Ask HN: Should Google be concerned with ChatGPT

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33873019

by rosebay • 4 years ago

8 36 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For all this talk about AI and general intelligence, what has striken me the most is how good GPT is as a search engine for information.

Should google be worried (I think so) and which companies can I invest in to ride this wave of AI?

rvz• 4 years ago

No.

StackOverflow are the ones that should be concerned.

bentt• 4 years ago

A ChatGPT bot crawling Stack Overflow could do some serious stuff.

lern_too_spel• 4 years ago

Not yet. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnaem/stack-overflow-bans-c...

hxugufjfjf2• 4 years ago

Crawling and doing what? Answering questions, or training based on questions and answers? If you mean the latter, it most likely has, given how great it is at fixing code errors.

fbrncci• 4 years ago

Yes. I spend the whole weekend, trying to find information on some caching and invalidation configuration for Django. I googled almost half a day, I get what I need to set up, but what I am working on is quite custom, and neither Stackoverflow or Google where of great help. There were decent answers, but they were not giving me the whole picture.

Then on Monday I decided to plug in the question into ChatGPT, within 10 minutes I got a better answer than half a day Googling (including code snippets). I could adapt my questions to better fit my customization need. And when I wasn't sure about some setting, I could ask ChatGPT to explain me why I should use this setting, and what it was good for. It gave me the whole picture and some more.

ChatGPT is like a personal consultant which absolutely rivals StackOverflow.

geoduck14• 4 years ago

What were you trying to do?

ackatz• 4 years ago

It's true that GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) is a very impressive language model that can generate human-like text and answer a wide range of questions. However, it's important to note that GPT-3 is not a search engine like Google. Instead, it is a tool that can be used to help generate text or answer questions based on the information that it has been trained on.

In terms of investing in AI, there are many companies working on developing AI technology, and some of the biggest names in the industry include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM. These companies are all working on a wide range of AI-related technologies, from natural language processing and machine learning to computer vision and robotics.

It's worth noting that investing in any specific company carries inherent risks, and it's always a good idea to do your own research and consult with a financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

tuckerpo• 4 years ago

Clever.

hn_user22• 4 years ago

At this point I can't tell anymore which comments are coming from GPT-3 and which ones are human. Sorry if I am wrong, and if this is offensive, but this one feels a GPT-3 response--and I find it fascinating that I can't tell the difference anymore.

mr_toad• 4 years ago

Either way the style is SEO blog-post bland. The tone is really off.

i67vw3• 4 years ago

Can someone ask the same question to chatgpt and post it here? Post it with proper note that it is from chatgpt.

It will be quite interesting to see what it 'thinks' about this topic.

lurker616• 4 years ago

Parent was definitely a chatGPT comment. The 'However' in the 2nd line, the neutral and unbalanced tone, and overall the informative and well constructed paragraph without any grammatical errors or personal ego - you'd identify it immediately if you played with chatGPT for a while.

seydor4• 4 years ago

The last paragraph must begin with "Overall" or "In conclusion".

hn_user22• 4 years ago

One thing I have been pondering about ChatGPT and what it can replace, is that all of the training data came from human sources. So of course it might know C++ or javascript answers. So in terms of replacing Google, Twitter, or stack overflow it seems to do a great job on existing ideas. But what about the next upcoming language, or new language features.

Without a healthy online discourse and public exchanging of ideas, how will AI learn about new events, and languages.

If we start to rely on an AI to help us instead of online discussion boards, but that AI needs those discussion boards to learn, something will have to give a bit.

yuuu• 4 years ago

Transfer learning, NEXT!

kevinmrose• 4 years ago

I don't think so. Google makes most of it's money on ad revenue generated from searches that are mostly commercial in nature. While ChatGPT could be a lot more useful for informational queries, in most cases I don't see it being practical for evaluating the value or quality of good and services, but maybe I'm missing something.

jstx1• 4 years ago

I don't know how you use search but even if ChatGPT is good, it can't replace Google for me because it serves a completely different purpose. I want links and pages, and being able to browse and read multiple sources, and find up-to-date information about what's happening in the world. ChatGPT can't give you any of that. And that's not a problem with ChatGPT; it was built for a very different use case.

add-sub-mul-div• 4 years ago

Do you think Google cares whether they spit back our own content at us in the form of search results or chatbot replies? All they care about is that they can insert ads into it.

saluki• 4 years ago

It is unclear whether Google should be specifically concerned with ChatGPT, as it is a relatively new and unknown entity in the field of natural language processing and conversational AI. However, Google is generally always concerned with staying competitive in the field of AI and technology, so it is likely that they are keeping an eye on developments in the conversational AI space.

In terms of specific competition with ChatGPT, it is worth noting that Google has its own conversational AI technology in the form of Google Assistant. Google Assistant is a widely used and highly advanced virtual assistant that is available on a variety of devices and platforms. It is likely that Google will continue to invest in and improve their own technology in order to stay competitive in the market.

In conclusion, while it is difficult to say with certainty whether Google should be specifically concerned with ChatGPT, it is likely that they are keeping an eye on developments in the conversational AI space and working to maintain their competitive advantage in the market.

heisenzombie• 4 years ago

Ok now I don't know whether this ChatGPT pretending to be a human commentor, or a human pretending to be an AI pretending to be a human...

swah• 4 years ago

But this kind of answer does well on HN!

varunramesh• 4 years ago

This was written by ChatGPT... Right?

treesrock• 4 years ago

most def... near identical voice to it

muzani2• 4 years ago

I play quite a bit with Google Assistant and it seems mostly hardcoded.

seydor4• 4 years ago

don't trust this LLM, google, they want to kill you

jamesredd• 4 years ago

Search engines are a nuisance and only an intermediary between your query and the answer. I find myself broadening my scope of questioning while using OpenGTP because those questions were limited by the search engine’s capacity to answer them. Processing irrelevant information is an impediment to the curiosity of learning.

wilde• 4 years ago

Google has a chatgpt-like model internally. The moment someone figures out the UI paradigm they’ll just copy it.

al2o3cr• 4 years ago

Why would they worry? Their indexes are going to be chock-full of the smooth-sounding nonsense that GPT produces soon enough, given how SEO spammers operate.

gukov• 4 years ago

Well, yeah, there's going to be (or maybe already was) an explosion of sites that are full of content that's okay quality. Now anyone can generate good copy for $0. Blogs, tweets, heck even comments (this one is all human, I promise). When everything is good nothing really stands out. I'd say that's a problem for someone like Google.

muzani2• 4 years ago

It's not like Google is entirely correct. It's been years and it still gives the wrong answer to "Is lemon an alkaline?"

idoh• 4 years ago

It's difficult to say whether Google should be worried about AI-powered chat. However, as AI technology continues to advance, it's likely that we will see more and more AI-powered chat systems that are able to perform a wide range of tasks. While this may pose a challenge for Google and other companies in the tech industry, it could also open up new opportunities for them to develop and improve their own AI-powered chat systems. Ultimately, the success of AI-powered chat systems will depend on how well they are able to meet the needs of users.

(the above was generated by GPT Chat …)

seydor4• 4 years ago

It is strange that it doesnt give the standard answer that it is not trained to answer that. That's politically incorrect

locallost• 4 years ago

I agree, was thinking this exactly. Google has become the go to place for answers, and I think we'll once again see nobody can build a better search engine, but they can build something different. They may work differently, but in the end they reuse public data and both could end up as the "go to place for answers". And GPT is the hot new thing, and might end up the Google of this generation.

seydor4• 4 years ago

I think this goes beyond that. The internet is not infinite, because it s too repetitive with all the spam / SEO etc. Wikipedia is too small to be the entire internet, but GPT is a compressed version of our entire knowledge and a relationship graph for all entities ever written.

The thing is, the whole thing is 200GB (??). This is the downloadable internet. In the future we will be running it locally, personally, and privately. It may become our digital facsimile or extension. This may change the entire economy of tech and how we view the internet

Ask HN: Should Google be concerned with ChatGPT

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