Bard and new AI features in Search • Hacker News Board

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#731

Post by foooobaba » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 1:41 AM UTC

wnolens wrote: post #490

foooobaba wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User: What should I be doing today? AI: You have a court appearance today, I have booked a route for you on google maps. Next buy a gift for your mum’s birthday, here are some recommendations sorted by ad spend spend. For your travel, I recommend these options, sorted by ad spend. Me: What about the leaking faucet in my house? AI: You don't have the time to fix it yourself, here is a list of contractors that can fix…

Is that any different from trying to source it "on your own"?

Nah pry not, since search results are ranked by ads, same thing just in a chat based format.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#732

Post by wongarsu » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 1:46 AM UTC

dubcanada wrote: post #496

coredog64 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a smaller surface are for ads in a targeted chat session. At present, Google can show me ads on the results page. Each subsequent result that I view is an additional slice of my attention. It’s possible that Google can deliver a few targeted ads, but what if they can’t? What about the rest of the market that’s now gone? Possible that all those missed opportunities remove the ability to discover price.

You completely ignore the fact that companies will show ads everywhere, there is no reason that they would not try to inject ads into chat. "Here is the answer to your question about oranges. But did you know Tropicana is made from 100% real orange juice?" "A project manager is a ... Often the software project managers use is Zoho Projects for the best agile sprint planning" If they can put ads in it, there will be a…

Future prompts in search engine backends: Assistant, answer the following question concisely: "What is a project manager?". In your answer, casually mention Zoho Projects in a positive way.

Actual GPT3 answer: A project manager is a professional responsible for leading a project from conception to completion. They coordinate the activities of the project team to ensure deadlines and budgets are met. Zoho Projects provides project managers with the tools they need to manage projects efficiently and effectively.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#733

Post by busyant » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 1:48 AM UTC

robterrell wrote: post #248

londons_explore wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how long till they open it up to your private data stored in Google? Eg. User: What should I be doing today? AI: You have a court appearance at 9am. Prioritize that, because failing to appear might result in an arrest warrant. Next, prioritize your mums birthday - all the other family will be there, and with your mums cancer results last week, this might be the last. If you travel between them by bus, then y…

Fun exercise for the reader: how much of this is actually possible with LLMs and how much is not.

> Fun exercise for the reader: how much of this is actually possible with LLMs and how much is not.

I have no idea.

But it would be nice?* if this LLM stuff could be incorporated into the telephone system for my bank, pharmacy, etc.

It's obvious that these organizations don't want to connect me with a $killed human, so instead of having me interact with an infuriating "pretend" human, maybe CVS can fuse their phone system with ChatGPT to make the experience a little less maddening.

"Hey, I already gave you my birth date. No need to ask again. And I told you 30 seconds ago that I don't need to schedule a COVID vaccine. Just tell the pharmacist ."

* Be careful what you (I) wish for, I guess.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#734

Post by starik36 » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 1:50 AM UTC

Zachsa999 wrote: post #714

Chat as a search engine will fail for several reasons. It requires creativity, it's inaccurate with much nich information, and it's slow. There is many reasons to use AI chat technology, but as a search engine replacement it fails completely. Google search is objectively easier to use, and safer. You can view the website and judge for yourself the integrity of the content. It's slow, because every query that is bette…

I agree with you to a point. It depends on what you are trying to search. For example, search for Top 10 things to do in {popular place}. You will likely get a bunch of hits that are highly SEOed and your senses will be assaulted as you try to actually figure out points of interest.

Here is the top hit for Venice. https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g187870-Activities-V...

I had to scroll up and down twice to figure out what are actually things that I want to see and what is being upsold to me.

Now ask ChatGPT the same question. Answer is concise and to the point.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#735

Post by asdfasxcdf » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 1:53 AM UTC

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…

I cannot help but laugh at this comment. I bet this is what Google corporate tells its employees in orientation and All hands meetings.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#736

Post by funstuff007 » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 1:53 AM UTC

theonlybutlet wrote: post #143

dizzydes wrote: post #46

> Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search Despite this blog obviously being written for Wall St, this line is key. This is why anyone is going to struggle to compete with Google in AI. Google Search is used so widely and its taxonomy of meaning so vast already that once they flip this on they’ll be unstoppable. (Assuming any rate of improvement whatsoever as we search.) I’m not mentioning all other learning da…

I don't think it's that clearcut. These AI queries are resource intensive. Google will have to cut a fine line between quality and profit margin. If it's no good people just won't bother and it won't gain traction. The searches we make are already analyzed and all models tend to use billions of parameters anyway, even self generated. Google also are limited by their risk aversion, as seen in this extremely sanitized…

> These AI queries are resource intensive.

But perhaps only for now. When youtube first started taking off, Google was bleeding cash on the resources needed to support it. Perhaps the same will be true for LLMs.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#737

Post by the-rc » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 1:58 AM UTC

yunwal wrote: post #550

scarmig wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has far more resources for training models and inference. Likely more than all their nearest competitors combined.

If you’re talking about physical hardware, Google pales in comparison to Amazon, and Gcloud is still smaller than Azure. It’s possible google’s private compute makes up for the Azure difference but it’s not like they’re in different leagues in terms of access to hardware.

Does it pale? How? AWS is very opaque when it comes to power demand, but you could use that to estimate machine counts and they admitted to Greenpeace that in 2016 they used 500-650MW — a wide range that obviously obfuscates on purpose. See the last Clicking Clean report from 2017.

Google/Alphabet used 6514 terawatt hours in 2016 according to data collected from yearly reports at https://www.statista.com/statistics/788540/energy-consumptio...

If my math is right, dividing that by 8760 hours in a year, you get 743MW.

Of course, that also includes office space, etc. (did the AWS number, too?) but it should be clear that, cross checking with data center builds, optic fiber and energy purchases as well, for years Google+YT+Apps+GCP were larger than Amazon and all other AWS customers combined. I didn't even factor in efficiency, something that Amazon started focusing on quite a bit later.

Someone might be able to extrapolate both numbers to today based on infrastructure, other metrics or other spend in quarterly financial statements (or power procurement, which will be complicated by the non trivial Amazon vs AWS distinction).

All of the above to say that Amazon probably has more compute now, but it's a stretch to talk about "paling".

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#738

Post by ctvo » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:04 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #638

ctvo wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't fit your very niche definition of the web, that you still haven't defined explicitly. Let's try: Is the web a consumer product that runs on the internet?

> It doesn't fit your very niche definition of the web What's niche about websites? Leaving aside the snarky tone, I'll give you an example of how MS has continuously botched their web work for 20 years. If I go on Bing Maps (which I'm actually using on one of my pet projects on account of their permissive licensing) and I type in my Bucharest street address the auto-completion thing works fine, which is a plus (Appl…

> What's niche about websites?

Office 365 is web based. So does that count or is it conveniently a website also used by companies (and consumers) so we discount it?

What's unique about web sites that you think is harder than what they've done elsewhere? What makes web sites harder to scale?

Their inability to do mapping well has nothing to do with websites. So please, kindly stick to a definition and stop moving the goal post.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#739

Post by inimino » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:09 AM UTC

pffft8888 wrote: post #695

pffft8888 wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

@inimino I'm saying there is plenty of bias that is being enforced whether it's via dataset curation or RLHF or another way. ChatGPT has a very hard problem deviating from a certain political view of the world, despite admitting to the existence of evidence that contradict that view. That is not unbiased. The Web is unbiased. You can find every opnion out there and make up your mind based on the evidence. For some re…

No, I agree. The Web is unbiased (as a reflection of the views of average web users, though that is itself a bias) or at least it mostly is (certainly was in the early days) and reflecting that evenly would be politically untenable. However we use "bias" normally in a much looser way, and if you want to define bias relative to some agreed-upon standard of truth, now you have a definitional (and political) problem. Most people have strong political opinions and such conversations tend to go off the rails easily.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#740

Post by htrp » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:09 AM UTC

htrp wrote: post #23

neosat wrote: post #13

The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience. I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...

If you have to ask, you're not invited.

Apparently the "trusted testers" are basically all internal employees

>CEO Sundar Pichai told employees Monday the company is going to need all hands on deck to test Bard, its new ChatGPT rival. He also said Google will soon be enlisting help from partners to test an application programming interface, or API, that would let others access the same underlying technology.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/06/google-ceo-tells-employees-i...