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but chat is not a search engine, so it will not replace them but it will make them obsolete. I dont see any of this obstacles as substantial. conversational sys

by seydor 4y ago

but chat is not a search engine, so it will not replace them but it will make them obsolete. I dont see any of this obstacles as substantial. conversational systems will take us back to the original, "bladerunner" concept of technology as something that gives us answers, not something that gives us the books to find the answers The main hurdle for openAI is that it must find a way to link back to the web so that people have an incentive to keep creating content for their training sets. But it seems this could be fixed if the model provides direct links to e.g. buy stuff in its answers.

charlieflowers 4y ago
Yeah, I agree. I do think Microsoft is capable of messing it up and blowing their first mover advantage. They have messed a whole lot of things up over the years. But they haven't messed up Github, VS Code, Typescript, several other things (IMO anyway). It'll be interesting to see how hard they try to stick to the Bing vision versus what they should do, which is replace it with something conversational.
goatlover 4y ago
> not something that gives us the books to find the answers And what if you want more than the generic summary answer? You could keep asking questions, but at some point, you might not know what to ask or what the alternative answers might be, particularly on a controversial topic, or one where the answer isn't fully known. And there could be lots of reasons you might want to visit a site over just getting an answer. If search is replaced, something else needs to link to those sites. Maybe I'd rather watch a video, look at videos, or find a discussion.
- Agraillo 4y ago
  Good point and that's why I recently came to an interpretation that search engines return some kind of "tables" for us (but not in the tabular form). List of links are rows, and for every link we have properties ("columns"): the title of the page, the date, the snippet with phrases containing our terms. The same is true for stackexchange.com/stackoverflow.com pages, the answers are rows, the text, score, comments are properties of this row. We are used to scanning this "tables" either for finding best answers or exploring multiple variants of answers. But single answer for everything is too limiting.

by seydor 4y ago

charlieflowers 4y ago

Yeah, I agree. I do think Microsoft is capable of messing it up and blowing their first mover advantage. They have messed a whole lot of things up over the years. But they haven't messed up Github, VS Code, Typescript, several other things (IMO anyway). It'll be interesting to see how hard they try to stick to the Bing vision versus what they should do, which is replace it with something conversational.

goatlover 4y ago

> not something that gives us the books to find the answers And what if you want more than the generic summary answer? You could keep asking questions, but at some point, you might not know what to ask or what the alternative answers might be, particularly on a controversial topic, or one where the answer isn't fully known. And there could be lots of reasons you might want to visit a site over just getting an answer. If search is replaced, something else needs to link to those sites. Maybe I'd rather watch a video, look at videos, or find a discussion.

Agraillo 4y ago
Good point and that's why I recently came to an interpretation that search engines return some kind of "tables" for us (but not in the tabular form). List of links are rows, and for every link we have properties ("columns"): the title of the page, the date, the snippet with phrases containing our terms. The same is true for stackexchange.com/stackoverflow.com pages, the answers are rows, the text, score, comments are properties of this row. We are used to scanning this "tables" either for finding best answers or exploring multiple variants of answers. But single answer for everything is too limiting.