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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29319 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I will admit this isn't an effortpost:

As is common knowledge and more deeply discussed elsewhere in this very comment section (e.g. https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/62270?context=8#context), Google got "scooped" by ChatGPT not because they were beat on the technology side, but because they were beat on the productization side. Some are comparing this to Xerox PARC, where Xerox invented or incubated many elements of modern computer technology -- the GUI, the mouse, etc. -- but, being blind to their actual utility, got "scooped" by Apple and others and subsequently lost out on trillions of dollars of market value.

What's deeply, deeply hilarious to me is: during this entire time, Google management were so busy posturing, and their internal A.I. safety teams were so busy noisily complaining sexism / racism / phobias of various sorts (not so much human extinction), and they developed such a reputation for being a place to coast, that despite 130,000 elite-educated, overpaid people sitting around ostensibly unleash their brilliance, they're now in a position where Microsoft has a puncher's chance (realistically, maybe 5 - 10%) of catching up and even surpassing Google's decades-long search dominance. Even better, competing with Microsoft now means that Google might have to cannibalize a $100B / yr line of business, whereas Microsoft cannibalizing Bing means it sacrifices maybe a ham sandwich / year line of business.

What I'm wondering about is this; we've seen with ChatGPT that if it doesn't have the answer, it will make something up: a fake book, a fake quote, and so on.

So what happens when you're using Edge+AI (a thing I am never going to do, because I loathe Bing) and you ask a question and the AI merrily does the "make shit up" thing? People are expecting that the search engine will return an even better, more accurate answer because shiny new AI powered searching. And now the AI is doing the "Watson in love" bit:

I trust that he may not remember any of the answers which I gave him that night. Holmes declares that he overheard me caution him against the great danger of taking more than two drops of castor oil, while I recommended strychnine in large doses as a sedative.

What's wrong with Bing? I find I like it better than Google nowadays, even if Bing doean't tell me to kill myself anymore.

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