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I think there is a genuine concern that Google could overreact and launch a half-baked product in pure panic of being left behind or one upped by Microsoft. The

I think there is a genuine concern that Google could overreact and launch a half-baked product in pure panic of being left behind or one upped by Microsoft. There is also a fear, I think, that the ChatGPT integration with Bing/Edge could not go all that smoothly. I think it could be game changing in many ways, but I can also see both of these falling apart. Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be good at launch, the press loved them...but now they are not nearly as valuable as they were touted (and actually lose these companies money.) Convenient, but not game changing. I think it's a waiting game to see what this truly does. I do think there is unique break here though, because I feel that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this -could- be the right moment for this.

esotericimpl 4y ago
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mouse_ 4y ago
Google Assistant and Siri were liked by the press, but not by me. In contrast, ChatGPT has helped me out more than a few times.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  Same here. I treat ChatGPT as another Wikipedia or Stack Overflow. I know that the content is not fact checked by experts and I need to judge it accordingly. But just like Wikipedia can get you started on a topic, ChatGPT can do the same, plus you can ask follow up clarifying questions!
vkou 4y ago
> half-baked product I'll make a 30,000 ft observation that LLMs, by definition, are half-baked bullshit generators. They can be useful, but they are full of warts.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  as in vacuous memorizers, reciting things they've seen, sometimes in new combinations?
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    They definitely aren't vacuous memorizers. GP's description of them as "bullshit generators" is correct. They generate plausible-sounding text that (when it includes facts) is often counterfactual.
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      Much better said, i agree
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I would love it if this nukes the SEO industry and the internet goes back to forums and community groups. The best info is almost always locked up in these places.
  - vkou 4y ago
    LLMs will do the opposite. The internet will get flooded with machine-generated bullshit.
    - smegger001 4y ago
      exactly. my only hope is that the flooding of cheap bulshit craters the market via oversupply. a combination of to much shit text competeing for ad space drops their revenue and people having diminishing trust for it reducing the ad clicks for it dropping the ad revenue even more
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      But LLM, while able to generate spam, if used used for search will reduce the need to click on a website, reducing the traffic to SEO websites… driving down profitability of doing it.
ren_engineer 4y ago
>I do think there is unique break here though, because I feel that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this -could- be the right moment for this. the problem here is monetization, will search even be profitable if LLMs are used for most queries? It might become a Uber/Lyft or food delivery situation where these companies aren't really able to profitably deliver the service. I don't see many people paying a subscription for search and there's no way governments will allow "native" advertising within answers without them being signaled as ads, which would hurt trust in responses Microsoft might not care and just see it as a way to hurt Google's money printing machine and operate Bing at a loss or break even. Google Cloud and workspace are finished without Google's ad money funding them and Microsoft Azure and Office would gain
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- partiallypro 4y ago
  > the problem here is monetization, will search even be profitable if LLMs are used for most queries? I think that is a concern, which is why I think Microsoft has a chance to just bundle this or a more advanced version with Microsoft 365. Then you're already paying for it. That automatically puts it in the hands of millions of paying customers and corporations. You can just raise your price by a dollar a month or something to offset the costs and no one really will even think they are paying for this.
  - onethought 4y ago
    That only makes sense if they can charge more for office 365. Shoving more features into something people pay for doesn’t mean those feature were worth it.
    - generalizations 4y ago
      Except that's not the calculus. By integrating chatgpt with their products, Microsoft pulls users away from: search, docs/workspace, and even gmail, and brings them over into: Bing, Office365, and outlook. In doing so, they threaten google's core income stream, and therefore google's ability to fight back. Microsoft is not paying for an expensive search engine: Microsoft is paying (with chatgpt compute infrastructure) for a much larger piece of the productivity suite market, and hamstringing google in the process.
didgetmaster 4y ago
I wonder if Microsoft's Bing/Edge/ChatGPT integration will go any better than its attempt to marry NTFS and SQL Server (i.e. WinFS)? Spoiler: that didn't go as planned!
- Yoric 4y ago
  Was there any technological issue? Or was it just that developers didn't want to use it?
  - didgetmaster 4y ago
    Microsoft never really revealed the 'real reasons' why it was canceled; so most people are left to speculate. My personal take is they decided it would become a tech-support nightmare to talk regular users through fixing a problem if the underlying database had an issue. Here is an article from 2006: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jun/29/insideit.guardianweeklytechnologysection https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jun/29/insideit....
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Maybe. The way I see it- whoever has the data wins in this new AI arms race. Google would have to make the biggest blunder in history to screw this up. It's not impossible but I wouldn't count them out. Their entire existence and practice of hoovering up all data has led to them this point.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > whoever has the data wins in this new AI arms race This has been the running hypothesis, but it’s not panning out. Tesla, for example, doesn’t have the unambiguously best self-driving kit despite having unambiguously more data. Google has tons of data, but a lot of it is intelligently-tuned noise in the form of SEO spam.
  - mach1ne 4y ago
    >Tesla, for example, doesn’t have the unambiguously best self-driving kit despite having unambiguously more data. Don’t they?
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      If we're being honest and not using backpedaling qualifiers like "available for purchase" or "designed without an ODD", then it's hard to argue how they could be. Multiple companies are operating driverless fleets in cities around the world. Tesla is not one of them.
- wowJustwow 4y ago
  We all “have the data”. I build private models scraping the web. I’m iterating on my own virtual world generator using prompts, open source Vulkan renderer. Velocities, positions, color gradients; trivial to for loop your way to a massive DB with open libs. Technologists are “screwing up” ogling Google/MS like passive consumer drones not seeing doing what Google and MS are doing is do-able at home with curl and open ML libs.
criddell 4y ago
> lose these companies money How can you say Siri loses Apple money? Does GarageBand lose them money? Photo Booth? Contacts?
- partiallypro 4y ago
  By that logic Alexa can't lose Amazon any money because it's baked into their products. But in fact, it's a massive money suck. It lost $10B last year, and there's no way you can say Apple magically avoided losses, because Google had similar losses. There is a reason that none of the assistants have really improved as much as you'd expect over a decade+, it's not profitable, and not only that, but it's also -extremely- expensive. Microsoft basically just gave up on it; not really because of market share, but because it made no money, was expensive, and had limited value to customers. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/report-google-doubles-down-on-pixel-hardware-cuts-google-assistant-support/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/report-google-double... https://www.theverge.com/22704233/siri-apple-digital-assistant-10-years-development-problems-why https://www.theverge.com/22704233/siri-apple-digital-assista... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-failure-of-amazon-s-alexa-shows-microsoft-was-right-to-kill-cortana/ar-AA14Q6eE https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-failure-of-ama...
  - scarface74 4y ago
    How hard do you really think it is to build intents into something like Siri once you have the underlying technology framework? Yes I have experience building intents on top of something like Siri.
    - supermatt 4y ago
      It’s not the complexity of building intents that costs the money. Near real-time speech inference at scale doesn’t come for free. It’s only very recently that has started moving to the edge.
preommr 4y ago
> and launch a half-baked product It'll be fortunate if it's only half-baked. These digital assitants are already rough around the edges with how they sometimes confidently provide inaccurate information. Add on Google's absolutely abysmal product development track record and the internal confusion over being forced into doing this and this isn't a stand alone application but it's being integrated into something, and it's a lot.
- smegger001 4y ago
  >These digital assitants are already rough around the edges with how they sometimes confidently provide inaccurate information. its only going to get worse. because there will LLMs like chatgpt pumping out content for SEO content mills with no vetting for accuracy, then the next generation of LLMs are trained on them thus further corrupting the knowledge base they pull on to produce new content. its going to be a horrible feed back loop.
  - spindle 4y ago
    Yes! You're the first person I've heard say that and I'm sure you're right. Then there will be some market for better-trained LLMs, which it will still be possible to make using curated data sets, but that will be expensive, and product differentiation will be messy. We're in for quite a ride. I can't predict the outcome. Maybe there is no stable outcome.
  - Smoosh 4y ago
    Indeed. We thought that the AI threat was killer robots. But it is actually the cancer of information which looks reputable but is incorrect in unpredictable ways.
enobrev 4y ago
> Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be good at launch In my own experience, Alexa and Google's query pucks were improving for a short time, and then got considerably worse, losing features every month until they basically stopped understanding or responding to anything but the simplest requests. A couple months after released, they expanded android auto with the same abilities, so I could "ok google" in my car and ask for the answer to just about any question, or to adjust the temp in my house, or ask it to play just about any obscure album / artist. It improved over about 6 months and then began to devolve from there. It's not even possible to ask for "[popular artist] radio" anymore in the car nor can I run voice queries at all that aren't map-specific. Not sure what happened there, but in my mind they failed miserably. I still like Android auto, but my google and alexa pucks are all in a pile in some cabinet around here somewhere.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  I’m not sure Siri ever got as good as the original Siri app that Apple bought. Maybe the custom triggers are an advancement but it has spent most of its life chasing the original Siri.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Siri is such a disappointment. It fails on things that seem like they should be trivial like unit conversions. Pretty much only good for setting timers and making phone calls now.
- tastysandwich 4y ago
  > In my own experience, Alexa and Google's query pucks were improving for a short time, and then got considerably worse, losing features every month until they basically stopped understanding or responding to anything but the simplest requests. Yes!! I thought it was just me and my Australian accent. And the commands are super limited. I wonder to what extent that's also because third-party companies aren't integrating properly? Eg, my Roborock has clearly labeled rooms, but I can't say "hey Google, start vacuuming the kitchen". Is that Google's fault, or Roborock's? Also, I can't seem to chain commands, eg "hey Google, set the lights to red and 10% brightness". I have to say them separately. That seems like a Google thing to me.
ASalazarMX 4y ago
They should be marketed as mascots, and given playful, childish personalities. You wouldn't blindly trust a child, why would you an AI in its infancy?
- furyofantares 4y ago
  Clippy?
  - oauea 4y ago
    Microsoft really missed out by not having the bing AI assistant be clippy-based
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      I guarantee they focus-tested it and found that most people who remember Clippy don't have fond memories of him (and/or remember the memes/jokes about him more than they remember the actual Clippy), but, more importantly, most people don't remember him at all and wondered why this weird paper clip guy was talking. he hasn't been in an Office product since, what, 23 years ago or something? (not counting cameos)
      - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
        And probably a fair number asked "what is this weird bent line thing and what does it have to do with searching the internet?"
        knodi123 4y ago
        "Okay, fine, we'll make him an anthropomorphic phone dial. Or maybe a floppy disc."
- skydhash 4y ago
  They trusted the "Red Queen". /s
kajecounterhack 4y ago
Voice assistants probably don’t make them money but damn if I don’t use google assistant every day when I drive.
rychco 4y ago
> Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri These were always bullshit, other than maybe for turning your lights on, setting alarms, & checking the weather. On the other hand, I immediately found ChatGPT / Copilot useful as a professional tool I could use to make my job measurably easier.
- scotty79 4y ago
  A minimum what could the be is voice interface to my phone apps and they can't even do that at all or in any consistent manner.
scotty79 4y ago
> ... Google could overreact and launch a half-baked product There's very low fraction of Google products that were sufficiently baked on release and just a few that weren't abandoned and killed after their half-baked release.
kodah 4y ago
Neeva has an AI for search. It works sufficiently well enough on some searches that it's all I'll read. Others I can tell it's missing things.
coffeebeqn 4y ago
This does seem essentially like a Siri 2.0. I never found Siri useful but maybe this time it’ll be
- knodi123 4y ago
  siri sucks, but google assistant is already pretty good for the 90% of things I want it to do. a much improved google assistant would be awesome, and if I remember to use it within its limitations, I'm not worried about any of this "confidently wrong answers" stuff.
fleddr 4y ago
Agree. Only thing I want to add is that it's not just SEO ruining search, it's contradictory incentives. A user wants the quickest path to an answer but Google actually wants you to engage as long as possible so that you can look at ads. If you'd now create a short/brief web page with the perfect answer to a particular question without any ads, Google would fully dismiss your page. That's the tragedy of Google, never breaking away from that perversion.
RajT88 4y ago
> I think it could be game changing in many ways, but I can also see both of these falling apart. Like that time the Microsoft Twitter chatbot got tricked into parroting white supremacist talking points within an afternoon?
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"I do think there is unique break through here, because I feel that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this -could- be the right moment for this." GPT-3 generally uses the same sources as search. Does GPT-3 using CommonCrawl have some way to exclude all the SEO garbage that is in the crawl data. The difference with ChatGPT is there is no way to know that the output has been constructed from SEO garbage. Arguably that's even worse than SEO URLs that one can easily identify and avoid. The comment about the press loving these projects is spot on. "Tech" employees love to criticise "mass media", except when mass media is promoting their (money-losing) projects.
kurthr 4y ago
I feel like what I want is a LLM that can tell me not only a summary answer, but what search terms are most likely to return documentation for the answer. Provide clickable citations documenting the answer using those terms (it can iterate on the answer and terms if they aren't internally consistent). Then give summaries of the information at each citation and/or parameters to input if the response requires further operations/searches. It could provide some commentary of the quality of those citation/sources as well. That makes the response more current, allows a further directed search based on the new parameters, and provides a traceable path to sources and citations. If it finds that there's not a Python library with that name then iterate. Basically, an LLM should have a very good idea what good search terms are for the topic, and where to find the information, whereas I might not know the acronyms, jargon, or related fields. Yes, this is getting pretty close to writing an 8th grade class report. That's about where these seem to be.
dietr1ch 4y ago
I'd go further and say that SEO has not only ruined search, but the internet itself. There's so much crappy content around, generated webpages that aim to match every search query. I just looked for "four times five" and there's a huge ton of matches, including pages dedicated to "4x5" [0], which I think do more damage to the web than help. I feel the web is broken. It was modeled around documents and slowly features started creeping in, like adding images, gifs, audio, video, applications (flash, java), 3D, making the document closer to a program. At every step it felt like an improvement, but it seems that we ended up with another C++. There's probably a law around creating a platform so popular that it'll organically get features until the accidental design is realized to be awful so people start coming up with their ideal subset that works reasonably well because they can't really leave such platform as they became hostages of their investment into it. [0]: https://multiply.info/times-what-equals/4-times-what-equals-5.html https://multiply.info/times-what-equals/4-times-what-equals-...
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
I wonder how AI SEO will look like. Bribe click workers to allow advertising to pass through in the ground truth data ?
- TecoAndJix 4y ago
  One way I imagine this is that answers will have “helpful” postfixes after them. When the user interacts with the postfix prompts it serves pay-to-play dialogue. Advertisers can just bid on spots in a decision table. Simple example: a user asks “How do I best take care of roses in my location”? The ChatGPT/Bard answer is delivered then analyzed for keywords/themes that someone may want to advertise on. At the end of the answer (These results may be sponsored. Learn more) - Do you need help finding the nutrients mentioned in this response?
- shellfishgene 4y ago
  Maybe companies will add dozens of pages of text to their websites describing every little detail of their great products in every way possible in the hopes of getting picked up for the training data for the models. That text would of course also be written by some ai...
- acdha 4y ago
  Thinking about how tech products are covered in the mainstream press, especially in the past when a lot of older journalists really didn’t have enough experience to ask the right questions, I’m betting this will be similar: write authoritative-sounding prose suggesting not just your company’s products but their preferred terminology and world-view, and spread it around as widely as possible. Get experts, real or self-labeled, to make ostensibly neutral buyer’s guides or reviews which conveniently exclude competitors (e.g. if my job was selling an Android phone, I might assert that nobody should even consider a closed-source OS for security reasons because that precludes the biggest decision while appearing to be objective).
harriet1 4y ago
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mvkel 4y ago
Measuring how useful something is by how much money it makes is like measuring a life by how intelligent it is.

esotericimpl 4y ago

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mouse_ 4y ago

Google Assistant and Siri were liked by the press, but not by me. In contrast, ChatGPT has helped me out more than a few times.

dougmwne 4y ago
Same here. I treat ChatGPT as another Wikipedia or Stack Overflow. I know that the content is not fact checked by experts and I need to judge it accordingly. But just like Wikipedia can get you started on a topic, ChatGPT can do the same, plus you can ask follow up clarifying questions!

vkou 4y ago

> half-baked product I'll make a 30,000 ft observation that LLMs, by definition, are half-baked bullshit generators. They can be useful, but they are full of warts.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
as in vacuous memorizers, reciting things they've seen, sometimes in new combinations?
- aidenn0 4y ago
  They definitely aren't vacuous memorizers. GP's description of them as "bullshit generators" is correct. They generate plausible-sounding text that (when it includes facts) is often counterfactual.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    Much better said, i agree
spaceman_2020 4y ago
I would love it if this nukes the SEO industry and the internet goes back to forums and community groups. The best info is almost always locked up in these places.
- vkou 4y ago
  LLMs will do the opposite. The internet will get flooded with machine-generated bullshit.
  - smegger001 4y ago
    exactly. my only hope is that the flooding of cheap bulshit craters the market via oversupply. a combination of to much shit text competeing for ad space drops their revenue and people having diminishing trust for it reducing the ad clicks for it dropping the ad revenue even more
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    But LLM, while able to generate spam, if used used for search will reduce the need to click on a website, reducing the traffic to SEO websites… driving down profitability of doing it.

ren_engineer 4y ago

>I do think there is unique break here though, because I feel that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this -could- be the right moment for this. the problem here is monetization, will search even be profitable if LLMs are used for most queries? It might become a Uber/Lyft or food delivery situation where these companies aren't really able to profitably deliver the service. I don't see many people paying a subscription for search and there's no way governments will allow "native" advertising within answers without them being signaled as ads, which would hurt trust in responses Microsoft might not care and just see it as a way to hurt Google's money printing machine and operate Bing at a loss or break even. Google Cloud and workspace are finished without Google's ad money funding them and Microsoft Azure and Office would gain

deleted 4y ago
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partiallypro 4y ago
> the problem here is monetization, will search even be profitable if LLMs are used for most queries? I think that is a concern, which is why I think Microsoft has a chance to just bundle this or a more advanced version with Microsoft 365. Then you're already paying for it. That automatically puts it in the hands of millions of paying customers and corporations. You can just raise your price by a dollar a month or something to offset the costs and no one really will even think they are paying for this.
- onethought 4y ago
  That only makes sense if they can charge more for office 365. Shoving more features into something people pay for doesn’t mean those feature were worth it.
  - generalizations 4y ago
    Except that's not the calculus. By integrating chatgpt with their products, Microsoft pulls users away from: search, docs/workspace, and even gmail, and brings them over into: Bing, Office365, and outlook. In doing so, they threaten google's core income stream, and therefore google's ability to fight back. Microsoft is not paying for an expensive search engine: Microsoft is paying (with chatgpt compute infrastructure) for a much larger piece of the productivity suite market, and hamstringing google in the process.

didgetmaster 4y ago

I wonder if Microsoft's Bing/Edge/ChatGPT integration will go any better than its attempt to marry NTFS and SQL Server (i.e. WinFS)? Spoiler: that didn't go as planned!

Yoric 4y ago
Was there any technological issue? Or was it just that developers didn't want to use it?
- didgetmaster 4y ago
  Microsoft never really revealed the 'real reasons' why it was canceled; so most people are left to speculate. My personal take is they decided it would become a tech-support nightmare to talk regular users through fixing a problem if the underlying database had an issue. Here is an article from 2006: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jun/29/insideit.guardianweeklytechnologysection https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jun/29/insideit....

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Maybe. The way I see it- whoever has the data wins in this new AI arms race. Google would have to make the biggest blunder in history to screw this up. It's not impossible but I wouldn't count them out. Their entire existence and practice of hoovering up all data has led to them this point.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> whoever has the data wins in this new AI arms race This has been the running hypothesis, but it’s not panning out. Tesla, for example, doesn’t have the unambiguously best self-driving kit despite having unambiguously more data. Google has tons of data, but a lot of it is intelligently-tuned noise in the form of SEO spam.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  >Tesla, for example, doesn’t have the unambiguously best self-driving kit despite having unambiguously more data. Don’t they?
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    If we're being honest and not using backpedaling qualifiers like "available for purchase" or "designed without an ODD", then it's hard to argue how they could be. Multiple companies are operating driverless fleets in cities around the world. Tesla is not one of them.
wowJustwow 4y ago
We all “have the data”. I build private models scraping the web. I’m iterating on my own virtual world generator using prompts, open source Vulkan renderer. Velocities, positions, color gradients; trivial to for loop your way to a massive DB with open libs. Technologists are “screwing up” ogling Google/MS like passive consumer drones not seeing doing what Google and MS are doing is do-able at home with curl and open ML libs.

criddell 4y ago

> lose these companies money How can you say Siri loses Apple money? Does GarageBand lose them money? Photo Booth? Contacts?

partiallypro 4y ago
By that logic Alexa can't lose Amazon any money because it's baked into their products. But in fact, it's a massive money suck. It lost $10B last year, and there's no way you can say Apple magically avoided losses, because Google had similar losses. There is a reason that none of the assistants have really improved as much as you'd expect over a decade+, it's not profitable, and not only that, but it's also -extremely- expensive. Microsoft basically just gave up on it; not really because of market share, but because it made no money, was expensive, and had limited value to customers. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/report-google-doubles-down-on-pixel-hardware-cuts-google-assistant-support/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/report-google-double... https://www.theverge.com/22704233/siri-apple-digital-assistant-10-years-development-problems-why https://www.theverge.com/22704233/siri-apple-digital-assista... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-failure-of-amazon-s-alexa-shows-microsoft-was-right-to-kill-cortana/ar-AA14Q6eE https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-failure-of-ama...
- scarface74 4y ago
  How hard do you really think it is to build intents into something like Siri once you have the underlying technology framework? Yes I have experience building intents on top of something like Siri.
  - supermatt 4y ago
    It’s not the complexity of building intents that costs the money. Near real-time speech inference at scale doesn’t come for free. It’s only very recently that has started moving to the edge.

preommr 4y ago

> and launch a half-baked product It'll be fortunate if it's only half-baked. These digital assitants are already rough around the edges with how they sometimes confidently provide inaccurate information. Add on Google's absolutely abysmal product development track record and the internal confusion over being forced into doing this and this isn't a stand alone application but it's being integrated into something, and it's a lot.

smegger001 4y ago
>These digital assitants are already rough around the edges with how they sometimes confidently provide inaccurate information. its only going to get worse. because there will LLMs like chatgpt pumping out content for SEO content mills with no vetting for accuracy, then the next generation of LLMs are trained on them thus further corrupting the knowledge base they pull on to produce new content. its going to be a horrible feed back loop.
- spindle 4y ago
  Yes! You're the first person I've heard say that and I'm sure you're right. Then there will be some market for better-trained LLMs, which it will still be possible to make using curated data sets, but that will be expensive, and product differentiation will be messy. We're in for quite a ride. I can't predict the outcome. Maybe there is no stable outcome.
- Smoosh 4y ago
  Indeed. We thought that the AI threat was killer robots. But it is actually the cancer of information which looks reputable but is incorrect in unpredictable ways.

enobrev 4y ago

> Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be good at launch In my own experience, Alexa and Google's query pucks were improving for a short time, and then got considerably worse, losing features every month until they basically stopped understanding or responding to anything but the simplest requests. A couple months after released, they expanded android auto with the same abilities, so I could "ok google" in my car and ask for the answer to just about any question, or to adjust the temp in my house, or ask it to play just about any obscure album / artist. It improved over about 6 months and then began to devolve from there. It's not even possible to ask for "[popular artist] radio" anymore in the car nor can I run voice queries at all that aren't map-specific. Not sure what happened there, but in my mind they failed miserably. I still like Android auto, but my google and alexa pucks are all in a pile in some cabinet around here somewhere.

rhaway84773 4y ago
I’m not sure Siri ever got as good as the original Siri app that Apple bought. Maybe the custom triggers are an advancement but it has spent most of its life chasing the original Siri.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Siri is such a disappointment. It fails on things that seem like they should be trivial like unit conversions. Pretty much only good for setting timers and making phone calls now.
tastysandwich 4y ago
> In my own experience, Alexa and Google's query pucks were improving for a short time, and then got considerably worse, losing features every month until they basically stopped understanding or responding to anything but the simplest requests. Yes!! I thought it was just me and my Australian accent. And the commands are super limited. I wonder to what extent that's also because third-party companies aren't integrating properly? Eg, my Roborock has clearly labeled rooms, but I can't say "hey Google, start vacuuming the kitchen". Is that Google's fault, or Roborock's? Also, I can't seem to chain commands, eg "hey Google, set the lights to red and 10% brightness". I have to say them separately. That seems like a Google thing to me.

ASalazarMX 4y ago

They should be marketed as mascots, and given playful, childish personalities. You wouldn't blindly trust a child, why would you an AI in its infancy?

furyofantares 4y ago
Clippy?
- oauea 4y ago
  Microsoft really missed out by not having the bing AI assistant be clippy-based
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    I guarantee they focus-tested it and found that most people who remember Clippy don't have fond memories of him (and/or remember the memes/jokes about him more than they remember the actual Clippy), but, more importantly, most people don't remember him at all and wondered why this weird paper clip guy was talking. he hasn't been in an Office product since, what, 23 years ago or something? (not counting cameos)
    - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
      And probably a fair number asked "what is this weird bent line thing and what does it have to do with searching the internet?"
      - knodi123 4y ago
        "Okay, fine, we'll make him an anthropomorphic phone dial. Or maybe a floppy disc."
skydhash 4y ago
They trusted the "Red Queen". /s

kajecounterhack 4y ago

Voice assistants probably don’t make them money but damn if I don’t use google assistant every day when I drive.

rychco 4y ago

> Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri These were always bullshit, other than maybe for turning your lights on, setting alarms, & checking the weather. On the other hand, I immediately found ChatGPT / Copilot useful as a professional tool I could use to make my job measurably easier.

scotty79 4y ago
A minimum what could the be is voice interface to my phone apps and they can't even do that at all or in any consistent manner.

scotty79 4y ago

> ... Google could overreact and launch a half-baked product There's very low fraction of Google products that were sufficiently baked on release and just a few that weren't abandoned and killed after their half-baked release.

kodah 4y ago

Neeva has an AI for search. It works sufficiently well enough on some searches that it's all I'll read. Others I can tell it's missing things.

coffeebeqn 4y ago

This does seem essentially like a Siri 2.0. I never found Siri useful but maybe this time it’ll be

knodi123 4y ago
siri sucks, but google assistant is already pretty good for the 90% of things I want it to do. a much improved google assistant would be awesome, and if I remember to use it within its limitations, I'm not worried about any of this "confidently wrong answers" stuff.

fleddr 4y ago

Agree. Only thing I want to add is that it's not just SEO ruining search, it's contradictory incentives. A user wants the quickest path to an answer but Google actually wants you to engage as long as possible so that you can look at ads. If you'd now create a short/brief web page with the perfect answer to a particular question without any ads, Google would fully dismiss your page. That's the tragedy of Google, never breaking away from that perversion.

RajT88 4y ago

> I think it could be game changing in many ways, but I can also see both of these falling apart. Like that time the Microsoft Twitter chatbot got tricked into parroting white supremacist talking points within an afternoon?

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"I do think there is unique break through here, because I feel that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this -could- be the right moment for this." GPT-3 generally uses the same sources as search. Does GPT-3 using CommonCrawl have some way to exclude all the SEO garbage that is in the crawl data. The difference with ChatGPT is there is no way to know that the output has been constructed from SEO garbage. Arguably that's even worse than SEO URLs that one can easily identify and avoid. The comment about the press loving these projects is spot on. "Tech" employees love to criticise "mass media", except when mass media is promoting their (money-losing) projects.

kurthr 4y ago

I feel like what I want is a LLM that can tell me not only a summary answer, but what search terms are most likely to return documentation for the answer. Provide clickable citations documenting the answer using those terms (it can iterate on the answer and terms if they aren't internally consistent). Then give summaries of the information at each citation and/or parameters to input if the response requires further operations/searches. It could provide some commentary of the quality of those citation/sources as well. That makes the response more current, allows a further directed search based on the new parameters, and provides a traceable path to sources and citations. If it finds that there's not a Python library with that name then iterate. Basically, an LLM should have a very good idea what good search terms are for the topic, and where to find the information, whereas I might not know the acronyms, jargon, or related fields. Yes, this is getting pretty close to writing an 8th grade class report. That's about where these seem to be.

dietr1ch 4y ago

I'd go further and say that SEO has not only ruined search, but the internet itself. There's so much crappy content around, generated webpages that aim to match every search query. I just looked for "four times five" and there's a huge ton of matches, including pages dedicated to "4x5" [0], which I think do more damage to the web than help. I feel the web is broken. It was modeled around documents and slowly features started creeping in, like adding images, gifs, audio, video, applications (flash, java), 3D, making the document closer to a program. At every step it felt like an improvement, but it seems that we ended up with another C++. There's probably a law around creating a platform so popular that it'll organically get features until the accidental design is realized to be awful so people start coming up with their ideal subset that works reasonably well because they can't really leave such platform as they became hostages of their investment into it. [0]: https://multiply.info/times-what-equals/4-times-what-equals-5.html https://multiply.info/times-what-equals/4-times-what-equals-...

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

I wonder how AI SEO will look like. Bribe click workers to allow advertising to pass through in the ground truth data ?

TecoAndJix 4y ago
One way I imagine this is that answers will have “helpful” postfixes after them. When the user interacts with the postfix prompts it serves pay-to-play dialogue. Advertisers can just bid on spots in a decision table. Simple example: a user asks “How do I best take care of roses in my location”? The ChatGPT/Bard answer is delivered then analyzed for keywords/themes that someone may want to advertise on. At the end of the answer (These results may be sponsored. Learn more) - Do you need help finding the nutrients mentioned in this response?
shellfishgene 4y ago
Maybe companies will add dozens of pages of text to their websites describing every little detail of their great products in every way possible in the hopes of getting picked up for the training data for the models. That text would of course also be written by some ai...
acdha 4y ago
Thinking about how tech products are covered in the mainstream press, especially in the past when a lot of older journalists really didn’t have enough experience to ask the right questions, I’m betting this will be similar: write authoritative-sounding prose suggesting not just your company’s products but their preferred terminology and world-view, and spread it around as widely as possible. Get experts, real or self-labeled, to make ostensibly neutral buyer’s guides or reviews which conveniently exclude competitors (e.g. if my job was selling an Android phone, I might assert that nobody should even consider a closed-source OS for security reasons because that precludes the biggest decision while appearing to be objective).

harriet1 4y ago

[dead]

mvkel 4y ago

Measuring how useful something is by how much money it makes is like measuring a life by how intelligent it is.