9 ms·

Google devising radical search changes to beat back A.I. rivals

95 points by thm 4y ago

kingstoned 4y ago
Let's read their next quarterly report in 10 days to see if ChatGPT caused a revenue decline in their search business.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  If ChatGPT causes Google's revenue to drop, it will at first be very gradual, and then suddenly.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  I suspect that as much as we hype ChatGPT here on HN, its effect on Google’s actual revenue is effectively zero. It could affect their stock price due to informed speculators, but their search revenue is another story. I assume it’s declining anyway but I doubt ChatGPT has a noticeable impact on it yet.
  - Baeocystin 4y ago
    Normally I would agree with this take. It's all been so fast, after all. I don't know, though... So many of my non-techie clients have asked me about, or have started using beforehand, ChatGPT over just the past month alone. I've never seen a phase change in user behavior like this before, and it strikes me that it may have had a material impact already.
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      Hmm.. I couldn't manage to convince my wife to try out ChatGPT a few months ago, but last week she heard about it on the Japanese news and wanted to give it a go I guess that means it managed to get to her the long way around human society, since Japanese evening TV news is pretty much at the rear end of any cultural developments..
    - twelve40 4y ago
      well we've been there before, a wave of massive, fever pitch hype around things like Siri when it came out, then people calm down and realize that it's useful for some situations, but not nearly a shift in the history of the Earth it may have seemed at first.
  - codexon 4y ago
    GPT-3.5 is not good enough to replace Google. However GPT-4 is but it's not widely available.
    - lostmsu 4y ago
      I thought it powers Bing Chat.
      - codexon 4y ago
        Not everyone has access to that and the last time I checked, it was heavily limited and not allowed to do things like code.
        lostmsu 4y ago
        Definitely allows code now.
- jitl 4y ago
  It’s still so, so early for ChatGPT. I just started to change my patterns to go to ChatGPT first and I’m a HN user, maybe not the most cutting edge but certainly in the population of internet users overall I’m far from a laggard.
- eldritch_4ier 4y ago
  It’s a default everywhere. Usually I’ll go to chatgpt as a 2nd option when google sucks at answering something. Chatgpt is still pretty unreliable for specifics (especially things that involve numbers like dates or statistics).
- elforce002 4y ago
  I'd willing to bet chatGPT didn't do as much damage (if any) as we think. Google is playing marketing hype before the slope goes down.
m348e912 4y ago
Nothing spurs innovation like game-changing competition. Makes you wonder how long Google would have continued to sit on their laurels if GPT or AI never picked up speed.
- leobg 4y ago
  Ask Peter Thiel. He has been arguing that Google has been just resting on their monopoly laurels for over a decade now (and that everything else they’ve been doing since then has been basically just a red herring, so they can say, „Oh we are so much more than a search company”).
  - PessimalDecimal 4y ago
    Got a link? I'd like to read more. The theory is at least plausible given what we see. They'll kill many products that seem viable, and would help diversify their revenue stream. Does Google really place no premium at all on that? For example, killing Stadia after only a few years, while predictable for Google, is still a head scratcher to me. Building a platform and letting other companies (in this case, game studios) take the big risks on what will sink and what will swim, is a hugely privileged position to be in. Why did they kill it when others are moving into the space?
    - 988747 4y ago
      [dead]
    - leobg 4y ago
      Several of his interviews on YouTube pre 2020 I believe. Might be in “Zero to One” as well. I believe there’s also a talk between him and Eric Schmidt on YouTube where he brought it up.
      - PessimalDecimal 4y ago
        Thank you!
    - 4y ago
mrfinn 4y ago
Strangest thing about this situation is that the "Attention Is All You Need" paper which, from what I read was crucial to give birth to the technology that fuels OpenAI's GPT actually came from Google Labs. So in theory they had the very upper hand implementing it, back in 2018. Did they put it on hold on purpose?
- skyhlar 4y ago
  Well the paper only talks about translation, the authors never seem to have considered generalizing the architecture to other problems.
  - mrfinn 4y ago
    Really? Because LaMDA looks like an effort in that direction but Google never made it publicly available AFAIK. Security concerns maybe? PS. Just read the Lemoine's transcriptions. Just wow.
    - akomtu 4y ago
      Big corps are risk averse. When you're at the top of the pyramid, there's nowhere else to climb, but there are plently of opportunities to fall, so you move very carefully and defensively. The lowly climbers at the bottom have nowhere else to fall, and have plenty of reasons to climb, so they climb in the most careless and brazen manner. Eventually they dislodge the lazy ass at the top and become risk averse. The winner of this show is the owner of the pyramid who sells food to the climbers.
- add-sub-mul-div 4y ago
  In Minority Report we saw a guy controlling a computer interface by waving his arms in the air, and ever since we've had people talking about how cool it would be to have that in real life. Well, actually, no it wouldn't. In practice your arms would get tired as hell pretty quickly. A mouse on a table surface is actually a pretty great solution, which is why it's lasted. People are drawn to things that look cool and innovative for the sake of it, but we're not good at thinking ahead to how well they'd work in practice. I've been searching the web for so long that it's like breathing. I type a few keywords, hop between the first few results very fast, get what I need and get out. Maybe I have to repeat. Few searches are more complicated than that. I've tried replacing that flow with AI. It's slower to input, slower to get results, the results are opaque with regards to where they came from and how trustworthy they are. And the results aren't better, in my experience as someone for who finds search to have been solved and painless for many years. Even asking one question of an LLM takes more time and effort than a traditional search, and the problem is compounded when I have to iterate on a search. (Also it sucks to cede the kind of power to search providers that gives them leverage to force us to be logged in and monetize what's always been free, but those are just random complaints.) So, going back to your question. My guess is that Google has always known this isn't a better overall experience, once you get over the initial wow factor. But maybe they underestimated how much that wow factor would allow true competition to materialize before the rest of us would figure it out and lose interest.
carlycue 4y ago
https://archive.ph/ti9Ns https://archive.ph/ti9Ns
alphabetting 4y ago
Pretty excited for the conversational tutor for learning languages. Been hearing about it since 2021 but my guess is Google's big investment in Duolingo probably put the brakes on it internally.
- elliekelly 4y ago
  I’m sure it depends on the language but I’ve found ChatGPT works well for this purpose. I suppose the risk is that I don’t know what I don’t know so it very well might look fine to me but terrible to native speakers. Even so I’m fairly certain it’s better than DuoLingo which is more of a mobile vocabulary game than a language learning platform.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >I suppose the risk is that I don’t know what I don’t know so it very well might look fine to me but terrible to native speakers. I general that describes what little I've used ChatGPT for. I have it write something on a topic I know a fair bit about... "OK. that's pretty good. That's veering into weeds. That's not right. I'm going to work a bit on how this is structured; it's pretty formulaic. Needs some actual references and maybe a quote." If I had to start from not knowing anything, I'm not sure how useful it would be. But when it's "just" a matter of writing about a topic I know, ChatGPT can fill in a lot. On the topic of languages, I had four years of high school French and have dipped in here and there (very dipping) since. If I wanted to put some effort in advance of maybe traveling some more in France, any recommendations? I know Duolingo but that seems to be more vocabulary.
  - the_doctah 4y ago
    >I’m sure it depends on the language but I’ve found ChatGPT works well for this purpose. How's that? It can't even give you pronunciations.
    - simonw 4y ago
      It can spell them out for you if you ask it to. It might even get them right!
skilled 4y ago
I despise all the corporate tech speak around these topics. Bing is still a shit search engine no matter which way you cut it. ChatGPT is useful if you know what you are doing and have experience in the field you're asking the questions in. Google is still enslaved by its ad revenue from Search so they will not cut its head off just like that. Is it really so hard to talk about these things as they are?
- bagels 4y ago
  Don't worry, Google will figure out how to embed ads in the chat responses.
  - nr2x 4y ago
    which is why they are doomed. they can't imagine a world where they aren't allowed to spy on everybody, but regulations are starting to have an impact there. they can't imagine a world where ads aren't the way to make money, and have 25 years of failing to find a new way. for all the "moonshots" they are still a one trick pony.
  - twelve40 4y ago
    but all the non-Google companies will surely forego the ad revenue out of goodness of their hearts? Ads (and even some form of SEO and spamming) are here to stay, they weren't invented by Google.
    - bagels 4y ago
      Oh, the others will too. I was kind of being facetious about Google succeeding with that strategy. I have no idea what the outcome will be, but I'm kind of concerned about introducing bias or commercial spam in to these products.
- balls187 4y ago
  Have you tried Bing+ChatGPt? I found it exceptionally great. As an aside, if you ever are in BC with kids, check out Kidtropolis. I did, thx to Bing+ChatGPT
m3kw9 4y ago
Google search been stuck in 2000 for the past 20 years. It’s great to see them sweat
epups 4y ago
The article is very light on details. For example, it doesn't explain whether this Magi would also be a LLM and whether there are any relevant architectural differences to GPT 4.
xwdv 4y ago
Google’s finished. Reddit is the number one place I go to first to find information about something, and often the last. Only when I’m desperate for info and can’t find it on Reddit, I decide to wade through the toxic swamp of search results, trying to separate SEO spam from something actually useful.
- nxm 4y ago
  I’m still puzzled by the fact that Sundar is still the CEO. He’s the Steve Ballmer just riding the stock price but the company is falling ever behind on innovation
- toofy 4y ago
  reddit is already heavily astroturfed and this is getting worse by the day. while this method may work, as often as i see this type of comment, i’m guessing reddit’s quality of information will be worse than even google search within months
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Well, there’s always hackernews then
    - salad-tycoon 4y ago
      HN is great for when there exists discussion, can be very deep and well thought out. However, community is very intent on not devolving into endless pointless meme posts which can be a bit stifling and overreacting. Guess you can’t have a cake and eat it too.
      - xwdv 4y ago
        It seems that way at first, but for years hackernews have used steganographic techniques to hide memes encoded into comments for years, just gotta know what to look for.
- lm28469 4y ago
balls187 4y ago
While I don’t doubt Google will create better search features, Google search is dead. My kids will just have a device that responds to their queries using AI. If that device isn’t made by Google, it won’t use Google search. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo will all aggregate data with their own AI front end. Google’s saving grace is Youtube.
- simmerup 4y ago
  If this is the case, you’re effectively talking about replacing the internet with procedurally generated text. That’s all well and good, but with no internet of blogs made by people … what will the AI be trained on?
  - balls187 4y ago
    That’s an interesting question. I’ll rephrase it, what will compel content creators? For some authors, it’s the desire to pass on knowledge. For others, it’s montetization. Just as the internet decimated the print business, Generative AI will decimate the content business. My dad bought Chilton’s automotive manuals. I used Google/YouTube. What will my children use?
    - zamnos 4y ago
      With any luck, AR glasses that show exactly the nuts and bolts to loosen at their pace, instead of a YouTube video with a mechanic standing in the way, that you have to repeatedly rewind and rewatch in order to get the confusing bit.
  - kolinko 4y ago
    Few people read blogs nowadays - they are virtually unfindible with Google, because it's page rank values them poorly.
- dzhiurgis 4y ago
  We already have LLM that can run on smartphones, maybe even watches. Just about every tech company will have a better chatgpt clone very soon.
s1k3s 4y ago
tldr: - they want to add Bard into search - they want to add "AI features into maps" - they want to add a tool to create AI images from Google Image Search So no, they're not actually working on fixing their issues with search, which IMO is in its worst state since creation.
- elforce002 4y ago
  > Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot, a Google director wrote in a document. Google Earth*
breck 4y ago
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" (https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/) I believe Google earnestly worked on this for many years, but about a decade ago, after losing the lawsuit with Google Books, this moved to the back burner. The number one issue to making information universally accessible and useful is no longer technical, it's legal. It's copyright law. Google is making quite a lot of money from the status quo, and is choosing profits over their stated mission. I can't blame them. They carried the torch quite far. Now OpenAI is running with the torch. They pretty much said "FU" to copyright law and trained on everything anyway. (Which is a great thing!). And now, in many many cases, are delivering on Google's stated mission better than Google.
geuis 4y ago
How about Google focus on actually making their search results good again. I have gotten increasingly frustrated with the results that even 6 years ago were more relevant. When I put quotes around a specific phrase, I only want direct matches to those words first, before showing me anything else. Yesterday an uncle was asking me if there are RV parks in SF or nearby. Google proceeds to show me a list of every dog park near my zip code instead. I quote "RV parks" and get similar. When I finally spelled out recreational vehicle parks, I got better results. And every result literally has "RV park" in the title. (Turns out there are 2 in SF. Candlestick park has bad reviews, and the link to the one in the Presidio is 404.) In a year or two all of this AI stuff is going to calm back down when people finally realize that for other than a few product types, sprinkling "AI" onto everything like cheap MSG isn't going to make the core products any better. I don't want a "personalized" search experience. I want accurate results for the damned thing I'm searching for. Those should be exactly the same results everyone else gets when looking for the same thing.
- jonas21 4y ago
  Huh? When I search for "rv parks" san francisco [1], I get the two you mentioned as the top results, and another in South San Francisco as the third result. And then after that, the top web results are articles that list about a dozen more RV parks in the bay area. Are you seeing dramatically different results? [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rv+parks%22+san+francisco https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rv+parks%22+san+francisco
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    with this year's google search, your results are not the same as your distant neighbor's results
    - codeflo 4y ago
      You're basically fucked if you want search results for a different location, and increasingly more fucked if you want them in a language that's not the dominant language of the region you happen to log in from. All of that used to be easy.
machdiamonds 4y ago
What are the potential ways for companies to make money using LLMs for search? If they start altering the LLMs output with ads, it will significantly reduce the usefulness of the search results, like watching a sponsored video on YouTube. On the other hand, if they only display banner ads related to the search, users can simply ask the LLMs for the best product based on their needs, and ignore the ads completely. Only a few users are probably likely to opt in for a monthly subscription, while the majority wouldn't.
stareatgoats 4y ago
Google is right to panic, because they might actually be overtaken now, mired as they are in their ad-driven business model that has largely turned search into SEO-poisoned well [0]. Instead, some future chatbot search will likely win that convinces users it is not influenced by advertisers nor "well-poisoned" by a SEO equivalent. OpenAI is well positioned and has the lead, but the field is wide open at the moment. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCo0A2M1tlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCo0A2M1tlE
dahwolf 4y ago
I still find it amazing how we've normalized the idea that Google can have 3BN and 20BN contracts with Samsung and Apple respectively to make Google the default search engine. This isn't free market or competition, it's buying the market. On point, the path from search engine to AI chatbot, in case it does succeed, is quite dramatic in any case: It might be economically challenging. My understanding is that an AI query is much more expensive to run whilst ad potential is lower. They can place an ad next to an AI answer, but Microsoft might not and subsidize it. But that's not even the biggest threat. If the AI chat is as good as to give a direct answer, it means you won't hit the source website. Which currently runs ads. This might mean websites getting a fraction of their original traffic in the long run and ad impressions decimate. Not to mention that even having a website becomes relatively pointless. Almost nobody would ever visit it, you're just a content slave for the big AI machine. You do all the work but get none of the rewards. The machine does no (human) work and gets all the rewards. This breaks the content "contract" of the internet. The incentives were already bad, but its going to get a whole lot worse.
- disqard 4y ago
  Your closing sentence made me realize that there are "social contracts" on the Internet, and we're suddenly in a new regime. Our notions of how to operate (and how to monetize) will have to recalibrate to this drastically altered milieu.
  - dahwolf 4y ago
    I think the situation was already dire for the open web. Most people are on social networks and consume content there directly or snippets/screenshots of open web content. Engagement on individual websites has been tanking for over a decade, it's truly starving, a few exceptions aside. The open web might as well cease to exist mostly, which might be compensated for with private spaces. That trend was already ongoing.
wildrhythms 4y ago
What I want 99% of the time is a plaintext search of the internet. That's it. Unfortunately 'SEO' and the myriad of ads and other such parasites have poisoned any chance of that actually working.
phmqk76 4y ago
Google search results went from great to passable to atrocious over the last fifteen years. Part of that is their refusal to maintain an index of older content, in an effort to trim costs. There are searches that I used to make ten years ago that yielded the info I was looking for, and it’s as if the info never existed existed. Part of that may be that the sites are gone, but I did read that Google simply doesn’t want to pay the cost of maintaining that older index as time goes by. This is all to say - Google could have not let it’s search product become a hopeless piece of garbage before the threat of real competition emerged.
gxt 4y ago
Why does google only offer a single search product? Why not specialized indexes and engines? I'd pay to reliably find the excerpt of technical doc I'm looking for, good examples, etc. And not just from the public web, partnerships with technology companies so that their documentation is easily consumable.
fariszr 4y ago
This article really shows that google finally realized that its to time to improve and compete. The product and features mentioned here are certainly interesting and could be indeed useful. I am surprised how their communication team has handled this, they appear to be calm, in this "we can do this, we can recover" mode, they aren't dismissive of competition or rumors as shown in their official responses in this article. And unlike others here, I really think its googles game to lose, they have much more data than anyone, they can customize and improve the experience much more than Microsoft can. And I doubt they are truly as behind GPT-4 as LLaMDA showed. Competition is definitely needed in the search space and we finally have it.
gumballindie 4y ago
High noon for a CEO change.
MarkMc 4y ago
> Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products… Two weeks? That’s a pretty slow response to an existential threat
malaz 4y ago
[dead]

95 points by thm 4y ago

kingstoned 4y ago

Let's read their next quarterly report in 10 days to see if ChatGPT caused a revenue decline in their search business.

newaccount74 4y ago
If ChatGPT causes Google's revenue to drop, it will at first be very gradual, and then suddenly.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I suspect that as much as we hype ChatGPT here on HN, its effect on Google’s actual revenue is effectively zero. It could affect their stock price due to informed speculators, but their search revenue is another story. I assume it’s declining anyway but I doubt ChatGPT has a noticeable impact on it yet.
- Baeocystin 4y ago
  Normally I would agree with this take. It's all been so fast, after all. I don't know, though... So many of my non-techie clients have asked me about, or have started using beforehand, ChatGPT over just the past month alone. I've never seen a phase change in user behavior like this before, and it strikes me that it may have had a material impact already.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Hmm.. I couldn't manage to convince my wife to try out ChatGPT a few months ago, but last week she heard about it on the Japanese news and wanted to give it a go I guess that means it managed to get to her the long way around human society, since Japanese evening TV news is pretty much at the rear end of any cultural developments..
  - twelve40 4y ago
    well we've been there before, a wave of massive, fever pitch hype around things like Siri when it came out, then people calm down and realize that it's useful for some situations, but not nearly a shift in the history of the Earth it may have seemed at first.
- codexon 4y ago
  GPT-3.5 is not good enough to replace Google. However GPT-4 is but it's not widely available.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    I thought it powers Bing Chat.
    - codexon 4y ago
      Not everyone has access to that and the last time I checked, it was heavily limited and not allowed to do things like code.
      - lostmsu 4y ago
        Definitely allows code now.
jitl 4y ago
It’s still so, so early for ChatGPT. I just started to change my patterns to go to ChatGPT first and I’m a HN user, maybe not the most cutting edge but certainly in the population of internet users overall I’m far from a laggard.
eldritch_4ier 4y ago
It’s a default everywhere. Usually I’ll go to chatgpt as a 2nd option when google sucks at answering something. Chatgpt is still pretty unreliable for specifics (especially things that involve numbers like dates or statistics).
elforce002 4y ago
I'd willing to bet chatGPT didn't do as much damage (if any) as we think. Google is playing marketing hype before the slope goes down.

m348e912 4y ago

Nothing spurs innovation like game-changing competition. Makes you wonder how long Google would have continued to sit on their laurels if GPT or AI never picked up speed.

leobg 4y ago
Ask Peter Thiel. He has been arguing that Google has been just resting on their monopoly laurels for over a decade now (and that everything else they’ve been doing since then has been basically just a red herring, so they can say, „Oh we are so much more than a search company”).
- PessimalDecimal 4y ago
  Got a link? I'd like to read more. The theory is at least plausible given what we see. They'll kill many products that seem viable, and would help diversify their revenue stream. Does Google really place no premium at all on that? For example, killing Stadia after only a few years, while predictable for Google, is still a head scratcher to me. Building a platform and letting other companies (in this case, game studios) take the big risks on what will sink and what will swim, is a hugely privileged position to be in. Why did they kill it when others are moving into the space?
  - 988747 4y ago
    [dead]
  - leobg 4y ago
    Several of his interviews on YouTube pre 2020 I believe. Might be in “Zero to One” as well. I believe there’s also a talk between him and Eric Schmidt on YouTube where he brought it up.
    - PessimalDecimal 4y ago
      Thank you!
  - 4y ago

mrfinn 4y ago

Strangest thing about this situation is that the "Attention Is All You Need" paper which, from what I read was crucial to give birth to the technology that fuels OpenAI's GPT actually came from Google Labs. So in theory they had the very upper hand implementing it, back in 2018. Did they put it on hold on purpose?

skyhlar 4y ago
Well the paper only talks about translation, the authors never seem to have considered generalizing the architecture to other problems.
- mrfinn 4y ago
  Really? Because LaMDA looks like an effort in that direction but Google never made it publicly available AFAIK. Security concerns maybe? PS. Just read the Lemoine's transcriptions. Just wow.
  - akomtu 4y ago
    Big corps are risk averse. When you're at the top of the pyramid, there's nowhere else to climb, but there are plently of opportunities to fall, so you move very carefully and defensively. The lowly climbers at the bottom have nowhere else to fall, and have plenty of reasons to climb, so they climb in the most careless and brazen manner. Eventually they dislodge the lazy ass at the top and become risk averse. The winner of this show is the owner of the pyramid who sells food to the climbers.
add-sub-mul-div 4y ago
In Minority Report we saw a guy controlling a computer interface by waving his arms in the air, and ever since we've had people talking about how cool it would be to have that in real life. Well, actually, no it wouldn't. In practice your arms would get tired as hell pretty quickly. A mouse on a table surface is actually a pretty great solution, which is why it's lasted. People are drawn to things that look cool and innovative for the sake of it, but we're not good at thinking ahead to how well they'd work in practice. I've been searching the web for so long that it's like breathing. I type a few keywords, hop between the first few results very fast, get what I need and get out. Maybe I have to repeat. Few searches are more complicated than that. I've tried replacing that flow with AI. It's slower to input, slower to get results, the results are opaque with regards to where they came from and how trustworthy they are. And the results aren't better, in my experience as someone for who finds search to have been solved and painless for many years. Even asking one question of an LLM takes more time and effort than a traditional search, and the problem is compounded when I have to iterate on a search. (Also it sucks to cede the kind of power to search providers that gives them leverage to force us to be logged in and monetize what's always been free, but those are just random complaints.) So, going back to your question. My guess is that Google has always known this isn't a better overall experience, once you get over the initial wow factor. But maybe they underestimated how much that wow factor would allow true competition to materialize before the rest of us would figure it out and lose interest.

carlycue 4y ago

https://archive.ph/ti9Ns https://archive.ph/ti9Ns

alphabetting 4y ago

Pretty excited for the conversational tutor for learning languages. Been hearing about it since 2021 but my guess is Google's big investment in Duolingo probably put the brakes on it internally.

elliekelly 4y ago
I’m sure it depends on the language but I’ve found ChatGPT works well for this purpose. I suppose the risk is that I don’t know what I don’t know so it very well might look fine to me but terrible to native speakers. Even so I’m fairly certain it’s better than DuoLingo which is more of a mobile vocabulary game than a language learning platform.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >I suppose the risk is that I don’t know what I don’t know so it very well might look fine to me but terrible to native speakers. I general that describes what little I've used ChatGPT for. I have it write something on a topic I know a fair bit about... "OK. that's pretty good. That's veering into weeds. That's not right. I'm going to work a bit on how this is structured; it's pretty formulaic. Needs some actual references and maybe a quote." If I had to start from not knowing anything, I'm not sure how useful it would be. But when it's "just" a matter of writing about a topic I know, ChatGPT can fill in a lot. On the topic of languages, I had four years of high school French and have dipped in here and there (very dipping) since. If I wanted to put some effort in advance of maybe traveling some more in France, any recommendations? I know Duolingo but that seems to be more vocabulary.
- the_doctah 4y ago
  >I’m sure it depends on the language but I’ve found ChatGPT works well for this purpose. How's that? It can't even give you pronunciations.
  - simonw 4y ago
    It can spell them out for you if you ask it to. It might even get them right!

skilled 4y ago

I despise all the corporate tech speak around these topics. Bing is still a shit search engine no matter which way you cut it. ChatGPT is useful if you know what you are doing and have experience in the field you're asking the questions in. Google is still enslaved by its ad revenue from Search so they will not cut its head off just like that. Is it really so hard to talk about these things as they are?

bagels 4y ago
Don't worry, Google will figure out how to embed ads in the chat responses.
- nr2x 4y ago
  which is why they are doomed. they can't imagine a world where they aren't allowed to spy on everybody, but regulations are starting to have an impact there. they can't imagine a world where ads aren't the way to make money, and have 25 years of failing to find a new way. for all the "moonshots" they are still a one trick pony.
- twelve40 4y ago
  but all the non-Google companies will surely forego the ad revenue out of goodness of their hearts? Ads (and even some form of SEO and spamming) are here to stay, they weren't invented by Google.
  - bagels 4y ago
    Oh, the others will too. I was kind of being facetious about Google succeeding with that strategy. I have no idea what the outcome will be, but I'm kind of concerned about introducing bias or commercial spam in to these products.
balls187 4y ago
Have you tried Bing+ChatGPt? I found it exceptionally great. As an aside, if you ever are in BC with kids, check out Kidtropolis. I did, thx to Bing+ChatGPT

m3kw9 4y ago

Google search been stuck in 2000 for the past 20 years. It’s great to see them sweat

epups 4y ago

The article is very light on details. For example, it doesn't explain whether this Magi would also be a LLM and whether there are any relevant architectural differences to GPT 4.

xwdv 4y ago

Google’s finished. Reddit is the number one place I go to first to find information about something, and often the last. Only when I’m desperate for info and can’t find it on Reddit, I decide to wade through the toxic swamp of search results, trying to separate SEO spam from something actually useful.

nxm 4y ago
I’m still puzzled by the fact that Sundar is still the CEO. He’s the Steve Ballmer just riding the stock price but the company is falling ever behind on innovation
toofy 4y ago
reddit is already heavily astroturfed and this is getting worse by the day. while this method may work, as often as i see this type of comment, i’m guessing reddit’s quality of information will be worse than even google search within months
- xwdv 4y ago
  Well, there’s always hackernews then
  - salad-tycoon 4y ago
    HN is great for when there exists discussion, can be very deep and well thought out. However, community is very intent on not devolving into endless pointless meme posts which can be a bit stifling and overreacting. Guess you can’t have a cake and eat it too.
    - xwdv 4y ago
      It seems that way at first, but for years hackernews have used steganographic techniques to hide memes encoded into comments for years, just gotta know what to look for.
lm28469 4y ago

balls187 4y ago

While I don’t doubt Google will create better search features, Google search is dead. My kids will just have a device that responds to their queries using AI. If that device isn’t made by Google, it won’t use Google search. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo will all aggregate data with their own AI front end. Google’s saving grace is Youtube.

simmerup 4y ago
If this is the case, you’re effectively talking about replacing the internet with procedurally generated text. That’s all well and good, but with no internet of blogs made by people … what will the AI be trained on?
- balls187 4y ago
  That’s an interesting question. I’ll rephrase it, what will compel content creators? For some authors, it’s the desire to pass on knowledge. For others, it’s montetization. Just as the internet decimated the print business, Generative AI will decimate the content business. My dad bought Chilton’s automotive manuals. I used Google/YouTube. What will my children use?
  - zamnos 4y ago
    With any luck, AR glasses that show exactly the nuts and bolts to loosen at their pace, instead of a YouTube video with a mechanic standing in the way, that you have to repeatedly rewind and rewatch in order to get the confusing bit.
- kolinko 4y ago
  Few people read blogs nowadays - they are virtually unfindible with Google, because it's page rank values them poorly.
dzhiurgis 4y ago
We already have LLM that can run on smartphones, maybe even watches. Just about every tech company will have a better chatgpt clone very soon.

s1k3s 4y ago

tldr: - they want to add Bard into search - they want to add "AI features into maps" - they want to add a tool to create AI images from Google Image Search So no, they're not actually working on fixing their issues with search, which IMO is in its worst state since creation.

elforce002 4y ago
> Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot, a Google director wrote in a document. Google Earth*

breck 4y ago

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" (https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/) I believe Google earnestly worked on this for many years, but about a decade ago, after losing the lawsuit with Google Books, this moved to the back burner. The number one issue to making information universally accessible and useful is no longer technical, it's legal. It's copyright law. Google is making quite a lot of money from the status quo, and is choosing profits over their stated mission. I can't blame them. They carried the torch quite far. Now OpenAI is running with the torch. They pretty much said "FU" to copyright law and trained on everything anyway. (Which is a great thing!). And now, in many many cases, are delivering on Google's stated mission better than Google.

geuis 4y ago

How about Google focus on actually making their search results good again. I have gotten increasingly frustrated with the results that even 6 years ago were more relevant. When I put quotes around a specific phrase, I only want direct matches to those words first, before showing me anything else. Yesterday an uncle was asking me if there are RV parks in SF or nearby. Google proceeds to show me a list of every dog park near my zip code instead. I quote "RV parks" and get similar. When I finally spelled out recreational vehicle parks, I got better results. And every result literally has "RV park" in the title. (Turns out there are 2 in SF. Candlestick park has bad reviews, and the link to the one in the Presidio is 404.) In a year or two all of this AI stuff is going to calm back down when people finally realize that for other than a few product types, sprinkling "AI" onto everything like cheap MSG isn't going to make the core products any better. I don't want a "personalized" search experience. I want accurate results for the damned thing I'm searching for. Those should be exactly the same results everyone else gets when looking for the same thing.

jonas21 4y ago
Huh? When I search for "rv parks" san francisco [1], I get the two you mentioned as the top results, and another in South San Francisco as the third result. And then after that, the top web results are articles that list about a dozen more RV parks in the bay area. Are you seeing dramatically different results? [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rv+parks%22+san+francisco https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rv+parks%22+san+francisco
- mistrial9 4y ago
  with this year's google search, your results are not the same as your distant neighbor's results
  - codeflo 4y ago
    You're basically fucked if you want search results for a different location, and increasingly more fucked if you want them in a language that's not the dominant language of the region you happen to log in from. All of that used to be easy.

machdiamonds 4y ago

What are the potential ways for companies to make money using LLMs for search? If they start altering the LLMs output with ads, it will significantly reduce the usefulness of the search results, like watching a sponsored video on YouTube. On the other hand, if they only display banner ads related to the search, users can simply ask the LLMs for the best product based on their needs, and ignore the ads completely. Only a few users are probably likely to opt in for a monthly subscription, while the majority wouldn't.

stareatgoats 4y ago

Google is right to panic, because they might actually be overtaken now, mired as they are in their ad-driven business model that has largely turned search into SEO-poisoned well [0]. Instead, some future chatbot search will likely win that convinces users it is not influenced by advertisers nor "well-poisoned" by a SEO equivalent. OpenAI is well positioned and has the lead, but the field is wide open at the moment. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCo0A2M1tlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCo0A2M1tlE

dahwolf 4y ago

I still find it amazing how we've normalized the idea that Google can have 3BN and 20BN contracts with Samsung and Apple respectively to make Google the default search engine. This isn't free market or competition, it's buying the market. On point, the path from search engine to AI chatbot, in case it does succeed, is quite dramatic in any case: It might be economically challenging. My understanding is that an AI query is much more expensive to run whilst ad potential is lower. They can place an ad next to an AI answer, but Microsoft might not and subsidize it. But that's not even the biggest threat. If the AI chat is as good as to give a direct answer, it means you won't hit the source website. Which currently runs ads. This might mean websites getting a fraction of their original traffic in the long run and ad impressions decimate. Not to mention that even having a website becomes relatively pointless. Almost nobody would ever visit it, you're just a content slave for the big AI machine. You do all the work but get none of the rewards. The machine does no (human) work and gets all the rewards. This breaks the content "contract" of the internet. The incentives were already bad, but its going to get a whole lot worse.

disqard 4y ago
Your closing sentence made me realize that there are "social contracts" on the Internet, and we're suddenly in a new regime. Our notions of how to operate (and how to monetize) will have to recalibrate to this drastically altered milieu.
- dahwolf 4y ago
  I think the situation was already dire for the open web. Most people are on social networks and consume content there directly or snippets/screenshots of open web content. Engagement on individual websites has been tanking for over a decade, it's truly starving, a few exceptions aside. The open web might as well cease to exist mostly, which might be compensated for with private spaces. That trend was already ongoing.

wildrhythms 4y ago

What I want 99% of the time is a plaintext search of the internet. That's it. Unfortunately 'SEO' and the myriad of ads and other such parasites have poisoned any chance of that actually working.

phmqk76 4y ago

Google search results went from great to passable to atrocious over the last fifteen years. Part of that is their refusal to maintain an index of older content, in an effort to trim costs. There are searches that I used to make ten years ago that yielded the info I was looking for, and it’s as if the info never existed existed. Part of that may be that the sites are gone, but I did read that Google simply doesn’t want to pay the cost of maintaining that older index as time goes by. This is all to say - Google could have not let it’s search product become a hopeless piece of garbage before the threat of real competition emerged.

gxt 4y ago

Why does google only offer a single search product? Why not specialized indexes and engines? I'd pay to reliably find the excerpt of technical doc I'm looking for, good examples, etc. And not just from the public web, partnerships with technology companies so that their documentation is easily consumable.

fariszr 4y ago

This article really shows that google finally realized that its to time to improve and compete. The product and features mentioned here are certainly interesting and could be indeed useful. I am surprised how their communication team has handled this, they appear to be calm, in this "we can do this, we can recover" mode, they aren't dismissive of competition or rumors as shown in their official responses in this article. And unlike others here, I really think its googles game to lose, they have much more data than anyone, they can customize and improve the experience much more than Microsoft can. And I doubt they are truly as behind GPT-4 as LLaMDA showed. Competition is definitely needed in the search space and we finally have it.

gumballindie 4y ago

High noon for a CEO change.

MarkMc 4y ago

> Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products… Two weeks? That’s a pretty slow response to an existential threat

malaz 4y ago

[dead]