7 ms·

Just to be devil's advocate -- I see this sentiment a lot; words which would make someone think that Microsoft's Sydney is on par with Steve Jobs's iPhone revea

Just to be devil's advocate -- I see this sentiment a lot; words which would make someone think that Microsoft's Sydney is on par with Steve Jobs's iPhone reveal in 2007. Is Sydney gonna save Bing, or is it more of a toy and fad that is being pumped up by hype? Most of my non-tech friends don't use ChatGPT and none of my friends outside of tech use Bing's Sydney. This new AI wave is a great example of what happens in the techie social bubble. A cool idea or incremental improvement is announced (ChatGPT is quite literally an incremental improvement with neural networks), and everyone goes wild with speculation that outpaces the actual change. ChatGPT is awesome and a great step, but still feels like a solution looking for a problem. People are infatuated with the idea that a better version of AskJeeves could be better than Google, but GPT-3 has yet to prove itself as something that could possibly replace Google.

siva7 4y ago
The same sentiment in your comment (downplaying the innovation) came along from press and competitors when Job's revealed the iPhone in his now-famous keynote from 2007.
- throwaway4837 4y ago
  Search marketshare for Bing is 3% now, Google is 90%. How do you expect Sydney (or generally, AI-powered chat interfaces for Search) to affect Bing's marketshare over the next 5 years? Is it going to be like a first order phase transition, where Bing steals a massive amount of market share quickly? Or will it be more gradual? What does Sydney actually add to Bing other than being a fun toy? It's not really a personal assistant, it's like Google's top widget that synthesizes answers from pages. I've had a Google Pixel with their personal assistant for several years and I never use it because it's a gimmick. I don't think Sydney or ChatGPT is even close to a 10x on that technology, or that there is any real "new" innovation here. GPT-3 has been out for quite a while, and all of the other big tech companies have similar technology. They are all going to catch up pretty quickly if this human-computer interface (AI chat) actually catches on this time... It has been introduced a handful of times in history before, and didn't catch on. Maybe Nth time is a charm? Obviously the tech wasn't ready before, but is it ready now?
  - siva7 4y ago
    Well, it's already happening. The world press talks about Bing for weeks. Something that didn't ever happen before.
    - throwaway4837 4y ago
      The press talked about a lot of fads for weeks, like PokemonGO. At this point there's nothing to indicate that this is or isn't a fad. Everything starts like this: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=bing,chatGPT,AI%20chat,AI https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=bing,chatG... And many things end up like this: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=google%20plus,pokemongo,game%20of%20thrones https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=g... Not trying to say AI chat isn't cool, but I think a common tendency is for humans to overhype the wins and oversell the losses. Seeing a lot of people praise Bing's chat as revolutionary is cute because while it's a 10x better AskJeeves, it's not even on par with incumbent search engines at this point. The only real "innovation" here is that they changed the interface from search to natural language context-preserving chat. That itself would be meaningless if it didn't achieve parity with search...
      - siva7 4y ago
        Even if PokemonGo is in your terms a fad (what isn't if your definition of fad gets too broad?), it was wildly successful in its product category. I believe there is a misconception about the goal to achieve parity with a traditional search engine (what ever that means). Yes, it's part of a brand whose main product is a search engine. Bing Chat doesn't need to compete with a traditional search engine to prove its usefulness as we have seen with many examples. In the same sentiment of your comment one could also say a common tendency in (some) humans is to undersell the wins.
fwlr 4y ago
I think ChatGPT/Sydney definitely cleared the bar for “just an incremental improvement that techies are getting too exciting about”. I do agree it hasn’t reached the level of the iPhone or Google Search or streaming video.
- throwaway4837 4y ago
  It is though? GPT-3 is an incremental improvement on GPT-2 (AFAIK, no groundbreaking scientific insight here), and the chat interface is arguably not even an improvement over a keyword search engine interface that supports pseudo-natural language queries. With every single chat-bot search interface from 2000 to 2022, people used it for a while, the fad died, and people stopped using it. Then the next one came along and the same thing happened, over and over again for 20 years. There is a threshold where chat-bot improves over the current search experience but it's not there, so I don't understand how, from a business side, this is even an incremental improvement (purely for chat-bot marketed as a search engine of course). I would be way more interested in other capabilities of GPT-3: 1. Text summarization. 2. Explaining concepts in articles without having to read the article. 3. Boilerplate code generation. 4. Boilerplate technical work.
vasilipupkin 4y ago
instead of googling a recipe, you may just ask one of these models for a recipe. Imagine a huge set of potential searches that doesn't happen? that's quite a threat to google

siva7 4y ago

The same sentiment in your comment (downplaying the innovation) came along from press and competitors when Job's revealed the iPhone in his now-famous keynote from 2007.

throwaway4837 4y ago
Search marketshare for Bing is 3% now, Google is 90%. How do you expect Sydney (or generally, AI-powered chat interfaces for Search) to affect Bing's marketshare over the next 5 years? Is it going to be like a first order phase transition, where Bing steals a massive amount of market share quickly? Or will it be more gradual? What does Sydney actually add to Bing other than being a fun toy? It's not really a personal assistant, it's like Google's top widget that synthesizes answers from pages. I've had a Google Pixel with their personal assistant for several years and I never use it because it's a gimmick. I don't think Sydney or ChatGPT is even close to a 10x on that technology, or that there is any real "new" innovation here. GPT-3 has been out for quite a while, and all of the other big tech companies have similar technology. They are all going to catch up pretty quickly if this human-computer interface (AI chat) actually catches on this time... It has been introduced a handful of times in history before, and didn't catch on. Maybe Nth time is a charm? Obviously the tech wasn't ready before, but is it ready now?
- siva7 4y ago
  Well, it's already happening. The world press talks about Bing for weeks. Something that didn't ever happen before.
  - throwaway4837 4y ago
    The press talked about a lot of fads for weeks, like PokemonGO. At this point there's nothing to indicate that this is or isn't a fad. Everything starts like this: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=bing,chatGPT,AI%20chat,AI https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=bing,chatG... And many things end up like this: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=google%20plus,pokemongo,game%20of%20thrones https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=g... Not trying to say AI chat isn't cool, but I think a common tendency is for humans to overhype the wins and oversell the losses. Seeing a lot of people praise Bing's chat as revolutionary is cute because while it's a 10x better AskJeeves, it's not even on par with incumbent search engines at this point. The only real "innovation" here is that they changed the interface from search to natural language context-preserving chat. That itself would be meaningless if it didn't achieve parity with search...
    - siva7 4y ago
      Even if PokemonGo is in your terms a fad (what isn't if your definition of fad gets too broad?), it was wildly successful in its product category. I believe there is a misconception about the goal to achieve parity with a traditional search engine (what ever that means). Yes, it's part of a brand whose main product is a search engine. Bing Chat doesn't need to compete with a traditional search engine to prove its usefulness as we have seen with many examples. In the same sentiment of your comment one could also say a common tendency in (some) humans is to undersell the wins.

fwlr 4y ago

I think ChatGPT/Sydney definitely cleared the bar for “just an incremental improvement that techies are getting too exciting about”. I do agree it hasn’t reached the level of the iPhone or Google Search or streaming video.

throwaway4837 4y ago
It is though? GPT-3 is an incremental improvement on GPT-2 (AFAIK, no groundbreaking scientific insight here), and the chat interface is arguably not even an improvement over a keyword search engine interface that supports pseudo-natural language queries. With every single chat-bot search interface from 2000 to 2022, people used it for a while, the fad died, and people stopped using it. Then the next one came along and the same thing happened, over and over again for 20 years. There is a threshold where chat-bot improves over the current search experience but it's not there, so I don't understand how, from a business side, this is even an incremental improvement (purely for chat-bot marketed as a search engine of course). I would be way more interested in other capabilities of GPT-3: 1. Text summarization. 2. Explaining concepts in articles without having to read the article. 3. Boilerplate code generation. 4. Boilerplate technical work.

vasilipupkin 4y ago

instead of googling a recipe, you may just ask one of these models for a recipe. Imagine a huge set of potential searches that doesn't happen? that's quite a threat to google