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AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

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Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#81

Post by azemetre »

DaSHacka wrote: post #79
whiplash451 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT nearly killed Chegg https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...

Doesn't surprise me whatsoever. All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for homework assignments that typically use per-student randomized numbers—so students have to recalculate their specific answer manually by following the steps—and "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even highschool-level math questions. Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek) for tons of assi…

I think the issue is when people start replacing their capacity to think and reason with these machines. There was an intergalactic space jihad about this IIRC.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#82

Post by Terr_ »

_benj wrote: post #26

I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions… I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many

> I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often

And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over. (But look! Engagement metrics!)

On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#83

Post by [deleted] »

pipes wrote: post #73
bluefirebrand wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete? If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information? This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next quarter I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure this out before AI ha…

In my experience, they do seem to be very good at synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if that will work for edge cases which is one of the things SO is good at.

[deleted]

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#84

Post by ForTheKidz »

darth_avocado wrote: post #15
joelthelion wrote: post #8

The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it. And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.

Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.

Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#85

Post by cosmic_cheese »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #72
mvdtnz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.

At least some of them are written by humans and some of them are good. Maybe good 20-50% of the time, still better than 100% SEO crap.

Yep. As poor as the signal to noise ratio is, for many things it’s substantially better there than elsewhere.

Though as of late, that’s been eroded too. Increasingly the most useful answers are in older threads more than newer ones, an effect I’d at least partially attribute to the APIpocolpyse a while back that drove away some of the site’s best and most prolific contributors. It’s becoming filled with the same mindless drivel found everywhere else.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#86

Post by Thorentis »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #45
vecter wrote: post #36

I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like: - What is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who ha…

After some experience and testing, I've become well aware not to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate responses (even for well-known people). What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful abo…

People used to criticise Wikipedia for being bad due to being crowdsourced (at least in school they did). Now, Wikipedia looks like one of the best antidotes to LLMs.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#87

Post by lcampbell »

gruez wrote: post #63
dougb5 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again. Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do t…

>and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again. Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you…

If you're given a button to click, your browser has successfully passed the environment integrity checks and you have not been flagged as a bot.

You'll be flagged as a bot if your browser configuration has something "weird" (e.g. webrtc is disabled to reduce your attack surface) and you will be completely unable to access any site behind cloudflare with the anti-bot options turned on. You'll get an infinite redirect loop, not a button to click.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#88

Post by shagie »

RandallBrown wrote: post #40
whiplash451 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but Q&A platforms were the prime collateral damage for ChatGPT. I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help you much. You’d have to pivot significantly.

Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?

Q&A tends to be "chunky" and asynchronous in its communication model.

This comes from a reaction to the previous model of forums where it was smaller bits of data spread across multiple comments or posts. I recall going through forums in the days before Stack Overflow, trying to find out how to solve a problem. https://xkcd.com/979/ was very real.

Stack Overflow (and its siblings) was an attempt to change this to a "one spot that has all the information".

That model works, but it is a high maintenance approach. Trying to move from a back and forth of information that can only be understood in its entirety across a conversation to become one that more closely resembles a Wikipedia page (that hides all of the work of Talk:Something). The key thing is it takes a lot of work to maintain that Q&A format.

And yet, users often don't know what they want. They want that forum model with interaction and step by step hand holding by someone who knows the answer. Stack Overflow was intentionally designed to make that approach difficult in an attempt to make the Q&A the easier solution on the site.

ChatGPT provides the users who want the step by step hand holding an infinitely patient thing behind the screen that doesn't embarrass them in public and is confident that it knows the answer to their problem.

Stack Overflow and Quora and other Q&A forums are the abomination. People want Perlmonks https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11164039 and /r/JavaHelp where its interacting with another and small steps rather than Q&A.

---

The future of "well, if people stop using the sites that is generating the information that is being used to train the models that people are using to get information" ... that becomes an interesting problem.

I am reminded of Accelerando ( https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... ) and the digital civilizations being various forms of scams and the currency is things that can think new ideas.

The currency is new material that is to be sold. The information gets locked behind some measures to try to make scraping impractical and then sold off wholesale. Humans still talk and answer questions. There are new posts on Reddit about how to solve problems even while ChatGPT is out there. And Reddit is presumably trying to make harvesting the content within its walls something that others have to pay for to get at for training.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#89

Post by immibis »

lcampbell wrote: post #87
gruez wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again. Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you…

If you're given a button to click, your browser has successfully passed the environment integrity checks and you have not been flagged as a bot. You'll be flagged as a bot if your browser configuration has something "weird" (e.g. webrtc is disabled to reduce your attack surface) and you will be completely unable to access any site behind cloudflare with the anti-bot options turned on. You'll get an infinite redirect…

Note that Google's version of this was determined to be checking whether you had a 9-day-old tracking cookie.

The researcher who discovered this was able to generate 60,000 "I am not a bot" cookies per day, and use them up about 15 times each in a bot before it started getting captchas.

That was in 2016 though.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#90

Post by immibis »

echelon wrote: post #32
bluedino wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.) Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.

We need P2P social media where bigoted, power hungry mods can't enforce their unilateral views on everyone else.

We tried that but they filled up with spammers and morons. Other people who are neither don't want to use those systems. It's the Nazi bar effect, but for spam.

Somewhere between there, and "recite these falsehoods someone paid us to make you recite or get banned", there may or may not be a point that's actually okay.

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