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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

#311
post #245

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 specifi…

> 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

I feel like it should be possible to build attribution "simply" by finding good results via traditional search (or even using LLM embeddings), then asking a LLM to summarize the sources. Then you can show the attribution. This would (to me) be much more meaningful. Especially for specific searches ("I want a red oversized couch thats got good back support"). Don't tell me about couches then find a random link, find a couch then tell me about that couch.

Is anyone doing this? IDK, maybe there is a reason that it's not happening, but it seems at least as easy as all the other crazy (and cool) things happening in this space.

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

#312
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? It is difficult to get a man to critically evaluate something if his future salary depends upon his unquestioning acceptance of it.

SV and Wall Street loves a smart guy who bucks the trend, big risk taker. Mostly a question of pucker factor -- how big of a bet in favor or against, and how big of an impact on the job will you risk?

> SV and Wall Street loves a smart guy who bucks the trend, big risk taker.

Only if they hit out of the park. You don't see a lot of founders getting a second bite of the Sand Hill Road apple if they failed the first time.

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

#313
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2 years later the Bold was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance. I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. You can talk all you want about the foundational models and how advanced they are, but the search product itself will require a ton of…

> I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. You can talk all you want about the foundational models and how advanced they are, but the search product itself will require a ton of fine-tuning on real-world training data that they aren't collecting yet. I love ChatGPT as a source of inspiration, but I don't think I'd w…

I disagree. The other day, I was debugging an issue in a web application. Only on iPhones, dragging an element around left odd residue on the screen. I googled the issue but was completely unable to find a solution, even though I consider myself a seasoned google user. I asked the question to ChatGPT, which immediately gave me the way to fix the issue.

Having a ChatGPT answer next to the google result would have saved me a bunch of time, and I could see it coming in useful in many cases.

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not so different from the current state of the world in which many search results are full of cheap SEO content. Now instead of appending Reddit to my search I just go to chatGPT. Probably similar levels of accuracy between Reddit and GPT anyway while the SEO content is just garbage filler.

Around of quarter of GPT's training data was Reddit so in some sense it's already a Reddit response generating API.

This can't be right. Any place I can read about this?

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

#315
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I ask ChatGPT who the highest scoring NBA player is? Oops, failed. How about I ask it how many games Jaime Benn has played? Or what the score of the last Dallas stars game was, or when the next one is? What if I ask ChatGPT for a copy of the manual for a meater bluetooth meat thermometer? It literally just told me to Google it. What if I ask which car manufacturers are joining Formula 1, and when they'll be s…

It will answer the following: The highest scoring NBA player is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with 38,387 career points. Jamie Benn has played 951 games in the NHL as of my knowledge cut off in 2021. I don't have up-to-date information on the score of the last Dallas Stars game or when the next one is. Regarding the manual for a Meater Bluetooth meat thermometer, you can usually find manuals for products on the manufacturer's…

> What if I ask ChatGPT: why do people resist new disruptive technologies?

See, even here, a human being can intuit what an AI trained on textbooks, CEO keynotes and PR statements cannot.

People resist because their bullshit detectors went off. Search AI has yet to 'disrupt' anything. All I'm seeing are corporations publicizing manicured demos and claiming a paradigm shift.

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

#316
post #261
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so GPT is good at parsing technical documentation. What about the other 95% of search volume that isn't tech-related?

TikTok believe it or not. I had a 19yr old cousin tell me that she almost uses TikTok exclusively for tutorials and when I pushed back and said why/how the other teens in the family heavily agreed. I’ve since asked ~5 gen z (I don’t interact with many!) and they told me the same.

I've heard this anecdotally, but I kinda still don't believe it, as TikTok seems like an entertainment first avenue, not for more substantive learning.

However, I could be completely wrong and TikTok video is the future of search. If so, where does that leave a text-only ChatGPT?

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with revisions ("please include Guam and Puetro Rico") Your wrote "please" to ChatGPT? FWIW, Miss Manners had a column a couple of weeks ago where she stated that we should not say please or thank you to machines, including Siri and Alexa. I was surprised.

> Your wrote "please" to ChatGPT? Yup. So when the machines take over, hopefully they'll enslave me last, or put me in a more pleasant Matrix instance compared to the average.

You'll suffer just as much ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. if i'm being frank, that doesn't match my experience with HN at all. chatgpt is the hot new thing, of course people here are preoccupied imagining a future powered with it. there are a bunch of different…

in general, i often post similar comments on HN, disputing the idea that there is such a thing as "HN groupthink". what puzzles me here is the the technical limitations of language models (i refuse to call them "large" because the sizes are going to change dramatically) seem so obvious and so well known, that i just find it hard to believe that there are more than a handful of people on HN who uncritically accept the…

With that said I'm not sure the cynics on HN are scoring much better (we've predicted the last 5000 of 10 major failures meme). The cynic in me said crypto was overhyped by con men and mostly useless, and I was right. At the same time I said the same about most social media and yet the masses flocked to it to give their personal information away.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That thread is mostly about Google completely messing up their response to what Microsoft announced yesterday. I don’t see that unanimous acceptance, there are a lot of interesting discussions about the shortcomings. There are many comparisons between Google results for examples, with also potential solutions to problems you cite like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709883 It’s not about replacing search overn…

If it takes even 10% of search volume (in its current technological form) then those of us working in this domain have failed, miserably. I have no idea what Microsoft is thinking. It's like a state hiring a known liar to be its star witness in some notable number of court cases. [ EDIT: OK, so one thing they might be thinking is to just this sort of technology to generate readable/listenable summaries of search resu…

Heh, this is where I think you may be wrong about the future....

We vote in known liars all the time. People tend to like a good story better than the truth. If this thing is good at storytelling we could be in trouble.

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

#320
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that end-users really care about having a GPT-written paragraph accompanying their search results. For 90% of my searches I don't want any search results. I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question. In the olden days of the web I had to figure out what to search to give me a website that would give me that answer as the first result, and in the mid-90s that was really hard because search was…

> Over the next 20 years the war between Google and SEO spammers meant finding things got a bit harder. Along with that Google's proliferation of adverts on their search result pages meant it actually became harder to even find the website link I wanted in the page itself. Yes, SEO spam has largely made the search experience a lot worse and ripe for change. But ChatGPT crawls these terrible links too! Many of the lin…

>So why would you trust GPT to provide an authoritative answer more than your own instincts

To use a highly specific example, I've recently been doing a lot of work in Excel and the search space for Excel related queries has been almost completely destroyed by SEO adware sites. If you're lucky, the answer you're looking for is at least buried somewhere on the page you click on, but there's just as much a chance you'll get a semi-gibberish pseudo-article that itself is probably AI generated. Using my instincts/intuition to locate the correct answer is a non-zero cost of time and effort, made intentionally more challenging by site owners who want me to linger and consume advertisements.

On the other hand, asking ChatGPT how to match two columns with XLookup or what have you almost always returns a correct, concise answer on the first try. If it's not correct, the formula doesn't work, and I can tell ChatGPT it gave me the wrong formula, and it corrects itself. Even in the rare event that happens, it's a fraction as much effort and frustration as it takes to rummage through the top search results for the same query.

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