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

The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 68 posts

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#41

Post by justinclift »

astrange wrote: post #32
largepeepee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now I'm creating a VM om MacOS inside the MacOS and will attempt to extract the browser part. I don't want microsoft all around my system. The funny part is that apple's telemetry is just as bad as Microsoft's, the modern macOS sends a hash of each and every program you run and if their servers are affected, it has a good chance to pull your apps down with it as long as you are connected to the net. And that is just…

It does not do that.

Wasn't it clearly shown a while back that macOS Gatekeeper does indeed do something along those lines?

Doing some searching online is turning up info about it:

* https://www.extremetech.com/computing/317371-evaluating-appl...

* https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/15/apple-responds-to-gatekeep...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25204909

* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-certificate-chec...

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#42

Post by mark_l_watson »

Thorentis wrote: post #24
mrtksn wrote: post #10

Call it a fall when people stop using it, not when it fails on some queries. ChatGPT is very effective as long as you keep in mind that this is not a sentient all knowing being. Being wrong sometimes is not a bing deal because people being wrong on the internet is old as the internet. Also, if people were going to stop using it when it acts as a passive aggressive drama queen people wouldn't be using Reddit, Twitter…

> ChatGPT is very effective Massive [Citation Needed] to be honest. ChatGPT is arguably even worse than Bing at producing factually correct information, since it does not have any ability to source it. It simply predicts the next most likely word in a sentence. Even if that next word makes the entire thing horribly incorrect.

It really sounds like you have not personally used ChatGPT+Bing, right?

I have been using it as my search engine for a few days and when in chat mode, it shows you the web search queries it uses to gather context text to feed to ChatGPT along with your question. It then provides reference links.

Just one case from yesterday: we had been considering leaving our parrot by himself for two nights. A few times a year we leave him for one night and he seems to do OK. I asked ChatGPT+Bing about this and I got a very good response on why leaving him by himself would be a bad idea. I checked the references it used, and then hired someone to bird sit.

I have also asked about business ideas, and other topics that I would not have thought to ask a search engine previously.

At the heart of it, Squad type deep learning models have for years done a good job at answering questions given context text. This new system just does a better job of it.

I think that what Microsoft has now is a very good first step in a new kind of technology.

I wrote a demo 2 years ago that used SPARQL queries on public Knowledge Graphs to get query context text and then I used a pre trained QA model. I surprised that it worked OK. What Microsoft has is similar, but works on a grander scale.

Anyway, get in the waiting list, then try it yourself.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#43

Post by justinclift »

askvictor wrote: post #25
wkat4242 wrote: post #3

Bing Search is actually not bad if you use it through duckduckgo. It has much less ads than Google and seems to deliver better search results on the first page (mainly because Google's results are now mostly paid ads, not real results) But I'd never use it directly. Before I'll even try their new chatbot someone will have to offer a privacy condom service for it like what duckduckgo does for search. Always use protec…

I tried DDG for a bit and was constantly being fed blog articles and 'developer websites' instead of canonical documentation for queries that I would have thought would go straight to (say) the main Python docs site. So I moved back to Google. Now Google does exactly the same thing. Time to try moving again I guess. (Also, ads? What ads? Doesn't everyone use an adblocker?)

Maybe try kagi (kagi.com)?

People have mentioned it here for a while, and I've been trying it over the last week (free trial thing).

So far, the results are definitely better than DDG. I don't use Google nor Bing though, so can't compare to those.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#44

Post by NayamAmarshe »

jalino23 wrote: post #9

I switched 100% to edge now with Bing search as my default page. I use this URL https://www.bing.com/search?q=1&showconv=1 , that q=1 is arbitrary cause It doesn't seem to work without the q. I also point the home button to the same page. But since I can't customize the new tab page URL, I just personalized it and turned off all default content and ads in the settings. Its super clean now with just the search bar. Pe…

I use Microsoft Edge when I want to remind myself that privacy is dead and people find it empowering.

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#45

Post by mark_l_watson »

jalino23 wrote: post #9

I switched 100% to edge now with Bing search as my default page. I use this URL https://www.bing.com/search?q=1&showconv=1 , that q=1 is arbitrary cause It doesn't seem to work without the q. I also point the home button to the same page. But since I can't customize the new tab page URL, I just personalized it and turned off all default content and ads in the settings. Its super clean now with just the search bar. Pe…

That is a good hint, thanks. When using Edge Browser on my iPad Pro and MacBook, I have been immediately going to bing.com and that also works.

My wife does not have access to the new service yet, and she is clearly jealous and she didn’t understand why Microsoft can’t just open an expensive to run prototype to the whole world.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#46

Post by vbo »

It seems to me that people are jumping the gun on ChatGPT, Bing, Google and LLMs in general with regard to success and failure when it's still so early in this space. Amusing at times, so, so wrong at others, but we got a functional demo of the future airdropped out of the blue -- and more will come in different shapes, not just chat but also applied automation and information discovery, at increasing levels of maturity and usefulness.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#47

Post by fauigerzigerk »

mrtksn wrote: post #28
Thorentis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT is very effective Massive [Citation Needed] to be honest. ChatGPT is arguably even worse than Bing at producing factually correct information, since it does not have any ability to source it. It simply predicts the next most likely word in a sentence. Even if that next word makes the entire thing horribly incorrect.

Factual correctness is not very important, you don't have to trust it. ChatGPT is very effective because it acts as an advisor in any topic. Sometimes its very wrong but it gives you an overall picture of the thing you are looking for and from there you can drill down. It is much better than trying to drill down from spam ridden ad infested results Google would provide. Once you pass the very basic stuff, you are oft…

>Factual correctness is not very important, you don't have to trust it.

If these chat bots are going to replace or compete with the traditional search interface, then correctness is absolutely key.

When a traditional search engine points you to some spammy site, you have far more context to decide for yourself how much credibility you ascribe to it. You may know the site from earlier visits. You can see whether it's completely ad infested and what the likely business model is. You can see what else is on the site. You can check who the publisher is, etc.

But when a chat bot delivers results in a conversational style, there is absolutely no indication as to whether a particular claim is fact or fiction. If the bot provides links to sources that's great, but then you're back to square one reading through 10 paragraphs of blog spam trying to filter out the one bit that may answer your question.

Also, the way in which these bots fail compared to traditional content farms and spammy blogs is very different. These sites tend to copy stuff from elsewhere. They may repeat falsehoods published by others. But they are unlikely to just make up numbers and present them as fact.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#48

Post by herculity275 »

college_physics wrote: post #26

Language models feel currently a bit like blockchain: a solution looking for a problem. But unlike the latter where the actual problems are fairly niche and depend on myriad other constraints, its more likely that language algorithms will be adopted more widely. The question is how. People are currently slotting this tool into "search" (as we have come to know it) as it is obviously information retrieval machinery at…

I was recently reminded how in the Harry Potter books random appliances/tools/visual media all have a tiny bit of intelligence and can speak back to you. They typically have no agency and don't appear sentient, but they make the magical world a lot more interactive. I do wonder if the near-short term for LLM adoption looks a bit like that.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#49

Post by mrtksn »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #47
mrtksn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factual correctness is not very important, you don't have to trust it. ChatGPT is very effective because it acts as an advisor in any topic. Sometimes its very wrong but it gives you an overall picture of the thing you are looking for and from there you can drill down. It is much better than trying to drill down from spam ridden ad infested results Google would provide. Once you pass the very basic stuff, you are oft…

>Factual correctness is not very important, you don't have to trust it. If these chat bots are going to replace or compete with the traditional search interface, then correctness is absolutely key. When a traditional search engine points you to some spammy site, you have far more context to decide for yourself how much credibility you ascribe to it. You may know the site from earlier visits. You can see whether it's…

I don't think its going to be drop-in replacement.

With ChatGPT, you can ask follow up questions. So if something doesn't sound right, you can pressure it to explain its position.

It's like talking with people, sometimes people are wrong and we happen to have a lot of linguistic tools to deal with it. Like, follow up questions or asking for specifics.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#50

Post by astrange »

justinclift wrote: post #41
astrange wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not do that.

Wasn't it clearly shown a while back that macOS Gatekeeper does indeed do something along those lines? Doing some searching online is turning up info about it: * https://www.extremetech.com/computing/317371-evaluating-appl... * https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/15/apple-responds-to-gatekeep... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25204909 * https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-certificate-chec...

No, it was not clearly shown, because it doesn't do that. The articles saying it does that are wrong.

(It sends a team identifier which is not unique per application, and would mostly be the same one since almost everyone mostly uses first party apps. It does this because that's how certificate validation works.)

Post reply on HN