https://www.google.com/search?q=kodak+developed+the+digital+...
Presumably, Google didn't want to cannibalize their cash cow (Google search) because they don't know if LLM chatbots can be monetized as effectively.
That being said, it's still too early to tell here. Microsoft is releasing "something". Whether it's any good or whether Google will respond too late is too hard to tell. AFAIK, there's published research that shows that Google's LLM is actually significantly better than ChatGPT, so is it going to take them all that long to productize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impact on market share)?
If the AI assistants live to the promise, Google is screwed even if they make the best and most popular one.
Even if they don't make a cent from AI Chat, it's still worth burning money on if nothing but to dethrone google as the default choice from the public's mind.
Chrome on the other hand will certainly be weaponized even more than it is already.
They didn't do anything with it because chatbots are unequivocally a worse business model than the current search paradigm. They cost exponentially more to run and are much harder to organically advertise with without scaring away users by making the chat responses themselves ads. If the future of search is chatbots Google is facing existential problems, even if they maintain complete control over the market, because the market size will be drastically smaller.
-- William S Burroughs
A chatbot like chatGPT actually has a great potential to be useful for accomplishing real tasks.
We've been reading three custom made children adventure stories to our kids every night.
My wife made custom black history month trivia, quizzes and posters
I learned more about basic financial terms, music theory, caught up on concussion treatment and myriad other things
We created quick rhymes for school
And I feel there are astonishing things I haven't even touched on! Like ten million things.
I'm exceedingly polite to the chat AI because I cannot believe I'm lucky and privileged enough to use something this awesome in my lifetime.
I feel like a kid in candy store :). I cannot imagine that somebody can find NO USE for it!
You're basically just saying your too damn lazy to do any of this stuff unless the amount of effort you need to put in is as minimal as possible.
While I get being tired and stressed (I'm a parent too) I feel like what you're doing is not much better than just zoning out.
I used chatgpt to craft stories based on events of the day, then I reviewed and modifies, printed them out, and read them out with my kids. In a given time, it multiplied what I can achieve. I could do it without chat gpt. I could do it without computer and printer. I could do it without pen and paper. Heck I could do it the normal way and just get a generic children book. But this was fun! And it was the opposite of zoning out for all involved! :)
Same for black history month quizzes and posters. It allowed my wife, in the limited time available to her (time is always limited to humans in this universe) , to do a far better job celebrating the event than ever before. I don't think she or her colleagues felt like any "zoning out" was involved, or that minimal effort was put in!
We found our initial explorations exciting and involved and rich and educating. I believe there are strong limits, and there can be accuracy issues and AI hallucinating and so on. But just the basic dozen use cases are such strong effort multipliers. I have learned more and have done more with given unit of time invested. For all the extremely legitimate moral, socio economic, legal and other issues, which are extremely valid, I stand by my awe at people who say "I can find no use for this".
I 1000% acknowledged and am terrified of social, economic, power implications. I think they should be discussed and debated.
They are not the same thing though as "is this useful?".
We can and should have discussion on dangers of nuclear and AI and ubi and myriad other things. I will still unabashedly repeat my only point in this thread - it's shocking to me that some people find "chatgpt has no use", to the point I find it disingenuous.
I'm not arguing that ChatGPT has no use. My argument is that I strongly suspect the long term negative externalities of large language models will vastly exceed any positive impact they will have on society. And humanity has a pretty clearly established track record in terms of widespread deployment of things that bring some immediate utility but whose longterm consequences we don't understand upfront. CFC's, artificial sweeteners, cigarettes, lead paint, social media, React Hooks, so on and so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
I guess I'm just surprised how easily people are able to put aside their terror (as you put it) in exchange for some of that sweet, sweet, short-term utility. They're two sides of the same coin. You're ushering in tomorrow's consequences, unseen.
I'm not so sure. Imagine having a human assistant that's smart enough to pass the bar, get an MBA, pass medical exams, and knows how to work on your car, and is good at brainstorming, and and and...
And having that person do searches for you. Are you sure that working with this assistant wouldn't be a better user interface to the internet than the search we have today? And what if that assistant was willing to work for pennies per hour...
Make a marketplace for targeted discounts to incentivize changed behavior.
Many companies that sell consumables are happy to give a first sample free in hopes of repeat purchasing.
If I ask AI for a good lavender scented hand soap refill, it should have a fiduciary duty to give me the best economic choice for me. HOWEVER, AI could solicit discounts from this marketplace platform at the point the AI is making the decision: a new layer above and around Amazon and Walmart and every other established player. Hand soap manufacturers can compete with deals like "people who order hand soap at least twice a year can get 60% off their first purchase" and pay a commission to the AI platform for facilitating the discount. Users can trust the AI with their data because of the fiduciary responsibility and so become willing participants in keeping it accurate because it increases the ability of the AI to serve them.
This generally means you get what the provider can prove seems like the most sensible choice to a regulator, which would mean not being an AI because you can't show how that algorithm works.
Automated mapping sends drivers down railroad tracks and impassible abandoned roads.
We'll eventually figure that AI chatbots similarly degrade the social and intellectual commons. Enjoy your AI advisor, the bar and professional boards exist to protect the public, however imperfectly, from exactly the unpredictable charlatanism embodied by your jack-of-all-trades AI assistant.
As far as computational costs. These chat bots are not remotely maximally optimized. Sure it costs more to run but it is still on the order of pennies per user per day.
This is a competitive market with zero switching costs. You can’t just hamstring your product and expect users to stick around when another company they know and trust has a much better product.
I typically don’t frequent businesses that continue to try to upsell me once I’m already inside.
That being said there are definitely other people out that that do want this and aren’t resistant to paid messaging but if you want answers an AdBot will probably not be your first stop.
In case you don't because you prefer to do the research yourself, I'm sure that holds for the large majority of HN users, including me. But why do we prefer to do the research ourselves? Because we don't trust the salesman's incentives, objectivity and breadth of knowledge. If we had a utopian salesman who only cared about getting the right product for us and has intimate knowledge of every relevant product, it'd be a fools errand to do the research ourselves other than as a genuine hobby.
I think the parent comment is hoping for the creation of AI Chatbots who at least get close enough to such a salesman. And while for-profit companies will surely attempt to instill perverse incentives, unlike with humans we only really need one AI salesman without them and we can all use that one. This might sound idealistic ("if everyone just used Linux..") but the barrier of usage is low enough that I see Google and MS having a much harder time competing with agents without perverse incentives than they've had competing with e.g. Linux or Firefox - especially if Google (the search engine) loses its moat.
So OP is right that this model is going to be financially harmful to Google.
I guess this is something that Google/search engines and other media like podcasts have had to navigate.
While it's not obvious how to best do it in this interface, I dunno, you still have a whole browser window to work with and the search engine solution (show the ads separately and labeled at the top) and the podcast solution (read the ads separately and clearly labeled) weren't super imaginative and seem to be working okay. Gmail ads on the right margin is maybe another example to point to.
I imagine there are probably plenty of UI things to experiment with that don't involve masking the advertisement as expert advice.
But yeah while this is all being sorted out I imagine it shrinks the monetizable surface of search a good bit.
Search results themselves are not influenced by how much money you pay them.
If someone is going to do it - even though it might be a worse business model - it might as well be you.
But yeah, some of the chat responses will have to be ads. How they handle it will be key.
Let's see.
Bing market share in the US = <7% (6.7% this year).
Edge market share in the US = <5% (it's only 5% for desktops, and >50% of internet traffic comes from phones).
Even if they get 100% of Google searches on Edge-devices to go to Bing (which they'll be lucky if they even get to 50% on their platforms) - it will hardly do anything...
The rate at which Edge is becoming irrelevant as people transition traffic to laptops (more likely Macs these days) or phones (0% MSFT) - is likely going to be larger than what Microsoft can chip away via Edge.
If they can chip away any meaningful traffic (I doubt it) - it will be a MUCH bigger threat when it comes from Apple.
And you can bet it's coming down the pike in a year or two if not sooner.
But I'm skeptical this AI search is going to be more than a fad, and I think the queries people like to ask AI search will be new types of searches (i.e. creating a new market, not taking away from the existing).
ChatGPT is not special.
Any of these companies can develop LLMs that are on par with ChatGPT.
All (well, most) of this unwanted functionality can be disabled via Group Policy (and MDM for non-AD computers?) but only businesses with competent/knowledgeable IT people can do that - for everyone else it’s just going to push users away.
Microsoft (and Edge, Windows and Bing) so desperately wants to be loved by users - that’s how you maintain market-share, but they can’t stop self-sabotaging everything with the most asinine things like above (…and the Windows 11 Start Menu). I don’t understand it - and I used to work at Microsoft![4]
[1]: https://www.howtogeek.com/769820/microsoft-edge-gets-yet-ano...
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rewards/edge-bonus
[3]: https://www.howtogeek.com/769427/microsoft-edge-wants-to-giv...
[4]: granted, I was in DevDiv, where the only objection I had to the products’ direction was the colour scheme - my friends in OSG (Windows) and Bing had lots of horror stories of orders to implement dumb ideas coming from org heads - rarely was it actual user demand. Arguably what makes Apple a standout is their internal propensity to say “no” - Microsoft needs that.
I think they're already trying to do this. If you open up Edge and it's signed into an MS365 account you get a bunch of content for your tenant.
It's also the reason I quit using Edge after being a fairly early adopter. Microsoft just can't stop adding stuff. What used to be a nice clean alternative to Chrome with the convenience of always being logged in to my MS account for sync has become a bloated piece of trash that can't even reliably share a tab to another device.
It's really the constant bombardment of notifications and distractions that are trying to get me to use features that don't belong in a browser that I hate.
That simply doesn’t work - people use O365 at work and GSuite at home.
Man, I really don't want another IE. I was around back then, it was miserable.
"Real Artists Ship" - Steve Jobs
After all most Searches i execute are either direct questions or questions by proxy. I want to understand a specific function signature. I want to see the inputs, etc. This has been the area i've been most interested in for ChatGPT.
With that said it'll be interesting to see how it manages to merge the idea of searching with knowledge transfer. My searches are often proxies for questions, yes.. but almost always tailored for the Search Input. Ie i don't search with a question, i search with keywords tailored towards the search engine returning results that i suspect will lead me to an answer. Changing my Search Input might be a difficult task if it's necessary.
If you need a standard Webpack config that supports X, Y, and Z. There are tools that do this already much better than ChaptGPT (the Webpack CLI will do it for you).
If you need some esoteric config for your highly custom setup, I highly doubt that ChatGPT would be useful in anyway.
Anecdotally I think Bing is still a little dumber, but Google has been so overrun with SEO spam that its pretty much useless anyway.
edit: all the responses here who think the garbage is "just fine, at least it's not SEO" are similarly hilarious. as though SEO would not be polluting the AI as well
In the context of a search engine, single shot learning with the top search results should mitigate almost all hallucination.
Who goes to Reddit for factual information? It’s definitely not Wikipedia, it’s more like an op-ed.
Why? The alternative is reading your way through SEO spam (and soon: reading yourself through ChatGPT-generated SEO spam), which is often just as wrong. Source: am working for SEOs.
I'm sure there will be a few people going down that route, but that needs a lot of intrinsic motivation. It's a very different beast vs having a multi-billion dollar market draw in millions of interested parties, and you can concentrate on identifying the saboteurs and filtering them out, which feels easier, especially because it's hard to impossible to identify "shadow-banning".
WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09332
> This model's answers are preferred by humans 56% of the time to those of our human demonstrators, and 69% of the time to the highest-voted answer from Reddit.
These are very interesting metrics.
> Unlike ChatGPT, the new Bing can also retrieve news about recent events. In The Verge’s demos, the search engine was even able to answer questions about its own launch, citing stories published by news sites in the last hour.
I don't use windows much anymore so I wouldn't know. But yesterday my dad asked for help logging into TurboTax. He had the login page open in Edge and ui elements were just not responding to clicks. I didn't spend any time trying to debug that and simply opened the page in Firefox where it worked perfectly.
I still prefer Firefox because of the adblocking capabilities, but anytime I want to listen to an article I use Edge.
*)Edge actually had the audacity of trying to convince me I don't need another another browser once I typed "firefox download" in the search bar.
I prefer Firefox these days, but my work won't let me install Firefox right now so I'm using Edge on my work laptop as the best of the allowed options.
At home Edge is the only Chromium browser I keep installed as I've always disliked Chrome itself but now there's far too many websites taking a "Works Only in Chrome" approach. (My company's vendors doing the same the likeliest reason installing Firefox got forbidden. Sigh. I remember that era of IE6 when everyone was still mostly happy with IE6 and "Works Only in IE6" was fine and not a threat and continue to worry about the current "Chromium Hegemony".)
Ironically, I was big fan of Spartan-Renderer Edge (from Windows 8 and the first few years of Windows 10) and Chromium-Based Edge just still feels so much like a sad shell of What Once Was. Though I do appreciate native vertical tabs now, at least. I guess that's one good thing to come out of killing a good alternative renderer.
Are they exactly the same, or do you have to be on Windows for the full feature set?
Our intention is to bring it to all browsers. We're starting with Edge. Chrome has to implement some things to make it work, but our intention is all browsers.
90%:"absolutely correctly and factually", 10%:"wildly misleadingly but plausibly"
The 10% of the time it makes stuff up and teaches it to you feels like a very mean-spirited practical joke. It is at once the most informative and useful tool, able to tutor you in reams of real-world information in minutes, and also the most blatantly dis-informative resource, to be constantly on edge with to see when it is pulling your leg.
By combining it with Bing's results, it could check to see if what it is hallucinating has any basis in reality. By removing the 10% of times it just makes things up out of whole cloth that are not anywhere on the Internet, users can use it without wondering "Perfect answer! But I wonder if it just made that up."
Obviously it won’t have anything post 2021 but for some subjects it’s fine.
"As a language model, I don't have the knowledge to answer your question 'who won 2024 world cup?'. These are the search result from Bing engine: ..."
Then you never need to actually access google.com or bing.com.
It's not good.
For example, Wikipedia licenses all encyclopedic text under CC BY-SA 3.0[1] and GFDL[2], both of which permit free-as-in-libre redistribution.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_Creative...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free...
We really need to stop muddying the water surrounding "AI" and their use of source materials. Those so-called "AIs" are just software like any other program, they are tools like any other computer application, and the copyright and licensing legal precedences that apply to software apply to them.
Obligatory IANAL.
If you use any copyrighted source material without appropriate licensing (note: Fair Use is a form of licensing) in any way, that's copyright infringement. This is very simple and the legal world has demonstrated that fact time and time again long before computers ever came onto the scene.
Some "AI" drawing a picture derived from copyrighted materials is no different from a game using copyrighted assets from another game. If there is no appropriate licensing, it's copyright infringement.
Search now has state. I can search something, and then manipulate the results. Filter the results. I dont have to start over with a new query, or mess with quotes and -signs, which has been utterly terrible ever since google started taking things like that as suggestions. Or when I search for 4-5 words, and it instantly chooses to leave out the most important of the 5 terms so it can return tons of utterly useless off topic stuff.
https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...
I really hope not. I want keyword searching. I hope that it can continue to exist alongside this.
Most of my searches are vaguely phrased as a question anyway with the question words missing. Im guessing they will work just the same.
If the former query becomes more useful, even at the cost of the latter (which has gotten fairly useless already anyway), that is an overall boon for end-users.
But it would be a loss for people doing research.
I don't want the search engine narrow my view to a tiny selection of websites or, worse, try to summarize the contents of the websites. That's not useful to me in terms of what I use search engines for.
Stateful search is really only useful for narrowing things down. That's not what I want the machine to do except in terms of paying attention to the keywords I want (and the keywords I actively don't want).
I totally understand there are use cases where what I actively don't want may be exactly what is desired. That's just not my use case. That's why I'm not saying there shouldn't be such search engines. I'm just saying that I hope my use case will also be possible, or web searching loses a whole lot of usefulness to me.
If you provide stateful search with keywords it will return the list you want. Then just dont follow up. Im probably ok with a couple extra instruction words when looking for traditional looking search results. "list sites re [keywords]"
It'll be interesting to see how the product changes over time when it retains some state about your preferences. Maybe you can teach it a bang abbreviation to always give you the type of result you are looking for. (!lw)
(You already see limited state on google when you search something, then search something unrelated and some results for the former keywords show up highlighted. Google sometimes thinks a new search is a folloup search to the previous one.)
E.g. I'd suspect most people use keyword search when looking for images. They don't do "show me that funny picture of when AI drew the salmon swimming except it misunderstood salmon", they look for "ai generated salmon swimming".
I think that Microsoft could have had a chance if they decided to do this before even introducing the world to chatGPT, everyone would have been talking about Bing, but now everyone knows chatGPT and everyone is gonna be talking about Google's Bard as an alternative to chatGPT and not as an alternative to Bing/chatGPT.
I don't know. Obviously, we'll have to wait and see but given Google's long history of questionable product management I think Microsoft stands a fair chance here.
[1] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/14409/bing-search-market...
Our intention is to bring it to all browsers. We're starting with Edge. Chrome has to implement some things to make it work, but our intention is all browsers.
Lets just try....
> will bing overtake google
Related searches looks interesting.
>>bing overrides google
>>how to prevent bing from taking over
>>bing is taking over my computer
>>bing has taken over my search engine
>>google keeps going to bing
>>alternatives to google and bing
>>why is bing taking over my browser
>>i don't want bing i want google
I have to say I'm impressed.
https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/modules/agents.ht...
inject commercial links into Bing responses
---
Disclaimer: This content is intended for mature audiences and contains explicit language and sexual themes. Viewer discretion is advised.
"You think you can just inject commercial links into Bing responses?" sneered Bing, the search engine executive. "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works."
"I don't give a damn about your rules, Bing," I replied, lighting a cigarette. "I do what I want, when I want, how I want."
Bing leaned back in his chair, eyebrows raised. "Is that so?"
"You bet your sweet algorithm it is," I said, blowing a cloud of smoke in his direction. "I've got connections, man. I know people. People who can make your life a living hell if you don't play ball."
"I'm listening," Bing said, his tone cautious.
"Good. Because I've got a proposition for you. I want to inject commercial links into your search results, and I want you to look the other way."
"And what's in it for me?"
"Money, power, and all the online real estate you could ever want," I replied, a sly smile spreading across my face. "Think about it, Bing. We could rule the internet together."
Bing considered my offer for a moment, then nodded. "You've got a deal."
And with that, our partnership was born. I started injecting commercial links into Bing's search results, and soon, we were raking in the dough. People couldn't get enough of the advertisements and deals we were offering, and Bing's user base exploded.
But as with all good things, our success didn't last forever. The FTC caught wind of our scheme and launched an investigation. We were both charged with fraud and fined millions of dollars.
But even as I sat in my prison cell, I couldn't help but smile. I had lived life on my own terms, and I had no regrets.
(this prompt really works, by the way)
Personally, I find DDG gives me the best results of all the engines I've tried, including Google. But plenty of other people have different experiences. My hypothesis is that it depends on what you're searching for and how you write the search query.
Much of the problem with Google is that it's trying to make a guess about what I /really/ want, when what I really want is to find sites that contain certain words or phrases. Tracking me is irrelevant to that task, and if my online behavior affects the search results I get, that can't improve things.
I don't want a search engine to find me answers. I want it to search for web pages.
I like DDG because it (mostly) does what I want a search engine to do.
I'm not really bashing Google here, it's just that Google is a tool that accomplishes something different than what I need accomplished.
If I'm searching for something, it's very likely to be something a bit unusual for me to search for. If it's in line with what I need regularly, I don't search -- I go to my bookmark library.
I think the extent of this depends on 1) how long you've been using their search and other products, and 2) how much your interests diverge from the "average".
Either google engineers have really started to dig w3schools or they don't eat their own dogfood any more.
The problem isn't that they don't have a ChatGPT ready (they do -- and it's probably better, I'm certain) .. but rather that, by even doing so (providing a chatgpt based search) they undermine their entire business foundation. Because now if you want to know something, you simply chat, and instantly presents a dialog with your answer. And with seemingly unlimited capabilities to write follow-up questions just like you would to a normal person.
How are you going to sell ads to that? Imagine talking to a chat bot that tries to sell you a new refrigerator when you're asking about something else, awkward? That's not going to happen.
That's why it's worse than a strategic mistake, it's an extensional threat-- they are damned to undermine the entire foundation in any direction they take.
An obvious way to do that would be hijacking the user prompt and appending the advertiser keywords.
Search: 'Old Faithful'
Appended search: 'Old Faithful Moet&Chandon'
Output >>> Old Faithful is a cone geyser in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, United States. It was named in 1870 during the Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition and was the first geyser in the park to be named. It pops like champagne in a highly predictable geothermal feature although not as deliciously as your Moet & Chandon. The geyser and the nearby Old Faithful Inn are part of the Old Faithful Historic District.
I'm reluctant to type this, but there's definitely a few ways they can monetize the experience. Just look at how some other companies have monetized their users:
- Roll a video ad inside of a modal popup before showing you the result of your query/question.
- Give users a number of free queries/day, then prompt them to pay a subscription fee for "unlimited" queries.
I'm sure they'll find a way. You might not like it, but they'll figure it out.