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OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

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Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#562
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal opinion is that this has nothing to do with SEO. All those developer-focused blogs serve Google ads, while the official Go documentation does not. Google is trying to boost revenue by promoting results with ads.

I still find it hard to believe. I've been at Google until 2015, which was a long time ago, but at that time the separation between Search and Ads was considered near sacred. Ads representatives couldn't even ask "Hey, my customer asked why their site is below this other irrelevant site for this query, this seems like a bug in search ranking..." Pretty much everybody understood that we will lose in the long term, if…

I'm in neither Search nor Ads, but have been at Google long enough to have seen the massive change in internal culture between 2015 and the present day. I don't want to speculate on any specifics, but it's pretty clear to me that we shouldn't be applying 2015-era logic or perceptions to today's Google and expecting them to hold.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#563
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment exactly. But your comment made me think about this an interesting way that I hadn’t thought about before, that made me better understand why I am “anti-GPT search”. All the same things that the model makes an effort to “understand” are things that can contribute to your own understanding. When it “understands”, you do not. You get the summary and miss out on a great amount of nuance that c…

A great quote from an article I read on HN recently > Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don’t learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out.

Do you have concrete examples of stuff you figure out instead of looking it up? I'm not going to figure out the population of the Liechtenstein, I'm going to look it up.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#564

I can’t even use google to translate a sentence. Their offering has seriously diminished the last 5 years and GPT is a god send.

How so? I just lazily typed "I'll be late in French" into Google search and got a Google Translate onebox with "je serai en retard". Or are you saying that the translation capability, while available, is not very good?

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is giving me “Look at me I’m so very smart” vibes. If you don’t have enough insight to understand how GPT4 could be useful for engineers you’re not as enlightened as you think you are.

This comment is giving me “Look at me I’m so very smart” vibes.

I don't think I'm so smart, what I am saying is the GP is being extremely dismissive of other engineers here on Hackernews. Every post about LLMs is full of engineers stating how these have been useful to them. GP simply asserts that these are all "terrible engineers." Do we think that's REALLY the case or in fact LLMs can be very useful, especially when for example learning a new language or framework they haven't used before.

Example: recently I was curious about cross-platform UI development so I used ChatGPT for research into different frameworks and made several apps in Java and .Net. Not being an engineer who's built many GUIs before, ChatGPT was amazingly useful for this and help speed my progress. Does this make me a terrible engineer?

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#566

That's cool in the short term, but it will be news when it's sustained. I logged in to Bing for the first time in forever to play with the AI some, but it didn't change my default search behavior of using Google, and now it's been easily two weeks since I went to Bing at all.

Duck duck go should integrate gpt-4 that could be interesting

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve said this before on HN, but if LLM agents catch on, won’t it be self-defeating in the long term? They need to pull tons of info from the web to be useful and up-to-date. If we all stop visiting websites, then who’s going to keep publishing all of that info?

The ad based revenue model is done, yes. A lot of sites will still exist though behind paywalls.

Doesn’t that mean that search products will also struggle, since they rely on everything being freely available?

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#568
post #537
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Don't trust everything you read on the internet", or "Don't trust everything you hear on social media" There is a difference. There are places with reputation and backlogs and even with scientific references. But if AI just gives you a text, there is nothing. Until they fix references, you can’t really use it for anything factual, non-logical information.

If these were the case, then why would "fake news" be a thing?

Fake news are exactly the current state of the A.I. presentation.

Confident expressions without proper referencing.

People also like that their own opinions are validated, regardless of the truth. Which is also another thing why fake news success.

I would say that fake news is an excellent example why current Chatbots might not be so good, as they express information in similar way.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#569
post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve said this before on HN, but if LLM agents catch on, won’t it be self-defeating in the long term? They need to pull tons of info from the web to be useful and up-to-date. If we all stop visiting websites, then who’s going to keep publishing all of that info?

Well, I would assume a lot of the producers, for example people making products would still have sites the agents could pull from to have up to date information. You'd most likely lose a lot of the middlemen that take that data, add something, and then cover the page in ads. There are also tons of ego websites that aren't going anywhere from what I can tell. Tiktok will still be around unless it gets banned, and some…

Product descriptions are a good example of info that will still be published, because people will still by buying and selling products. The problem is with writing where the writing itself is the product, such as news.

The LLM relies on free access to that writing in order for it to be informed about current events. The news publisher relies on readership to pay writers. If LLMs are too useful to the point that people rely on them alone for news, then ironically they will become worse products over time as the publications they draw from go out of business.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#570
post #165

While I agree with a bunch of other comments that are interested to see what happens in the long term, to me, all of this points to some profound organizational and cultural problems at Google. I base that statement on things I see as an external observer, from posts I've seen from current/ex-Googlers here on HN, and from some (albeit brief) conversations I've had with some of these folks. If a decade ago you told me…

> Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'm sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of "big company that lost its way Former Googler, opinions are my own. They haven't lost their way technologically - as you mentioned they invented the Transformer - and internally Google has long had language models…

GPT-4 got much better results on many benchmarks than PaLM, Google's largest published model [1]. PaLM itself is probably quite a bit better than LamDa in several tasks, according to a chart and a couple of tables here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02311

It's unclear that Google currently has an internal LLM as good as GPT-4. If they do, they are keeping quiet about it, which seems quite unlikely given the repercussion.

[1] GPT-4's benchmark results vs PaLM: https://openai.com/research/gpt-4

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