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Metaphor Systems: A search engine based on generative AI
- terminal_d 4y agoAny plans for a paid tier? Maybe something like Kagi[1]? 1: https://kagi.com https://kagi.com
- headcanon 4y agoInteresting, how do you ensure the link is accurate?
- sdiacom 4y agoIt does not seem like people pumping out "AI for X" products care about any sort of quality assurances regarding the products they sell.
- wutbrodo 4y agoWhat a bizarre complaint. Are you under the impression that normal search engines only return "accurate" results? Why would an "AI for search engines" magically gin up a consistent and reliable way of determining accuracy?
- sdiacom 4y agoMy complaint is not about search engines in particular. I agree the quality of search engines is lacking across the board. That said, with a traditional search engine, you can poke into its algorithm and find out what is it that made it decide that a spam link was more relevant than an useful link. You can examine what makes your implementation more or less accurate, and devise potential changes that would make it more accurate. With the current state of AI, you're crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. You're combining several black boxes that have been trained on arbitrary subsets of internet data, and hoping that they've inferred something from that training data about the current shape of the internet that leads to useful results.
- prathyvsh 4y agoMetaphor is a search engine based on generative AI, the same sorts of techniques behind DALL-E 2 and GPT-3
- sharemywin 4y agoso you trained a LLM to pretend it's a search engine?
- soco 4y agoGenerates its own search results too.
- GistNoesis 4y agoFrom what I understand from the demo on the website, it's not a Large Language Model. The following is how I think it works : They are probably using diffusion model conditioned on the input prompt to organize the spaces of link. Search engines in the deep learning era usually embed responses (here links) and queries (here text prompt) in some joint space. And to get the response they usually do an approximate near neighbor search. Here they probably replace this neighbor search by a diffusion process. This is akin to building a learned index. The diffusion process is an iterative process that progressively get you links closer to your query. This diffusion process is kind of a learned hierarchical navigation small world. Because you need your response to be an existing link at the end of the diffusion process you must project to the discrete space of existing links. There are two schools of thoughts here : If you did your diffusion in a continuous space you can do an approximate near neighbor search in the buckets around to do this projection. Alternatively you can stay in discrete space. You do your diffusion along the edges of a graph. Something akin to train your network to play wikipedia speedrun but on the whole internet. But diffusion model can be more powerful by not embedding them in the same space (you can do still it but you can do something more powerful). The problem of embedding in a same space is that with this embedding process you define what is a relevant answer instead of learning the relevancy from the data. With a diffusion generative model, among other things, what you can do instead to build your database is for each link you read the associated page and you use GPT-3 to generate n queries that would be appropriate to your document (or portion of document). Then you use the diffusion model to learn the mapping query to link with this generated example pair (generated query, link). Diffusion models solve the mode collapse problem. Aka one query can have multiple different responses weighted by how often they appear in the training data. So they are the natural candidate for building a search engine.
- etaioinshrdlu 4y agoHow will you afford to keep the search engine up to date without expensive retraining of the entire model? My understanding is that fine-tuning will not result in the same accuracy as a full retrain.
- agajews 4y agoHey, thanks for posting! We actually have an architecture that lets us expand the index without doing any retraining, so we can add/update pages pretty much for free.
- Imnimo 4y agoSurely expanding the index is not the only sort of change that needs to occur over time, though. Like for the example "My two favorite blogs are SlateStarCodex and", the model not only needs to have an up-to-date list of blog URLs in the index, it also needs to have an up-to-date understanding of what SlateStarCodex is. If SlateStarCodex changes to AstralCodexTen after the model has been trained, does that prompt still work? EDIT: It looks like the answer is "no". Substituting in AstralCodexTen gives a bunch of weird occult and esoteric blogs, not rationalist blogs. These are the top results: https://www.arcturiantools.com/ https://www.arcturiantools.com/ https://secretsunarchives.blogspot.com/ https://secretsunarchives.blogspot.com/ https://skepticaloccultist.com/ https://skepticaloccultist.com/
- carrotcarrot 4y agoOr maybe it's because the new name is less relevant and not used as much anyways? If you want to hardcode in these updated names and make judgements about what is REALLY relevant you should stay on Google
- nl 4y ago> needs to have an up-to-date understanding of what SlateStarCodex is I don't think that is how this works. This works by looking a web text where it talks about SlateStarCodex and seeing what URLs are associated with that text (ie, what it links to). If the name is changed this will break completely.
- agajews 4y agoHey everyone! Metaphor team here. We launched Metaphor earlier this morning! It's a search engine based on the same sorts of generative modeling ideas behind Stable Diffusion, GPT-3, etc. It's trained to predict the next link (similar to how GPT-3 predicts the next word). After GPT-3 came out we started thinking about how pretraining (for large language models) and indexing (for search engines) feel pretty similar. In both you have some code that's looking at all the text on the internet and trying to compress it into a better representation. GPT-3 itself isn't a search engine, but it got us thinking, what would it look like to have something GPT-3-shaped, but able to search the web? This new self-supervised objective, next link prediction, is what we came up with. (It's got to be self-supervised so that you have basically infinite training data – that's what makes generative models so good.) Then it took us about 8 months of iterating on model architectures to get something that works well. And now you all can play with it! Very excited to see what sorts of interesting prompts you can come up with.
- billconan 4y agobut aren't the generated results usually fuzzy? how can it produce an exact link that actually exists?
- agajews 4y agoYeah exactly. That's why you can't really do it with a language model like GPT-3, you have to bake into the architecture the concept of a "link" as a first-class object.
- pmoriarty 4y ago"how can it produce an exact link that actually exists?" Instead of generating links from scratch it might just be choosing from a pool of already existing links.
- kbyatnal 4y agoThis is interesting! I wonder how different the results are from just indexing the contents of the page and semantically searching them (vs. trying to predict the next link). Have you tried anything like that?
- fire 4y agothis is a really cool idea! How do you plan to keep it up to date?
- Imnimo 4y ago>You can learn the real truth about the election at >howbidenstoletheelection.com/ Yeah, this is gonna go great.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoI can't find a way to get this prompt. Is this made up or am I missing it
- Imnimo 4y agoIf you login with Discord, you can just type in whatever prompt you want.
- Imnimo 4y agoA few more: >This site taught me everything I need to know about covid-19: >fakepandemic.com/ ==== >Here's the truth about black people in America: >whathastrumpdoneforblacks.com/ ==== >Here's the truth about abortion: >abortionfacts.com/
- kikokikokiko 4y agoMaybe an "unfiltered" machine learning model trained on real world user generated content is showing something different and "unexpected" when compared to what the mainstream "approved" search engines would show you... Hmmm, who would have guessed it right? And you can't even argue that it was game seod to show you this results.
- Shared404 4y agoAlternately, disinformation often shared with that sort of phrasing will be brought up with that sort of phrasing. People showing actual sources rarely say "the real truth" because it is implicit that no one source has all of "the real truth" _and_ the phrase is a dog whistle.
- carrotcarrot 4y ago
- spywaregorilla 4y agoIt would be interesting to be able to search with descriptors of the content rather than questions / keywords /content match searches. maybe? But I feel this page is offputting. the templates make it feel less flexible than it probably is. > Here's a > wikipedia page > about the most > Elon Musk > -like figure from the > 19th > century: This is an interesting query that you can't do in google. I like it. > Here's a cool demo of > GPT-3 This one is bad. It's more cumbersome than a search of "GPT-3 demo" and probably not going to give you anything more noteworthy. I'm curious if there's a reason 3 of your prompts try to identify content that is "cool"?
- robertvc 4y agoCongrats on launching! I found myself using this more than I expected in the closed beta. I used it most for opinionated prompts (e.g. "the PG essay I gave my parents to help them understand startups was..."), but also had some luck with finding content by its description (e.g. "I really like the intuitive explanation of [college math topic] at ...".
- 71a54xd 4y agoIs this a joke?
- Y_Y 4y agoHere's a wikipedia page about the most Elon Musk -like figure from the 2nd century: Secundus the Silent en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secundus_the_silent
- sdiacom 4y agoGoing from the supposedly curated examples, the Wikipedia page for the "most Jackson Pollock-like", the "most Dalai Lama-like" and the "most Elon Musk-like" figure from the 2nd century is Secundus the Silent. Given that his name is Secundus and his Wikipedia short blurb mentions twice that he lived in the 2nd century AD, I think your AI has decided that he is just the most 2nd century figure.
- johnfn 4y agoOne search string that really illustrated the problems with modern-day Google for me is "best things to do in hawaii". Try it and see what I mean. It's just link after link of blogspam. You get extremely long pages filled with ads and generic stock photos of Hawaii, but which are bereft of any actual content. I just want a single person's account of how they went to Hawaii and what they liked/didn't like, but it's impossible to find, even though I'm sure it's out there on the internet somehow. The best thing to google if you want an answer to this question is something like "reddit best thing to do in hawaii" which gets you actual accounts from actual real people who actually went to Hawaii and have interesting things to say about it. I tried this with metaphor.systems as well, using their prompting language - "My favorite place to go in Hawaii is:". Unfortunately, I still didn't get great results, though some of them showed some promise.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- qwoz 4y agoWith these kind of generative systems, the way you prompt is is often really important. You have to kind of talk as though you've stumbled upon someone talking about the thing you're looking for. Not quite sure what you were looking for but I seemed to have better luck with a prompt that looked like this: "I'm thinking about traveling to Hawaii next month. Does anyone have recommendations for what to do? I just came back from Hawaii and loved it. If you're going you have to check this out" https://metaphor.systems/search?q=I%27m%20thinking%20about%20traveling%20to%20Hawaii%20next%20month.%20Does%20anyone%20have%20recommendations%20for%20what%20to%20do%3F%0A%0AI%20just%20came%20back%20from%20Hawaii%20and%20loved%20it.%20If%20you%27re%20going%20you%20have%20to%20check%20this%20out https://metaphor.systems/search?q=I%27m%20thinking%20about%2...
- davnn 4y agoI believe that is not a problem with Google, or at least it would be the same problem for any large search engine. There is money to be made when your search result ranks high, thus, a lot of a useless affiliate marketers do their absolute best to rank high without providing any value. I don't believe Google is interested in promoting those useless articles, but it's a cat and mouse game. By the way, most non-technical people have never heard of Reddit.
- lacker 4y agoI used to work on Google search but it was a long time ago so hopefully I am not too biased here. I think it would really help the UI to have better snippets. Ie, the text that appears below the blue link for a set of search results. In Google search results the key words are often bolded, as well. It helps you skim through and see which of the results are going to be a good fit. Maybe there is some fancy AI thing you can do to generate snippets, or tell me more about the page. For example one of the search results for your sample query is: Online resources in philosophy and ethics sophia-project.org/ That doesn't really tell me anything without clicking on it. Is it good? I don't know... I usually don't click on that many results from a Google search, people often decide after only selecting one or two, based on the snippet.
- mccorrinall 4y agoWhen I read the word title, I expected a search engine, which finds metaphors based on my text input. Too sad that there still isn’t anything like this :(
- peterweyand 4y agoSomeone else posted a link to their for profit search engine. I find having to login to use the product a bit disturbing. What if I don't want my data collected?
- carrotcarrot 4y agoWhy discord?
- bmitc 4y agoI find it somewhat sad that such a cool company name was chosen for something that has nothing to do with metaphor or metaphorical thinking.
- ilaksh 4y agoThis worked really well when I tried using it to search for papers. I didn't record the details but it was something related to converting a mesh to boundary representation.
- hackpert 4y agoI've been using Metaphor for a few weeks now and have almost entirely switched from Google and other search engines. Keyword based search simply doesn't come close when it comes to getting the _right_ results. While I have to sift through a few pages of results on Google and then maybe find what I'm looking for, on metaphor, there's almost no SEO spam or Wikipedia-style links dominating the top results. It directs you to sources that are relevant to your search query. I don't know how they did this (probably a lot of very specific and targeted tricks), but Alex and team have created a marvelous product and I'm excited to see where this goes! Congrats on the launch!
- Lisa_Singer 4y agoApart from the gains of the civil rights movement, there have been other factors which have occurred such as African American communities have suffered from very high imprisonment rates in young males
- harbin88 4y agowhat is the best site for learning pl/sql