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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#721
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those new language models are "Google killers" because they reset all the assumptions that people have made about search for several decades. Imagine that people start using those chat bots massively as a replacement for Google search. Then the notion of keyword disappears. Google AdSense becomes mostly irrelevant. Of course, Google is a giant today with a history of machine learning innovation. So they have a good c…

I think this is the same type of thinking that people had when they think technology will "steal" jobs, when in reality we have lower and lower unemployment as time goes on. Most likely this will not actually happen, and even if it did your content would still be valuable as an AI is analyzing it in a more nuanced way than just looking for keywords. Which, by the way, is exactly what search engines do.

> I think this is the same type of thinking that people had when they think technology will "steal" jobs, when in reality we have lower and lower unemployment as time goes on.

Technical changes do kill jobs. We always find a way to invent jobs, of course, but that doesn't mean old jobs aren't viable.

Movie theaters once employed professional musicians, not they don't, because movies have audio built in. Obviously a net-loss since musicians are jobs people like. Less coal miners or farmers is probably a good thing though.

It all depends on the type of job you replace. If you replace hard manual labor jobs, you're a net-good. Replacing a job people like... and you'll get a negative label. Doesn't change the fact that progress marches on, but jobs are killed by tech changes.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#722

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…

I agree, I think it's a fairly unimaginative take (a common one though) that ChatGPT is likely to lead to the usurping of Google.

It's a two-part claim; a) yes, conversational AI agents will replace typing searches into a text box, but b) I see no reason to think that Google can't easily monetize that format.

Regarding the first point, I think Google appears to have been caught a little bit off guard as to how soon this transition would happen. People seem to be over-indexing on the "code red". I do think it's a strategic mis-step by Google to not have a product ready to go here. (Their broader strategy was quite risk-averse and that was probably sensible, given the shit-storms that previous systems like Galactica and Tay generated; Google couldn't be the first ones to publish a prototype/demo system like ChatGPT, or the NYT would have jumped all over them for the inevitable questionable utterances.)

But the second part; given AI agents are here, who's going to win the competition to monetize them? It seems clear to me that Google is in a great place to monetize and capitalize on this technology, and I think they will win if their language models are better. (So far, they seem to be way ahead; LaMDA was early 2022, and it's clearly better than ChatGPT.) If Google's version of this service is substantially better, but intersperses ads based on what you're talking about (the Gmail model for ads), would people use this? I think it's clear that consumers would take the better free service that comes with ads, vs. paying ChatGPT or accepting inferior quality.

Let alone the fact that Google can put the assistant onto billions of Android phones, fine-tune a model per user, offload compute power with device-based inference to save OpEx, and so on; all of these will give whoever is running the AI agent a lot more ad targeting power.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#723
post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these conversations have one glaring omission. As it stands right now, ChatGPT is a net negative on the ecosystem it exists in. What does that mean? ChatGPT extracts value from the ecosystem by hoovering up primary sources to provide answers, but what value does ChatGPT give back to these primary sources? What incentivizes content creators to continue producing for ChatGPT? Right now, nothing. ChatGPT (or its des…

They don't have to. Ad & search dependent companies need to answer for themselves how to handle the coming disruptions. As an analogy, Kodak was a disruption opportunity, not a problem, for apple and flickr. Yes, maybe some content dries up -- no more stock photo sites -- but entirely unclear how important and they can wait to see how zombie companies adjust. Ex: ChatGPT encourages us to put more api docs online, not…

Google has already taken a lot of heat from increasingly keeping people on the search results page rather than sending them to the content providers. Chat interfaces are going to take that problem to the next level since they not only present someone else’s content but do it without linking to them.

At some point that destroys the web as sites move behind paywalls. Google or Facebook giving you less revenue is still a lot better than receiving nothing.

In some cases, that’s fine (AWS doesn’t mind you learning how to call their metered APIs on someone else’s site) but there are a ton of people who aren’t going to create things if they can’t make rent. Beyond the obvious industries like journalism, consider how many people are going to create open source software or write about it when they won’t get credit or even know if another human ever read it.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. I remember reading a question answering paper from Google in 2021 that concluded there was little evidence that models were actually grounding the generated answers in the contexts. Do you know if this problem has been solved?

Ah yes, it's this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06332 . With recent advances in alignment, this problem has gotten much better. Furthermore, the LLM used in that paper is only ~400 million parameters, which is orders of magnitude smaller than models being used for this task today. Scale + alignment has been the solution so far.

Thanks for the reply! It’s interesting (counterintuitive?) that the problem of models drawing too much from their stored knowledge is mitigated by using models with much greater stored knowledge.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#725
post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was already going this route. ChatGPT is simply pushing GOOG and META to go faster. Simple as.

But without ChatGPT when would Google put a LLM into Search? 2025? 2030?

They wouldn't have been the first ones to release an AI chat bot, but that doesn't matter. What matters is, given ChatGPT is here, is Google going to lose the coming battle to monetize advertising in AI agents?

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acquire what after release? The point GP is making is that Google's technology has been (at least to a non-expert) on-par with the external things. Why would they acquire something they already have?

My point was that this public relations issue could have been easily solved. A tech first company can easily get PR to solve it. That they didn't implies they they are past their prime. This is Xerox-Apple thing again

I still don't follow. "We should publish a harmful product when instead we could continue refining and instead publish a good product at the same time as everyone else" is a good strategy.

This is ultimately only an issue if you think Google's models are significantly worse (and that's related to the lack of public testing). That assumption doesn't seem justified.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia is really just a collection of sources, summarized. It owes nothing to the authors of the source material And yet it provides references and attribution where possible most of the time.

...which do nothing for the websites that had the original content.

This is the opposite of true in my experience: if you run a content-heavy site, Wikipedia is going to be one of your top traffic sources — especially for time on site since the visitors who arrive tend to have a very low bounce rate.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#728
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but what value does ChatGPT give back to these primary sources? The dissemination of their thoughts and ideas.

With no attribution or way to discover the source. That's great for propagandists but maybe less great for everyone else.

Maybe the next generation of LLMs will have more favorable things to say about you if you have published interesting things on your blog. Which in turn would be visible to any employer looking you up in that LLM.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#729
post #398

Anybody remember how we used to learn new words and build our vocabulary? Perhaps it went something like: "What does this word mean"? "Look it up in the dictionary" "Why can't you just tell me??" I remember the hassle of looking things up in a paper dictionary. Over the long term, it massively helped improve my ability to not just recall a simple definition, but also learn new words, as they were adjacent to what I w…

> Instead of a group of links that you'd personally evaluate and mentally rank in terms of usefulness (thereby building your own bullshit detector over time)... This sounds an awful lot like email's "Spam" folder, an AI driven bullshit detector that I am particularly fond of.

Did you hear how Google made a decision that political email wasn’t spam prior to last election? So that AI driven filter is, at least, partly influenced by political bias.

What about the AI that drives YouTube auto play so somehow kids watch horror clips and everyone else gets nudged towards Jordan Peterson for some reason?

Having more of our internet and communication filtered by ostensibly “neutral” AI will get lead very weird and probably not great places.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like the earlier responses said, if it is retrieving information from an external data source I was under the impression it went through like a multi-month long ultra expensive training process involving many GPUs on terabytes of data "snapshotted" point in time. Is it possible to do this at a smaller scale once a day at the end of the day with "all new content scraped from the Internet nightly"?

The paper about PaLM mentioned that they used 6144 TPU chips to train it over several weeks. That's a metric shit ton of processing power (pardon my language). If Google could dedicate 2 racks of TPUs to just continuously training PaLM (note: I'm not sure if LAMDA is PaLM, but let's assume they're similar), they could do this retraining. Catch is: consider these statements: Donald Trump is the President. Joe Biden is…

Lamda is about 20% of the size of palm IIRC
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