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Comparing Google and ChatGPT

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Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#211

Post by hhda »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #138
hncel wrote: post #135

I work at Alphabet and I recently went to an internal tech talk about deploying large language models like this at Google. As a disclaimer I'll first note that this is not my area of expertise, I just attended the tech talk because it sounded interesting. Large language models like GPT are one of the biggest areas of active ML research at Google, and there's a ton of pretty obvious applications for how they can be us…

> and the fact that the average revenue on something like a Google search is close to infinitesimal already Isn't Search ad revenue >$100Bn per year? Isn't that >$0.07 per search?

From what I can tell, yearly Search ad revenue is in the neighborhood of $104 billion [0], and the number of yearly searches served by Google is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.1 trillion [1]. This brings the revenue per search to somewhere between 3 and 3.5 cents.

[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20210203_alphabet_10K.pd... (page 33)

[1] https://www.oberlo.com/blog/google-search-statistics

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#212

Post by knorker »

jtode wrote: post #165
drchopchop wrote: post #6

It's great, until people realize GPT-3 will generate answers that are demonstrably wrong. (And to make matters worse, can't show/link the source of the incorrect information!)

The same can said of Google, though with less entertainment value. For instance, somewhere in the bowels of wordpress.com, there is an old old blog post that I wrote, on the topic my having recently lost quite a bit of weight. The blog and the post are still up. I called the post "On being somewhat less of a man". Again, this blog post is live on the internet, right now. I won't provide the link, it's not a thing I w…

Google probably blocked it as hate speech.

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#213

Post by jtode »

knorker wrote: post #212
jtode wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can said of Google, though with less entertainment value. For instance, somewhere in the bowels of wordpress.com, there is an old old blog post that I wrote, on the topic my having recently lost quite a bit of weight. The blog and the post are still up. I called the post "On being somewhat less of a man". Again, this blog post is live on the internet, right now. I won't provide the link, it's not a thing I w…

Google probably blocked it as hate speech.

Lol yep

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#214

Post by jtode »

layer8 wrote: post #206
jtode wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can said of Google, though with less entertainment value. For instance, somewhere in the bowels of wordpress.com, there is an old old blog post that I wrote, on the topic my having recently lost quite a bit of weight. The blog and the post are still up. I called the post "On being somewhat less of a man". Again, this blog post is live on the internet, right now. I won't provide the link, it's not a thing I w…

FWIW, Bing does find it.

For all their anticompetitive crap over the years, they keep emerging as the company that still sort of has a soul, in spite of having every reason to have long since abandoned it...

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#215

Post by summerlight »

hncel wrote: post #135

I work at Alphabet and I recently went to an internal tech talk about deploying large language models like this at Google. As a disclaimer I'll first note that this is not my area of expertise, I just attended the tech talk because it sounded interesting. Large language models like GPT are one of the biggest areas of active ML research at Google, and there's a ton of pretty obvious applications for how they can be us…

This is so true. Some folks in Ads also tried to explore using large language models (one example: LLM is going to be the ultimate solution for contextual targeting if it's properly done), but one of the major bottleneck is always its cost and latency. Even if you can afford cpu/gpu/tpu costs, you always have to play within a finite latency budget. Large language model often adds latency by order of seconds, not even milliseconds! This is simply not acceptable.

I think Pathways is one approach to tackle this issue at scale by making the network sparsely activated so the computation cost can be somehow bounded based on difficulty of each query. This effectively gives Google knobs for the axis across computational cost and the result quality by limiting the size of network to be activated. If it turns out to work well, then we might be able to see it incorporated to Search in a foreseeable future.

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#216

Post by jtode »

jeffbee wrote: post #162
jtode wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the existing social platforms could also implement ActivityPub and have it working in a week. Name any other organizations that are as well-positioned to make the Fediverse a reality. They [don't] do it, because they have a business model. Same goes for Google. The problem for google is that apparently this other tool is already available, today, though the website is currently overloaded so I can't reach it. But…

> All the existing social platforms could also implement ActivityPub and have it working in a week. Name any other organizations that are as well-positioned to make the Fediverse a reality. That's not a good analogy. There are architectural reasons why AP/fediverse will never work, no matter how hard anyone tries. It is not business reasons that prevent, say, Facebook from adopting ActivityPub. They are prevented fro…

Back in the 90s, when mcdonalds.com was owned by some yokel who thought to register it before anyone else, I used to say that they couldn't do capitalism on the internet, and look, they pulled it off! We only had to throw every shred of social cohesion out to make it happen, but hey, the attention economy is in full swing!

Rubbish, lad. These platforms manage accounts in their millions within the garden every day, and you're telling me that they can't manage to open up a hole in the API to let someone add and read posts that way, rather than through their sadistic web interfaces? After everything they've already done?

More to the point, ActivityPub is just the current popular prototype, the Bitcoin if you will, of the federated social space. We'll get it sorted just fine.

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#217

Post by GalahiSimtam »

tfsh wrote: post #11

These are addressing two very different concerns but framed as a singular one. Google is first and foremost a search engine - it searches the web for answers, the key point being the answers need to exist on the web. The other is a machine learning model tasked with deriving answers, and sometimes - if not very often answers will be provided in an authoritative tone whilst being completely and utterly incorrect. Goog…

The feature of Google that is lampooned is called Google Quick Answer

I know that because a physics PhD friend once made a lecture for students on how to find truthful physics/engineering information on the web, with a dozen slides examples of factual mistakes in Google Quick Answer. Regardless of whether they are from other sources verbatim or transformed by Google - e.g. modulus of elasticity of cast iron is stripped of units

So it certainly could be an improvement there

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#218

Post by rtkwe »

sho_hn wrote: post #70
rtkwe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least there it's still linking to the original source where the information is contextualized or correct. GPT-3 will just spit out an answer with no links so you either trust it got it right or you go to google to confirm it basically eliminating the reason to go to GPT in the first place.

Until the source Google points at is a GPT-generated text. Do we have models yet that identify GPT responses vs. human-authored text? :-)

Sure some day but as far as I understand it there's an "authoritativeness" measure for the info box so there's still a hurdle to get through to become the info box answer.

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#219

Post by teawrecks »

vineyardmike wrote: post #205
teawrecks wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is first and foremost an advertiser. The search engine, android, all the random short lived products, they're all attempts to find new ways to put ads in front of eyes. The only way google is "done" is if someone can figure out a way to put the ads in front of more receptive eyes/wallets AND do it on Google's scale without first being acquired or killed off. This means they would need to more effectively gathe…

> The only way google is "done" is if someone can figure out a way to put the ads in front of more receptive eyes/wallets AND do it on Google's scale without first being acquired or killed off. No, alternatively they just need to steal googles traffic, they don’t need to steal the ad spend. If you take the traffic, you’ll take their revenue, and they’ll die. If you steal 50% of traffic, you’ll steal 50% of their ad i…

All good points, especially about orthogonality being....orthogonal to disruption :D. I would love to see advertising disrupted. Advertising seems stuck in 2010; very rarely are ads relevant or worth my time. A perfect solution would offer precisely what I want to see, precisely when I want to see it, all while respecting my privacy. We're nowhere near that.

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#220

Post by spaceman_2020 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #197
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for Google isn't just technical, it's organizational. The entire organization and all its products are built around ads. If a new product comes along that drastically reduces the number of pages a user views, what happens to the ad revenue? Right now, every click, every query is an impression. But if there's an all-knowing AI answering all my questions accurately, what incentive do I, as a user, have to s…

> The entire organization and all its products are built around ads. Citation? I assume ads are a big part of Google but I suspect it’s not organized around ads. Eg I assume the GCP teams don’t report to any ad teams. I bet Gmail team -which does show ads- is primarily managed to optimize for the paid enterprise customers and they just have an ads guy shove ad boxes in where they can. I bet no one at Nest reports to…

> I assume ads are a big part of Google but I suspect it’s not organized around ads.

Other than GCP, how many products can you name that are not monetized by ads?

Advertising is nearly 80% of their revenue. It has remained stubbornly near that mark despite the massive list of products they keep releasing (and shutting down early).

Large organizations tend to coagulate around their profit centers. Google isn't any more immune to it than, say, IBM.

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