We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis • Hacker News Board

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#151

Post by sobellian » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #126

soarfourmore wrote: post #49

The following quotes are fairly interesting and ironic: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: >> "we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" > and that >> "we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives…

At this point, the snide dismissal of all things advertising is nothing short of boring. To be sure there are many forms of advertising annoyance: auto-playing sound/video, remarketing (or what I like to call advertising a product I've already bought), interstitials, popups (to be fair, there are many non-advertising forms of these eg "sign up to our newsletter" dialogs) and so on. But what made Google a money-printi…

We know that paid advertising works, so it should not surprise us to discover that paid advertising on the Internet also works. But Google and other search engines seek to organize the world's information, not the world's commercial products and services. For a multi-multi-billion dollar company's core product, I'm somewhat surprised they cannot do a better job killing the blogspam. Given the resources at their disposal, I think most people just assume that they don't care about the blogspam.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#152

Post by FridayoLeary » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #81

bagacrap wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-technical users can't read the bolded "Ad" in the top left? Ok, it's more subtle than before but it doesn't prey on the less sophisticated among us.

For one, that Ad logo spent about two years being yellow-on-white, so people without well-tuned contrast monitors couldn't see it at all. Last year they made a change that made them so indistinguishable to the untrained eye that even Google rolled them back: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/ https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/24/google-will-iterate-the-desi... But no, generally, they don't notice…

it normally takes me 1 sentence max to realise i've clicked on an ad by mistake. I think even if there was no ad shin i would still manage to work out what is promoted content. If ads ever stops being generic, irrelevant clickbait, we might have a problem on our hands. But that particular danger doesn't seem to be very likely at all.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#153

Post by zinok » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

zpeti wrote: post #88

cblconfederate wrote: post #37

The problem is that google created a negative feedback loop with the web. People have a tangible interest to game google, which worsens the quality of their AI datasets, which makes their AI suggestions terrible. There was the expectation that google's AI suggestions and info boxes would improve over time, but i 've noticed them getting worse and consider them a permanently broken gimmick now. They probably have the…

Sometimes I have this scary thought that paid search results are actually inherently better than organic ones, because when you spend money you do need to be relevant to the query and serve up a decent result. When it comes to organic, everything is free, so you try whatever hacks the algorithms, from keyword stuffed content to link spam etc. So as time goes on organic search results will actually get worse and worse…

This sounds good but doesn't work in practice.

If you Google the name of a UK car insurer with some likely keyword like 'claim' or 'accident', you get paid listing from people offering two 'services'. a) 'call connection', which means that you call their premium-rate number and they just put the call through to the right company's phone line while charging you per-minute. b) 'claim management', you fill out a form on their website, they submit it to the actual company's website, and take a percentage of your claim. Neither of these are illegal, Google has promised to not take ad money from the first type, but in practice don't remove ads fast enough to make it unviable.

Consumer-facing companies now, ludicrously, have to do their own SEO to make sure they appear top of search results for their own name, and some even pay Google for ads to themselves. But clicks are more valuable to scammers than to legit businesses, so the former can always outbid the latter.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#154

Post by erikpukinskis » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

ryanianian wrote: post #20

Borrible wrote: post #12

Since Dartmouth AI looks like a story of naive visions, exaggerated promises, massive disappointment, recurrent divisionary tactics, rebranding and snak oil sale. Until finally a light on the horizon became visible and academically camouflaged wishful thinking could be materialized into usable products. A groping in the dark, nothing more. There are probably good reasons why the blind watchmaker needed billions of ye…

What?

Which part of it needs clarification? “Snake oil” is a product that is sold on false promises. The author suggested much of AI has been snake oil historically.

They also suggest that the way intelligence was created (natural selection, AKA the “blind watchmaker”) may be the fastest way to do it. And that trying to do it again, in computers, might also take a billion years because the problem is just that hard. But hopefully it is faster than that.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#155

Post by cletus » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

guerrilla wrote: post #136

cletus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, the snide dismissal of all things advertising is nothing short of boring. To be sure there are many forms of advertising annoyance: auto-playing sound/video, remarketing (or what I like to call advertising a product I've already bought), interstitials, popups (to be fair, there are many non-advertising forms of these eg "sign up to our newsletter" dialogs) and so on. But what made Google a money-printi…

> But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here? This doesn't hold wate…

> This doesn't hold water. It's just being shown because someone paid for it to be, not because it's the best thing to be shown which is what algorithms would be tuned for if they were in the users interest.

You are factually incorrect and this is part of the problem: a lot of proselytizing (and, honestly, virtue-signaling) by people who don't know how advertising actually works.

Display advertising works on a CPM basis (ie paying for the impression) so yes, that's pretty much a case of someone paying to show the ad and that's it. They may be paying for that based on contextual information (eg RTB) or not.

But search advertising, at least how Google does it, it sold on a CPC basis (ie paying for the click not the impression). This actually means Google is motivated to show you the search ads you're most likely to click on because that's some revenue vs just who bid the most.

> That's pretty dismissive of all the thought that has gone into criticism of advertising...

No offense but if you don't know how search advertising works at the highest level then either you haven't put much thought into it or you're simply parroting someone else (who also hasn't) because it fits your world view.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#156

Post by Swenrekcah » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

dimitrios1 wrote: post #149

Zelphyr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, maybe, "Everybody is altruistic until they have shareholders." The idea that companies should only be beholden to shareholders that has taken firm hold over the past 50(+/-) years doesn't look to be a good one, in hindsight.

It's not some idea that came about from a vacuum. Put yourself in an investors shoes: you may have some investments that you do for the sake of charity or philanthropy, however, the majority of your investments are to increase your investment. It isn't surprising then, following this basic premise, that we have arrived at the current situation. Capitalism factors in greed for the general welfare of the most people. I…

It's not so much an underestimation as it is a systematic breakdown of constraints and personal responsibility for owners/directors of large corporations.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#157

Post by hnnameblah365 » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

hajile wrote: post #3

The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an opinion and you’ll get 5 pages of custom built “review” sites that offer nothing useful besides copious ads and paid click-through to Amazon. Even when Google knows where I go with my searches, they still refuse to show those sites for anything that might have commercial interest. So much for customized search. I get tired of being the product. Can we get…

Google could easily lower pagerank for blogspam by measuring density of affiliate links.

They don't, because low quality consumerist search results make the ads fit right in. Also those sites are more likely to contain Google Ads themselves.

The search engine is fully optimized for consumerism, not finding the most relevant result.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#158

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

Librarians find it pretty tough. In 1970 MARC (used to represent a "library card") was the first standard data format with variable length fields! It was the first standard data format to confront internationalization, etc.

It is no wonder metadata systems are ahead of other systems in semantic flexibility. If somebody gave you a whole bunch of weather simulation data you would have some big arrays laid out in accordance to their scale and expected usage patterns and then you would have some a graph of relationships describing that the content is barometric pressure sampled on a certain grid, etc.

Sometimes these "metadata" relationships are so privileged that they become code, I mean a "CREATE TABLE" in SQL can be "exactly similar to" some definitions in OWL even though one causes the physical layout of memory and storage and the other one only attaches meanings to some symbols that may or may not be in the graph without what OWL thinks.

The "production rules" systems that were popular in 1980s A.I. have improved by orders of magnitude because of RETE-type algorithms, hashtable indexes, etc.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#159

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:18 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #155

guerrilla wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here? This doesn't hold wate…

> This doesn't hold water. It's just being shown because someone paid for it to be, not because it's the best thing to be shown which is what algorithms would be tuned for if they were in the users interest. You are factually incorrect and this is part of the problem: a lot of proselytizing (and, honestly, virtue-signaling) by people who don't know how advertising actually works. Display advertising works on a CPM ba…

[deleted]

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#160

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

The whole problem is the adversarial environment. It's orders of magnitude harder to create genuinely useful content than it is to create crap or copy content. Meanwhile, the difference between useful and lazy content requires a holistic view and even embodied (IRL) understanding. For example, it's so much more work to physically review a set of items and write that up than it is to just read and summarize other people's reviews (bad content). It's also hard to tell the difference between these without physically trying the item in real life (bad ranking). So the ranker can't tell what's crap and there's more crap than good stuff.

If there was no money to be made by ranking highly on search engines, I think the promise the article's talking about might have been fulfilled.