Google CEO Sundar Pichai Says Search to Feature Chat AI | Hacker News Reader

Google CEO Sundar Pichai Says Search to Feature Chat AI

wsj.com

29 pointsstereoradonc27 comments

Prompt:

You are now an expert ad-blocker whose name is "Blocky". Your job is to return results from Google Search after you have removed Google advertisements from the results. Only return links to original content. Remove links to content that could be characterized as "SEO spam". Respond with your name and an appropriate salutation to acknowledge that you understand your role.

This would be awesome! I'd like to call it OverturnOverture. Take Google back to the pre-Overture and pre-Doubleclick days.

Until spammers write OverturnOverturnOverture prompt, introducing "SEO spam" back again.

Remove links to content that could be characterized as "SEO spam. Google has spent billions of dollars on this right? No way you could detect that a page with 27 (google) ads that takes 12 minutes to scroll is not useful content.

They didn’t spend that billions on chatGPT, so I would expect this to be possible.

no no noo, Google has _made_ billions of dollars on that. Content farms are bread and butter of Google Ad business. Pinterest is their crown jewel, founder/ex ceo and current ceo came from Google, whole business is build on relationships with Google ad division.

“He dismissed the notion that chatbots posed a threat to Google’s search business, which accounts for more than half of revenue at parent Alphabet Inc.”

That’s great. Between bookmarks and GPT, I haven’t done a Google search in over a month.

If I wanted to see ads I’d subscribe to Facebook.

Google search has absolutely deteriorated to the point of being useless for me. The only valuable thing left from are walled gardens like Google Maps that contain curated information. The open web, or at least Google's understanding of it, is a wasteland.

Here's a concrete example of something I experienced just yesterday. Watched the excellent film "A touch of sin" and wanted to know about the background so I went on Google and started searching. I actually gave it a good try and gave up after 10 minutes. Asked ChatGPT and it gave me the perfect answer, zero shot:

My prompt:

The Chinese movie "A touch of sin" is based on four real-life events from chinese life, all random acts of violence. Can you provide the real-life events that were the basis for the movie? Only answer if you are confident that these were indeed the original events. Make sure this answer is based in news sources

ChatGPT-4:

"A Touch of Sin," directed by Jia Zhangke, is a 2013 Chinese film inspired by four real-life events that occurred in China. While the movie creatively adapts the stories, these are the actual events that served as its basis:

    * Zhou Kehua's crime spree (2010-2012): Zhou Kehua was a notorious serial killer and robber who targeted ATM users in several Chinese cities. He murdered at least 10 people and was eventually shot dead by the police in August 2012.

...

I'm leaving out the others but I double checked each one and they're all correct.

You mention that Google search is now useless for you. How did you double check what GPT-4 told you here?

I actually clicked through to the links GPT-4 provided (Guardian or SCMP articles)

When I tried your prompt in ChatGPT it gave inaccurate responses and fabricated links. I compared them to the real events described in the Plot section of the Wikipedia article of the movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Touch_of_Sin.

Is it because you used ChatGPT-4?

I do agree the answers are a little hard to find in the Wikipedia article. Although I also feel that writing a prompt like that takes a bit of time as well...

Yes, GPT3.5 gives pretty bad results. GPT-4 gives way better results

I find sometimes the only way to get good results for obscure movies like that is to search in the original language. For example, searching for “tian zhu ding” surfaces pretty good results for me. Also those real life events are listed on the wikipedia page at the bottom of the synopsis for each vignette. I’m obsessed with that movie, though. Good taste!

I’m sure Google must be feeling the heat by now, but we need to determine the percentage of non-tech users who are utilizing ChatGPT vis-a-vis Google search.

I started using gmail actively in 2008, in 2012 I think almost everyone who had an email, had a gmail account, maybe not as primary. By 2014 it was the norm for non tech users. It's not b2b and cost if switching for individual users is cheap. OpenAI showed they can do marketing, UI and scale. Search is Google’s golden goose, loosing 20-40% of market share in 5y span might be devastating.

But the main “attack” vector isn’t gonna be chatgpt replacing Google search or another search engine cannibalizing market, but rather search becoming obsolete, as tools become smarter. GPT plugins combined with good api, specialized models and maybe even local inference. Most of my searches are “how to do X in such and such library / tool / framework / etc.” When my tool, whether its IDE or Jupyter notebook or Photoshop can use few prompts to essentially do what I mean, I don’t need to search the internet. And then Google PMs can dwell 24/7 on diminishing metrics of MAUs and DAUs, wondering why they are loosing to other search engine or chatgpt, when in fact they are losing to the next generation UI.

Google is finally feeling the heat from their competitors and they are now relunctantly trying to move quicker. Amusing to watch.

We're seen this before, with Google+.

Google+ was raid on enemy's territory.

Bard is attempt to defend own territory against existential threat.

I am not sure I agree. I think both were driven by fear.

i replaced google with chat gpt for a lot of my developer debug workflows. Love it, a single place which gives me (most times) the answer i'm looking for.

i replaced google with chat gpt for a lot of my developer debug workflows.

Question investors should be asking "Why didn't you guys come up with this first?"

I think most investors know or trust that this is what Google knows.

"AI (as it stands today) will have a negative impact on their current cash cow (Ads)."

If you are a trusting investor of Google, this is the only reasonable conclusion.

If you don't trust Google to know what they are doing, then you would have bailed a while back after it was clear Sundar wasn't going to revolutionize growth (his role has mainly been keeping the ball rolling on Ads, Youtube, Cloud - whose strategy is pretty simple, grow grow grow at nearly any cost)

On the contrary. Ad revenue will only explode once advertisers can microtarget consumers with even more precision, thanks to the amount and quality of data voluntarily shared by users.

Ad insertions will be even more sinister and manipulative, seamlessly embedded into the chatbot's responses. It will be like astroturfing, but automated and even cheaper.

At the same time, expect the system to also be abused for political and propaganda purposes.

Fun times ahead.

Everyone concerned about this should think twice before using any proprietary chatbot service. Instead, use an open source solution you can self-host, tweak and have direct control over. This is already possible, if you're willing to sacrifice some quality (llama.cpp, Vicuna, etc.), and these systems are quickly improving.

ChatGPT and other AI-based chat engines could be the downfall of Google as users can generate entire essays, articles etc without ever doing even a search on Google. This has profound effects, of course - one being that a lot of errors will crop in, but users will continue to ignore those dangers and use these AI tools.

Welcome to the new era, same as the old era. All I need to know is how to shut it off.

Archive: https://archive.is/jt4y7

>Advances in AI would supercharge Google’s ability to answer an array of search queries, Mr. Pichai said in an interview

Google hasn’t yet achieved a goal of becoming 20% more productive

Google has pushed forward with its AI efforts despite the cost cuts,

accelerating work on new products following the breakout success of ChatGPT.

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