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I am also a heavy Kagi and Reddit user for search, and usually that's enough. But when it's not, its concerning how much better other search engines can be, especially since non-tech savvy folks will never use them.
> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…
I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good enough. I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is simply next token guessing.…
> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…
> how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't. In recent years i started noticing a correlation between alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote alcohol and try to correlate it with the good…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't. In recent years i started noticing a correlation between alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote alcohol and try to correlate it with the good…
Ha, now try cigarettes/smoking! At least low level alcohol consumption is only detrimental to the drinker. Cigarettes start poisoning the air from the moment they are lit, and like noise pollution there is no boundary. I hate them or thrir smokers with a vengeance and the foreign satanic cabal that is „hollywood“ sold everyone out for their gold calf tobacco money
And there are countless books and movies where the hero has drinks, or routinely swigs some whisky-grade stuff from a flask on his belt to calm his nerves, then drives.
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Can you imagine how much better it would be if people were paid to create the content!
I think it would be worse. Money tends to ruin collaborative communities.
> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…
The providers can sell inclusion in the system prompt to advertisers. Run some ad-tech on the first message before it goes to the LLM to see whose gets included.
If you're someone like Marlboro or Coca-Cola, on the other hand, it might be worth your while to pollute the training data and wait for subtle allusions to your product to show up all over the place. Maybe they already did, long before LLMs even existed.
> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…
I think for the moment the leading AI companies are strongly incentivized to not succumb to the advertising curse. Their revenue is subscription driven and the competition is ridiculously fierce and immune to collusion. Everyone is trying to one-up everyone else and there is no moat that locks you into a single product. Their incentive is to score as high as possible on benchmarks in order to drive up their user base…