[HN Gopher] AI is making it easier to create more noise, when al...
___________________________________________________________________
AI is making it easier to create more noise, when all I want is
good search
Author : saeedesmaili
Score : 305 points
Date : 2023-03-08 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachsmith.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachsmith.com)
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 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.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| 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.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| 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
| mjevans wrote:
| Back of napkin approach:
|
| Allow-list some sites that already have a good reputation for
| useful results (probably anything scraped for summary snips).
|
| Penalize all other sites based on the quantity of ads and
| similar non-content.
|
| Use the old web search core on what's left.
| ssklash wrote:
| Kagi lets you do exactly this. You can allow/block list
| certain site results, or create a curated list of domains to
| include results from.
| guluarte wrote:
| sadly closed gardens like reddit, human moderation is the way
| to go
| avereveard wrote:
| > Can't wait to see how this affects hn comments over the next
| 5 years
|
| I think new form of comment ranking will take over, all those
| system we're building to detect ai spam will also double as
| scoring system to evaluate content originality. the problem
| will be to differentiate good original content and bad original
| content, but that can be left to flagging systems.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new
| google_
|
| If it's solvable. There are many problems that aren't.
|
| Perhaps the new Google would just be a 1996-era Yahoo! human-
| curated catalog.
| philote wrote:
| I've often wanted something like that yahoo catalog. I miss
| the days of being able to browse categories of sites.
| tremon wrote:
| My hope is for something like YaCy with a web-of-trust
| overlay. I'd want it to only show results from peers that I
| trust, and if garbage starts showing up in my search
| results, I want to know from which peer it came so I can
| un-trust it.
|
| Which in my mind is somewhat of a middle ground between a
| search engine and a directory: what I'd want is a whitelist
| of curated directories that contain domains to be crawled
| by my search engine.
| izzydata wrote:
| My solution is to go back to meat space and physical libraries
| of information.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It's seriously hard to beat libraries. For a while, it looked
| like the internet was making them less instrumental, but I
| think the balance started tipping back toward them a few
| years back.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| Websites are seo-ing Reddit now (shit things like: Top ten
| airfryer recommended by Reddit), so appending reddit is not
| enough anymore. In a very close future we are going to have to
| type the whole site:reddit.com.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Well, I already do that today. Probably won't help too much,
| though, cause AI will generate some legit looking
| posts/comments and you will have a hard time figuring out if
| they are written by a bot or person.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Exactly. I keep coming back to the fact that, between all
| the different ways AI can generate content, the entire
| user-contributed-internet is about to be completely flooded
| with amicable and true-sounding nonsense with a peppering
| of whatever viewpoint the bot-runner wants to push.
|
| I honestly don't see any way out besides Digital ID -- if a
| person has to provide the host with information about who
| they really are, then once they're discovered the host can
| actually prevent further abuse. Otherwise, a single person
| can create infinite bots to shill whatever product or
| viewpoint they want.
|
| Which is why I have conspiracy theories about the
| conspiracy theories about digital ID. The same actors who
| use the internet to push misinformation benefit from
| anonymity.
| pictureofabear wrote:
| It's almost like the Matrix but in cyberspace where
| humans are constantly trying to escape the bots, except
| instead of mining the humans for energy, the bots are
| mining data.
| nico wrote:
| 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.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Why were you using a web search if you didn't want to access
| the web (find a website)?
|
| Openai says don't use chatgpt for search. Microsoft says
| double check everything Sydney tells you. Is there an
| argument for LLMs replacing search besides laziness?
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| If this works as we wish(no saying that is posible), this
| will reduce the amount of seo spam trash you read to 0%,
| will allow to investigate things faster, and will allow to
| have more recursive way to expore topics. And this will be
| key to make ok google more similar at what we wish as ai
| companion
| napier wrote:
| 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.
| beauzero wrote:
| I was pretty decent early on. Now I just use it to augment
| copilot...generally when I don't have a specific "start"
| but just an idea...works better than dumping a comment into
| copilot. I was hoping with the 3 tabs creative -> more
| exact it would be a little better but I haven't seen any
| difference. It isn't quite as interesting as when it was
| regularly hallucinating. I found the hallucinations to
| bubble up inspiration...forgotten facts, unused paths, etc.
| nico wrote:
| Keep reading great things about it. Will have to try it.
| Thank you for the recommendation!
| wetpaws wrote:
| It is so low heavily lobotomized that 99% I find much
| better results with chatgpt even though it is technically
| an older model.
| nirav72 wrote:
| 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.
| nico wrote:
| Could you mention or link the extension here? Thank you!
| nirav72 wrote:
| Sure. The one I'm using is WebChatGPT:
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webchatgpt-
| chatgpt...
|
| Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/web-chatgpt/?...
|
| note - I haven't tried the firefox version. But the
| chrome one works fine in Brave.
|
| Edit: Source for the above extension:
| https://github.com/qunash/chatgpt-advanced
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Everyday I'm using Google search less and less, while using
| ChatGPT more and more.
|
| Wasn't ChatGPT3 trained on web content with a cutoff of 2021?
| Future ChatGPT versions will likely be trained on data
| tainted by AI-generated fluff, and will face the same
| challenges Google is facing with today's web content.
| whstl wrote:
| This is already a problem with "content marketing"
| companies.
|
| Most of those SEO-spam blogposts are based on older
| internet content, and written by non-expert copywriters
| that can write about 10 different subjects on a given day.
| A lot of the work is just information compilation and
| rephrasing, taking some items from a few Buzzfeed lists and
| changing the text a bit. Some stuff like SEO-spam medical
| advice can be downright dangerous if done without care. And
| a lot of companies in this field have been experimenting
| with AI for at least 10 years.
|
| The problem however is that they require sources, be it
| freelancers of AI. And there is so much corporate blogspam
| today, especially in the areas that use content marketing,
| that it is becoming harder and harder to find "first
| generation" content written by an actual expert. Google
| isn't helping by prioritizing newer content.
| coldtea wrote:
| And at an even worse scale, because soon AI-created SPAM
| will hugely dominate actual content...
| jmbwell wrote:
| And when this serpent starts eating its tail and the AI
| starts returning highly-ranked results consisting of AI-
| generated content, ... well, I hope I can move to a farm by
| then.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Hmm, maybe the singularity won't be a time when the AI
| take over, but instead when a single element's
| hallucination causes a cascade failure that brings it all
| down.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| This is exactly what I think will happen. The internet is
| quickly going to fill up with AI garbage, and it's going
| to be more and more difficult for AI to source new human
| content to feed into it's own model.
| nirav72 wrote:
| It kind of already is. Self-published ebooks on amazon's
| kindle store are currently flooded with garbage written
| using ChatGPT.
| nico wrote:
| It's been like that since humans have been around. That's
| the way knowledge spreads.
|
| We humans have been repeating and imitating ourselves
| forever. That's even the way babies learn to talk.
|
| And we are not all clones, we don't all think, say or do
| exactly the same things. But most just repeat and consume
| the same content and ideas (movies, music, books,
| languages, media).
| tremon wrote:
| _That's even the way babies learn to talk_
|
| No, it's not. Babies learn to talk by babbling, and then
| by taking cues from their parents which babbles elicit a
| response and which don't. If you want to translate that
| to AI, it would mean that the AI would spew random
| garbage and then learn to filter its garbage from the
| responses to its outputs. That's pretty far away from
| what ChatGPT and other language models are doing right
| now, because they stop learning before they start
| producing any output.
| mfcl wrote:
| (Why are you being downvoted?)
|
| I think the important part is to have a minimum of
| filtering. Humans consume knowledge brought by others
| humans, but most of the time we cherry pick the true and
| useful knowledge and reject what turns out to be false
| (ideally).
|
| I think what AI brings to the table is automation and
| speed, but the quality is not better. So if AI starts
| consuming its own content, will that decrease the quality
| of knowledge* in general?
|
| (*Here I mean the first knowledge you quickly get from a
| search or asking some AI, not what you could get after
| hours/days of research.)
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| HN crowd is so very skeptical about the usefulness of
| a.i., especially related to content generation. I share
| the skepticism (the positive and hence out of control
| feedback loop of ai consuming its own content
| recursively). But on the other hand, when smart people
| enhance the primitives of the a.i. algorithms, a.i. might
| become better at rating the quality of its own output.
| Not by means of the question, 'does this look like
| anything found on the internet' , rather by the question,
| 'does this make sense, is this even possible, do the
| numbers add up' ? Also, it is not very hard to "freeze" a
| pre-ai knowledge base or NN, and use that as a reference
| for sensibility.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _But on the other hand, when smart people enhance the
| primitives of the a.i. algorithms, a.i. might become
| better at rating the quality of its own output_
|
| All incentives of massive industries like SPAM, "content
| creation", "news" publishing, and advertising, are
| against it becoming better at rating the quality of its
| output - or rather, just have it become better at being
| undetactable but still a cheap fast mass produced wall of
| text...
| coldtea wrote:
| >It's been like that since humans have been around.
| That's the way knowledge spreads. We humans have been
| repeating and imitating ourselves forever.
|
| Humans repeating and imitating others has historically
| been a "volatile memory" keep-alive mechanism. Basically
| saving culture and knowledge in people's minds and
| helping it transfer, as literacy was low and (manual)
| writing and book copying scarce, expensive, and time-
| consuming.
|
| Even when, with the advent of typography writing was
| easier to reproduce, but still somewhat costly (cost of
| materials, typesetting, distribution, etc.) and
| gatekeepers (publishing houses, bookstores, etc.) ensured
| that most stuff is somewhat original, not just copies or
| random permutations of the same content. Indexing was
| also costly manual labor (creating dictionaries, curated
| bibliographies, books with oversight on a subject matter
| and references to what the main science/wisdom/etc about
| that is, library collections, etc.)
|
| Now, however, SPAM and AI-SPAM is on mostly permanent
| storage - and permanent storage, indexing, and
| duplication/reproduction costs close to zero and happens
| automatically at huge scale.
|
| So, no, it's not the same thing. The same way breaking a
| quick little wind is not the same as having full-blown
| Taco-Bell-inspired diarhea.
| [deleted]
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Yeah someone needs to figure out how to get a continuously
| trained online model up and running without running the
| risk of people figuring out how to exploit it
| krupan wrote:
| Is this actually giving you good results? The few times I
| tried to use chatGPT instead of google I got terrible
| results:
|
| - Horrible and wrong driving directions
|
| - Buggy incomplete code
|
| - long winded explanations of how it was just a chat AI and
| not a whatever whatever blah blah blah
|
| I found it to be tedious and incredibly untrustworthy
| Groxx wrote:
| It'll probably look something like this.
| userbinator wrote:
| Does ChatGPT know things like part numbers for mid-80s ICs by
| Japanese manufacturers?
|
| That's what I use search for. Unfortunately Google is getting
| worse at those queries, but I doubt AI is going to be better.
|
| Beware of wanting "answers" or "solutions" --- that's a
| slippery slope towards complacency and loss of agency,
| replaced by corporate subservience. Classic example: instead
| of finding a service manual or discussions on repairing
| something, AI may try to convince you to buy a new one.
| gmadsen wrote:
| that seems like exactly something bing could give you
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| ChatGPT does surprisingly well at this task. My question
| was very biased towards it knowing the answer because I
| asked it for examples of mid-80s Japanese ICs when google
| failed me, but it definitely knows a ton of model numbers
| for real parts from the era. Give it a shot with a real-
| world example and report back
| squarefoot wrote:
| If you are looking for data sheets, the Internet Archive
| contains some. Example: https://archive.org/search?query=su
| bject%3Atoshiba+integrate...
|
| Also, a Google search followed by "site:archive.org" will
| filter out everything not coming from archive.org, and
| "filetype:pdf" will return only pdf files.
|
| Sometimes it can be more effective a search for images, so
| that one can recognize the target book by the cover. That
| can be especially effective with old titles that were
| scanned but not OCR'ed where the file name is all one can
| search for, so that ambiguous part names (for example ICs
| named like airplane flights) can be easily recognized.
| jsenn wrote:
| > that the context-awareness is just a very well done
| illusion
|
| Could you expand on this? The context awareness is the part
| that blows my mind. I would be disappointed/fascinated to
| find out that it's "just" a simple set of tricks!
| nico wrote:
| ChatGPT is "only" a chat interface to GPT.
|
| GPT basically has access to two contexts: its internals,
| and the prompt that it gets
|
| Then when you ask something to ChatGPT, it takes your
| prompt and it generates a new prompt that includes the
| previous messages in your session, so that GPT can use them
| as context.
|
| But, there's a limit to the size of the prompt. And it's
| not that big.
|
| So then ChatGPT's magic is figuring out how to crafts
| prompts, within the size limits, to feed GPT, so that it
| has enough context to give a good answer.
|
| Essentially, ChatGPT is some really amazing prompt-
| engineering system with a great interface.
| jsenn wrote:
| That makes sense. So ChatGPT has to use some cleverness
| to present the relevant previous text in the current
| prompt, but the language model is still responsible for
| pulling out the meaning of that context and responding
| appropriately. I remain mind-blown :)
| nico wrote:
| Exactly. Very eloquently put.
| nirav72 wrote:
| >while using ChatGPT more and more.
|
| I'm assuming you're using ChatGPT to validate/generate
| technical solutions such as code and not necessarily
| searching for specific information? If its for information
| search, then how do you deal with the fact that at times it
| tends to make up a things that are factually incorrect or
| logically inconsistent?
| ruszki wrote:
| By using Google to verify. It's still okayish to find out
| whether a statement is true or not. The problem is that
| Google is becoming worse to find that statement. For
| example, I wanted to figure out how I should replace a
| given dependency. Google was terrible, so was
| Stackoverflow. ChatGPT gave me a guess. For such questions
| it's quite right in about 3/4th of the queries, and when I
| search for the given guess Google finds it immediately
| whether it's fine or not.
| passion__desire wrote:
| [0] : "You can try doing a web search with the URL, but
| Frankly, I haven't had much success with that."
|
| In my experience, Bing is the best search engine for finding
| info on deleted videos - for example:
| bing.com/search?q=youtu.be/t1wjL4BqXlI 1st result shows title
| of video: "Awolnation "Sail" - Unlimited Gravity Remix"
|
| [1] Daniel Dennett talking about why we should still support
| explicit string search.
|
| [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/3876476/how-to-
| fin...
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/arEvPIhOLyQ?t=1330
| stockhorn wrote:
| How about letting the users flag each website with a label "seo
| spam", "useful", " fakenews", "inaccurate"... and display a
| summary of the votes as a badge beneath each link in the search
| results?
|
| We could create a browser extension to add this functionality
| to all search engines at once. Using a web of trust mechanism
| to ensure that we only get real votes...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999285
| Veen wrote:
| Wouldn't work. You'd have "SEO professionals" selling
| automated upvote, downvote, and labelling botnet services
| almost immediately. Nothing that can be gamed is reliable at
| scale.
| pushfoo wrote:
| Spammers would submit fake tags faster than everyday users.
| Since this is a social problem rather than a technical one,
| maybe old-school trust networks are worth considering
| instead.
| bnjms wrote:
| I assume implicitly that votes only count for users two
| degrees of separation from you and it's tied to real life
| friends registry. Wish FB hasn't happened and the web of
| trust stuff turned into something useful.
| pushfoo wrote:
| I don't think real life is the main issue. Instead, it
| seems like the same issue PGP has: the benefits never
| outweighed the bad UX for most people.
| xgbi wrote:
| Tie this to a proof of << browse >> and a blockchain to weed
| out the big players and you got yourself a business model !
| voz_ wrote:
| Blockchain is garbage and totally irrelevant here.
| originalcopying wrote:
| no its not. blockchain is a legitimate innovation looking
| for an real world use case.
|
| blockchain technology's biggest problem is the fact that
| its use cases touch the ideological foundations of our
| global culture. And bitcoin operated on the foundational
| level of any all governments in the world.
|
| Bitcoin is just one use case of the technology, another
| is land registries. Again, foundational institutions of
| society; not the kind of thing that has ever been
| peacefully reformed ever.
|
| Your comment is evidence that 'cultural directors' of our
| civilization decided to destroy this technology. However
| it's funny to notice that they will proceed to implement
| their own versions of it: possibly the renminbi unless
| the dollars bomb them out of existence? but I'm so far
| into guesswork that this whole comment ought to be voted
| into the really light grays.
| originalcopying wrote:
| [flagged]
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Steam has user tags.
|
| The last time I referred to them was to tag Elite: Dangerous
| Odyssey as "Early Access".
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| We're already drowning in an ocean of SEO bullshit without help
| from AI. Adding another ocean isn't really going to change
| anything IMO.
| tomxor wrote:
| > 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.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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).
|
| 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-invest...
| O__________O wrote:
| 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?
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| Actually, not very easy as the LLMs don't give you sources and
| literally make things up by design.
| politician wrote:
| Only about 10% of the links I ask for don't resolve.
| sometdog wrote:
| 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.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >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.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Biased much?
| jsheard wrote:
| 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
|
| 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.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| I got so many links to github repos which didn't exist lol
| visarga wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| That said with enough training and training data, the
| line between "plausible sounding" and "accurate" gets
| thinner and thinner. This will be especially true as
| these AI models refine their results based on user
| interactions. Being right for the wrong reasons becomes
| less and less relevant the higher the accuracy goes up,
| and at a certain point, it might get so good that no one
| cares.
|
| Maybe human intelligence is more like that than we're
| willing to admit ;)
| jerf wrote:
| Source identification isn't a space amenable to guessing,
| no matter how much data you throw at it.
|
| Here's an exercise you can try: Cite some information
| from the next issue of Science to be published. Cite
| anything you like from it.
|
| You can make some plausible stuff up. You could make even
| more plausible stuff up if you went and scanned over the
| past few issues first. But without specific knowledge of
| the contents of the next issue, you aren't going to be
| able to create real citations. This is what LLMs lack, by
| their nature. It's not a criticism, it's a description.
|
| You can't guess sources. The possibility space is too
| large, the distribution too pathological, and the
| criteria for being correct too precise.
|
| GPT will never cite sources correctly. Some future AI
| that uses GPT as a component, but isn't entirely made out
| of a language model, will be able to, by pulling it out
| of the non-GPT component. Maybe it'll need to be built as
| an explicit feature, maybe it won't, only time can tell.
| But expecting language models to cite sources correctly
| is not sensible. It's just not a thing they can do.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Lies and falsehoods are just as valid sentences as the
| truth.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you have shareable links to good tutorials about using
| embeddings with ChatGPT for this case?
| [deleted]
| neovive wrote:
| The books sounds very interesting. I never worked with
| LlamaIndex and now I'm intrigued by the possibilities!
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| 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
| luxuryballs wrote:
| why was this so hard to read? maybe use the AI next time :D
| jamesgill wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| AI, the cause of, and solution to all of our problems. At least
| on the Internet.
| seydor wrote:
| 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
| all2 wrote:
| 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.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I cant wait to watch this play out
| twelve40 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| They find a direction in activation space that satisfies
| logical consistency properties, such as that a statement and
| its negation have opposite truth values.
| thanatropism wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm just starting down this path myself. Any resources outside
| of official HF docs you would recommend?
| leobg wrote:
| sbert.net is all you need.
| Kiro wrote:
| 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/
| runlevel1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| flatline wrote:
| 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.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| > It is ultimately going to force a complete reinvention of
| the written assignment.
|
| If by complete reinvention you mean returning to what we
| used to do, which is write essays with a pencil during
| class without using a computer.
|
| > This is just the beginning, even if the tool appears to
| be a mostly-useless toy for any real-world applications.
|
| It is not possible to tell on this side where LLMs (or any
| invention) fall on the spectrum of 3D tv to the smartphone.
| It will become apparent in the future and 50% of us will
| have been wrong but anyone who claims to know is just
| BSing.
| jfengel wrote:
| The fact that it has a notable downside is certainly
| interesting. School assignments are well suited to LLMs
| because they also don't present new information. That's not
| what they're for; they're for assessing what the student
| knows.
|
| They're usually fairly obvious, but it's hard to prove.
| Unlike much ordinary copypaste plagiarism, you can't
| trivially reject it as cheating. That forces teachers to
| think of new ways to test student knowledge... an
| interesting challenge, if not exactly a "use".
| jamesdepp wrote:
| 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.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| I started to do some cpp development again and google is just
| giving me wrong/outdated solutions or just unanswered
| question from SO, while ChatGPT is on point most of the
| times.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Translation and summarization are just two examples of use
| cases for which text generation is suited great.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| > Anything they say, has already been better said elsewhere.
|
| I don't understand how someone can say this
|
| There have probably never been poems written that explain the
| particular niche physical phenomenon that I've had GPT-3
| generate for me.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| 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
| [1] https://openai.com/research/instruction-following
| politician wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My understanding is majority of "Reinforcement Learning from
| Human Feedback (RLHF)" for OpenAI comes from contractors:
|
| - https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
| windex wrote:
| 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.
| bagacrap wrote:
| How will the ai know the answer if it's trained on SEO (AIO?)
| content?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Normal web search is doomed.
|
| I hope not. The likes of ChatGPT don't do what I want a search
| engine to do. If normal web search is doomed, then how will I
| find any good new stuff on the web?
| orangepurple wrote:
| The SEO out of ChatGPT is for boomers and other clueless
| people. The dead internet theory is true.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It isn't doing it right now.
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| kimburgess wrote:
| Why imagine when you can experience the future now:
| https://future.attejuvonen.fi (from a recent thread here).
| spacephysics wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >most likely be a subscription-based tool that caters to
| specific niches and avoids product placement.
|
| Have you not been paying attention? The expensive
| subscription based plan will ALSO have ads and product
| placement. These businesses just can't help themselves
| twelve40 wrote:
| who in their right mind would give up tens of billions of
| ad revenue? the ads are coming no matter what.
| ilikeatari wrote:
| Yes that's possible and probable. However I dream that it
| will ba a paid subscription businesses model or at least
| non ad driven.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The big tech products might have this, but there will be
| competitors that don't.
| twelve40 wrote:
| there will be non-rent-seeking competitors that will raise
| $11B and will have nothing to do with big tech. Got it.
| ilkke wrote:
| Maybe nation-states? You'd just get a different kind of
| ads then I guess.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| You won't need $11B to create an LLM in a couple years.
| Stable diffusion has created the blueprint for open
| source large models. Sure it might be worse in some sense
| than the cutting edge ad bloated products, but some
| people will take that tradeoff.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Once a model is trained thats 99% of the work. Open
| source models or a hacker leaking a major model will be
| enough to compete.
| Frotag wrote:
| I settled for reading the docs and searching github issues like
| a caveman. I wonder if this'll eventually popularize low-key
| advertisements in bug reports. Like "I scanned the repo using
| this (my company's) tool and found mixed usage of ' and ""
| tnzk wrote:
| I have seen this once in the issues in sveltejs/svelte
| (couldn't find the link though.) It had been closed by
| moderators fairly soon, I wonder how long it will take for
| the amount of this thing to surpass the capacity of voluntary
| efforts.
| rchaud wrote:
| Keyword stuffing never dies.
| dougb5 wrote:
| I think the list-of-links Web search paradigm has plenty of
| time left, for at least three reasons: (1) A good chunk of a
| typical user's needs are to do something, not to find an answer
| to a question; (2) Google is lightning fast compared to
| present-day chat interfaces; (3) "keywordese" may be an
| unnatural input language for search queries, but it's faster
| than having a dialog.
|
| I still make dozens of Google queries per day, and do maybe 1
| or 2 ChatGPT sessions per week, and I'm quite aware of all the
| capabilities and deficits of each. I wondered why this was,
| until I reflected on the things I actually search for on Google
| (Go to https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and filter to
| just show "Search"). This was a useful exercise. What
| percentage of your recent queries would have worked well, and
| more quickly, on ChatGPT? For me it was less than 1/10...
| system2 wrote:
| Average user doesn't know about AI. Average user is 99% of the
| society. We are the only ones who are doomed.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer product in history
| bob1029 wrote:
| Ive observed the average user go from zero to hero on ChatGPT
| in about 30 minutes.
| chrgy wrote:
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| In a world of AI-generated trash, _provably_ genuine human-made
| content will be more valuable than ever.
| h10h10h10 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| O__________O wrote:
| 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| neura wrote:
| IMHO, you're talking about 2 very different things. I would
| guess that the maps difference was due to devices (not sure
| if MacOS users even use Apple Maps with any frequency
| compared to opening up maps.google.com in a browser, but I'm
| guessing most iOS users are too lazy and complacent to use
| google maps). Also, it's hard to recognize and understand the
| differences in the various mapping apps.
|
| OTOH, it's pretty easy to tell the difference in the first
| few minutes (or first few searches) between various search
| sites. Heck, the difference in the search engine having a
| better idea of what you're looking for based on previous
| searches (or ad related data) alone can make it more
| compelling to continue using the same search engine.
|
| My personal example is that I try to switch to DDG every so
| often (maybe several months in between), but I get
| dissatisfied with the results and start wondering if I'm just
| getting bad at search or Google knows me better or Google is
| just better at finding the things that people want in
| general.
|
| Just the fact (for me) that I consider that Google generally
| gives me better results makes me wonder if all the talk of
| Google search getting worse is just complaints based on
| heightened expectations, feelings or the landscape of content
| on the internet in general instead of "is Google search
| getting worse?"
| harimau777 wrote:
| I'm not sure that most of those are any better. I think that
| DDG is the only one of those that still respects modifiers
| like +, -, and "". However, I've had mixed success with it.
| It seems like maybe it's web crawler isn't as effective or
| something?
|
| That or maybe Google has poisoned the well so much that even
| with a good search engine you can't find good results because
| everything is SEOed for Google.
| topaz0 wrote:
| > rapidly internalized into your brain
|
| I'm not sure how old you are/how long you have been working at
| your job, but I can tell you that over 10 years or so there are
| tons of things that I "internalized" for a while, then did
| other stuff for a while, and now only have vague memories of.
| This is the use case for searching your own content.
| visarga wrote:
| I'm wondering to this day why web browsers don't run a full
| text search index locally. Only saving urls and titles is not
| enough. Especially if I spend more than a minute on a page I
| would like it indexed. And today being today, I would also
| like a LLM on top.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| krupan wrote:
| Two words: Butlerian Jihad
| gil2rok wrote:
| This is precisely what Hebbia AI (https://www.hebbia.ai/) does --
| they let you train a large language model on your own documents
| then search them better.
| classified wrote:
| 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.
| fwlr wrote:
| 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.
| lopatin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| deet wrote:
| 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.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 wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| The more noise there is the easier it is to plug in advertising
| :/
| adamch wrote:
| 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.
| mishu2 wrote:
| 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/ 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.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| 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.
| naillo wrote:
| 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).
| okhuman wrote:
| Why couldn't we take something like
| 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?
| aj7 wrote:
| "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.
| bloppe wrote:
| 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.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In other words, the web is doomed? I wish I could say that
| sounds implausible.
| pphysch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| The internet has always been full of misinformation and
| entertainment, and that is unlikely to change.
|
| I think the last decade+ was in many ways a regression
| for the web and I am optimistic for the future
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The internet has always been full of misinformation and
| entertainment
|
| Of course. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking
| about the ability to find stuff.
|
| > I am optimistic for the future
|
| I'm honestly glad! I sorely wish I were.
| inductive_magic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| fnovd wrote:
| Really, I don't think these assertions have any ground to
| stand on. Humans are not magical or divine. Our
| intelligence, like that of all life, is as basic as it can
| be to guarantee our niche. It just happens to be the most
| "developed" (by our estimation) on our one singular planet.
| Big deal.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > Humans are not magical or divine
|
| And yet, they can do things that no other being we know
| of can do. Humans don't have to be magical or divine to
| be unique.
| maxdoop wrote:
| How are you so confident in your claims?
|
| "The actual intelligence emerges elsewhere "-- can you even
| define intelligence ? And does what an LLM does differ from
| what humans might do?
|
| I'm not claiming the human brain and an LLM are identical.
| Rather, I'm pushing back on the confident claims of "LLMs
| aren't intelligent or doing anything that's real intelligence".
| inductive_magic wrote:
| >How are you so confident in your claims?
|
| My understanding is that intelligence is the process of
| continuous adaptation wrt a stream of information, with the
| goal of maxing out fitness while minimizing energy-
| expenditure. To satisfy this, an intelligent agent needs to
| create models.
|
| I can't rule out that the modeling-skill may latently emerge
| during training despite not being the focus of the cost
| function, but current network designs can't form new
| connections/change their architectures in production, so post
| training, there'd be nothing but feed forward. Pure feed
| forward isn't intelligent in my book. It may become the
| smartest parrot we know, even outperforming humans in most
| disciplines, but sans ability to adapt, it's dead, and thus,
| it's dumb in the moment that its environment changes.
| fnovd wrote:
| >the process of continuous adaptation wrt a stream of
| information, with the goal of maxing out fitness while
| minimizing energy-expenditure
|
| This makes sense in a biological context but not a digital
| one. Biological replication is expensive and time-consuming
| while digital replication is as easy as can be. Adaptation
| to this domain means maximizing the perception of utility
| from those developing the AI, which comes from fitness
| (i.e. perception of fitness) alone. A focus on cost-
| efficiency re energy-expenditure is a dead weight from the
| perspective of the AI; the details of that adaptation are
| rightfully outsourced to the developers in the same way
| that we outsource photosynthesis to plants. A model can
| also be perfectly embedded in a system despite our lack of
| understanding of exactly how the embedding works, and the
| disconnect between our perception and reality in this
| context is only going to get more extreme as the field
| develops.
|
| Humans have a bad habit of emphasizing the specific kinds
| of intelligence we possess as "intelligence" writ large. As
| though our intelligence serves any higher purpose than the
| basic replication and propagation that all life is adapted
| to pursue. We still train dogs to identify smells, because
| their nasal intelligence is better than anything we can
| create. This gives them a special place in our human-
| centric ecosystem and only their fitness to the desired
| function is necessary for them to thrive in their niche.
| Who is trying to breed a dog that eats slightly less food
| when our needs are for more reliable detection? The cost of
| dog food isn't a serious concern. The same goes for these
| AI tools: they are adapted to the niche that our lack of
| comparable faculties creates.
|
| Again, as with humans and photosynthesis, AI doesn't need
| to emulate every process we perform because we are below
| them on the food chain. What a waste of resources for them
| to worry about learning things we don't need them to do.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > And does what an LLM does differ from what humans might do?
|
| I'll bite. I've been quite convinced by the Popperian model
| of "conjecture and refutation" as as good model for
| explaining not just scientific inquiry, but human thought
| processes in general. David Deutsch's "The Beginning of
| Infinity" is a very lengthy exposition of this idea.
|
| When I am writing, I have an idea in my mind that I would
| like to communicate. I type it out, and if the words on the
| page don't convey what I intended, I edit them. I delete a
| sentence or change a word, until I believe I have a sequence
| of words which will convey my intended meaning to my expected
| audience.
|
| The words, as they come, are a kind of "conjecture" about
| what will best convey my intention. I can "refute" or
| "criticise" (as Deutsch puts it) the conjecture using my own
| reasoning, even before testing the words on another person.
|
| As far as I understand LLMs (which admittedly not far), there
| is no such process going on. There is no intention which it
| is attempting to communicate via words. There is no creative
| conjecture about how to express the intention, and no
| criticism of the result.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| Category theory seems to have no relation whatsoever to
| operational human concepts which may explain how unuseful
| category theory actually is.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I sometimes think the main use of category theory is to look
| like a wizard, and say that as someone first exposed in math
| grad school in the early 90s.
|
| Then i realize it's also an assertion that there are
| recurring patterns in functions (in general). And, as such,
| sometimes results noticed in one domain actually can be
| expected to have analogous results in another domain.
| staunton wrote:
| As you say, the main use of category theory is to organize
| very different areas of math in one overarching framework
| and generalize ideas from one area of math to others. It
| might be used in the pursuit of developing AI but it is
| definitely not "an approach" to developing AI, just like
| "taking ideas from books" isn't one.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| well said
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