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Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#41

Post by manmal »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #7
mg wrote: post #2

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology. I think we are at a turning point in this regard. AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. The web will change…

> AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. Little comfort when so much of that fluff is now being AI generated. There becomes a point at which we dilute the quality of the information on the web so much, the detail is just lost. AI generating summaries of AI generated garbage is not going to create a better web. I’ve been reading AP News recently,…

> There becomes a point at which we dilute the quality of the information on the web so much, the detail is just lost

I think websites will infact need to compete by providing succinct answers or people will just run a transformer model on them, skipping all the ads.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#43

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

tomjen3 wrote: post #16
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. There will also be no more incentive to create sites with actual useful information since AI will just appropriate it. AI will destroy the source of its training data.

Wikipedia is not going to stop. Your local cinema is not going to stop posting movies and show times on their website. The only sites that are going to be hit by this are those that make money on ads.

Wikipedia doesn't cover everything.

> The only sites that are going to be hit by this are those that make money on ads.

There are plenty of those and they do provide value - else they won't have been able to survive all these years via ads.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#44

Post by danielbln »

gonzo41 wrote: post #32
danielbln wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, but perplexity.ai for me. Search enabled LLMs that can slog through the search results for me is where it's at.

But LLM's don't really do that. They take the shape and context of your prompt and respond with a corresponding shape of text. But im sure there's some hybrid in the works that will be very helpful soon.

I'm not sure I follow, those hybrids exist today, I mentioned one of them. They tend to fire search queries, extract the content over multiple hops and inject it into the LLM prompt for evaluation and summary.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#45

Post by manmal »

joosters wrote: post #19
mg wrote: post #2

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology. I think we are at a turning point in this regard. AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. The web will change…

> AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. So? Google can do that too. They just choose not to, for profit reasons. AI can (presumably) also do that. But will AI companies instead choose profit? Of course they will.

They already do, ChatGPT Plus is a monthly subscription. If they add ads or product placement, people will start self-hosting transformers, at least for website summarizing.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#46

Post by walthamstow »

leobg wrote: post #31

Recipe blogs are the most horrible example. The amount of BS you have to scroll through to get to the actual recipe.

Any recipe that shows up on the first page of Google is shit anyway, IMO/IME. There are maybe four or five websites I trust with recipes, anything else I get from a book.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#47

Post by lkramer »

idoubtit wrote: post #30
calrain wrote: post #3

This is why I use ChatGPT and Kagi over Google search now.

A few weeks ago, I had a question and I couldn't find the answer with Wikipedia or with internet searches. So I asked ChatGPT. I got an answer. Even better, it was sourced... Except that the source was a Wikipedia page that I had read and that didn't contain what I wanted. ChatGPT's answer was "fouled up beautifully", as Donald Knuth would say. A plain search is just a link and a quote, while the IA's answer is an ed…

I had similar experience; a friend use chatGPT to answer a question we had (was Stalin's son involved in the crash of an airplane carrying a Hockey team?). And it combined two separate events, a crash in 1953 which was actually the one we were thinking of, and another from 2011. It didn't give any sources, though I guess it may have been able to, but it was very confident in its answer and I only realised it was wrong because I was curious and wanted to find out more, but that certainly made me look at chatGPT differently. I don't think LLMs are in any way the replacement for search engines, certainly not in their current form.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#48

Post by somenameforme »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #28
calrain wrote: post #3

This is why I use ChatGPT and Kagi over Google search now.

All hail the paid web. It sure took a long time to get here, from humble beginnings 20+ years ago when salon.com toyed with the idea of charging a micro-fee per article view.

Doesn't have to be the paid web. Paid is good, free is good. The cause of all problems is "free."

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#49

Post by tannhaeuser »

US antitrust turning a blind eye towards the aggregation into FAANG (or was it conflict of interest?) also made this possible. Specifically, Google's acquisition of DoubleClick alone (then the largest ad network) created a monopoly and closed vertical supply chain network along with AdWords/Google Search. But then Google also controls TV (YouTube), devices (Android), and browsers (via Chrome and subverting weak and financially dependent puppet orgs for web standardization and advocacy), and also many services found via Google Search.

Something's gotta give.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#50

Post by _ahxg »

dageshi wrote: post #29

The web thrived for a decent number of years with ads before it began to really spiral down. For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most users using desktops to most users using mobile to interact with google. In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their…

And here we have the tyranny of the marginal user as posted here a while ago =/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507
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