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

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 601 posts

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

#591

Post by mobiledev2014 »

edanm wrote: post #577
bradly wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what I have asked it the past few days with great results: - What is the trim stop attachment that comes with the Festool DF 500 used for? - What are some options for water for a home with no municiple water or well access? - What dimensions drawer should I make when using 18" Blum Blumotion full extension drawer slides if the drawer opening is 20 inches wide, 18 inches deep and seven inches tall? - Can the s…

> - I'm trying to remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience. I love that movie! I had the same experience a few years ago of trying to remember its name. This is a great example of something ChatGPT does amazingly well at. I did almost the same thing myself recently, trying to find the name of a show featuring…

This is hilarious- now when I google "90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience" the top result is the IMDb page for Gifted!!

The actual movie is Little Man Tate, yes? I've never seen it but that's what ChatGPT tells me. Zero Google results point there, but it is the #5 result for "related searches." I hate Google and even I am shocked how bad this is.

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

#592

Post by archon810 »

bradly wrote: post #142
culopatin wrote: post #26

I feel like I’m missing out on something but other than to summarize text or fill pointless and lazy homework assignments I don’t have much of a use of gpt search. I think I have a trust issue with it and I rather get the raw result and process it myself than to believe that what this model “understood” is right. Anyone else feels this way?

Here is what I have asked it the past few days with great results: - What is the trim stop attachment that comes with the Festool DF 500 used for? - What are some options for water for a home with no municiple water or well access? - What dimensions drawer should I make when using 18" Blum Blumotion full extension drawer slides if the drawer opening is 20 inches wide, 18 inches deep and seven inches tall? - Can the s…

To be fair, Google is usually pretty good about answering movie questions. It guessed Gifted in your case, is that right?

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

#593

Post by danans »

pantalaimon wrote: post #528
danans wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well it seems like Bing’s version is more sassy than ChatGPT's Assistent. But that just makes it feel more human-like which is impressive. Google used to be quirky and exiting too, now they are trying to be as boring as possible.

> But that just makes it feel more human-like which is impressive.

Sure, it's being sassy is impressive, but it's not useful (unless the utility is novelty or entertainment), which is not what a Search engine's job is.

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

#594

Post by gniv »

nirav72 wrote: post #413
o8o8o8o wrote: post #167

The rumour I keep hearing is that it's like the Hunger Games inside Google at the moment. Total chaos and infighting at all levels, investors are freaking out over AI and Bard's middling performance compared to OpenAI and blood is in the water. Sundar may be forced to resign and Larry/Sergei deployed to rescue the company.

The thing that I don’t understand is that google had every advantage in this AI race. They have the largest amount of training data than anyone. Not just internet data. But also geospatial data, video, images and books. Among other collected data. Including a huge lead and deep pockets for research. Yet, somehow they got caught off guard.

Execs were too conservative and didn't realize the potential. They had a chatbot years ago but didn't release it. See for example this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-chatbot-chatgpt-ye...

(Noam Shazeer is one of the authors of the Transformer paper.)

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

#595

Post by xyzzyz »

yongjik wrote: post #275
rcme wrote: 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 joined in 2014 and left in 2019, and it was much different company by the end. My wife still works there, and she tells me it is different still from since when I left.

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

#596

Post by int_19h »

ithkuil wrote: post #587
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is bard that bad? If Bard had been released to the public before ChatGPT, I probably would have been amazed by it (I know people love to point out errors, hallucinations, stuff AI gets wrong , but there's also the huge "Guys, you're having a fully natural, back and forth conversation with a computer . You can reference previous comments and ask it specifics about those comments. This was strictly the realm os SciFi…

It's hard to to tell how much of that is caused by the default system prompt setup that the two chat systems have. You can easily cause chatgpt to radically change its style by prepending the right system prompt. Some people even published many many "jailbreak" prompts that undid the safety priming that openai's system prompt defines. From what I read it does indeed seem that openai's experience is much more balanced…

It's not just the prompt. Bard is just not good at things that require, shall we say, more than a modicum of understanding. Let me give you an example.

Bard: https://i.imgur.com/m5UGjxU.png

GPT-3.5: https://i.imgur.com/XH1266o.png

GPT-4: https://i.imgur.com/ZcaZ9Qk.png

So basically Bard didn't understand the instructions at all, GPT-3.5 understood that it needs to substitute words but can't figure out the proper context, and GPT-4 not only did almost everything correctly, but it actually went kinda meta and wrote a rationale within the context of the story for the substitutions I asked it to make (which it does on this task more than half of the time, BTW).

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

#597

Post by int_19h »

nneonneo wrote: post #492
jonplackett wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever there’s a big shift like this it’s always tempting to look at the new thing as say how great it is - and ChatGPT is awesome. But it’s also worth looking at how shit the old thing has become. Google.com now literally delivers you an entire page of ads before any real results. It’s blatant profit-squeezing instead of trying to serve their users. This is their reward.

Or how Google now aggressively autocorrects search queries, to the point where I’m regularly spending 3-4 queries just trying to convince Google to accept the input as-is. I get that it’s likely an effort to assist mobile users who make lots of typos, but the fact that the same autocorrection is deployed on desktop computers rubs me the wrong way.

What's truly horrifying, and cannot be explained by "mobile", is that they autocorrect quoted words and phrases quite often now, if query has "too few results" (one of which is exactly what you need, of course, which is why you used the quotes in the first place...).

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

#598

Post by int_19h »

danans wrote: post #593
pantalaimon wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it seems like Bing’s version is more sassy than ChatGPT's Assistent. But that just makes it feel more human-like which is impressive. Google used to be quirky and exiting too, now they are trying to be as boring as possible.

> But that just makes it feel more human-like which is impressive. Sure, it's being sassy is impressive, but it's not useful (unless the utility is novelty or entertainment), which is not what a Search engine's job is.

Thing is, the utility is entertainment for a lot of people.

But Bing actually has a mood selector displayed prominently right about the input box, so you can set it to be more pedantic or more "creative".

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

#599

Post by int_19h »

tshaddox wrote: post #147
eindiran wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this is a big part of the issue. Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying to do the search based on their model of what you want back. Sometimes you benefit from that, other times it pushes the results you want way down. I just tested this and there were some micropython related results in the top ten, but the majority were for beautiful soup with no mention of micropython.

> Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying to do the search based on their model of what you want back... There's a problem here though, which is that there is no way for me or any other reader to discern whether the reality of the situation is "it's not reproducible and the commenter is misremembering basic facts about their search results due perhaps to some unrelated frustrations" and "it's not rep…

I believe the OP because I've had that exact problem once myself, except in my case it was "helpfully" substituting FreeBSD in the query with Linux.

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

#600

Post by soiler »

koyote wrote: post #496
soiler wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want. The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android. Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the clock display to an readable clock display. I don't particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about GrapheneOS, but it'…

Which clock change are you referring to? I don't think I've ever heard anything about this.

android changed the lock screen clock from HH:MM to

HH

MM

it's a little stupid to be angry about but it's also pretty stupid to do in the first place.

Post reply on HN