Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed this too, and frequently wonder why there aren't new and better search startups...
There are, like DuckDuckGo. But the first complaint is usually "their results aren't as good as Google" and that's because Google in reality still gives better results because of their (lack of) privacy. People want better results but don't want to be tracked, and those things are in opposition to each other.
Shirt Without Stripes
441–450 of 639 posts
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you have points, but they break down here: “Shirt -stripes” is unambiguous to a system, yet the first result on Amazon(.ca) is a striped shirt, and the 3rd is sweatpants.
As someone else said you don't know that's wrong for what Amazon are optimising. If they find people [with your background profile] who buy shirts are susceptible to buying sweatpants, they might also find that if the seed you with "sweatpants" as an idea up front that the repeated presentation of sweatpants in "people who bought X also bought Y" sections is more effective. That's the sort of thing I'd expect Amazon…
“Yes, I would like an unstriped dress shirt please”
“How about this striped shirt?”
“No thank you, I would like an unstriped dress shirt please”
“I have some lovely jogging pants”
“Ok, I need to be clear here, I would like a dress shirt that has no stripes”
“Can I interest you in a white undershirt? People who buy dress shirts usually buy undershirts”
....
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#443The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their advanced AI capabilities, yet they cannot understand a very simple query that young children can.
At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.
Is it surprising that very few of the result surprises me?
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't quite believe your comment when I read it so I did a Google image search for "person" and the results weren't a lot better than you'd suggested. Mostly white men, a few white women, a very few black women, a handful of Asians, and multiple instances of Terry Crews. The net result of that Google search, combined with the "Shirt Without Stripes" repo, leaves me even more unimpressed with the capabilities of…
If you really want to be disappointed, search for [doctor] and [nurse]. Unless things have really changed, [doctor] will be mostly white men and [nurse] will be mostly white and Filipino women. But don't blame the AI. The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given. And in this case the data is the entirety of human knowledge that Google knows about. So really you can't…
Nurses it's 34 women to 5 men. Proportions of skin tones are what I'd expect to see in a city in my country.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it hard? Honestly. Add a "t" to "no" and you get a basic Boolean query.
Boolean queries aren't statistically analyzed; they're parsed and algebraically evaluate. So your point seems to support the opposite thing you're supporting.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
"there is no evidence of cancer" and "there is evidence of no cancer" are two different statements with different meaning, so it's more complex a task than just understanding the importance of "no" in a sentence. It's involves semantic analysis of the sentence. The paper I linked to below describes a technique they call "deep parsing." Check it out for more context.
Lexical analysis is surely clever enough to make "no evidence" and "no cancer" the atoms used and should even differentiate "no cancer" from "no, cancer" pretty easily? Are we really still at 80s chatbot level functionality when it comes to string parsing? Related aside: It frustrates me no end that spellcheck still doesn't appear to use any probablistic considerations, like Markov chains, to determine the intended w…
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#447This problem is known as "attribution" - you have a "no" or "without" in the sentence, but you don't know where it belongs. One could (and one does) argue that the problem cannot be solved with statistical methods (ML), especially not in any domain where accuracy is required, such as medical recored analysis: "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Zooming out, the language fiel…
If it just disregards the word without, well, that's pretty bad.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#448Larry: "I saw a red Lamborghini in the parking lot!"
Most people will assume Lisa is driving a red Lamborghini and back from Vacation, meanwhile, all the bots are searching for Lamborghini vacations and trying to figure out what's going on in the conversation.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#449I have noticed in the past few years google results have become noticeable worse for similar reasons. Google used to _surprise_ me with how good it was able to understand what I was really looking for even when I put in vague terms. I remember being shocked on several occasions when putting in half remembered sentences, lyrics, expressions from something I had heard years ago and it being the first! result. I almost…
Google was good at launch because it was harvesting data from webrings and directories to provide it "high quality" link ranking data. However, they didn't thank or credit or share any of their revenue with the sites whose human curation helped their results become so impressive. Seeing that Google search was effective, most human curators stopped curating directories and webrings. The SEO industry picked up the slac…
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed this too, and frequently wonder why there aren't new and better search startups...
There are, like DuckDuckGo. But the first complaint is usually "their results aren't as good as Google" and that's because Google in reality still gives better results because of their (lack of) privacy. People want better results but don't want to be tracked, and those things are in opposition to each other.