May I ask how old you are? I'm 38 and I've been trying hard to break my 10 year-old of the habit of just typing questions into search engines (or telling me to "Ask Google" whenever she asks me a question and I say, "Oh, I don't know").
May I ask how old you are? I'm 38 and I've been trying hard to break my 10 year-old of the habit of just typing questions into search engines (or telling me to "Ask Google" whenever she asks me a question and I say, "Oh, I don't know").
I loath products like Facebook, Messenger, Google Photos, etc. are turning their traditional "search" page/feature into a one-stop AI slop shop.
All I want to do is find a specific photo album by name.
The issue is that they don't want to. They'd rather be a middleman offering you "useful recommendations" (that they or may not sell to the highest bidder) instead of offering you value.
I can assure you that force is strong with me.
I was using searx instances with reasonable results but many of them started failing recently.
Anyway, I hope everyone finds a good one. I fear things will only get worse though.
Google operates the largest display ads network. They literally *pay* websites for SEO spam, and take a very healthy cut off the top.
I wish people would stop acting like Google has been in a noble battle against the spam sites, when those sites generate Google billions of dollars a year in revenue.
The obvious question is, why would they ruin search for display? The answer is greed combined with hubris. They were able to double dip for years, but they killed the golden goose.
Everybody with a brain knew this would happen when they bought Doubleclick, and it took longer than expected, but here we are.
It makes no financial sense for Google to give you good search results and get you off Google as soon as possible.
Instead, if they make you spend more time on Google due to having to go through more crappy results, they can sell more ads.
Most people won't change search engine and will stomach it.
Until ChatGPT happened and can save you the pain of having to use Googles search engine.
You remember the pagerank paper? It described how Google classifies each page on a scale from "something that links to good pages" to "informative page". Google and other search engines produces links to the latter. And since then, web site operators have had strong incentives to be on the "informative page" end of the range. Today I don't think the 2000s code can find a lot of pages of the former kind (well, outside Facebook).
It produced very nice results back then. It was/is good code, but good results need more than just good code, it needs good input too.
I just searched "what's the ld50 of caffeine" and it says:
> 367.7 mg/kg bw
This is the ld50 of rats from this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27461039/
This is higher than the ld50 estimated for humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeinism
> The LD50 of caffeine in humans is dependent on individual sensitivity, but is estimated to be 150–200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass (75–100 cups of coffee for a 70 kilogram adult).
Good stuff, Google.
Google AI responded: "To lose weight, men typically need to reduce their daily calorie intake by 1,500 - 1,800 calories"
Which is obviously dangerous advice.
IMO Google AI overviews should not show up for anything (a) medical or (b) numerical. LLMs just aren't safe enough yet.
But maybe I'm just weird. Oftentimes when my wife or kids ask me a question, I take a deep breath and start to say something like "I know what you're asking, but there's not a simple or straightforward answer; it's important to first understand ____ or define ____..." by which time they get frustrated with me.
Funnily enough, this is exactly what the LLM does with these questions. So well that people usually try to tweak their prompts so they don't have to wade through additional info, context, hedging, and caveats.
Obese people can lose a bit more under doctor supervision. My understanding is that it’s tied partially to % of body weight lost per week and partly to what your organs can process, which does not increase with body mass.
So for example if your weight is stable at 2500 kcal per day, I would start by reducing the intake by 250–500 kcal, but not more. If this works well for a month or two and then you want to lose weight faster, you can still reduce your intake further. You generally have to do that anyway even just to maintain the velocity, because weight loss also tends to reduce calorie expenditure.
First and foremost, you need to monitor your calorie intake against weight. Here is a useful text about that: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
I get a pretty good summary when I paste the question into Google. It comes up with a ballpark but also gives precautions and info on how to estimate what caloric restriction makes sense for you within the first 3 sentences.
And all in a format someone is likely to read instead of clicking on some verbose search result that only answers the question if they read a whole article which they aren't going to do.
This seems like really lame nit picking. And I don't think it passes the "compared to what?" test.
But I wonder, were those few words the full response? Information hiding to prove a point is too easy.
A 500lbs man will need to consume 4000kcals/day to not lose weight. Cutting 1800 of that is realistic and might be good advice on the LLM's part, so it really depends on how GP asked the question.
I use LLM to help with training data as they are great at zero shot, but after the training corpora is built a small, well trained, model will smoke an LLM in classification accuracy and are way faster - which means you can get scale and low carbon cost.
In my personal opinion there is a moral imperative to use the most efficient models possible at every step in a system design. LLM are one type of architecture and while they do a lot well, you can use a variety of energy efficient techniques to do discrete tasks much better.
And, yes, purpose-built models definitely have their place even with the advent of LLMs. I'm happy to see more people working on that sort of thing.
Same advice as my trainer gives me.
reduce their daily calorie intake to 1,500 - 1,800 calories
or
reduce their daily calorie intake by 1,500 - 1,800 calories
These are very different answers, unless you’re consuming ~3,300 calories per day. These kinds of ‘subtle’ phrasing issue often results in AI mistake as both words are commonly used in advice but the context is really important.[0] Note that the robot suggested to reduce calorie intake by 1,500->1,800 calories, and the recommended calorie intake is 2,000.
I asked this about 1 minute after you posted your comment. Perhaps it learned of and corrected its mistake in that short span of time, perhaps it reports differently on every occasion, or perhaps it thought you were a rat :)
The median lethal dose (LD50) of caffeine in humans is estimated to be 150–200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass. However, the lethal dose can vary depending on a person's sensitivity to caffeine, and can be as low as 57 milligrams per kilogram.
Route of administration
Oral 367.7 mg/kg bw
Dermal >2000 mg/kg bw
Inhalation LC50 combined: ca. 4.94 mg/L
ref: https://i.imghippo.com/files/yeKK3113pE.png 13:25EST (by a Kagi shill ftr)That’s half the people in a caffeine chugging contest falling over dead. The first 911 call would be much much earlier. I doubt you’d get to 57 mg before someone thought they were having a heart attack (angina).
--
The median lethal dose (LD50) of caffeine in humans is estimated to be 150–200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass. However, the lethal dose can vary depending on a person's sensitivity to caffeine, and can be as low as 57 milligrams per kilogram. Route of administration LD50 Oral 367.7 mg/kg bw Dermal 2000 mg/kg bw Inhalation LC50 combined: ca. 4.94 mg/L The FDA estimates that toxic effects, such as seizures, can occur after consuming around 1,200 milligrams of caffeine.
There was a table in the middle there.
Maybe the argument is that if you turn off the randomness you don’t have an LLM like result any more?
The argument is, as you suggest, that without randomness you don't have an LLM-like result any more. You _can_ use the most likely token every time, or beam search, or any number of other strategies to try to tease out an answer. Doing so gives you a completely different result distribution, and it's not even guaranteed to give a "likely" output (imagine, e.g., a string of tokens that are all 10% likely for any greedy choice, vs a different string where the first is 9% and the remainder are 90% -- with a 10-token answer the second option is 387 million times more likely with random sampling but will never happen with a simple deterministic strategy, and you can tweak the example slightly to keep beam search and similar from finding good results).
That brings up an interesting UI/UX question.
Suppose (as a simplified example) that you have a simple yes/no question and only know the answer probabilistically, something like "will it rain tomorrow" with an appropriate answer being "yes" 60% of the time and "no" 40%. Do you try to lengthen the answer to include that uncertainty? Do you respond "yes" always? 60% of the time? To 60% of the users and then deterministically for a period of time for each user to prevent flip-flopping answers?
The LD50 question is just a more complicated version of that conundrum. The model isn't quite sure. The question forces its hand a bit in terms of the classes of answers. What should its result distribution be?
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ideal
(We’re allowed to imagine the impossible.)
In the most concentrated form in typical commercial caffeine tablets, it's half to one fistful. In high-caffeine pre-workout supplements, it's still a quantity that you'd find almost impossible to get down and keep down... E.g. a large tumbler full of powder of mine with just enough water to make it a thick slurry you'd likely vomit up long before much would make it into your bloodstream...
I'm not saying it's impossible to overdose on caffeinated drinks, because some do, and you can run into health problems before that, but I don't think that error is likely to be very high on the list of dangerous advice.
Also, in what context is this dangerous? To reach dangerous levels one would have to drink well over 100 cups of coffee in a sitting, something remarkably hard to do.
some people use caffeine powder / pills for gym stuff apparently.
someone overdosed and died after incorrectly weighing a bunch of powder.
doubt it is a big leap to someone dying because they were told the wrong limits by google.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-60570470
as ever, machine learning is not really suitable for safety/security critical systems / use cases without additional non-ML measures. it hasn’t been in the past, and i’ve seen zero evidence recently to back up any claim that it is.
For my high-caffeine pre-workout powder, I suspect I'd vomit long before I'd get anywhere near. Pure caffeine is less unpleasant, but still pretty awful, which I guess is why we don't see more deaths from it despite the widespread use.
I agree with you that there really ought to be caution around giving advice on safety-critical things, but this one really is right up there in freak accident territory, in the intersection of somewhat dangerous substances sold in a poorly regulated form (e.g. there's little reason for these to be sold as bulk powders instead of pressed into pills other than making people feel more macho downing awful tasting drinks instead of taking pills).
Found an article about a teenager who died after three strong beverages. The coroner is careful to point out that this was likely an underlying medical condition not the caffeine. The health professional they interviewed claims 10g is lethal for “most” people, which would be 100-150mg/kg. That still seems like something an ER doctor would roll their eyes at.
> The hearing was told the scales Mr Mansfield had used to measure the powder had a weighing range from two to 5,000 grams, whereas he was attempting to weigh a recommended dose of 60-300mg.
Nothing to do with an LLM nor with someone not knowing the exact LD50 of caffeine. Just "this article contains someone dying of caffeine overdose, and we're talking about caffeine overdose here, therefore LLM is dangerous."
At 200mg per pill, which is the strongest I had, I'd still have to down some 70+ pills in one go. Not strictly impossible, but not something you could possibly do by accident, and even for the purpose of early check-out, it wouldn't be my first choice.
And if on purpose, using caffeine would just be staggeringly awful...
it’s intent (want to improve my gym performance so down a bunch of caffeine) combined with incorrect information gained from what is supposedly a trustworthy source (the limit presented is much higher than it actually is for humans).
There are plenty of revenue models aside from ads.
I kid, but also hope I'm wrong.
Honest question: why?
I understand not wanting to use Google (the search engine) or not wanting to support Google (the company). But I don't see with the issue with just looking up questions.
I'm 10 years younger than you, and I've been reaching for search engines first since I was 7, I think. Basically since I learned how to turn the computer on and open a web browser.
Google exists, as both a successful enterprise and as a verb, precisely because to most people they are exactly the same thing.
No, this is wrong. People ask what they want to know. Sometimes the best answer is a link. Sometimes it's just an answer. The ability to intuit which is best is what makes products in this space worth making.
First conceptualization of the "search" were web directories then AltaVista and Google drove the complexity down for the users by providing the actual system which crawls, index and ranks web information. Now cycle will repeat again and we will get Answer Machines aka chat bots which drive the UX complexity for users even more down.
Why would I skim search results links and websites if the "AI" can do it for me. The only reason would be if you don't trust the "AI" and you want the actual links of websites so you can look for useful information by yourself but the majority of people want an instant answer/result to their search query hence Google's old school button "I'm feeling lucky".
Sometimes the answer we want is a specific page containing some term, but for most people, most of the time, I'd argue that getting a narrower piece of information is more likely to be valuable and helpful.