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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#941

Post by billychuck21st »

UncleMeat wrote: post #928
simiones wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But why would SO (or an equivalent) be dead. I know very little about ML so it is entirely possible that I'm way way way off here but it seems like a product with this sort of tool integrated would be capable of determining when a query produced a not-very-useful result and could even aggregate such queries. We'd have a very powerful training system where the AI can communicate back "hey I need training on this sort…

people will visit SO less, make it less profitiable to stay alive.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#942

Post by epistemer »

alvah wrote: post #890
s3p wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of the jobs we have now resemble David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" though. I suspect many jobs that largely consist of making powerpoints and looking out of a window could disappear tomorrow without upsetting anyone except the incumbents.

I completely disagree and I love David Graeber.

We will automate some bullshit jobs but create all kinds of new bullshit jobs that have titles that start with AI.

Thousands of titles like "AI ____ ____ Manager" that also does nothing but schedule meetings about meetings about AI.

The mistake to me is to believe bullshit jobs are the end result of some systemic inefficiency that AI is going to automate out of existence. I just don't think that is at all the case because otherwise we would just cut so many bullshit jobs right now without AI.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#943

Post by 13years »

px43 wrote: post #834
13years wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After all the buzz of decentralization, AI is going to be the new era of centralization. One AI interface to rule them all.

Hey look, a decentralized chatbot running BLOOMZ-176B (an open source LLM about the size of GPT-3) http://chat.petals.ml I'm contributing to the project by running a node in my garage with a single RTX 3060ti in it, and you can too: https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals It's early days, but the tech is super promising.

Thanks, I'm aware there are actually numerous decentralized AI projects, but until proven otherwise, their success is unlikely. Outside of cryptocurrency, there just hasn't been much success challenging the big tech institutions.

Decentralized search and social media never gained traction. It turns out that the majority of people just aren't that interested in privacy and freedom. Features and convenience still win. If decentralized AI is going to be successful, it will have to compete head to head for features and convenience. I do hope that it is successful.

Nonetheless, decentralization is just one major hurdle. I have numerous concerns about the application of the tech overall. Too much to put into this post, but if you are interested I've written much more here.

https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#944

Post by nostrademons »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #911
nostrademons wrote: post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really a problem for the adoption or economic viability of ChatGPT, though. At some point, it hoovers up all the knowledge of the Internet, encodes it into its model, and then - the model just stagnates as content providers stop providing content. That's not a big deal for it - it'll continue to be the primary place people go for answers even when the source material has thrown in the towel and decided the…

Once all competing language models and providers have hoovered up all the existing knowledge and can do similar things with it then margins for that part of the story will shrink rapidly. It will all be about access to new information, access to customers (such as advertisers) and access to users attracted to other aspects of the platform as well. I think producers of new content and their distribution platforms will…

The content is a bootstrapping tool. Once the language model gets critical mass it gets further training data from its interactions with users, which are private to the language model's developer. It's like how Google Search bootstrapped off the content of the web, but the real reason you can't replicate Search today is all the information about who is searching for what, which links they actually click on, and how long they spend on the page.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#945

Post by amai »

Without citing its sources chatGPT, Bard and others will quickly accumulate a lot of law suites because of copyright and content violations.

Just think about what happened with Google News in Europe: Google needs to license its content: https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/google-li...

And with citing its sources an AI search answer is basically like an individualised Wikipedia article for your question. That is not much different from the list of search results, now.

Except there will be more text in between the links. This will make it more difficult to influence the ranking of the cited search results by means of SEO. This is because like in a Wikipedia article the order of the citations depends more on the order of the content of the article, not so much on the relevance of the citation for the article as a whole.

So I think these new AI search engines will not be so much a "Google killer", but they will be more a "SEO killer".

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#946

Post by simiones »

UncleMeat wrote: post #928
simiones wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But why would SO (or an equivalent) be dead. I know very little about ML so it is entirely possible that I'm way way way off here but it seems like a product with this sort of tool integrated would be capable of determining when a query produced a not-very-useful result and could even aggregate such queries. We'd have a very powerful training system where the AI can communicate back "hey I need training on this sort…

If Google launches this tool, Google will make money off the answers this tool provides. The fact that this tool is trained on the content from SO will not mean SO gets any money. Also, if users just get the answers from Google Bard, they will not visit SO, and will not contribute to SO's community or revenue. So, the SO community will eventually die if Google Bard is good enough.

The whole premise of the economics of these LLMs is built on the assumption that the training data is (mostly) free. If you need to pay people to provide the training input, you will quickly find that you're spending more money on creating the training data than you're getting out of the finished model.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#947

Post by Jcowell »

dmix wrote: post #937
bzbee10 wrote: post #895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need to be a place that people go to ask and answer these questions. It doesn’t matter how big or small you are if you don’t exist because the people answering the questions don’t go to you in the first place. You’re right that there’s another means in which a business can fill this, but I don’t think it’ll be stack overflow.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#948

Post by oceanplexian »

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…

Remember LMGTFY? People will be too lazy to ask the AI and will instead ask basic and completely obvious questions on Stack Overflow, forums, and so on. Probably forever.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#949

Post by Jcowell »

generalizations wrote: post #828
Oras wrote: post #343

Missing the point of positioning by miles. I’m sure Google will release something good, but it will be called: Google’s ChatGPT. Should have made something to distinguish their AI solutions from just being a copy to trendy solution. Saying AI will be used in search is not news, AI is already part of Google search.

Tying it back to search at all is completely missing the point imo. They need to realize people want answers and information - they don’t want to look for answers and information. From a a marketing perspective, it sure seems like Google has already missed the ball on this one. Not that they can do anything about it, though, since their cash cow is search results. They need people to look, not find, and chatgpt helps…

How would people get answers and information without looking for answers and information? You need to query before you receive and search is the prime input that people are use to.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#950

Post by allenleee »

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…

Sadly, we feed programming knowledge into ChatGPT now.
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