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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#901

Post by bzbee10 »

Kiro wrote: post #880
bzbee10 wrote: post #874

Here's a concrete scenario: StackOverflow makes money because people go to it for answers to their questions. The answers are provided by people who write them because they get points for providing good answers, that they use for reputation points to get good jobs. It's an ecosystem. Everybody profits. Now Google scrapes the contents, and provides a service where you just ask your question and it gives the best, most…

Google already shows snippets from SO and has done so for years, without AI. Why would this be any different?

The difference is that the snippet points to the source. If you are like me, when I see the snippet and find it relevant I immediately go to the source, since I get access to the full context and others' comments. With a technology like chatGPT, that link is cut.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#902

Post by lofaszvanitt »

ElFitz wrote: post #759
alain94040 wrote: post #388

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…

> Imagine no one actually reads web sites. Instead a blog post to share an opinion, I'll probably want to make sure my opinion gets picked up by the language model. How do I do that? Computed knowledge may render many websites and blogs obsolete. Realising that has made me wonder why I should bother write anything publicly accessible online. Aside from pure altruism and love for my fellow human, or some unexplainable…

Time to introduce a robots.txt extension:

DisallowModelUse: *

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#903

Post by throwaway3672 »

jhoelzel wrote: post #897
WithinReason wrote: post #892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing the token limit is a solvable problem

Sure we just need next level super computers for these large models and the patience of multiple days to wait for output

Not necessarily - you just need hierarchical abstraction memory. I reckon my "token" limit when analysing code is around 7.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#904

Post by lofaszvanitt »

flakeoil wrote: post #866
zone411 wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at my profile, I own content-heavy sites and have for many years. I can show you logs - Wikipedia does virtually nothing. And the content of my sites has been regurgitated by Wikipedia thousands of times.

It maybe doesn't drive much traffic directly from Wikipedia, but you might have a higher SEO rank when people search in google for whatever your sites are about. Thanks to the links from Wikipedia.

Which are tagged with ugc or nofollow :DD. You have to realise that the current model is based on outrageous theft of people's hard work.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#905

Post by boppo1 »

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…

Blockbuster should have been able to easily pivot too.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#906

Post by somsak2 »

granzymes wrote: post #820
somsak2 wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still unclear if YouTube is actually profitable.

It’s been clear since Google started breaking out YouTube in 2020 that YouTube is profitable.

do you have a source for YouTube profit numbers? all I've ever seen is revenue stats with zero details on cost.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#907

Post by hackernewds »

jjeaff wrote: post #149
CabSauce wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good for users, potentially. But not good for the sites where google is sourcing the information.

Potentially good for users initially. 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. It could actually be a huge benefit in some ways if it chokes out the content mills. However, something tells me that they have little to no overhead compared to the people who actually toil away to post good, original content.

Website are not posting content for the sake of Google scraping it currently anyways. Look at reddit for example: fake internet points

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#908

Post by hackernewds »

bzbee10 wrote: post #874

Here's a concrete scenario: StackOverflow makes money because people go to it for answers to their questions. The answers are provided by people who write them because they get points for providing good answers, that they use for reputation points to get good jobs. It's an ecosystem. Everybody profits. Now Google scrapes the contents, and provides a service where you just ask your question and it gives the best, most…

> because they get points for providing good answers, that they use for reputation points to get good jobs.

Please show your work for the second part. Seems like a general statement but don't see that reflected in reality.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#909

Post by ElFitz »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #782
ElFitz wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine no one actually reads web sites. Instead a blog post to share an opinion, I'll probably want to make sure my opinion gets picked up by the language model. How do I do that? Computed knowledge may render many websites and blogs obsolete. Realising that has made me wonder why I should bother write anything publicly accessible online. Aside from pure altruism and love for my fellow human, or some unexplainable…

> What do I stand to gain from it The AI will absorb your words, and some small part of you will gain immortality. In some small but very real way, you'll live forever, some part of you ensconced safely for all eternity in a handful of vectors deep inside a pile of inscrutable matrices. ...at least, until some CEO lays off that whole team to juice the stock price.

Yes, that was my take too. Except that for those who care about such things, it is already supposedly achieved thanks to the internet archive.

> ...at least, until some CEO lays off that whole team to juice the stock price.

Or the model is retrained on a different somehow more relevant dataset. Or the company shuts down because of a series of poor choices. Or something new and vastly better comes along.

Or... who knows? The possibilities are so vast that seeking immortality is ultimately futile.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#910

Post by lebed2045 »

jb1991 wrote: post #876
arbol wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use github copilot to create simple functions by typing the function name and copilot does the rest. This works reasonably well for basic stuff. It becomes unhelpful and starts creating incorrect paths to library functions as soon as you add your work context.

This doesn't address the parent's excellent question: how do these models continually get trained and updated if they put their key sources of training data out of business? Related: I'd be quite worried if I was a Q/A site like StackOverflow or Quora.

Imho, quora users don’t use it for finding answers but rather reading personal experience. I used to write on quora fairly often many year ago. But something happened, and in my subjective experience the platform became far less interesting and useful. Significant part of questions turned into barely hidden shills for business or products, right answers seldom ever get visible and overall quality of content went down drastically. Maybe I’m not a representative but from my point if view the readers and writers on quora 2023 won’t have any different experience when there’s some smart machines that gives right answers.
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