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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

#91

Post by dingnuts »

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.

it won't work for anything that requires a novel synthesis of ideas because Gen AI is incapable of novelty

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

#92

Post by immibis »

francisofascii wrote: post #31
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.

um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.

Depends on the moderation. /r/worldnews bans any user who says anything that makes Israel look bad (I'm not exaggerating). That does nothing for quality of content.

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

#93

Post by immibis »

rchaud wrote: post #64
dougb5 wrote: post #34

AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 year…

Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.

So about 1 request per second?

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

#94

Post by smcin »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #84
darth_avocado wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value. That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined.

No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of view.

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

#95

Post by aleph_minus_one »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #84
darth_avocado wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet.

In the very early years of Quora, quite a lot of answers there were written by experts in their area.

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

#96

Post by aleph_minus_one »

smcin wrote: post #94
ForTheKidz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value. That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined. No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of…

> No you don't have to pay on Quora to see answers; that's incorrect.

Some authors decided to join the Quora+ program where you do have to pay to see some of their answers.

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

#97

Post by shagie »

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 had it. It's still out there. NNTP (and ignore cancel messages if you dare).

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

#98

Post by shagie »

azemetre wrote: post #81
DaSHacka wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also recommend the written story for Zima Blue (the Love Death and Robots version was much more focused on the artistic aspect) and the question of wine.

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

#99

Post by aleph_minus_one »

shagie wrote: post #88
RandallBrown wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

> 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.

This sounds like the seed for a business model to pitch in the next upcoming hype cycle: "short-term hiring of experts with quarter-hourly billing increments enabled by our web- or app-based user interface". :-)

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

#100

Post by smcin »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #96
smcin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value. That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined. No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of…

> No you don't have to pay on Quora to see answers; that's incorrect. Some authors decided to join the Quora+ program where you do have to pay to see some of their answers.

I know that. There's nothing forcing you to join Quora+ premium subscription to see a small subset of answers. I wouldn't. Most Quora users don't. It's not necessary.

The vast majority of Quora posters are unmonetized, and if you can't find figure out how to use Quora to get quality answers among them (e.g. figure out which Spaces to join to get traction), you might as well equally consider which Medium/Substack/Patreon to subscribe to than the not-at-all-necessary Quora+. I'd much rather that 90% of any subscriptions I paid went to sponsoring human writers.

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