all now working for the AI to find niche scraps of knowledge that haven't been indexed.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#920

Post by caleb-allen »

foooobaba wrote: post #280
londons_explore wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how long till they open it up to your private data stored in Google? Eg. User: What should I be doing today? AI: You have a court appearance at 9am. Prioritize that, because failing to appear might result in an arrest warrant. Next, prioritize your mums birthday - all the other family will be there, and with your mums cancer results last week, this might be the last. If you travel between them by bus, then y…

User: What should I be doing today? AI: You have a court appearance today, I have booked a route for you on google maps. Next buy a gift for your mum’s birthday, here are some recommendations sorted by ad spend spend. For your travel, I recommend these options, sorted by ad spend. Me: What about the leaking faucet in my house? AI: You don't have the time to fix it yourself, here is a list of contractors that can fix…

I recall reading a very interesting short story about exactly this - handing over the entirety of your daily minutiae to AI and the moral consequences. I'm unable to find the name of it, maybe something by Ted Chiang?
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