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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#671

Post by int_19h »

ux-app wrote: post #636
gretch wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: work at google YouTube was founded in ~2005. Google bought it in 2006. It is now 2023. YouTube has spent 2 years as its own company and 17 as part of Google. Try to remember what YouTube functionality was in 2006. It was very different and has grown a lot. The narrative that Google doesn’t know how to innovate YouTube doesn’t add up.

the point was that Google Video sucked and wasn't able to beat YouTube. Same story for Google+

Google+ was better than Facebook, which was its primary competitor. The problem there was the same that any new social network has: nobody is going to switch if they can't bring most of their social graph over.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#672

Post by [deleted] »

cutenewt wrote: post #614
wiremine wrote: post #232

I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be…

Unfortunately I don't think it's that easy. That is, the cat is out of the bag: ChatGPT not only showed us the power of AI, but it showed us a bunch of non-AI things like: - Ad-free results - Clutter-free results - The elegance of not having to click on links A competitor could capitalize on this, putting Google's ad-driven, click-driven, clutter-driven model at serious risk.

[deleted]

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#673

Post by int_19h »

mrkramer wrote: post #565
generalizations wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else remember the beginnings of youtube? Google tried to compete with them, with their own Google Videos. It sucked - and I remember reading how the engineers running it couldn't even figure out why they lost. In the end, Google just had to buy their competition, because they couldn't figure out any other way to win. They've tried to compete elsewhere, too, and I don't think they've ever been able to make a go…

Google already has a trackrecord of beating Microsoft. Do you remember Windows Phone? Well Google made Android in response to Windows Phone + Bing threat not in response to iPhone.

Windows Phone launched in late 2010, long after Android. Do you mean Windows CE / Windows Mobile? But if so, those weren't really a serious threat to anyone.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#674

Post by inimino »

pffft8888 wrote: post #644
inimino wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close enough, I'm just peevish about that word. Teaching is miles away from anything in ML or deep learning practice today.

I was speaking in English and doing so concisely to convey the point about bias transfer. I don’t really care what you call it. I could have said RLHF and blacklisting sources or curating training dataset. I know bias when I see it and the LLM does not come up with it on its own if trained on all data out there because for one thing the world is large with all kinds of opinions. When it refuses to legitimize all opin…

Yes, it's a sample of all opinions in the training set. It has no opinion of its own, even no place of its own to stand from which to have an opinion. There can be no bias without reference to some ground truth, and there's no general agreement on that in most of the areas where people are talking about these topics. It's a messy area, not helped by how few people understand how these systems work.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#675

Post by int_19h »

pphysch wrote: post #625
rippercushions wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's WordLens, which Google acquired in 2014, 9 years ago. https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/16/google-has-acquired-quest-...

Do you have a source that WordLens worked without an internet connection?

If it didn't, surely that wasn't a tech limitation? Google Translator itself has had offline translation capabilities for many years now, and Bing had that feature even longer. Offline OCR has been around even longer.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#676

Post by dougmwne »

urbandw311er wrote: post #665

Well this is a big old panic press release isn’t it? Ahead of Microsoft’s presumably near identical AI/search integration reveal tomorrow.

Screenshots from Twitter show that “the new Bing” is a real live product ready to roll. Google has a screenshot and a press release. As engineers, we should know the difference between a mock-up and a launched product ready to scale.

https://mashable.com/article/bing-chatgpt

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#677

Post by nwienert »

nabakin wrote: post #345
bnralt wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I can't see how anyone will be incentivized to create and post content for Google to scrape if they won't have any traffic from Google. The problem right now is that the incentives have caused most of the output online to be garbage.

Exactly. If Google is able to provide better answers than the garbage websites with their SEO hacks, those garbage websites will not get clicks. I could see this improving the incentive system significantly

- collect creators content, make it searchable, become worlds largest company

- encourage more content because PROFIT

- content becomes garbage

- have to pay those pesky content creators

- slowly squeeze out entire industries by inlining more and more content

- still, not squeezing the juice all the way

- introduce "AI", it just laundries copyrighted content to look original

- bye creators

- for some odd reason people cheer you for this

- creators forced to make their content private

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#678

Post by icelancer »

lumb63 wrote: post #662
stoniejohnson wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What search engine have you switched to? Maybe I've just been tuned to use Google effectively, but Bing/DuckDuckGo results are horrid except for very simple things, while Google gets me exactly what I want in the first ~5 results.

I switched to DuckDuckGo initially and had similar gripes over search results. The last straw was when I started to hear about censorship and suppression of sources on DuckDuckGo. I switched to Startpage and the results seem much better. It’s probably using a larger company’s (Google?) index, but I haven’t done that deep of a dive.

Startpage pays Google to use their search engine. It's on their wikipedia.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#679

Post by progx »

asim wrote: post #224

People forget that Larry Page's ultimate goal was to have Google predict what you wanted before you even asked for it. This isn't about hype. This isn't about beating the competition. This is about delivering on a 3 decade dream that's now coming to fruition and Sundar just happens to be the one leading the org as it manifests in the real world. We're going to end up with 10+ vertically integrated AI solutions like t…

And how will they make money?

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#680

Post by cactusplant7374 »

freediver wrote: post #353
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #304

Question for AI experts out there: ChatGPT is awesome, but it is obviously hamstrung by the fact that it crawled the web at the end of 2021, so all of its data is essentially "frozen" and it doesn't "know" of any topics that occurred after 2021. Seems to me like the next "holy grail" in large language models is building a model that can be continually updated. If Google can achieve that, I think they could leapfrog O…

You do not need to constantly update the model. You just need to feed it with fresh data as inpput. Example to try that in action: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/context

I asked it: What happened today?

It gave me news from April 9, 2022. What should I give it?

Edit: Late comment because dang put me on the rate limit list and didn’t tell me.

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