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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

1–10 of 346 posts

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#2
> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content.

For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themselves in this way, if they haven't already.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#3
post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

fortunately for our investors we have found a way to solve this with more ai

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#4
post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

I kind of look forward to freshman composition essays “written” with AI that are rife with appeals to use online casinos.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#5
post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

I'm not going to disagree because greed knows no bounds, but that could be RIP for the enthusiast crowd's proprietary LLM use. We may not have cheap local open models that beat the SOTA, but is it possible to beat an ad-poisoned SOTA model on a consumer laptop? Maybe.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#6
post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

"here is how to to translate this query from T-SQL to PL-SQL... ..."

"... but if you used our VC's latest beau, BozoDB, it could be written like THIS! ... ..."

9 months, max. I give it 9 months.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#7
post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

It's kind of already happening. For example, if you ask an LLM for advice on building an application, it's going to pigeon-hole you into using React.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#8
I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good enough.

I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is simply next token guessing. LLMs certainly cannot be trusted for "current affairs" - they will always be out of date, by definition (needs training)

Modern search - Goog or Bing or whatever - seem to be somewhat confused, ad riddled and stuffed with rubbish results at the top.

I've populated a uBlacklist with some popular lists and the results of my own encounters. DDG and co are mostly useful now, for me.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#10
post #8

I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good enough. I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is simply next token guessing.…

I miss Altavista every day. Case-sensitive search is how you tell DOS from DoS. Putting "exact phrases" in quotes no longer seems to work. Then they added insult to injury by forcing you to +mandate a term otherwise they might just ignore it. Now that no longer works either.

I've entirely given up on Google.

I've made extensive shortcuts so I can directly search various sites straight from my location bar: wikipedia, wiktionary, urbandictionary, genius, imdb, onelook, knowyourmeme, and about two dozen suppliers/distributors/retailers where I regularly shop.

If I need something that's not on that list, I'll try some search engines but I start with the assumption that I'm not going to find it, because the battle for search is lost.

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