6 ms·

Google is an established brand. When ChatGPT makes up fake historical facts or has Opinions about Races, that's a cute quirk of the beta technology you were try

by tveita 4y ago

Google is an established brand. When ChatGPT makes up fake historical facts or has Opinions about Races, that's a cute quirk of the beta technology you were trying out. When a regular Google search does the same it is perceived differently. You can tell they've tried to be conservative with the AI-driven "People Also Ask" feature which quotes a snippet of source text, and I still see completely wrong answers every so often. They also depend on distinguishing "real" content from spam in order to have pages to link to and train on, and with GPT we may see the conclusive defeat of spam detection. There are detectors that claim to detect ChatGPT, but I suspect motivated adversaries can defeat those by training their own models.

realusername 4y ago
The real issue starts even before that, Google search is still a cash cow, integrating some GPT tech can threaten their own economic model, they are in a tricky situation here.
- plastic3169 4y ago
  [dead]
- klipt 4y ago
  No, the cash cow is ads, search is incidental. Showing a quick answer from AI is no worse for them than showing a quick answer from their knowledge graph (which they already do when available). What matters monetarily is the people searching "best 2023 SUV" and clicking on dealer ads.
  - visarga 4y ago
    Targeted, useful ads are so rare almost nobody has seen them. How can they push low quality ad inventory through a trusted AI? If they train the AI to trick people into bad purchases, it will be a disaster.
  - realusername 4y ago
    Search is exactly how they are displaying ads though. Language models have the possibility to replace a very large portion of the classic search with a different interface, maybe 40%. How they are going to evolve their current business model facing this new reality is unknown. Any tech initiative will be blocked by the executive side afraid of losing the cash cow.
msoad 4y ago
Google loves to put that red BETA tag on its products. Remember Gmail was in beta for a two decades?
- jlmorton 4y ago
  Point taken, but it was five years, not twenty.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ignoramous 4y ago
> You can tell they've tried to be conservative with the AI-driven "People Also Ask" feature which quotes a snippet of source text, and I still see completely wrong answers every so often. All well and good but that doesn't explain why it wasn't Google that came up with Copilot? Paul Graham predicted that a Google Search competitor would target hackers (a dinosaur egg he called it; and building Search in the image of Unix: "give you the right answers fast"), which is exactly how it is playing out with OpenAI + GitHub + Microsoft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&t=250 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&t=250 / https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/R9ITLdmfdLI https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/R9ITLdmfdLI
- jpollock 4y ago
  Because copilot is a copyright hellscape that litters codebases with landmines. Anyone using it for company-owned code is relying on the cloned code never being discovered. Google would have learned an expensive lesson from Oracle v Google. Even the smallest snippets of "copied/replicated/duplicated/parallel implementation" code are bad juju.
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    I wonder why Microsoft (GitHub) didn't harbour such reservations.
    - jpollock 4y ago
      The model itself would probably be considered a transformative work, and Microsoft likely has a broad license to do whatever they want with code hosted on GitHub. However, there is a reason the CoPilot instructions say that users shouldn't trust the results. "These include [...] IP scanning" We will learn from the trial whether or not it is possible to wash away copyright by sending it through an opaque, lossy, compression algorithm. If it turns out that people are free to use a model trained on _any_ source code it finds regardless of license? Zowie, that would be a bigger change to the industry than if Oracle had won.

by tveita 4y ago

realusername 4y ago

The real issue starts even before that, Google search is still a cash cow, integrating some GPT tech can threaten their own economic model, they are in a tricky situation here.

plastic3169 4y ago
[dead]
klipt 4y ago
No, the cash cow is ads, search is incidental. Showing a quick answer from AI is no worse for them than showing a quick answer from their knowledge graph (which they already do when available). What matters monetarily is the people searching "best 2023 SUV" and clicking on dealer ads.
- visarga 4y ago
  Targeted, useful ads are so rare almost nobody has seen them. How can they push low quality ad inventory through a trusted AI? If they train the AI to trick people into bad purchases, it will be a disaster.
- realusername 4y ago
  Search is exactly how they are displaying ads though. Language models have the possibility to replace a very large portion of the classic search with a different interface, maybe 40%. How they are going to evolve their current business model facing this new reality is unknown. Any tech initiative will be blocked by the executive side afraid of losing the cash cow.

msoad 4y ago

Google loves to put that red BETA tag on its products. Remember Gmail was in beta for a two decades?

jlmorton 4y ago
Point taken, but it was five years, not twenty.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ignoramous 4y ago

> You can tell they've tried to be conservative with the AI-driven "People Also Ask" feature which quotes a snippet of source text, and I still see completely wrong answers every so often. All well and good but that doesn't explain why it wasn't Google that came up with Copilot? Paul Graham predicted that a Google Search competitor would target hackers (a dinosaur egg he called it; and building Search in the image of Unix: "give you the right answers fast"), which is exactly how it is playing out with OpenAI + GitHub + Microsoft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&t=250 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&t=250 / https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/R9ITLdmfdLI https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/R9ITLdmfdLI

jpollock 4y ago
Because copilot is a copyright hellscape that litters codebases with landmines. Anyone using it for company-owned code is relying on the cloned code never being discovered. Google would have learned an expensive lesson from Oracle v Google. Even the smallest snippets of "copied/replicated/duplicated/parallel implementation" code are bad juju.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  I wonder why Microsoft (GitHub) didn't harbour such reservations.
  - jpollock 4y ago
    The model itself would probably be considered a transformative work, and Microsoft likely has a broad license to do whatever they want with code hosted on GitHub. However, there is a reason the CoPilot instructions say that users shouldn't trust the results. "These include [...] IP scanning" We will learn from the trial whether or not it is possible to wash away copyright by sending it through an opaque, lossy, compression algorithm. If it turns out that people are free to use a model trained on _any_ source code it finds regardless of license? Zowie, that would be a bigger change to the industry than if Oracle had won.