Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.
Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.
I dunno. There have been quite a few times where I am trying to do something on my computer and I could either spend 5 minutes searching, refining, digging through the results…or I can ask chatgpt and have a workable answer in 5 seconds. And that answer is precisely tailored to my specifics. I don’t have to assume/research how to modify a similar answer to fit my situation.
Obviously it’s dependent on the types of information you need, but for coding, bash scripting, Linux cli, or anything of that nature LLMs have been great and much better than Google searches.
Okay but the problem with that is that LLMs not only don’t have any fidelity at all, they can’t. They are analogous to the language planning centre of your brain, which has to be filtered through your conscious mind to check if it’s talking complete crap.
People don’t realise this and think the bot is giving them real information, but it’s actually just giving them spookily realistic word-salad, which is a big problem.
Of course you can fix this if you add some kind of context engine for them to truly grasp the deeper and wider meaning of your query. The problem with that is that if you do that, you’ve basically created an AGI. That may first of all be extremely difficult and far in the future, and second of all it has ethical implications that go beyond how effective of a search engine it is.
Did you read my last little bit there? I said it depends on the information you are looking for. I can paste error output from my terminal into Google and try to find an answer or I can paste it into chatgpt and be, at the very least pointed in the right direction almost immediately, or even given the answer right away vs getting a stackoverflow link and parsing the responses and comments and following secondary and tiertiary links.
I absolutely understand the stochastic parrot conundrum with LLMs. They have significant drawbacks and they are far from perfect, but then neither is are Google search results. There is still a level of skepticism you have to apply.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is the idea that LLMs and websearching is a zero sum affair. They don’t replace each other. They compliment each other. Imo, google is messing up with their “ai” integration into Google search. It sets the expectation that it is an equivalent function.
Sure but if that becomes the norm then a huge segment of the population will believe the first thing the bot tells them. You might be okay, but we’re talking about an entire society filtering its knowledge through an incredibly effective misinformation engine that will lie rather than say “I don’t know”, because that simple phrase requires a level of self-awareness that eludes a lot of actual people, much less a chatbot.
