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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

#111

Post by wombatpm »

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 "…

See what’s missing is the ability to put your answers on the blockchain …

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

#112

Post by aimanbenbaha »

dig1 wrote: post #10

The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles, blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management. IMHO, of course.

Unlike WebMD, Healthline doesn't seem to be losing traffic: https://www.semrush.com/website/healthline.com/overview/

I don't know what differentiates them since the content is apparently similar but I suspect a lot of websites like this will diversify their distribution channels and pivot accordingly.

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

#113

Post by bloomingkales »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #68
layer8 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, this doesn’t change the problem that Q&A platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don’t see how that is likely to change.

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…

If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information?

You just take arbitrary data and ask the LLM to put it in Q&A format and generate the synthetic training data. Unless you are suggesting Quora is the source of new information, which I don't agree with.

Quora does not care about the user experience. Their obsession with pay-walling killed the site for me across a decade. They literally could not get me to sign up and boy did they try (I really needed an answer once too!). My soul really remembers hostile sites.

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

#114

Post by plagiarist »

rchaud wrote: post #66
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.

As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article bursting at the seams with affilliate links?

Exactly. Like the other person said, reddit is great if it is some niche. It is garbage on the more popular areas.

Wirecutter is like: "we tested the top ~10 results on Amazon for ten minutes each and picked one."

Whereas reddit is either: "we're so obsessed with flashlights we know the exact part number of the best LEDs to use (after you remove the cap from it)" or "haha I also remember the lyrics to that old top 40s hit song haha."

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

#115

Post by FridgeSeal »

BobbyJo wrote: post #12
MidnightRider39 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More competition is good though - people are just going to be much more picky and if your content is not distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will perish.

This ignores the volume problem. Human written content can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned out in a way that is unfixable.

I just think people will instead choose to just…disengage instead.

“IRL experiences are the new luxury status indicator” is only the tip of this iceberg.

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

#116

Post by tomrod »

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…

All the professors I pair with recently for papers are pro-chatgpt with some minor grumbling of content refactors.

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

#117

Post by tomrod »

immibis wrote: post #20
staticautomatic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.

Disagree. The new way of doing SEO blogspam, which involves LLMs, is the way forward. Sadly, downvoting this comment won't make it not be true.

Nor will calling it true make it true. Epistemology is great that way.

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

#118

Post by gradus_ad »

diamond559 wrote: post #110
Legend2440 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely. LLMs are smart enough to answer questions from documentation or from other sources, even if the exact question wasn't asked anywhere. But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be in other sources, so there would be some loss.

That's just copying from better sources, doesn't mean the ai is "smarter".

How about "more capable"?

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

#119

Post by jncfhnb »

diamond559 wrote: post #110
Legend2440 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely. LLMs are smart enough to answer questions from documentation or from other sources, even if the exact question wasn't asked anywhere. But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be in other sources, so there would be some loss.

That's just copying from better sources, doesn't mean the ai is "smarter".

True. But AI does not close your question because it didn’t like your phrasing.

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

#120

Post by gboss »

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…

This is no joke. Run an e-commerce site and have been generally skeptical of WAFs but had to sign up for a bot mitigation service because it became out of control two years ago. These bots were even executing JavaScript and loading third party scripts which caused additional fees from these vendors. We went with Datadome and are pretty happy with it but I wish I didn’t need to!
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