24 ms·

AI is making it easier to create more noise, when all I want is good search

557 points by saeedesmaili 4y ago

mark_l_watson 4y ago
I agree that having text generated inside a tool like Notion might not be everyone’s use case. The author mentions a chat bot trained in internal documentation (fairly easy using GPT-3 APIs, LangChain, and GPT-Index/Llama-Index - I am writing a book on the topic https://leanpub.com/langchain https://leanpub.com/langchain). I read that 100 companies released products using ChatGPT APIs the first week the APIs were publicly released. I expect a lot of useless and also a lot of very useful products. A little off topic, but Salesforce Ventures just announced a $250 million fund for generative AI startups https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/generative-ai-investing/ https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/generative-ai-invest...
- gibsonf1 4y ago
  Actually, not very easy as the LLMs don't give you sources and literally make things up by design.
  - jsheard 4y ago
    They do give sources if you ask for them... but have a habit of inventing plausible sounding but completely fake sources. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672 That example is a few months old but OpenAI doesn't seem to have made much progress here, if you ask ChatGPT for "a list of academic papers about X" and it will nearly always confidently churn out a list of 5-10 papers that don't exist. Amusingly if you ask it for papers about an absurd premise it will sometimes call out the absurdity and say there are probably no papers on that subject, but then offer a more plausible variation on that premise and trip up at the last hurdle by inventing all the examples on the subject it supposedly thinks is more likely to really exist.
    - gibsonf1 4y ago
      Right, they just make all things up by design, no matter what you ask about. There is a statistical chance that a pattern of words output may correspond to fact but just as a good a chance not. The LLM's literally know nothing about the world, its just statistical word pattern output.
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        Lies and falsehoods are just as valid sentences as the truth.
    - aledalgrande 4y ago
      I got so many links to github repos which didn't exist lol
      - visarga 4y ago
        Somebody went as far as contacting the author of a paper based on chatGPT suggestion. Of course the author was pretty sure he never heard of that paper.
    - jerf 4y ago
      "They do give sources if you ask for them... but have a habit of inventing plausible sounding but completely fake sources." Basically, the way you want to think about it is, no, they can not give sources. That information is not in their neural net. It can't be. There isn't anywhere to encode or represent it. What they can do is make a guess what a source might look like, but even if they are right, it is only because they happened to guess correctly, not because they knew the source. They don't. They can't. It isn't that "they give sources but they might be wrong", it is "they will make up plausible-sounding sources if you ask just as they'll make up plausible-sounding anything else you ask for, and there's a small chance they'll be right by luck". For more normal factual-type questions part of the reason they are useful is that there's a good chance they'll be right by what is still essentially luck, but for sources in particular there's a particularly small chance, by the nature of the thing.
  - sometdog 4y ago
    That is true, but you can combine LLMs with other tools to get sourcing and more accurate answers overall. Instead of using the LLM to directly answer a question, you can use the question to search for relevant text in a particular knowledgebase, and then use the LLM to summarize those results.
    - gibsonf1 4y ago
      If you use the LLM to summarize the results, it makes things up by design. As soon as you introduce the LLM into search, you lose.
      - raincole 4y ago
        I've personally replaced Google with Bing Chat for technical things (like searching for specific API). Does it make things up? Maybe. But in my experience it never happes even once in past whole week (>100 times of searchs). It's not "it happened but you just didn't notice..." if it uses a function call wrong I'd have noticed. My code won't compile. My test won't pass. So far it either gives me 100% correct result, or completely fails. But it doesn't generate "seemingly correct but actually wrong" things even once, unlike ChatGPT.
        autonomousErwin 4y ago
        I find this the killer application for ChatGPT (at least for now). Answers you can very quickly verify and care little about the sources because a significant no. of answers on Stack Overflow make ChatGPT look modest in confidence comparison
      - throwuwu 4y ago
        Biased much?
    - DebtDeflation 4y ago
      >use the question to search for relevant text in a particular knowledgebase, and then use the LLM to summarize those results As a consultant, based on personal experience, I can say that what you wrote above constitutes >90% of current enterprise use cases for ChatGPT. What clients REALLY want to do is be able to take a pre-trained LLM and then train it further on their own corpus of documents, but given limitations around token window size, the above is probably the best way to fake it for now.
  - mark_l_watson 4y ago
    The web demo version of ChatGPT can sometimes, as you say, make things up! I asked it a question about an ancient war in Greece and it stated two facts and then just inventing stuff. However, I would ask you to also consider something: when you supply prompt input text (this is the "context text" in the ChatGPT API calls) and then ask questions about the context text, it is very accurate. It also does a very good job when you give it context text from a few different sources, and it integrates them nicely. It is more efficient to use embeddings for context text, as Llama-Index does.
    - nico 4y ago
      Do you have shareable links to good tutorials about using embeddings with ChatGPT for this case?
      - mark_l_watson 4y ago
        I would start with https://gpt-index.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://gpt-index.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ and https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
        nico 4y ago
        Awesome, thank you!
  - politician 4y ago
    Only about 10% of the links I ask for don't resolve.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    For AIs to replace search, they will end up giving sources. Search for users is “how can I find the correct answer” but the part of search that runs the capitalist machine is for experts to say “how can I prove my expertise while I monetize it?” and that means those experts need to be cited.
- neovive 4y ago
  The books sounds very interesting. I never worked with LlamaIndex and now I'm intrigued by the possibilities!
- O__________O 4y ago
  Possible missing something, but custom GPT + index will not solve the problem of the users knowing what to prompt to use to access the information. Is there something I am missing?
RC_ITR 4y ago
The dirty little secret of Large Language Models is how many humans are in the loop.[0][1] Transformers are great at building extremely complex maps of language without any human interventions, but if you want them to consistently query the right part of the map (e.g., His Codepen search example), you need a very non-trivial amount of human feedback. Will be interesting to see if all this hype leads to a solution that scales better than what we do now (so that orgs. actually could have insanely good AI chatbots trained on their docs), but the jury is still definitely out on that. [0]https://openai.com/research/learning-from-human-preferences https://openai.com/research/learning-from-human-preferences [1] https://openai.com/research/instruction-following https://openai.com/research/instruction-following
- politician 4y ago
  Wow - [1] should be considered required reading. OpenAI is baking in human employee biases during fine-tuning. I would want to see the exact set of posed completions and paired responses.
  - O__________O 4y ago
    My understanding is majority of “Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)” for OpenAI comes from contractors: - https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
fwlr 4y ago
Lucky break for the author - seems like a larger context window is all you need to turn GPT’s language skills towards search and summarize, so that search they want will probably be shipping soon.
pydry 4y ago
The more noise there is the easier it is to plug in advertising :/
okhuman 4y ago
Why couldn't we take something like https://github.com/mckaywrigley/paul-graham-gpt https://github.com/mckaywrigley/paul-graham-gpt but more general purpose for a doc site? Would that approach to a chat bot trained in product documentation work?
inductive_magic 4y ago
I find it increasingly tiring that “ai” is used as a synonym for LLM-based tooling, as there is _zero_ intelligence in those architectures. Gradient descent is not intelligence. Nor is stochastic token prediction. Anyone active in the field ought to be humbled by the depth of literature exploring the path to synthetic intelligence. We have very interesting work happening in biology-inspired approaches, category theory, Bayesian networks, symbolic systems leveraging neural nets as components… it’s maybe the most interesting journey of science so far, all being discarded in favor of sequence2sequence models. LLMs are impressive and can be leveraged to create lots and lots of value, but they do a disservice to the term AI, as they do not represent the progress that can be observed across the field - all they showcase are transformers. Transformers are a truly interesting tool to build stuff with, but they cannot amount to more than a component of an intelligent agent. The actual intelligence emerges elsewhere. My guess is, it emerges at true attention. It’s a shame that even big players who could clearly afford not to, decide to compromise terminology for marketing efforts directed at an utterly clueless public. We just throw away attention and forge bias, thus creating noise in a world in heavy need of signal.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  There's a lot wrong here, but I just want to point out two things: > We have very interesting work happening in biology-inspired approaches You realize that these LLMs are all some variety of neural network right? > Gradient descent is not intelligence. It's pretty plausible that your intelligence is derived from gradient-descent prediction, just in analog instead of digital form.
  - inductive_magic 4y ago
    >You realize that these LLMs are all some variety of neural network right? Come on. Calling them neural nets doesn't make them that. Actual neural nets are living compositions of individual predictors, in a constant state of restructuring and communication across multiple channels, infinitely more complex than static matrix multiplication on arbitray vectors which happen to represent words and their positions in sequences, if you just shake the jar long enough. >It's pretty plausible that your intelligence is derived from gradient-descent prediction I highly doubt that gradient descent in the calculus-sense is the determining factor that allows biological organisms to formalize and reason about their environment. Minimizing some cost function - yes, possible. But the systems at play in even the simplest organisms don't spend expensive glucose to convert sensory signals to vectors. Afaik, they work with representations of energy-states. Maybe there is an operational equivalence somewhere there though. Gradient descent is an algo that optimizes derivatives wrt some cost function. An intelligent system may use the resulting inferences for its own fitness function, and it may do this using gradient descent itself, but at no point does the mechanical process of iterating over cost-values escape its algorithmic nature. A system performing symbolic reasoning may delegate cognitive tasks to context-specialized evaluators ("am I in danger?", "how many sheep are on that field?", "is this person a friend?", "what is a pumpkin?"), all of which are conditioned to minimize cognitive effort while avoiding false positives, but the sequence of results returned by those evaluators (think neural clusters) is observed by a centralized agent, who has to make new inferences in a living environment. Gradient descent fails at that.
windex 4y ago
Normal web search is doomed. The people creating SEO out of ChatGPT dont realize that I am not going to be searching for answers by reading page upon page of SEO optimized pages anymore. I will ask an AI directly, and of late it has been a god send in terms of code and systems administration. First time right in most simple cases and queries.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  Hope you enjoy endless product placement in your search queries. > Looks like you want to ask about how to administer your Kubernetes cluster. While I am an AI and not qualified to give advice on how to run mission-critical systems, I can heartily recommend the amazing Azure Managed Kubernetes, which is Gartner-certified for painless six-sigma reliability!
  - windex 4y ago
    It isn't doing it right now.
    - jerf 4y ago
      The tech that detects that you're asking a racist question can detect you're asking about Kubernetes or orchestration in general and serve you up an ad as easily as it serves up an explanation of why you shouldn't ask racist questions. It is no different to the AI at all.
  - spacephysics 4y ago
    I think this will occur with free AI based search, since it would be a similar business model to Google (if not more bias/intrusive) The alternative (which I think in todays age vs when google came out, is more readily accepted by the masses), will most likely be a subscription-based tool that caters to specific niches and avoids product placement. But to what I think your point is, the further removed one is from the original docs/content/etc, the more likely/able some middleman is to inject their own economic/political incentives, which is of concern. Especially when AI has a political bias, regardless of where it originates.
O__________O 4y ago
Author mixes two topics, that being searching content they control and content they don’t control. While understand desire to search content created by yourself, in my opinion vast majority of valuable content is created by others, in part because the most valuable content created by yourself is rapidly internalized into your brain. Meme of Google is getting worse fails to acknowledge that Google is free and makes money from advertisers. More to the point, more valuable the related search is per amount spent on advertising, the more the noise and as result, more resources user will need to spend to enhance the signal. This has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with value of the information itself.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Noting that Google being "free" isn't so "free" when low-quality or made-up results make my job more difficult and error-prone, or lead me to make suboptimal decisions in my personal life.
- lesuorac 4y ago
  > More to the point, more valuable the related search is per amount spent on advertising, the more the noise and as result, more resources user will need to spend to enhance the signal. This sounds like an argument of, The worse Google Search becomes the more time a user has to spend their and therefore see more ads. But it has a very large hole in that the worse Google Search becomes the easier it is for a user to switch to Bing/DDG/Apple Search. It may seem unfathomable that people wouldn't use Google Search but people felt the same way about Google Maps which lost a huge moat to Apple Maps/Waze (albeit the latter was purchased by Google).
  - dktp 4y ago
    I think the argument is that whatever search option you choose to use will inherently have the same problems Noise isn't just the paid ads, it's the websites gaming SEO for valuable searches. And that is not isolated to Google > more valuable the related search is per amount spent on advertising, the more the noise and as result, more resources user will need to spend to enhance the signal Sums it quite well really
runlevel1 4y ago
We've just invented the hammer. It can do a lot of cool things! You can build a house with it, you can smith metal with it, and you can even use it as a weapon. The thing is, right now, we're so amazed by its potential that we're finding a lot of uses that, while technically possible, aren't a great fit. Technically you can use the hammer as an axe, a hole digger, and a backscratcher, but there are far better tools for the job.
- jfengel 4y ago
  It's unclear to me that there is any use for the "hammer" of text generation. It adds no new knowledge, and doesn't pretend to. Its transformations of existing knowledge are neither interesting nor attractive. Anything they say, has already been better said elsewhere. I can imagine uses for generated art, which may at least be aesthetically pleasing. But I can't conceive of any end for computer generated text.
  - jamesdepp 4y ago
    Personally, I think that the beauty of current LLMs are their ability to process and present information. Although current generation LLMs might not be best suited to making new discoveries or producing new (valuable) information, their ability to summarize and process information already out in the open is undeniably valuable.
  - flatline 4y ago
    Its use is very much in question - but it is certainly a powerful tool, and that combination is worrisome. Much like the social graph, it is going to have a profound impact on how we interact online and with each other, and that impact will not be known for some time, even though we may be feeling it now, unawares. In a decade, maybe less, we will have some picture of the use and power of these models, there will be meetings in front of congress on how tech companies have used them, etc. Just look at what is happening in education right now. It is ultimately going to force a complete reinvention of the written assignment. This is just the beginning, even if the tool appears to be a mostly-useless toy for any real-world applications.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
luxuryballs 4y ago
why was this so hard to read? maybe use the AI next time :D
thanatropism 4y ago
Obsidian vaults are just folders of .md files and huggingface provides a great `sentence-transformers` package which allows you to easily to k-neighbors search on BERT embeddings of your query and vault. This is a weekend project really, and that considering a streamlit or tk frontend as well.
- bloudermilk 4y ago
  I’m just starting down this path myself. Any resources outside of official HF docs you would recommend?
  - leobg 4y ago
    sbert.net is all you need.
gil2rok 4y ago
[dead]
rchaud 4y ago
> If you ask me, if there’s one thing we don’t need more of on the internet, it is more soulless content written for “SEO” purposes, with enough wordcount to inject ads between. But this is precisely what people will pay money for! Companies like Canva are 'unicorns' because people need faster ways to churn out more templated digital detritus to grab your attention with.
seydor 4y ago
AI is making the value of noise go to $0. There is no more SEO signals that google can "optimize". It will be forced to switch to AI results and somehow monetize that one, because its old business model is over
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  I cant wait to watch this play out
- twelve40 4y ago
  well AI is not magic and while it might be better at, say, summarizing some documentation, the moment you hit a popular commercial query or something not as clear-cut as programming documentation, or something gameable, it will have to draw upon the same shitty sources as everyone else: random sources of data that have to be somehow ranked and filtered for noise. And how does it solve that problem?
  - visarga 4y ago
    Don't be quick to write off AI for that task > Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03827 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03827 They find a direction in activation space that satisfies logical consistency properties, such as that a statement and its negation have opposite truth values.
- all2 4y ago
  AI essentially raises the publishing wall for "noise". Print books used to be like this until the advent of single-unit/low-volume publishing. We're essentially returning to a time when the walled garden of content creators will be the most valuable game. Substack and communities will likely grow as search results and AI make "standard search" useless.
mishu2 4y ago
I still use search but am concerned about the day when all results will just be SEO AI-generated garbage (for some searches that is already the case). So I recently started https://cstdn.org/ https://cstdn.org/ and am sharing all good links I can find there. I created a Show HN but didn't make the front page, but anyone who wants to try it out is more than welcome to do so.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  Congrats, you've just invented yahoo!
barbariangrunge 4y ago
The Seo spam has already made it hard to find what you want on google. Seo spam + ai is going to be a dumpster fire. Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new google Can’t wait to see how this affects hn comments over the next 5 years
- nico 4y ago
  Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. It’s pretty rare that I want to find a website or document. Most of the times I want an answer or a solution, and ChatGPT is so much better at that than google. The ChatGPT user-experience is mind-blowing, but when you start using their API and see, partly, how the sausage is made, you realize that the context-awareness is just a very well done illusion. But that’s exactly where the magic of the experience is, and what gives ChatGPT it’s edge. Google should just launch a “chatux” version of their search.
  - napier 4y ago
    Have you tried Bingchat yet? It’s rumoured to be using a more advanced model from OAI than ChatGPT or Davinci and is very often surprisingly excellent.
    - nico 4y ago
      Keep reading great things about it. Will have to try it. Thank you for the recommendation!
    - wetpaws 4y ago
      It is so low heavily lobotomized that 99% I find much better results with chatgpt even though it is technically an older model.
      - nirav72 4y ago
        I've noticed the same thing. Other than generating code examples - I found it be useless for search. I've had better luck using a third-party extension that inserts web search context into the ChatGPT than using Bing chat to search for something.
classified 4y ago
This will be all the rage, now you can produce ad spam and SEO crap fully automated, and don't even have to hire copywriters any more.
DontchaKnowit 4y ago
I think the biggest possible upside of AI is that there will be a brief money grab where people are raking in money on automatically generated internet content - then the internet will be filled with useless noise and no one will use it in the obsessive, drip-fed-dopamine-IV way we currently use it- cause it will all just be garbage. Social media will continue to exist, but consuming content will require trust in the publisher e.g. tied to a real identity or to a trusted anonymous or business entity. Just my speculation, but I think the more garbage we put on the internet the better
rootusrootus 4y ago
AI, the cause of, and solution to all of our problems. At least on the Internet.
michaelbrave 4y ago
I don't think search is bad because the tech can't do it, I think it's bad because they are maximizing profit from advertising and because SEO got gamed by marketer's too hard.
- pphysch 4y ago
  With zero curation, SEO rules. Ads are frankly a partial solution to the problem of SEO corruption. Rather than giving the top spots to blackhat SEO spammers, you give them to the highest bidder and therefore damage the SEO industry. Lesser of two evils, but both suck. Ads can also be seen as a degenerate form of curation, where the curation function is just money + some loose content rules. Is that better or worse than the curation being a function of some particular set of values, i.e. do you want Democrats or GOP partisans curating the top Google results?
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    In other words, the web is doomed? I wish I could say that sounds implausible.
    - pphysch 4y ago
      The libertarian/anarchist ideal of the web was doomed from day 1. The only way forward IMHO is increased public (i.e. government) control over it. The curated, regulated corners of the internet can still thrive, with measured degree of openness. Too much abuse elsewhere.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        I'm talking about the web as a useful source of information and entertainment, not in terms of some libertarian/anarchist ideal. If curation is the only way that the web can retain some semblance of usefulness, that's a serious problem. It would drastically limit the usefulness of the web. Perhaps that is where this is all going. If so, I'd say that's the web being doomed. I'm just hoping for a good result instead.
hexage1814 4y ago
I think a big problem is how closed and walled the platforms become. For instance, search engines don't have access to the whole twitter database, Google Images don't index instagram posts and so and so forth.
deet 4y ago
It seems like everyone is reading this article to be about public web search. But what the article is really about is how products are using new AI tech to add shiny features instead of solving existing, core problems like search and information retrieval in new and innovative ways, especially for personal and private data. The reason this is happening is pretty easy to explain: the generative AI and chat demos are a sufficient leap beyond what was previously possible that people are excited to be on the frontier of new applications, not just new implementation of previously known use cases. Not to mention that some of the demos have people excited about the "singularity" being closer than they might have previously thought (though this can be debated...) and that VCs will shovel money to you if you want to play around with generative AI even without a proven use case (slight exaggeration but not much) I personally believe that transformers and LLMs do unlock a ton of new applications, especially when applied in interesting ways to interesting data, like what is private-to-you or private-to-your company. For example, LLMs can be used to not just generate content, but plan sequences of actions including searches, summarizations, and even calculations (see LangChain agents https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/modules/agents.html https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/modules/agents.ht... for an example of how to do this). And this can have real value for existing, known problems like search. People just have to choose to focus on these less-sexy but core problems ... PS I'm currently working on a project towards this goal, and if anyone is interested I'd love to talk (see link in profile). I believe we can solve much of the author's desire by simply hooking up the right tech to the right data sources, and doing it in a privacy preserving way (for example we're running most of our ML including vector DB, summarization, etc on device) and then present that info at the right time (ie in your OS)
- Zetice 4y ago
  I’ve said before and I’ll say it again; the startups that find ways to use AI to solve problems without having to advertise that they’re using AI will be the winners in the long run.
jamesgill 4y ago
I was just thinking this yesterday. I realized that I always thought the promise of AI was to cut through the noise for us and bring us signal. As I watch the ChatGPT-like products proliferate, I’m realizing the opposite will be true. And soon, it’ll be AIs to help us deal with AIs. A layer cake of clever but useless 'tools' for improving human life.
- studentik 4y ago
  It's like a fractal Rube Goldberg machine made of Rube Goldberg machines. (c) copied comment from other topic
Kiro 4y ago
The title makes it sound like those are mutually exclusive but I thought there was a bunch of services doing exactly what they are describing, all built on ChatGPT. E.g. https://ingestai.io/ https://ingestai.io/
naillo 4y ago
Well yes and no. Image 'search' has kinda been radically improved via stable diffusion. It can help you find things that search never would have enabled you to (e.g. because of 'anti biasing' or because the search just isn't good enough).
meindnoch 4y ago
In a world of AI-generated trash, provably genuine human-made content will be more valuable than ever.
- h10h10h10 4y ago
  Why? I honestly don't care who or 'what' wrote something, as long as it is useful. In fact, after a certain point there's no way to actually distinguish human-written content from AI-written content because it's the same. We'll just become used to it and only a few people in HN will shout to the clouds.
  - meindnoch 4y ago
    Currently the bandwidth of online astroturfing is limited by the human copywriters producing it. In a post-ChatGPT world, astroturfing will be limited by the number of GPU-seconds one can pay for, which is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper. It doesn't matter that AI is capable of producing useful content, because useful AI-generated content will be a zero-measure subset of all AI-generated content in the wild. Compare with organic food: is it true that non-organic food can be healthy? Sure! Then why do people prefer organic food? Because it's just not worth it for them to figure out which one is healthy/unhealthy. Similarly, it's just not going to he worth the effort to figure out if some AI-generated content is genuine or trying to astroturf. If there will be a "certified human" badge, people will use that as a positive signal.
    - h10h10h10 4y ago
      You're right about that. Dealing with astroturfing will be an arms race and will require some proof of "humanity" in social media, forums, etc. But, ultimately, I don't buy the idea that astroturfing is all bad. Or the opposite, that the lack thereof is necessarily good. I think bombarding with AI content can have possitive effects, like overwhelming human moderators who built echo chambers and ban wrongthink (e.g., Reddit). Or, it has the capacity for a small organization to compete with the likes of the NYTimes, or The Atlantic, etc which currently control the narrative.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
ChatGPT is really good if you don’t need specific facts. It can’t tell you what 1+1 is. But ask it to write you an apology letter and it’s a god. I think most websites are screwed. For facts I can go to wikipedia etc but for answers now I can go to an AI. I don’t need to search reddit or anything because the AI is really good at giving me human like answers to problems.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  Were websites writing apology letters for you up till now?
aj7 4y ago
“What I would use the shit out of, though, is a chatbot that has been trained on all the information in the CodePen knowledge base.” Of course. Whether you’re operating a 777, a refrigerator, or a dildo, narrow but exhaustively trained ChatBots are the killer app. This is worth in the $T range.
tomxor 4y ago
> What I would use the shit out of, though, is a chatbot that has been trained on all the information in the CodePen knowledge base. Have it suck in all the meeting notes. Yeah, it's pretty good at this, I've recently been hitting up OpenAI's chatGPT with some queries that were too exhausting to extract from google - and it's pretty good at surfacing resources quickly - and the workflow of refining the query with the context of the current thread of conversation works really well when you are struggling to succinctly describe it in a single shot (which google search doesn't really do beyond the global context of your profile - which can actually be counter productive). I really hate all the hype around chatGPT, it can't be trusted for a lot of stuff, people over anthropomorphise it, but so long as you don't rely on it for accuracy, it's pretty useful for search. One major issue I found is that ~95% of the time it can't provide correct links to sources, this is fine if it can just name stuff - then you can follow it up with a more specific google search. But chatGPT will just make up bullshit links, in the same way it will wax poetic some BS explanation to hit it's "looks correct" training. You can even point this out and it will keep generating variants on the URLs that are all fabricated. It kind of makes sense that it would be good at search... it's a language model, it should be able to link descriptions of difficult to search for things to known resources.
chrgy 4y ago
Once AI makes 90% of new content, the only question is only the qualities of the prompts. This AI we see is still very shallow and it is only really good at creating the next word or pixel, but at some point it would converge to AGI.
citizenpaul 4y ago
The only solution is the death of exponential growth and easy investment money. Probably ultimately the technical solution will be some sort of variation on PGP key signing parties. No way to get 10k users per financial period with that real world friction though.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  >The only solution is the death of exponential growth and easy investment money. This is true. Almost everyone in the world doesn't want to hear it, though.
lopatin 4y ago
SEO has always been a war. Spammers automate spam. Google comes up with ingenious ways to combat it. Spammers adapt. I keep hearing that Google search is nothing but SEO optimized, affiliate link riddled content nowadays. I don’t disagree. I see it too. But what makes you think that the affiliate like riddled article is worse then what you would otherwise find if you’re searching for “best office chair” on Google? Google got so good at combating traditional SEO spam, that the only way to “cheat” google is to actually write valuable content and insert your affiliate links into it. This is what we see now I think. The spam SEO sites actually provide more value than random forum conversations.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  It's not just Google immune system that's making it's search function useless, it's also that Google wants to advertise to it's users regardless of what kind of search is being performed.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > The spam SEO sites actually provide more value than random forum conversations. How so? The SEO sites are fundamentally dishonest because they are always trying to get you to buy the product in question. Random forum conversations don't have the same goal.
  - lopatin 4y ago
    Imagine a hypothetical scenario: Someone is buying office chairs and Google has two search results for it. The first is a forum thread with 3 posts on it. A couple people posted their arm chair opinions (no pun intended) and experiences with their chairs. No affiliate links included. The second is a full blown encyclopedia style repository of useful information about all kinds of office chairs. The content here is unmatched. And yes, it has affiliate links. Why is this necessary less valuable? I’ll stop here because the next step is debating what capitalism even means.
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      If no other information is known other than what you just wrote, I would assume that the second result is untrustworthy, because in the first result the authors have no financial incentive to deceive me and so I have to consider only that they might be mistaken or their subjective experience differs from mine, but in the second scenario it is a reasonable assumption that the whole content may be explicitly designed with an intent to mislead me - because we know for sure that at least for other types of products the vendors do put in the effort and marketing $$ to make such seemingly independent sites.
adamch 4y ago
I really like the design of this blog. It's clean and simple but has enough character from the carefully-chosen decorations. The rainbow hyperlinks are a nice touch! Great styling.
bloppe 4y ago
The secret to good AI is massive amounts of quality data. To get massive amounts of quality data, OpenAI and others employ massive armies of data curators. It's possible that massive armies of data curators could play a role in de-noising the internet of the outputs of the very models they helped create, either directly or indirectly by helping to train new models to detect AI noise. Hard to predict how the adversarial AI noise race will play out, but interesting to think that these epic noise machines were themselves created by armies of humans working to remove noise from the internet.
- studentik 4y ago
  And people worry about losing jobs)
krupan 4y ago
Two words: Butlerian Jihad
mcbuilder 4y ago
Classic doubled edged sword, perhaps the one stable thing about so called technological revolutions. Yay industrialization, boo child workers. Yay, social media, boo increased teenage depression, Yay AI, boo AI.
conqrr 4y ago
One of the fundamental problems that has never been solved is how to verify, record and search facts. As long as we are don't have an official source of Truth for these things, we will rely on low signals like page views, likes etc and these will always be manipulated. Having an AI do this work is still flawed since the signal is low and you are trying to generate high quality data and others know of your process and will beat you soon.
bigmattystyles 4y ago
I imagine that's we'll have AIs sifting through noise, which boils down to AIs generating trash for other AIs to sift through. This will be an even more senseless use of power than crypto mining.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  And since NVidia will concentrate on producing mostly GPUs usable for AI, it will mean gamers won't be able to find affordable GPUs like in the crypto craze period.
ddren 4y ago
I have noticed this too while giving the new bing a try the last few days. It doesn't matter that you have an AI bot summarizing and answering questions about the search results if your search results are worthless anyway. I am back to google now, the search results aren't any better but at least it has a dark theme that won't burn my eyes and it doesn't try to get me to switch to Chrome at every chance like bing does with Edge.
- suspectdoubloon 4y ago
  I've also switched back to google after trying bing for a few days. The bing bot gets stuck and loses context after awhile. Not only do you get ads in bing to try edge, that if your using edge on Mac you'll get ads to buy a PC the whole time. Rather just use google/chrome seems less pushy.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  > and it doesn't try to get me to switch to Chrome at every chance like bing does with Edge Every single time I go to Google search it tries to make me switch to Chrome.
  - ddren 4y ago
    That's not my experience, but maybe it is my adblocker hiding the Chrome ads. You can't even use the chat feature in bing with firefox without spoofing the user agent.
leroy-is-here 4y ago
I've actually been using Bing as an alternative to Google. Bing. I never would have guessed 10 years ago...
hwbehrens 4y ago
Neal Stephenson sometimes gets things wrong, but the concept of 'bogons' he references in Anathem is very nearly exactly this. It describes the concept of a global network so crammed with machine-generated nonsense of varying quality that it requires GAN-style discrimination agents to pre-filter things prior to search. This[0] HN comment from more than 10 years ago references the same phenomenon. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5058185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5058185
ema_dev 4y ago
The noise generated by AI-generated content is a problem that will need to be addressed soon
est 4y ago
reminds me of a joke sticker: "100% Organic content, handwritten with " I should put it somewhere on my blog.
papito 4y ago
I am going to go ahead and say it. ChatGPT is the Blockchain of search - a solution in search of a problem. There is nothing preventing Google from being better right now - except for its quest for more money. Everyone is making funny outputs by prompting ChatGPT to tell a naughty story in voice of an old cowboy, but fundamentally it's useless, because you cannot trust it. This sort of AI can convincingly lie to you, so if you are looking for facts, then each one of them still has to be corroborated. So, why not just go straight to Wikipedia? This is exactly what DuckDuckGo is doing now, as a matter of fact.
DeathArrow 4y ago
People want good search, with AI ingurgitating content and answering to simple questions like: "how much time is needed to hard boil an egg". Instead people will get more spam and more ads.
DeathArrow 4y ago
ChatGPT = Spammer's heaven.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Before widespread internet, information was costly in both time and money. You had to buy newspapers, books,spend time reading or going to a library, pay an expert to give you answers. For a period, information was essentially free. Now, with all the spam and with future garbage AI generated content, it will be very hard to discern signal from noise, so information that is curated, vouched and produced by an expert will be going to cost again.
mollym123 4y ago
What is the best way to stand out from AI noise in marketing?
- paraknight 4y ago
  Build a brand and reputation with followers who consume your content for you. The content has to be good of course such that people share to their friends directly.
christophepas 4y ago
You take Notion as an example and I couldn't agree more. We are their competitor and followed your exact line of thought trying and not releasing GPT in editor to avoid noise, and building ASK, an engine powered by semantic search, GPT (and a lot of other fun models for refinements), to answer all questions you could have on your knowledge base. It's private, fast, works with real time edited documents, and it's already in production for thousands. Check it out: slite.com/ask

557 points by saeedesmaili 4y ago

I agree that having text generated inside a tool like Notion might not be everyone’s use case. The author mentions a chat bot trained in internal documentation (fairly easy using GPT-3 APIs, LangChain, and GPT-Index/Llama-Index - I am writing a book on the topic https://leanpub.com/langchain https://leanpub.com/langchain). I read that 100 companies released products using ChatGPT APIs the first week the APIs were publicly released. I expect a lot of useless and also a lot of very useful products. A little off topic, but Salesforce Ventures just announced a $250 million fund for generative AI startups https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/generative-ai-investing/ https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/generative-ai-invest...

gibsonf1 4y ago
Actually, not very easy as the LLMs don't give you sources and literally make things up by design.
- jsheard 4y ago
  They do give sources if you ask for them... but have a habit of inventing plausible sounding but completely fake sources. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672 That example is a few months old but OpenAI doesn't seem to have made much progress here, if you ask ChatGPT for "a list of academic papers about X" and it will nearly always confidently churn out a list of 5-10 papers that don't exist. Amusingly if you ask it for papers about an absurd premise it will sometimes call out the absurdity and say there are probably no papers on that subject, but then offer a more plausible variation on that premise and trip up at the last hurdle by inventing all the examples on the subject it supposedly thinks is more likely to really exist.
  - gibsonf1 4y ago
    Right, they just make all things up by design, no matter what you ask about. There is a statistical chance that a pattern of words output may correspond to fact but just as a good a chance not. The LLM's literally know nothing about the world, its just statistical word pattern output.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Lies and falsehoods are just as valid sentences as the truth.
  - aledalgrande 4y ago
    I got so many links to github repos which didn't exist lol
    - visarga 4y ago
      Somebody went as far as contacting the author of a paper based on chatGPT suggestion. Of course the author was pretty sure he never heard of that paper.
  - jerf 4y ago
    "They do give sources if you ask for them... but have a habit of inventing plausible sounding but completely fake sources." Basically, the way you want to think about it is, no, they can not give sources. That information is not in their neural net. It can't be. There isn't anywhere to encode or represent it. What they can do is make a guess what a source might look like, but even if they are right, it is only because they happened to guess correctly, not because they knew the source. They don't. They can't. It isn't that "they give sources but they might be wrong", it is "they will make up plausible-sounding sources if you ask just as they'll make up plausible-sounding anything else you ask for, and there's a small chance they'll be right by luck". For more normal factual-type questions part of the reason they are useful is that there's a good chance they'll be right by what is still essentially luck, but for sources in particular there's a particularly small chance, by the nature of the thing.
- sometdog 4y ago
  That is true, but you can combine LLMs with other tools to get sourcing and more accurate answers overall. Instead of using the LLM to directly answer a question, you can use the question to search for relevant text in a particular knowledgebase, and then use the LLM to summarize those results.
  - gibsonf1 4y ago
    If you use the LLM to summarize the results, it makes things up by design. As soon as you introduce the LLM into search, you lose.
    - raincole 4y ago
      I've personally replaced Google with Bing Chat for technical things (like searching for specific API). Does it make things up? Maybe. But in my experience it never happes even once in past whole week (>100 times of searchs). It's not "it happened but you just didn't notice..." if it uses a function call wrong I'd have noticed. My code won't compile. My test won't pass. So far it either gives me 100% correct result, or completely fails. But it doesn't generate "seemingly correct but actually wrong" things even once, unlike ChatGPT.
      - autonomousErwin 4y ago
        I find this the killer application for ChatGPT (at least for now). Answers you can very quickly verify and care little about the sources because a significant no. of answers on Stack Overflow make ChatGPT look modest in confidence comparison
    - throwuwu 4y ago
      Biased much?
  - DebtDeflation 4y ago
    >use the question to search for relevant text in a particular knowledgebase, and then use the LLM to summarize those results As a consultant, based on personal experience, I can say that what you wrote above constitutes >90% of current enterprise use cases for ChatGPT. What clients REALLY want to do is be able to take a pre-trained LLM and then train it further on their own corpus of documents, but given limitations around token window size, the above is probably the best way to fake it for now.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  The web demo version of ChatGPT can sometimes, as you say, make things up! I asked it a question about an ancient war in Greece and it stated two facts and then just inventing stuff. However, I would ask you to also consider something: when you supply prompt input text (this is the "context text" in the ChatGPT API calls) and then ask questions about the context text, it is very accurate. It also does a very good job when you give it context text from a few different sources, and it integrates them nicely. It is more efficient to use embeddings for context text, as Llama-Index does.
  - nico 4y ago
    Do you have shareable links to good tutorials about using embeddings with ChatGPT for this case?
    - mark_l_watson 4y ago
      I would start with https://gpt-index.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://gpt-index.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ and https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
      - nico 4y ago
        Awesome, thank you!
- politician 4y ago
  Only about 10% of the links I ask for don't resolve.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- joshspankit 4y ago
  For AIs to replace search, they will end up giving sources. Search for users is “how can I find the correct answer” but the part of search that runs the capitalist machine is for experts to say “how can I prove my expertise while I monetize it?” and that means those experts need to be cited.
neovive 4y ago
The books sounds very interesting. I never worked with LlamaIndex and now I'm intrigued by the possibilities!
O__________O 4y ago
Possible missing something, but custom GPT + index will not solve the problem of the users knowing what to prompt to use to access the information. Is there something I am missing?

RC_ITR 4y ago

The dirty little secret of Large Language Models is how many humans are in the loop.[0][1] Transformers are great at building extremely complex maps of language without any human interventions, but if you want them to consistently query the right part of the map (e.g., His Codepen search example), you need a very non-trivial amount of human feedback. Will be interesting to see if all this hype leads to a solution that scales better than what we do now (so that orgs. actually could have insanely good AI chatbots trained on their docs), but the jury is still definitely out on that. [0]https://openai.com/research/learning-from-human-preferences https://openai.com/research/learning-from-human-preferences [1] https://openai.com/research/instruction-following https://openai.com/research/instruction-following

politician 4y ago
Wow - [1] should be considered required reading. OpenAI is baking in human employee biases during fine-tuning. I would want to see the exact set of posed completions and paired responses.
- O__________O 4y ago
  My understanding is majority of “Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)” for OpenAI comes from contractors: - https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

fwlr 4y ago

Lucky break for the author - seems like a larger context window is all you need to turn GPT’s language skills towards search and summarize, so that search they want will probably be shipping soon.

pydry 4y ago

The more noise there is the easier it is to plug in advertising :/

okhuman 4y ago

Why couldn't we take something like https://github.com/mckaywrigley/paul-graham-gpt https://github.com/mckaywrigley/paul-graham-gpt but more general purpose for a doc site? Would that approach to a chat bot trained in product documentation work?

inductive_magic 4y ago

I find it increasingly tiring that “ai” is used as a synonym for LLM-based tooling, as there is _zero_ intelligence in those architectures. Gradient descent is not intelligence. Nor is stochastic token prediction. Anyone active in the field ought to be humbled by the depth of literature exploring the path to synthetic intelligence. We have very interesting work happening in biology-inspired approaches, category theory, Bayesian networks, symbolic systems leveraging neural nets as components… it’s maybe the most interesting journey of science so far, all being discarded in favor of sequence2sequence models. LLMs are impressive and can be leveraged to create lots and lots of value, but they do a disservice to the term AI, as they do not represent the progress that can be observed across the field - all they showcase are transformers. Transformers are a truly interesting tool to build stuff with, but they cannot amount to more than a component of an intelligent agent. The actual intelligence emerges elsewhere. My guess is, it emerges at true attention. It’s a shame that even big players who could clearly afford not to, decide to compromise terminology for marketing efforts directed at an utterly clueless public. We just throw away attention and forge bias, thus creating noise in a world in heavy need of signal.

bpodgursky 4y ago
There's a lot wrong here, but I just want to point out two things: > We have very interesting work happening in biology-inspired approaches You realize that these LLMs are all some variety of neural network right? > Gradient descent is not intelligence. It's pretty plausible that your intelligence is derived from gradient-descent prediction, just in analog instead of digital form.
- inductive_magic 4y ago
  >You realize that these LLMs are all some variety of neural network right? Come on. Calling them neural nets doesn't make them that. Actual neural nets are living compositions of individual predictors, in a constant state of restructuring and communication across multiple channels, infinitely more complex than static matrix multiplication on arbitray vectors which happen to represent words and their positions in sequences, if you just shake the jar long enough. >It's pretty plausible that your intelligence is derived from gradient-descent prediction I highly doubt that gradient descent in the calculus-sense is the determining factor that allows biological organisms to formalize and reason about their environment. Minimizing some cost function - yes, possible. But the systems at play in even the simplest organisms don't spend expensive glucose to convert sensory signals to vectors. Afaik, they work with representations of energy-states. Maybe there is an operational equivalence somewhere there though. Gradient descent is an algo that optimizes derivatives wrt some cost function. An intelligent system may use the resulting inferences for its own fitness function, and it may do this using gradient descent itself, but at no point does the mechanical process of iterating over cost-values escape its algorithmic nature. A system performing symbolic reasoning may delegate cognitive tasks to context-specialized evaluators ("am I in danger?", "how many sheep are on that field?", "is this person a friend?", "what is a pumpkin?"), all of which are conditioned to minimize cognitive effort while avoiding false positives, but the sequence of results returned by those evaluators (think neural clusters) is observed by a centralized agent, who has to make new inferences in a living environment. Gradient descent fails at that.

windex 4y ago

Normal web search is doomed. The people creating SEO out of ChatGPT dont realize that I am not going to be searching for answers by reading page upon page of SEO optimized pages anymore. I will ask an AI directly, and of late it has been a god send in terms of code and systems administration. First time right in most simple cases and queries.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Hope you enjoy endless product placement in your search queries. > Looks like you want to ask about how to administer your Kubernetes cluster. While I am an AI and not qualified to give advice on how to run mission-critical systems, I can heartily recommend the amazing Azure Managed Kubernetes, which is Gartner-certified for painless six-sigma reliability!
- windex 4y ago
  It isn't doing it right now.
  - jerf 4y ago
    The tech that detects that you're asking a racist question can detect you're asking about Kubernetes or orchestration in general and serve you up an ad as easily as it serves up an explanation of why you shouldn't ask racist questions. It is no different to the AI at all.
- spacephysics 4y ago
  I think this will occur with free AI based search, since it would be a similar business model to Google (if not more bias/intrusive) The alternative (which I think in todays age vs when google came out, is more readily accepted by the masses), will most likely be a subscription-based tool that caters to specific niches and avoids product placement. But to what I think your point is, the further removed one is from the original docs/content/etc, the more likely/able some middleman is to inject their own economic/political incentives, which is of concern. Especially when AI has a political bias, regardless of where it originates.

O__________O 4y ago

Author mixes two topics, that being searching content they control and content they don’t control. While understand desire to search content created by yourself, in my opinion vast majority of valuable content is created by others, in part because the most valuable content created by yourself is rapidly internalized into your brain. Meme of Google is getting worse fails to acknowledge that Google is free and makes money from advertisers. More to the point, more valuable the related search is per amount spent on advertising, the more the noise and as result, more resources user will need to spend to enhance the signal. This has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with value of the information itself.

CamperBob2 4y ago
Noting that Google being "free" isn't so "free" when low-quality or made-up results make my job more difficult and error-prone, or lead me to make suboptimal decisions in my personal life.
lesuorac 4y ago
> More to the point, more valuable the related search is per amount spent on advertising, the more the noise and as result, more resources user will need to spend to enhance the signal. This sounds like an argument of, The worse Google Search becomes the more time a user has to spend their and therefore see more ads. But it has a very large hole in that the worse Google Search becomes the easier it is for a user to switch to Bing/DDG/Apple Search. It may seem unfathomable that people wouldn't use Google Search but people felt the same way about Google Maps which lost a huge moat to Apple Maps/Waze (albeit the latter was purchased by Google).
- dktp 4y ago
  I think the argument is that whatever search option you choose to use will inherently have the same problems Noise isn't just the paid ads, it's the websites gaming SEO for valuable searches. And that is not isolated to Google > more valuable the related search is per amount spent on advertising, the more the noise and as result, more resources user will need to spend to enhance the signal Sums it quite well really

runlevel1 4y ago

We've just invented the hammer. It can do a lot of cool things! You can build a house with it, you can smith metal with it, and you can even use it as a weapon. The thing is, right now, we're so amazed by its potential that we're finding a lot of uses that, while technically possible, aren't a great fit. Technically you can use the hammer as an axe, a hole digger, and a backscratcher, but there are far better tools for the job.

jfengel 4y ago
It's unclear to me that there is any use for the "hammer" of text generation. It adds no new knowledge, and doesn't pretend to. Its transformations of existing knowledge are neither interesting nor attractive. Anything they say, has already been better said elsewhere. I can imagine uses for generated art, which may at least be aesthetically pleasing. But I can't conceive of any end for computer generated text.
- jamesdepp 4y ago
  Personally, I think that the beauty of current LLMs are their ability to process and present information. Although current generation LLMs might not be best suited to making new discoveries or producing new (valuable) information, their ability to summarize and process information already out in the open is undeniably valuable.
- flatline 4y ago
  Its use is very much in question - but it is certainly a powerful tool, and that combination is worrisome. Much like the social graph, it is going to have a profound impact on how we interact online and with each other, and that impact will not be known for some time, even though we may be feeling it now, unawares. In a decade, maybe less, we will have some picture of the use and power of these models, there will be meetings in front of congress on how tech companies have used them, etc. Just look at what is happening in education right now. It is ultimately going to force a complete reinvention of the written assignment. This is just the beginning, even if the tool appears to be a mostly-useless toy for any real-world applications.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

luxuryballs 4y ago

why was this so hard to read? maybe use the AI next time :D

thanatropism 4y ago

Obsidian vaults are just folders of .md files and huggingface provides a great `sentence-transformers` package which allows you to easily to k-neighbors search on BERT embeddings of your query and vault. This is a weekend project really, and that considering a streamlit or tk frontend as well.

bloudermilk 4y ago
I’m just starting down this path myself. Any resources outside of official HF docs you would recommend?
- leobg 4y ago
  sbert.net is all you need.

gil2rok 4y ago

[dead]

rchaud 4y ago

> If you ask me, if there’s one thing we don’t need more of on the internet, it is more soulless content written for “SEO” purposes, with enough wordcount to inject ads between. But this is precisely what people will pay money for! Companies like Canva are 'unicorns' because people need faster ways to churn out more templated digital detritus to grab your attention with.

seydor 4y ago

AI is making the value of noise go to $0. There is no more SEO signals that google can "optimize". It will be forced to switch to AI results and somehow monetize that one, because its old business model is over

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
I cant wait to watch this play out
twelve40 4y ago
well AI is not magic and while it might be better at, say, summarizing some documentation, the moment you hit a popular commercial query or something not as clear-cut as programming documentation, or something gameable, it will have to draw upon the same shitty sources as everyone else: random sources of data that have to be somehow ranked and filtered for noise. And how does it solve that problem?
- visarga 4y ago
  Don't be quick to write off AI for that task > Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03827 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03827 They find a direction in activation space that satisfies logical consistency properties, such as that a statement and its negation have opposite truth values.
all2 4y ago
AI essentially raises the publishing wall for "noise". Print books used to be like this until the advent of single-unit/low-volume publishing. We're essentially returning to a time when the walled garden of content creators will be the most valuable game. Substack and communities will likely grow as search results and AI make "standard search" useless.

mishu2 4y ago

I still use search but am concerned about the day when all results will just be SEO AI-generated garbage (for some searches that is already the case). So I recently started https://cstdn.org/ https://cstdn.org/ and am sharing all good links I can find there. I created a Show HN but didn't make the front page, but anyone who wants to try it out is more than welcome to do so.

bagacrap 4y ago
Congrats, you've just invented yahoo!

barbariangrunge 4y ago

The Seo spam has already made it hard to find what you want on google. Seo spam + ai is going to be a dumpster fire. Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new google Can’t wait to see how this affects hn comments over the next 5 years

nico 4y ago
Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. It’s pretty rare that I want to find a website or document. Most of the times I want an answer or a solution, and ChatGPT is so much better at that than google. The ChatGPT user-experience is mind-blowing, but when you start using their API and see, partly, how the sausage is made, you realize that the context-awareness is just a very well done illusion. But that’s exactly where the magic of the experience is, and what gives ChatGPT it’s edge. Google should just launch a “chatux” version of their search.
- napier 4y ago
  Have you tried Bingchat yet? It’s rumoured to be using a more advanced model from OAI than ChatGPT or Davinci and is very often surprisingly excellent.
  - nico 4y ago
    Keep reading great things about it. Will have to try it. Thank you for the recommendation!
  - wetpaws 4y ago
    It is so low heavily lobotomized that 99% I find much better results with chatgpt even though it is technically an older model.
    - nirav72 4y ago
      I've noticed the same thing. Other than generating code examples - I found it be useless for search. I've had better luck using a third-party extension that inserts web search context into the ChatGPT than using Bing chat to search for something.

classified 4y ago

This will be all the rage, now you can produce ad spam and SEO crap fully automated, and don't even have to hire copywriters any more.

DontchaKnowit 4y ago

I think the biggest possible upside of AI is that there will be a brief money grab where people are raking in money on automatically generated internet content - then the internet will be filled with useless noise and no one will use it in the obsessive, drip-fed-dopamine-IV way we currently use it- cause it will all just be garbage. Social media will continue to exist, but consuming content will require trust in the publisher e.g. tied to a real identity or to a trusted anonymous or business entity. Just my speculation, but I think the more garbage we put on the internet the better

rootusrootus 4y ago

AI, the cause of, and solution to all of our problems. At least on the Internet.

michaelbrave 4y ago

I don't think search is bad because the tech can't do it, I think it's bad because they are maximizing profit from advertising and because SEO got gamed by marketer's too hard.

pphysch 4y ago
With zero curation, SEO rules. Ads are frankly a partial solution to the problem of SEO corruption. Rather than giving the top spots to blackhat SEO spammers, you give them to the highest bidder and therefore damage the SEO industry. Lesser of two evils, but both suck. Ads can also be seen as a degenerate form of curation, where the curation function is just money + some loose content rules. Is that better or worse than the curation being a function of some particular set of values, i.e. do you want Democrats or GOP partisans curating the top Google results?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  In other words, the web is doomed? I wish I could say that sounds implausible.
  - pphysch 4y ago
    The libertarian/anarchist ideal of the web was doomed from day 1. The only way forward IMHO is increased public (i.e. government) control over it. The curated, regulated corners of the internet can still thrive, with measured degree of openness. Too much abuse elsewhere.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      I'm talking about the web as a useful source of information and entertainment, not in terms of some libertarian/anarchist ideal. If curation is the only way that the web can retain some semblance of usefulness, that's a serious problem. It would drastically limit the usefulness of the web. Perhaps that is where this is all going. If so, I'd say that's the web being doomed. I'm just hoping for a good result instead.

hexage1814 4y ago

I think a big problem is how closed and walled the platforms become. For instance, search engines don't have access to the whole twitter database, Google Images don't index instagram posts and so and so forth.

deet 4y ago

It seems like everyone is reading this article to be about public web search. But what the article is really about is how products are using new AI tech to add shiny features instead of solving existing, core problems like search and information retrieval in new and innovative ways, especially for personal and private data. The reason this is happening is pretty easy to explain: the generative AI and chat demos are a sufficient leap beyond what was previously possible that people are excited to be on the frontier of new applications, not just new implementation of previously known use cases. Not to mention that some of the demos have people excited about the "singularity" being closer than they might have previously thought (though this can be debated...) and that VCs will shovel money to you if you want to play around with generative AI even without a proven use case (slight exaggeration but not much) I personally believe that transformers and LLMs do unlock a ton of new applications, especially when applied in interesting ways to interesting data, like what is private-to-you or private-to-your company. For example, LLMs can be used to not just generate content, but plan sequences of actions including searches, summarizations, and even calculations (see LangChain agents https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/modules/agents.html https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/modules/agents.ht... for an example of how to do this). And this can have real value for existing, known problems like search. People just have to choose to focus on these less-sexy but core problems ... PS I'm currently working on a project towards this goal, and if anyone is interested I'd love to talk (see link in profile). I believe we can solve much of the author's desire by simply hooking up the right tech to the right data sources, and doing it in a privacy preserving way (for example we're running most of our ML including vector DB, summarization, etc on device) and then present that info at the right time (ie in your OS)

Zetice 4y ago
I’ve said before and I’ll say it again; the startups that find ways to use AI to solve problems without having to advertise that they’re using AI will be the winners in the long run.

jamesgill 4y ago

I was just thinking this yesterday. I realized that I always thought the promise of AI was to cut through the noise for us and bring us signal. As I watch the ChatGPT-like products proliferate, I’m realizing the opposite will be true. And soon, it’ll be AIs to help us deal with AIs. A layer cake of clever but useless 'tools' for improving human life.

studentik 4y ago
It's like a fractal Rube Goldberg machine made of Rube Goldberg machines. (c) copied comment from other topic

Kiro 4y ago

The title makes it sound like those are mutually exclusive but I thought there was a bunch of services doing exactly what they are describing, all built on ChatGPT. E.g. https://ingestai.io/ https://ingestai.io/

naillo 4y ago

Well yes and no. Image 'search' has kinda been radically improved via stable diffusion. It can help you find things that search never would have enabled you to (e.g. because of 'anti biasing' or because the search just isn't good enough).

meindnoch 4y ago

In a world of AI-generated trash, provably genuine human-made content will be more valuable than ever.

h10h10h10 4y ago
Why? I honestly don't care who or 'what' wrote something, as long as it is useful. In fact, after a certain point there's no way to actually distinguish human-written content from AI-written content because it's the same. We'll just become used to it and only a few people in HN will shout to the clouds.
- meindnoch 4y ago
  Currently the bandwidth of online astroturfing is limited by the human copywriters producing it. In a post-ChatGPT world, astroturfing will be limited by the number of GPU-seconds one can pay for, which is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper. It doesn't matter that AI is capable of producing useful content, because useful AI-generated content will be a zero-measure subset of all AI-generated content in the wild. Compare with organic food: is it true that non-organic food can be healthy? Sure! Then why do people prefer organic food? Because it's just not worth it for them to figure out which one is healthy/unhealthy. Similarly, it's just not going to he worth the effort to figure out if some AI-generated content is genuine or trying to astroturf. If there will be a "certified human" badge, people will use that as a positive signal.
  - h10h10h10 4y ago
    You're right about that. Dealing with astroturfing will be an arms race and will require some proof of "humanity" in social media, forums, etc. But, ultimately, I don't buy the idea that astroturfing is all bad. Or the opposite, that the lack thereof is necessarily good. I think bombarding with AI content can have possitive effects, like overwhelming human moderators who built echo chambers and ban wrongthink (e.g., Reddit). Or, it has the capacity for a small organization to compete with the likes of the NYTimes, or The Atlantic, etc which currently control the narrative.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

ChatGPT is really good if you don’t need specific facts. It can’t tell you what 1+1 is. But ask it to write you an apology letter and it’s a god. I think most websites are screwed. For facts I can go to wikipedia etc but for answers now I can go to an AI. I don’t need to search reddit or anything because the AI is really good at giving me human like answers to problems.

bagacrap 4y ago
Were websites writing apology letters for you up till now?

aj7 4y ago

“What I would use the shit out of, though, is a chatbot that has been trained on all the information in the CodePen knowledge base.” Of course. Whether you’re operating a 777, a refrigerator, or a dildo, narrow but exhaustively trained ChatBots are the killer app. This is worth in the $T range.

tomxor 4y ago

> What I would use the shit out of, though, is a chatbot that has been trained on all the information in the CodePen knowledge base. Have it suck in all the meeting notes. Yeah, it's pretty good at this, I've recently been hitting up OpenAI's chatGPT with some queries that were too exhausting to extract from google - and it's pretty good at surfacing resources quickly - and the workflow of refining the query with the context of the current thread of conversation works really well when you are struggling to succinctly describe it in a single shot (which google search doesn't really do beyond the global context of your profile - which can actually be counter productive). I really hate all the hype around chatGPT, it can't be trusted for a lot of stuff, people over anthropomorphise it, but so long as you don't rely on it for accuracy, it's pretty useful for search. One major issue I found is that ~95% of the time it can't provide correct links to sources, this is fine if it can just name stuff - then you can follow it up with a more specific google search. But chatGPT will just make up bullshit links, in the same way it will wax poetic some BS explanation to hit it's "looks correct" training. You can even point this out and it will keep generating variants on the URLs that are all fabricated. It kind of makes sense that it would be good at search... it's a language model, it should be able to link descriptions of difficult to search for things to known resources.

chrgy 4y ago

Once AI makes 90% of new content, the only question is only the qualities of the prompts. This AI we see is still very shallow and it is only really good at creating the next word or pixel, but at some point it would converge to AGI.

citizenpaul 4y ago

The only solution is the death of exponential growth and easy investment money. Probably ultimately the technical solution will be some sort of variation on PGP key signing parties. No way to get 10k users per financial period with that real world friction though.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
>The only solution is the death of exponential growth and easy investment money. This is true. Almost everyone in the world doesn't want to hear it, though.

lopatin 4y ago

SEO has always been a war. Spammers automate spam. Google comes up with ingenious ways to combat it. Spammers adapt. I keep hearing that Google search is nothing but SEO optimized, affiliate link riddled content nowadays. I don’t disagree. I see it too. But what makes you think that the affiliate like riddled article is worse then what you would otherwise find if you’re searching for “best office chair” on Google? Google got so good at combating traditional SEO spam, that the only way to “cheat” google is to actually write valuable content and insert your affiliate links into it. This is what we see now I think. The spam SEO sites actually provide more value than random forum conversations.

cyanydeez 4y ago
It's not just Google immune system that's making it's search function useless, it's also that Google wants to advertise to it's users regardless of what kind of search is being performed.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> The spam SEO sites actually provide more value than random forum conversations. How so? The SEO sites are fundamentally dishonest because they are always trying to get you to buy the product in question. Random forum conversations don't have the same goal.
- lopatin 4y ago
  Imagine a hypothetical scenario: Someone is buying office chairs and Google has two search results for it. The first is a forum thread with 3 posts on it. A couple people posted their arm chair opinions (no pun intended) and experiences with their chairs. No affiliate links included. The second is a full blown encyclopedia style repository of useful information about all kinds of office chairs. The content here is unmatched. And yes, it has affiliate links. Why is this necessary less valuable? I’ll stop here because the next step is debating what capitalism even means.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    If no other information is known other than what you just wrote, I would assume that the second result is untrustworthy, because in the first result the authors have no financial incentive to deceive me and so I have to consider only that they might be mistaken or their subjective experience differs from mine, but in the second scenario it is a reasonable assumption that the whole content may be explicitly designed with an intent to mislead me - because we know for sure that at least for other types of products the vendors do put in the effort and marketing $$ to make such seemingly independent sites.

adamch 4y ago

I really like the design of this blog. It's clean and simple but has enough character from the carefully-chosen decorations. The rainbow hyperlinks are a nice touch! Great styling.

bloppe 4y ago

The secret to good AI is massive amounts of quality data. To get massive amounts of quality data, OpenAI and others employ massive armies of data curators. It's possible that massive armies of data curators could play a role in de-noising the internet of the outputs of the very models they helped create, either directly or indirectly by helping to train new models to detect AI noise. Hard to predict how the adversarial AI noise race will play out, but interesting to think that these epic noise machines were themselves created by armies of humans working to remove noise from the internet.

studentik 4y ago
And people worry about losing jobs)

krupan 4y ago

Two words: Butlerian Jihad

mcbuilder 4y ago

Classic doubled edged sword, perhaps the one stable thing about so called technological revolutions. Yay industrialization, boo child workers. Yay, social media, boo increased teenage depression, Yay AI, boo AI.

conqrr 4y ago

One of the fundamental problems that has never been solved is how to verify, record and search facts. As long as we are don't have an official source of Truth for these things, we will rely on low signals like page views, likes etc and these will always be manipulated. Having an AI do this work is still flawed since the signal is low and you are trying to generate high quality data and others know of your process and will beat you soon.

bigmattystyles 4y ago

I imagine that's we'll have AIs sifting through noise, which boils down to AIs generating trash for other AIs to sift through. This will be an even more senseless use of power than crypto mining.

DeathArrow 4y ago
And since NVidia will concentrate on producing mostly GPUs usable for AI, it will mean gamers won't be able to find affordable GPUs like in the crypto craze period.

ddren 4y ago

I have noticed this too while giving the new bing a try the last few days. It doesn't matter that you have an AI bot summarizing and answering questions about the search results if your search results are worthless anyway. I am back to google now, the search results aren't any better but at least it has a dark theme that won't burn my eyes and it doesn't try to get me to switch to Chrome at every chance like bing does with Edge.

suspectdoubloon 4y ago
I've also switched back to google after trying bing for a few days. The bing bot gets stuck and loses context after awhile. Not only do you get ads in bing to try edge, that if your using edge on Mac you'll get ads to buy a PC the whole time. Rather just use google/chrome seems less pushy.
DeathArrow 4y ago
> and it doesn't try to get me to switch to Chrome at every chance like bing does with Edge Every single time I go to Google search it tries to make me switch to Chrome.
- ddren 4y ago
  That's not my experience, but maybe it is my adblocker hiding the Chrome ads. You can't even use the chat feature in bing with firefox without spoofing the user agent.

leroy-is-here 4y ago

I've actually been using Bing as an alternative to Google. Bing. I never would have guessed 10 years ago...

hwbehrens 4y ago

Neal Stephenson sometimes gets things wrong, but the concept of 'bogons' he references in Anathem is very nearly exactly this. It describes the concept of a global network so crammed with machine-generated nonsense of varying quality that it requires GAN-style discrimination agents to pre-filter things prior to search. This[0] HN comment from more than 10 years ago references the same phenomenon. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5058185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5058185

ema_dev 4y ago

The noise generated by AI-generated content is a problem that will need to be addressed soon

est 4y ago

reminds me of a joke sticker: "100% Organic content, handwritten with " I should put it somewhere on my blog.

papito 4y ago

I am going to go ahead and say it. ChatGPT is the Blockchain of search - a solution in search of a problem. There is nothing preventing Google from being better right now - except for its quest for more money. Everyone is making funny outputs by prompting ChatGPT to tell a naughty story in voice of an old cowboy, but fundamentally it's useless, because you cannot trust it. This sort of AI can convincingly lie to you, so if you are looking for facts, then each one of them still has to be corroborated. So, why not just go straight to Wikipedia? This is exactly what DuckDuckGo is doing now, as a matter of fact.

DeathArrow 4y ago

People want good search, with AI ingurgitating content and answering to simple questions like: "how much time is needed to hard boil an egg". Instead people will get more spam and more ads.

DeathArrow 4y ago

ChatGPT = Spammer's heaven.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Before widespread internet, information was costly in both time and money. You had to buy newspapers, books,spend time reading or going to a library, pay an expert to give you answers. For a period, information was essentially free. Now, with all the spam and with future garbage AI generated content, it will be very hard to discern signal from noise, so information that is curated, vouched and produced by an expert will be going to cost again.

mollym123 4y ago

What is the best way to stand out from AI noise in marketing?

paraknight 4y ago
Build a brand and reputation with followers who consume your content for you. The content has to be good of course such that people share to their friends directly.

christophepas 4y ago

You take Notion as an example and I couldn't agree more. We are their competitor and followed your exact line of thought trying and not releasing GPT in editor to avoid noise, and building ASK, an engine powered by semantic search, GPT (and a lot of other fun models for refinements), to answer all questions you could have on your knowledge base. It's private, fast, works with real time edited documents, and it's already in production for thousands. Check it out: slite.com/ask