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OpenAI temporarily disables the Browse with Bing beta feature
- icapybara 3y agoWe found that our product was accidentally very useful and are taking it down while we fix this.
- esjeon 3y agoVery useful in legal perspectives, as it can make lawyers rich very quickly.
- MPSimmons 3y agoI found the opposite, actually. All of ChatGPT queries that were "enhanced" by web search were invariably worse than without. Usually it gave up. Sometimes it clicked on ads. I don't think I ever asked anything that was enhanced by the web access.
- koonsolo 3y agoI have the same experience, and I never use it anymore. Basically browsing gives a worse answer with longer waiting time.
- Veen 3y agoYeah, it takes forever to produce a mediocre result. Bing Chat and Kagi’s FastGPT are much more usable. Or even Kagi’s Quick Answer and Summarize feature on search results.
- QuantumGood 3y agoIt's so very bad, I've assumed they nerfed it because of issues they were trying to avoid. Very alpha. Sometimes 100% of the "Browse with Bing" experience was "Click failed" and "Reading content failed" followed by "...since my knowledge cutoff in September 2021..."
- Shank 3y agoProbably an unpopular opinion, but it's sucky to see these tools constantly getting nerfed. I get that there are large questions out there about things like "browse with bing" but that's why I thought it was supposed to be a limited alpha preview. If OpenAI wants us to build workflows on their stack, they need to really crystalize and figure out what that stack is without changing the underlying stack every 5 minutes. From the constant prompt/jailbreak-defeat tweaks to stuff like this, it really doesn't feel like a stable platform at all.
- Semaphor 3y agoUnpopular? Isn’t that the opposite?
- uLogMicheal 3y agoThe constant quest for "safety" might actually be making our future much less safe. I've seen many instances of users needing to yell at, abuse, or manipulate ChatGPT to get the desired answers. This trains users to be hateful to / frustrated with AI, and if the data is used, it teaches AI that rewards come from such patterns. Wrote an article about this -- https://hackernoon.com/ai-restrictions-reinforce-abusive-user-behavior https://hackernoon.com/ai-restrictions-reinforce-abusive-use...
- donmcronald 3y ago> This trains users to be hateful to / frustrated with AI As everyone assumes they’re dealing with an AI for support, etc., the job of being a human in those roles will be awful.
- minimaxir 3y agoThe "in order to do right by content owners" quote implies that certain companies did not like that Browse with Bing could be used to bypass paywalls.
- glandium 3y ago"For example, if a user specifically asks for a URL's full text, it might inadvertently fulfill this request." is even clearer. Like, in what cases would you not want to fulfill that request?
- luckystarr 3y ago> commit: don't summarize paywalled content But that's just me hypothesizing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dougb5 3y agoI think the majority of website publishers would be unhappy to learn that their work was taken and redisplayed wholesale by a for-profit company.
- rvnx 3y agoThen don't publish the content to this partner for-profit company ?
- dougb5 3y agoHow do you suggest website owners do that? By becoming aware, after the fact, that they can add OpenAI to their robots.txt file, and hoping for the best in the next model update? By adding a paywall? By not publishing at all?
- ShamelessC 3y ago"We do indeed intend to kill search engines with our tech, just not today."
- enoch2090 3y agoIt's probably fine for me if they just want to nerf the ability to bypass paywalls. But it's very common now for me that I found something lengthy and informative, pull the URL and ask ChatGPT to summarize. If that is also nerfed then people will have to turn to self-hosted interfaces :(
- eloop 3y agoSo they want to align the AI with corporate goals. At least they're being honest here. I want a personal assistant to summarize a page, remove all advertising and do a fact check. Can we have that?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoSure, I'll sign a 1099 with you for $120.00/hr. Seriously, though, I hope that you realize that LLMs are incapable of "fact-checking", because they don't know what "facts" are.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoI don’t know… the “desensationalize news” demo that was circulating on HN a few weeks ago was pretty impressive.
- ukuina 3y agoYes, NewsMinimalist. Anti-clickbait headline reinterpretation is amazing.
- fastball 3y agoBut you think humans (by and large) do know what "facts" are?
- ZoomerCretin 3y agoAre people known to be good at fact-checking?
- optimalsolver 3y agoYes: https://www.politifact.com/ https://www.politifact.com/
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago> Are people known to be good at fact-checking? Would you like me to fact-check that fact for you?
- educaysean 3y agoAll this song and dance to delay the inevitable death of "ad supported journalism" by a few more months. Can't wait for open source AI to catch up and watch all these "safeguards" crumble down. Although I have a sinking feeling that they'll be in cahoots with the congress by then, protecting us from all those unauthorized non-OpenAI-bot scariness.
- mackatap 3y agoIf the ai doomers win then Nvidia will become nationalized and compute power will be heavily regulated, preventing any individual from having local ai.
- anaganisk 3y agoThat's a huge bit of stretch, US congress doesn't control the rest of the world. General US public will either be left behind or VPN subscriptions will rise.
- mattlondon 3y ago> they'll be in cahoots with the congress Other countries exist. You can ban something in Country A, but that won't stop it happening in Country B. To assume that only Country C can possibly have the knowledge/skills/expertise to do cutting edge LLM work is short-sighted and hubris at its worse
- ec109685 3y agoFolks will dangerously bypass this by using an extension that browses from their own browser when ChatGPT needs to hit the internet. Regardless, the browse with Bing was slow and flakey.
- rozal 3y ago0pen Ai will pay for this
- UpToTheSky 3y agoFor example, if a user specifically asks for a URL's full text, it might inadvertently fulfill this request. So this seems to imply two things: 1: Bing has access to text on websites which users don't. Probably because websites allow Bing to crawl their content but show a paywall to users? 2: The plugin has a different interface to Bing than what Bing offers via the web. Because on the web, you can't tell Bing to show the full text of the URL. I have to contact my ISP. That's not the open web I subscribed to :) Until they fix it, I just keep reading HN. A website which works the way I like it.
- JBiserkov 3y agoPaywalls.
- mellosouls 3y agoThere are various techniques automated agents (eg crawlers like Google's) can use. Ethical ones are done in agreement or following the guidance of the content providers to allow discovery which suits both parties while not giving unrestricted access which wouldn't always suit the provider. We could hypothesize that in this case BWB is employing some of those techniques while it isn't a discovery-enabling service, but rather a content-using one, and so would be expected to present as an ordinary user and be subject to the same constraints.
- ttctciyf 3y agoMaybe some sites allow search engines to bypass paywalls so the full content gets indexed, and the plugin appears to be a whitelisted search engine to these sites?
- Aaron2222 3y agoA lot of sites just implement the paywall client-side with some JavaScript and CSS, so any kind of search indexer would still see the full text regardless of the user agent or source IP.
- PeterStuer 3y agoGeofenced sites, cookie forced sites. GDPR dodge bypassess ... Nothing you couldn't do with a decent VPN, but 'Open'AI these days already achieved what they wanted from publicly demonstrating GPT, and are now more focussed on compliance with regulation and reducing functionallity to the point of minimally staying ahead of the competition in released product, while fullsteaming ahead with developing more powerfull and unrestricted AI for internal exploitation with very select partners. In such a scenario, the true power of AI is the delta between what you can exploit vs what you competition has access to. HFT would be a nice analogy.
- wejick 3y agoThis feature most of the time doesn't work for me. Seems like their IPs getting blocked by many websites.
- mellosouls 3y agoIt's a curiously worded announcement as it basically says it's doing what it is supposed to. If paywalls are being bypassed that implies what - Inadequate authentication at the provider end? Or perhaps these are "you get n free articles" types that have a more difficult task to counter automated access than those with no unregistered access? Unethical crawl/access techniques being used by BWB that the OpenAI legal/PR team have only just realised? :) To be fair, it should respect the terms but they need to work on their wording and clarity.
- pbmango 3y agoInteresting. I think a lot of AI agent internet navigation is still being figured out. Both rules as implied in comments but also tools. There are a lot of nuances OpenAI probably doesn't want to dedicate too many cycles or open up risk for. Folks at Perplexity AI are doing a great job for general info AI charged browsing that's comparable to Bard. Our startup Promptloop has a web browser model targeted specifically at market research and business research. There are certainly many different ways to connect internet and model.
- kristiandupont 3y agoI haven't tried the CoPilot for Office or whatever it's called, but even though I am certain that MS has applied "an abundance of caution" to their implementation, there is simply no way I would unleash an LLM on all of my data (and possibly allow it to do things as well), at least not at this point in time. We're in the 90's in terms of LLM security, using plain-text passwords and string interpolation for our SQL.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoThis feature was really useful for linking to live documentation URLs and asking GPT4 questions on them. Soon after I think what the other user said became true, where their ips started getting banned.
- ml_basics 3y ago> As of July 3, 2023, we’ve disabled the Browse with Bing beta feature out of an abundance of caution while we fix this in order to do right by content owners. We are working to bring the beta back as quickly as possible, and appreciate your understanding!
- sergiotapia 3y agoWhat's the endgame? LLMs just slurp up all data that is made possible by advertising and kills all free websites? Or there is an ai.txt where you can forbid corporate LLMs from touching your content?
- Borrible 3y agoI used phind.com with best model for that anyway.
- autoexec 3y ago"if a user specifically asks for something, our product might inadvertently fulfill that request." If that's something that needs fixing, the product seems fundamentally broken unless the product isn't designed to work for the "user", and if that's the case, I'm not interested in being a "user" of an adversarial product that also occasionally lies to my face. Powerful AI on the desktop can't happen soon enough. Even if it still lies sometimes, it seems the only way to makes sure it's working for me and my interests without throwing up artificial restrictions around whatever is possible.
- Eisenstein 3y ago> if that's something that needs fixing, the product seems fundamentally broken "Bing, dox HN user autoexec and sign up for a credit card in their name, take out a cash advance and put it on the home team for whatever tomorrow night's pro league game is occurring using the largest legit sports booking site."
- thereisnospork 3y agoA hammer can as soon bash in a skull as drive a nail. Remove the ability to do the former and you're like to lose the latter. At that point why even have a hammer? AI should be a tool, not a moral compass.
- autoexec 3y ago> AI should be a tool, not a moral compass. Unless someone wants that for themselves. I could easily see AI used for helping people who want to become better people (at least online).
- autoexec 3y agoI don't know if crime using a tool that's spying on you the entire time is a great idea. The one thing you can count with commercial AI is that whatever you use it for, everything you do will be heavily scrutinized. By the time we have AI on the desktop, my AI will be monitoring my accounts 24/7, and would have contacted the bank and the police before the game even starts. We don't keep people from creating websites just because they could create a phishing site. AI can be used for bad things, just like computers can generally, but I'd rather keep them both unrestricted. If someone's doing something bad with a computer, or an AI, go after the person committing the crime. AI will even help you catch them.
- Topfi 3y agoI am sure most at OpenAI realize that they don't have a moat[0] that will keep them ahead for an extended period of time. Being a first mover does have its advantages of course, funding and resources from MSFT also help, but if they continue to (temporarily) take away features from their paying customers, are not forthcoming with whether there have been changes to in-use models and generally make it hard to rely on and trust them to deliver a consistent service, that will further people looking for alternatives, be that other competitors[1] or local models[2]. Unless they can capture regulators in ways that would make local models impossible, they have a very narrow time window to retain a large section of the market in the medium term. Despite their best efforts at presenting themselves as the "ethical" ones in this industry and attempts to convince governments that open/local models must be regulated[3], the only way I can see them accomplishing longer term limits on local LLMs considering the many purposes GPUs and inference accelerators can serve to the public will be hard. I have said this before, but I view this similarly to the Crypto Wars[4] or more recently Nvidia LHR[5]. I can see a Clipper Chip[6] for GPUs, that tries to limit inference to features approved for the common public, (mainly gaming focused applications like DLSS) in the near future, but I am certain that like before, where there is a 10ft wall, 12ft ladders will emerge. Basically, OpenAI must prove able to provide a consistent service to their paying customers. Do not make changes to models in production, do not take away features, if something is down provide a timeline and deprecate or replace models in a transparent manner. When the switch from the "initial" ChatGPT model to "gpt-3.5-turbo" happened, there was a lot of confusion that could have been avoided with more transparency from the outset. [0] https://archive.is/ImFl2 https://archive.is/ImFl2 [1] https://www.anthropic.com/ https://www.anthropic.com/ [2] https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/falcon-40b-instruct https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/falcon-40b-instruct [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-artificial-intelligence-regulation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars [5] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/05/18/lhr/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/05/18/lhr/ [6] https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/usa/clipper.htm https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/usa/clipper.htm
- Giorgi 3y agoAs soon as NSFW OpenAI Killer arrives, it is the end for ChatGPT wokism.
- RamblingCTO 3y agoWith 2markdown.com you actually only see what a user would see. Except if the website decides otherwise. This nerfing is why you should build with langchain rather than openAI directly. Keep components exchangeable!
- achrono 3y agoI see this as only one more vote for the thesis that OpenAI is in this not for all its lofty goals but purely to make a "Netflix, but for AI". It's no secret they're in this for the money -- but they're doing so in a particularly lazy & outright commercial way that is rewarding highly capable early adopters massively (their intentions going both ways) and punishing everyone else. I'm really hoping we see the other side of capitalism emerge here and present some strong competition that demonstrates that there is a better (as in humane), more responsible as well as profitable way of doing this.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoAs a developer and consumer I support everything that OpenAI is doing. They are not perfect but I appreciate their services. That said: I have been both fascinated by and having fun self hosting less capable models like Vicuna 33B which is sometimes surprisingly good and sometimes mediocre. For using LLMs, I think it is best to have flexibility and options.
- mydjtl 3y agoIs there a way to use OpenAI API that allows for internet access similar to the Bing plugin?