4 ms·

I think it's the first credible challenge to google's results in 2 ways. 1. People are typing questions into it and finding it hugely useful in ways that overl

by ekanes 4y ago

I think it's the first credible challenge to google's results in 2 ways. 1. People are typing questions into it and finding it hugely useful in ways that overlap with google. It just answers you, and you can ask clarifying questions, argue with it, etc. It's proving useful. 2. More subtly, the excitement around it seems to reveal that people are open to alternatives. For decades, alternative search engines haven't made inroads. If people are typing queries and questions into somewhere new, well that implies they're open to something new. So whether it's chatGPT or bing.com or ... the zeitgeist is shifting.

xen2xen1 4y ago
Hey Google, how big is Maine? G: It's xxx big. Person: Do I know anyone there ? G:No one is in your address book. P: What's the closest person I know to Maine? G:Bob. G: Is this about your asking about Maple Syrup last night? There are closer places to get fresh Maple Syrup, how about Michigan? Contrived, but not impossible.
- antonvs 4y ago
  I think anyone who's used ChatGPT seriously could tell you that this isn't the same thing, at all. You're giving "assistant"-like questions, but the problem with those assistants has always been how shallow their responses have been, which significantly limits their usefulness. GPT's responses are still shallow in an absolute sense, but relatively speaking they're the Mariana Trench compared to Google's little creek.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Depends what the objective is. If I want to be amused by a Hacker News comment in the style of the Bible, draft a conclusion for my essay or a engage in a long and superficially appealing conversation about philosophy, I'm not using Google's publicly-viewable AI products Then again, Google - with and without a conversational interface - will do just fine with what the capital of Maine is, much better with what the weather is like in Maine tomorrow, and there's a lot more usefulness and revenue in associating it with stuff in my address book and selling me flight tickets to Maine which is... some way outside ChatGPT's wheelhouse.
    - ekanes 4y ago
      I think that's fair. But one is a mature product, and the other was just born/launched and will improve massively over the next decades. That this new tech is competing already bodes badly for google (yes they will incorporate their own AI, but the cat is out of the bag...)
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Its ability to synthesize answers with data from numerous sources is also game-changing and not something a traditional search engine could ever hope to do. It’s not infrequent that googling for the intricacies of some badly-documented library turns up almost nothing useful, or the bits that are useful are scattered sparsely among the results, some of which are pages deep. It’s so much easier to ask ChatGPT to explain the struct, function, etc in question and have it pull the pertinent info from whatever corners it of the internet it found these things in. Even if it’s only 80% accurate it’s a massive time saver.

by ekanes 4y ago

xen2xen1 4y ago

Hey Google, how big is Maine? G: It's xxx big. Person: Do I know anyone there ? G:No one is in your address book. P: What's the closest person I know to Maine? G:Bob. G: Is this about your asking about Maple Syrup last night? There are closer places to get fresh Maple Syrup, how about Michigan? Contrived, but not impossible.

antonvs 4y ago
I think anyone who's used ChatGPT seriously could tell you that this isn't the same thing, at all. You're giving "assistant"-like questions, but the problem with those assistants has always been how shallow their responses have been, which significantly limits their usefulness. GPT's responses are still shallow in an absolute sense, but relatively speaking they're the Mariana Trench compared to Google's little creek.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Depends what the objective is. If I want to be amused by a Hacker News comment in the style of the Bible, draft a conclusion for my essay or a engage in a long and superficially appealing conversation about philosophy, I'm not using Google's publicly-viewable AI products Then again, Google - with and without a conversational interface - will do just fine with what the capital of Maine is, much better with what the weather is like in Maine tomorrow, and there's a lot more usefulness and revenue in associating it with stuff in my address book and selling me flight tickets to Maine which is... some way outside ChatGPT's wheelhouse.
  - ekanes 4y ago
    I think that's fair. But one is a mature product, and the other was just born/launched and will improve massively over the next decades. That this new tech is competing already bodes badly for google (yes they will incorporate their own AI, but the cat is out of the bag...)

kitsunesoba 4y ago

Its ability to synthesize answers with data from numerous sources is also game-changing and not something a traditional search engine could ever hope to do. It’s not infrequent that googling for the intricacies of some badly-documented library turns up almost nothing useful, or the bits that are useful are scattered sparsely among the results, some of which are pages deep. It’s so much easier to ask ChatGPT to explain the struct, function, etc in question and have it pull the pertinent info from whatever corners it of the internet it found these things in. Even if it’s only 80% accurate it’s a massive time saver.