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Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

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Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#251

Post by Veen »

dang wrote: post #236
dmazin wrote: post #107

I find the editorialization of my title hilarious. I did not put a ? at the end. The answer to any headline with a ? at the end is “no.” Whoever at HN edited it — this is not alright. Feel free to argue against the piece on its merits.

We sometimes put question marks on titles when a claim in a title is controversial. This is a longstanding practice: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... . > The answer to any headline with a ? at the end is “no.” There's a popular meme that says that, but it's not true. Edit: after reading everyone's objections I think the easiest thing to do is just reverse all of this. Sorry for the trou…

It may be a longstanding practice, but it's a foolish and aggravating one. Do you think HN's readers are so silly they don't understand claims made in headlines are not to be taken at face value?

The article advances a position and argues for it, which is reflected in the original headline formatted as a statement. It doesn't ask a question and then provide answers; the editorialized headline misrepresents the article's content.

EDIT: You've now rather spitefully changed the title to something that's even less representative of the contents—plucking a quote doesn't make it representative—and removes the intended allusion to recent conversations around the Google moat memo.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#252

Post by dang »

dmazin wrote: post #249
dang wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you that no one here is incentivized to please Reddit. Have you seen HN lately? Same point if you mean OpenAI. Titles on HN aren't the property of the submitter nor of the author of an article (though the author's opinion carries more weight). They're shared pointers and we edit them to be as neutral as possible. Mods do this all the time and have been doing it since HN began 16 years ago. It's primarily be…

Look, I just don’t think you should editorialize without making it clear. Why is the claim controversial, for example? Edit: I guess we went too deep in the thread, so we're resorting to edits. that was a rhetorical question. It's sort of like the Twitter community notes feature: making the edit, and its reason clear, builds trust. Otherwise, you just look like you're doing something shady (given that, again, the peo…

I wasn't the mod who added the question mark, but I'd guess it's because it makes a grand and speculative claim about the two most hyped topics of recent months. Nothing wrong with that, but in an HN context it generally makes for shallower and hotter discussion, and that is not the best fit for a site like HN which is trying to go deeper. (Note that I said trying, not succeeding.) The question mark is one device we have for dampening that effect sometimes.

One sign of a linkbait title is when it claims a lot more than the article delivers. Usually such articles begin by walking back their own title, since it has served its purpose (getting attention) and is now a handicap (because the text has to deliver on what the title promised). I'm not saying you did this intentionally! But your article follows just this pattern, since by the time you get to the meat of it, the claim has become weaker and in fact has been turned into a question: "what if we thought of Reddit as, functionally, subservient to OpenAI?".

Another thing we often do is replace baity titles with representative language from the article itself. In this case we could do that by using your own question instead of appending a question mark to the original title. That is, we could make the HN title something like "What if we thought of Reddit as subservient to OpenAI?". I think I'll go ahead and do that, since using representative language from the article itself is arguably less of an intervention in this case.

p.s. I just put back your original title. It was a borderline case and not worth arguing over (but maybe the discussion was clarifying or of interest to some readers). Generally when there are strong protests about a title edit we just either roll it back or figure out something that people are happy with.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#253

Post by moffkalast »

rjh29 wrote: post #76
duxup wrote: post #64

> There is no question that Reddit is extremely valuable as training data. How often do you append “reddit” to your searches? Is it? When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations. Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic. For e…

Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby. It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it. What are the alternatives? Facebook an…

> Quora is a shithole

It's actually funny how much this is true. They used to be a quality source of info, but these days the default option is to show "all related" so you don't even get direct answers to the question you searched for, ads from top to bottom (and even somewhere in between) and just hordes of bots answering nonsense. At least they made it official with Chatgpt integration now lol.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#254

Post by [deleted] »

dmazin wrote: post #249
dang wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you that no one here is incentivized to please Reddit. Have you seen HN lately? Same point if you mean OpenAI. Titles on HN aren't the property of the submitter nor of the author of an article (though the author's opinion carries more weight). They're shared pointers and we edit them to be as neutral as possible. Mods do this all the time and have been doing it since HN began 16 years ago. It's primarily be…

Look, I just don’t think you should editorialize without making it clear. Why is the claim controversial, for example? Edit: I guess we went too deep in the thread, so we're resorting to edits. that was a rhetorical question. It's sort of like the Twitter community notes feature: making the edit, and its reason clear, builds trust. Otherwise, you just look like you're doing something shady (given that, again, the peo…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#255

Post by importantbrian »

hospitalJail wrote: post #200
nostrademons wrote: post #62

The leaked Google memo "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" is instructive here: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne... Original author is an ML researcher, and the crux of his argument is that most weights in a LLM are significantly overdetermined. Once you have ingested several terabytes of natural language, you know how to generate natural language. The remaining misses are facts tha…

>You'd usually be better off training on trade publications, scientific journals, or fandom than Reddit. Bold claim. There are plenty of engineers and doctors on reddit answering nuanced questions that arent talked about in any journals. That is what is missing. The absurdly specific stuff that reddit gets. Sure you can answer with nonsense that sounds realistic, but you could also answer with the exact text that sol…

> There are plenty of engineers and doctors on reddit answering nuanced questions that arent talked about in any journals.

There are lots of really good subreddits that have expert feedback, but I think the issue is that going through all that and separating the wheat from the chaff is going to be a much more involved process than feeding in those other sources of expert opinion.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#256

Post by hospitalJail »

dmonitor wrote: post #230
hospitalJail wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You'd usually be better off training on trade publications, scientific journals, or fandom than Reddit. Bold claim. There are plenty of engineers and doctors on reddit answering nuanced questions that arent talked about in any journals. That is what is missing. The absurdly specific stuff that reddit gets. Sure you can answer with nonsense that sounds realistic, but you could also answer with the exact text that sol…

The replies of engineers and doctors are significantly outweighed by the responses of bored teenagers.

Yeah, but I imagine bored teenagers are not patrolling the embedded subreddit.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#257

Post by BitwiseFool »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #163
duxup wrote: post #64

> There is no question that Reddit is extremely valuable as training data. How often do you append “reddit” to your searches? Is it? When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations. Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic. For e…

My experience in the past 5-10 years on Reddit is: - the voting system is about what people want the truth to be, not the truth. - the users can be very easily gamed in comments to vote one way or another just by the initial voting being negative or positive (aka most just vote with the trend) - the opinions all come from a bias of urban and major metro area people. It's painfully obvious they don't understand any mi…

I struggle to find the right word for this, but I find that Redditors with 10K+ comment karma have an "attitude" that pervades how they respond on virtually every topic. There's this sense of faux-civility and if you have an opinion that slights them in some way the mask comes off and you end up with hostility or sardonic replies that completely misconstrue your point. Then there tends to be a dogpile with downvotes.

Yes, I know reddit can be valuable for niche and non-contentious topics but such examples are becoming increasingly rare. Snark and combativeness pervades the site and it seems to be a function of the voting system and monkey-see, monkey-do from how commenters are rewarded in the default subreddits for this kind of behavior.

I dread AI models being taught to comment like a redditor.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#258

Post by stevenhuang »

moffkalast wrote: post #253
rjh29 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby. It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it. What are the alternatives? Facebook an…

> Quora is a shithole It's actually funny how much this is true. They used to be a quality source of info, but these days the default option is to show "all related" so you don't even get direct answers to the question you searched for, ads from top to bottom (and even somewhere in between) and just hordes of bots answering nonsense. At least they made it official with Chatgpt integration now lol.

I make it a point to downvote and report as spam the promoted answers that have no relation to the current question.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#259

Post by bentcorner »

tomrod wrote: post #177
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search If you're good at googling the flow is: Ask the question > Clock which result isnt spam and click it > Figure out how to dismiss the cookies gate without accepting the cookies > Dismiss the google login box > Dismiss the popover pushing you to install an app > Scroll the page or ctrl+F to find the answer With ChatGPT it's just type your question and your answ…

It lies like crazy on surprising things. Database parameters for an enterprise provider, for example, I've seen hallucination in 5% of cases. That's _bad_ when its taken as authoritative.

I like that you can get results quickly and it solves the "I don't know what I'm looking for" problem.

I'm learning typescript and ran into a weird typescript construct the other day, I threw it into chatgpt and asked "what is this" and it explained it to me. I'm not entirely sure if pasting in a bunch of braces and parentheses into google would find me the same result.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#260

Post by marcosdumay »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #63
zdragnar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search. The provenance of information is just as important as the resulting information for pretty much anything I search for. I almost never accept a single search result as authoritative unless I'm pretty familiar with the source. Reddit in particular seems like a terrible set of training data. Pretty much any opinion is going to have a counter-opinion somewhere in…

> I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search If you're good at googling the flow is: Ask the question > Clock which result isnt spam and click it > Figure out how to dismiss the cookies gate without accepting the cookies > Dismiss the google login box > Dismiss the popover pushing you to install an app > Scroll the page or ctrl+F to find the answer With ChatGPT it's just type your question and your answ…

Well, if you make up the answer from nowhere yourself, you save the work of creating a question and typing it on the ChatGPT prompt.
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