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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#931

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

wnkrshm wrote: post #885
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess a couple of reasons: 1) Because it is disruptive. Things may get shook up, and Google may not end up in as exclusive position as they are currently in. There's risk. 2) Because it's not obvious how advertising would fit in with a conversational interface. Google may stay as #1 search/answer engine, but would revenue be adversely affected?

ChatGPT and the like are the automated tools to seamlessly introduce advertising into text/image content - with the right prompt all the advertisements are between the lines. All it needs at the end is: this paragraph includes content sponsored by [Comapny name]. Edit: Why have ads separable from content if you can just weave them in? Ad-blocking is toast, you'll have to use another AI service to fish them out and re…

Maybe we can fast-forward past this projected future where our computer overlords are just trying to sell us stuff, and get to the bit where we are insignificant ants they mostly ignore. Sounds better, really.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#932

Post by SakeOfBrevity »

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…

I think the trend we see is there will be a generalized engineering-category of LLMs and people maintaining them will just feed new frameworks/libraries/languages etc. documentations to training sets and those models will then happily answer questions about "new stuff"

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#933

Post by WithinReason »

jhoelzel wrote: post #921
WithinReason wrote: post #899

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing the token limit without needing more resources to run the network is a solvable problem

but you do sure see the problem with a codebase right?

The current token limit comes from a O(N^2) memory requirements for N tokens, there is research that's trying to reduce this towards O(N), for example as the (downvoted) sibling comment suggests. This is not exactly straightforward but not impossible either. It's not a fundamental limitation of language models going forward.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#934

Post by ekanes »

notahacker wrote: post #428
antonvs wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think anyone who's used ChatGPT seriously could tell you that this isn't the same thing, at all. You're giving "assistant"-like questions, but the problem with those assistants has always been how shallow their responses have been, which significantly limits their usefulness. GPT's responses are still shallow in an absolute sense, but relatively speaking they're the Mariana Trench compared to Google's little creek.

Depends what the objective is. If I want to be amused by a Hacker News comment in the style of the Bible, draft a conclusion for my essay or a engage in a long and superficially appealing conversation about philosophy, I'm not using Google's publicly-viewable AI products Then again, Google - with and without a conversational interface - will do just fine with what the capital of Maine is, much better with what the we…

I think that's fair. But one is a mature product, and the other was just born/launched and will improve massively over the next decades. That this new tech is competing already bodes badly for google (yes they will incorporate their own AI, but the cat is out of the bag...)

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#935

Post by [deleted] »

simiones wrote: post #879
hcks wrote: post #878

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand this scenario. If someone already posted the answer then asking the question again on SO has no value. If the LLM can automate giving answers then we don’t need SO as much as before.

> If the LLM can automate giving answers then we don’t need SO as much as before. This is probably the misunderstanding: the LLM can only automate giving answers because it has been trained on all of SO (or other similar communities). It's a summary of SO, not an alternative to it. When new problems arise, the LLM will need to be re-trained to include the new SO answers, it will not be able to synthesize new knowledg…

[deleted]

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#936

Post by dmix »

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…

> Where does Google gets its information now? The feeder pipeline has died.

If people are asking questions and don't get one, then they'll still seek out an answer? I could see a cycle where Q&A sites get eaten by Google but as long as there is demand for fresh answers there will be services that fullfil them.

People will still seek out sites to post questions requiring context and domain issues that AI won't ever fully address. Plus the human instinct for social interaction and asking the same question already solved 5x before.

It doesn't have to be a Stackoverflow tier business but forums will remain a thing and there's plenty of reputation networks outside of Q&A.

I can get 90% of Yelp's resturant info via Google SERP (menus, hours, location, reviews) but I still use Yelp all the time and as a business they are doing fine.

This AI stuff will be a similar thin layer on top for quick answers, but niche content sites will still flourish IMO. Just with less traffic for a whole new classes.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#937

Post by dmix »

bzbee10 wrote: post #895
nathanyukai wrote: post #886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most accurate answer might still not be correct, so they'll still go to stackoverflow to ask new ones, thus keeping the pipeline alive ?

But if the traffic to SO is reduced significantly because of Google, there will be a death spiral. There wouldn't be a site to go and ask new questions, and even if the site is still there, nobody will bother to answer. The core problem is that the people who create the new knowledge (the answer writers) and the people who aggregate the knowledge (StackOverflow) will not get any concrete return for their efforts, sin…

You don't need to be a big business like SO to provide this service. The death spiral would only make sense for a business with demands for growth out pacing the market, so they exit. or who has an operation which is too expensive vs the ad revenue.

But that doesn't mean other businesses can't fill that reduced role more efficiently.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#938

Post by generalizations »

gretch wrote: post #509
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…

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 is that they had to buy youtube, not that they weren't able to put a shiny interface on top after they bought it.

What I'm trying to get at is, imagine if Microsoft bought youtube before google could - given Google's track record with their own video search, they would not have been able to compete with youtube, and they would almost certainly have simply lost that market. I think that's what happened here. Google is amazing at algorithms, but has very little business sense...they can buy a successful product, but rarely create one of their own.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#939

Post by amai »

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…

> Now Google scrapes the contents, and provides a service where you just ask your question and it gives the best, most accurate answer.

You can already nowadays "google" for an answers instead of asking them on StackOverflow. So what is the difference to the situation we already have?

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#940

Post by billychuck21st »

addandsubtract wrote: post #919
jerrygoyal wrote: post #913

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where does Google gets its information now? The feeder pipeline has died. The bar has raised now. People will ask the questions on SO whose answers they couldn't find from anywhere else including AI.

Correction: the AI will ask the questions it couldn't find a high enough confidence answer to. We are all now working for the AI to find niche scraps of knowledge that haven't been indexed.

maybe people get paid to answer questions that AI can't answer, can be a new eco system
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