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Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

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Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#241

Post by [deleted] »

filoleg wrote: post #239
minsc_and_boo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Apple, who shares more user data with the CCP than most American tech companies: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce... All FAANG are suspect these days

> Apple, who shares more user data with the CCP than most American tech companies Whether intentionally or not, your comment is very misleading due to omitting the fact that it only applies to chinese customers of Apple in China (which the linked article mentions in the very beginning). Apple doesn't share user data of people outside of China with the CCP. Also, this is literally a legal requirement to be able to ope…

[deleted]

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#242

Post by vel0city »

flir wrote: post #160
noelsusman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a random experiment I asked both platforms "What is the current average mortgage rate?" https://www.perplexity.ai/?s=u&uuid=6f7fe592-c11f-4df9-a2bf-... https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+current+average+... Google's results were far more informative and usable. I then tried something I thought would be more up Perplexity's alley: "Who was the first US president with a last name starting with R?" https://w…

> The first US president with a last name starting with "R" was John Quincy Adams, whose middle name started with "R". If you're looking for a president whose last name starts with "R", then the first would be James A. Garfield. ChatGPT is amazing, until it isn't.

I don't know how anyone could trust anything it tells you when it replies with facts like this. If someone honestly said this in person, would people really continue to think this person to be a credible person?

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#243

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

You know, whatever the merits (and it sounds as if there were very few) of Google's presentation (or Pinchai's recent non-statement) might be, I would have expected the commentariat here at HN to display way more skepticism about language models as a replacement for search. If there's a crowd anywhere in the world large enough to leave 200+ comments on a post like this, you'd think thatg the one at HN would understand these models' currently unsolved problem with lying and fabulation.

And yet when I read the comments, I see this sort of calm acceptance that of course this technology is going to take over search. Why is everyone so confident? The performance of these models is simultaneously jaw-dropping and absurd. With no proposed solutions to the problems that they fundamentally face, why this level of belief that their ascendance is inevitable?

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#244

Post by hintymad »

88913527 wrote: post #236
hintymad wrote: post #187

> This suggests to me that Google is finally getting disrupted and are scrambling of desperation because of the release of ChatGPT. Even if Google is not getting disrupted, this suggested that Google is finally at the stage where its culture is hindering its progress and causing subpar performance. I hope I'm wrong, though. Google is such an admirable company. Its search engine has forever changed the world. The laun…

This is what happens to all companies. It's a natural progression. Some new companies will wow us in the way Google did in the mid-aught's.

Definitely. Bell, DEC, Sun, Intel, IBM... Google feels refreshingly different probably because she was a later generation. It's actually good for the US to have such a lively natural progression. It's like a forest springs forth with life anew in front of a sick tree's fading frame.

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#245

Post by sho_hn »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #243

You know, whatever the merits (and it sounds as if there were very few) of Google's presentation (or Pinchai's recent non-statement) might be, I would have expected the commentariat here at HN to display way more skepticism about language models as a replacement for search. If there's a crowd anywhere in the world large enough to leave 200+ comments on a post like this, you'd think thatg the one at HN would understan…

I'd like to have more discussion about the attribution problem, specifically.

We now have a couple of the players saying they're working on, or having demos. But from what I can see, all of these don't _actually_ attribute the source. They're just able to find _a_ source that fits to the output, working backward from it. Often the attributed source fits, but is actually disagreeing with the original output in specific details. In other words, it's not backing the output at all. At most it's a "you could check out these links and compare yourself and it might help you judge our accuracy".

Is there any indication real attribution is coming?

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#247

Post by [deleted] »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #220
jaggs wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got to say it was one of the most painfully bad presentations I've ever seen, from any company or organization. Spectacular fail.

Yeah... For those who haven't seen it: At one point they were unable to demo because there was no phone to demo on (~9:35).

[deleted]

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#248

Post by kossTKR »

minsc_and_boo wrote: post #225
kossTKR wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After wrestling with Google Ads for a year my admiration went to zero. Google is a mainly running a scam these days with completely blackboxed systems that absolutely fleece the little guy when not doing outright criminal auction price manipulation. I don't know why this hasn't gotten more media attention. Probably because of stockholm syndrome in the publishing sphere. Yes they pioneered amazing things but where the…

Advertising is like finance; there are entire teams of people whose full time jobs it is to make money using complex markets. SMBs are not going to be able to casually compete. Also if it wasn't a black box, then scammers would be fleecing everyone.

Good points. The problem though is that the barrier to entry now is so high that only the wealthiest are allowed to compete, the ones with a huge trustfund or lots of VC money or institutional backing.

Most smaller players are getting eaten or drowned, with the way Google Ads has implemented their changes. It was not like this 3 or or even 10 years ago, especially in the tech sphere.

So yes the state of Google could be a black mirror to the rising Gini Coefficients, HFT, armies of lawyers and private wealth management that create systems so complex that no - even upper middleclass person - will be able to enter or stay in the market.

AI is probably going to make this exponential. The ones with the money will be able to hire the tech and wealth expertise to grow while the barrier to entry just keeps rising.

Or is there a less dark outlook for the smaller or just midsized entrepreneurial endeavours?

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#249

Post by [deleted] »

Raidion wrote: post #155
monknomo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just wondering aloud, but say like this eats google's lunch and search goes away. These chatbots provide answers, and footnotes. In a world like this, where the need is reduced to actually go to a website, what's the incentive for maintaining a website that no one visits? After a couple rounds of "adversarial training data evolution," that is, people optimizing their websites to get mentions by chatbots, will the bot…

It's the dying out of the "middle" of the value curve. You end up with a market that's dominated by cheap "good enough" products for casuals and "products built to last" for power users. So if you have a low effort website that's factual and text based, you're going to get your lunch eaten by GPT, if you have a higher effort website (subscription gated with lots of multimedia content and user engagement) you'll be fi…

[deleted]

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#250

Post by visarga »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #185
TrevorJ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google already has an issue with accuracy - the snippets they choose are often not very correct.

Yes but I think they're correct a lot more often than ChatGPT. And they give the source!

Search "What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot" and see precision Zero. None of the responses match the query. It should say - not found. Or actually find that people attempted to illegally cross through the Channel Tunnel.

Usually when I search for error messages for a specific version of software it will respond with other versions. That is useless. That's not what 24 years worth of excellence in search should look like.

At the very least they should collate a dataset of say, one million queries, and try to use a LLM to find the correct answers using search. A better search ranking model will make the LLM generate more correct answers. Iterate until score is improved. Just make the result solve the task.

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