Google Is Losing Control
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
OpenAI clearly spent a lot time red teaming the chatbot to make sure the outputs were sanitized. Chatbot as a service is an easy monetization strategy from big companies. I wonder if ChatGPT servers will share resources with Bing search servers, I can't imagine they will, but if they do, the paid subscription will be a lot more valuable. I think users will react extremely negatively if Bing AI results embed affiliate links on every response possible. On the other hand, I can see myself clicking links of products ChatGPT recommends if I am intetionally asking about some sort of product, like if I ask it types/differences of climbing carabiners.
Research is very collaborative, so I understand why those at Google stay there. But it seems like MS and OpenAI are prioritizing having a clear pathway for novel AI work to reach users, and it won't be limited only to implementations that will help serve ads better.
Q: "What new discoveries from JWST can I tell my 9 year old child?"
A: "JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside our solar system"
So, it took the first picture of a (particular) exoplanet, which is not to be confused with the first picture (ever) of an exoplanet. There is a misunderstanding here.
Regardless of the validity, I think it's still fair to call it a mistake because of the ambiguity. Most people would misunderstand the answer to mean something it doesn't. But there was such a strong reaction in media about it, when I would have assumed most people wouldn't care. Google never promised an AI chatbot never got anything wrong, and no one I knew expected differently. It makes me think about how many other news stories, for things out of my field, are like the Bard situation. I'll just never know because I won't gain expertise in it.
No interpretation of Bard's output here is accurate. It is wrong.
c.f.
> Astronomers discovered the planet in 2017 using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and took images of it using short infrared wavelengths of light. Webb’s view, at longer infrared wavelengths, reveals new details that ground-based telescopes would not be able to detect because of the intrinsic infrared glow of Earth’s atmosphere.
The JWST news is that JWST took the first photo it has ever taken of an exoplanet.
JWST took the first picture of LHS 475 B, confirming it exists.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/W...
Sure, JWST has also taken the first picture of a different exoplanet-- 2 months later. But JWST did not:
* Take the first picture of an exoplanet
* Take the first picture of the exoplanet in the cited source (instead, it took its first picture of any exoplanet).
I think a lot of people realize google search results aren't great anymore. There's pages of dumb things at the top because the system is optimized for profit. Hence, almost anyone on HN adding "reddit" as a keyword to search results. Or news editorials explaining why searching for a recipe for eggplant parm will have an enormous website with a story about grandma and food photography shots before the 5 step recipe at the very very bottom.
And maybe there's some wishful thinking too.
Anyone who used ChatGPT frequently enough finds it difficult to get back to using Google. One specific query is all that takes to get an answer from ChatGPT which is on point. The alternative is to rummage through the top few links from Google and trying to construct the information you need after trying different variations of search phrases.
When the iPhone first came out there were arm chair pundits who predicted that no one would buy or use an expensive phone. But the people who actually used it knew that it was the wave of the future even back in the day. Same thing with ChatGPT.
Except for one query, I don't think LLM could have helped me with the rest. The rest are monetizable queries, btw.
I think that whether or not they had published this article, the transformer architecture would have been established within a year or two anyway. If you read the paper, they cite plenty of references to work already using self attention. As attention itself has no trainable parameters, it’s a short jump to add an mlp to create the “memory bank” it needs.
Likely they knew this, and thought it better to publish and receive the credit for their work than to let someone else claim it.
I've seen many more people appending reddit to Google searches.
google should be more worried about reddit getting their search together
Controlling the search pages is of low value compared to staying fixed at the top of Google searches (thanks to obfuscated interaction rankings) by having a lot of people who search dozens of times a day always selecting only your page in Google's responses and of course never applying captcha to a new visitor from Google.
The biggest search tragedy is Twitter. There’s an incredible amount of information on that platform but most of it is hard to find because of the awful search.
IMO the real issue with twitter is how it only loads tweets on a page to your monitor size. Impossible to CTRL+F if you know what you're looking for even on the right author's page.
Same reason why Mercedes or Audi did not bring automated driving on the road, even though they were technologically more advanced than Tesla. History proved them right.
And then when ChatGPT launched they got caught with their pants down and rushed to save face.
And the irony is that if they had simply worked on perfecting standard keyword based information retrieval, the thirst for a LLM integrated search engine would not be as high.
Engineers: Okay, we have LaMDA which is a more powerful language model, we'll implement it.
Execs: Great, what are the risks?
Engineers: Well each search is going to cost 5x more compute power, and may reduce the amount of clicks to ads and search results since we're answering all their questions directly.
Execs: Hold on... we need to have a bunch of meetings about why not to do this.
That's the literal bottom line. How is Google going to insert ads into an AI system. There's probably people being paid a fortune to try to find out.
One of the most recent was Chrome's plan to force manifest v3. But many of the features promised to devs from v3 wouldn't have been ready by the time v3 was supposed to release. I would approach Google's AI stuff with similar hesitancy as I would have approached Stadia within the last few months before it shut down. Just like with Stadia, Google very clearly does not care to prioritize this kind of AI tech. Google failed to proofread its own ad about Bard. I can't understand how rushed they would have to be for something like that to happen.
In my opinion, this is why new ChatGPT users are going to stay with ChatGPT, even as the aggressive filtering makes the output slightly worse as time goes on.
First, there is the issue of paid ads. An example is if I look up "How to learn C++", the top link is a paid ad for CodeAcademy, which claims to be free, but then has three tiers with only the basic one being free. I started looking for information on C++ and ended up in a sales room being given a payment plan. Contrast this to me typing "How to learn C++" into ChatGPT, which informs me about "variables, data types, control structures, functions, and arrays", which are a lot of nice keywords that I could jump further into.
Second, Google does not give you access to the information itself. As such, the style the information is stored in on a website is inconsistent, with each website displaying information in drastically different ways. For an example, I Googled "what is a pointer in c++".
The top link starts with "You learned from the previous chapter, that we can get the memory address of a variable by using the & operator", leads to a single example, and is about a single screen long. This would be useless to someone who has no idea what a pointer is and just heard the name of the concept.
Meanwhile the second top link starts with "In earlier chapters, variables have been explained as locations in the computer's memory which can be accessed by their identifier" and is a much more in-depth tutorial spanning over a dozen screens worth of information. This is better as it gives a lot more information, but is still assuming that I got there from following their tutorial, but instead Google just jumped me into the middle of it.
However, ChatGPT homogenizes this, so the data is already organized in an easily accessible format that does not assume you have much previous knowledge. When I tried ChatGPT with this question, it started with "A pointer is a variable in C++ that stores the memory address of another variable." That is far better than either of the websites that I tried with Google that assumed you were halfway through their personal tutorials.