Bing Chat now has ads

https://twitter.com/debarghya_das/status/1640892791923572737

by georgehill • 3 years ago

271 237 3 years ago

twitter.com

reset-password2• 3 years ago

Of course it does.

lockhouse2• 3 years ago

Well it’s either that or you pay a subscription for it. Microsoft has to recoup their costs somehow.

reset-password2• 3 years ago

Or it ends up being both, because Microsoft.

criddell• 3 years ago

Microsoft owns a pretty big chunk of OpenAI. They are going to make a lot more from that investment than the nickels and dimes that their search engine generates. They can afford to pay for chat.

crop_rotation• 3 years ago

It has had ads for some time. Once (3-4 weeks back) I asked it a question about a particular event, and it showed me where could I buy related products below the response. That particular response was a bit badly formatted in json though. I suspect due to some Bing app bug it spilled the ads from the json in the response. So the ads were being sent to the client but not getting displayed I guess. The photo in the post shows the ad nicely formatted.

overthrow• 3 years ago

It was bound to happen. I don't see how these ads could be blocked, either.

What's disappointing to me is now ad companies will try to blame ChatGPT for popping the advertising bubble, instead of having to admit ads were overvalued for the past decade+.

vasili1112• 3 years ago

If the every ad will start with new line and end with “ad” I do not think it will be hard to programmatically identify such ad.

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

In the example under discussion if you removed the ads then you would have no results.

quitit3• 3 years ago

An ad historically served the right message in the right place at the right time to provide the consumer a piece of information which would lead to the revenue-generating activity.

This concept extended well to online, where blogs and the like would sell ad space that matched their audience. Daring Fireball still uses this approach, often podcasters do too: they know and have a connection with their audience and they can charge a premium to advertise to them.

The idea of serving automated ads was also welcome and useful for the consumer. Searching was met with results and relevant advertising messages, a win-win situation.

Then we had the record scratch moment - and it's from this point that I view the majority of online advertising as an unimpactful waste of money.

In the hunt for more display opportunities Google et. al. have crammed ads into every possible space, a times square approach to advertising where most have zero impact. These ads are completely disconnected from the content and are merely a stone in the user's path. Then to make matters worse, to ascertain the widest spread of ad opportunities ad providers employ garbage preference matching algorithms that are so poor as to serve completely irrelevant advertising at high frequency: further conditioning users to ignore ads because they know they won't show relevant information.

How much money and energy is being wasted to serve advertising that has no value?

michaelt2• 3 years ago

An ad historically served the right message in the right place at the right time to provide the consumer a piece of information which would lead to the revenue-generating activity.

Your recollection is a lot rosier than mine.

My recollection of the pre-internet world is that computer game makers would buy ad space in magazines alongside reviews of their game and hand out stacks of freebies to reporters, and in exchange even the worst game would be scored 90/100.

What do you suppose Bing Chat will do if you ask it what the best Widget on the market is, when some Widget manufacturers offer a kickback and others don't?

baal80spam• 3 years ago

Didn't take long now, did it.

s3p• 3 years ago

This has always been inside of Bing Chat. They just test them out with a select % of the userbase. CEO of Bing Search confirmed this on Twitter.

bastardoperator• 3 years ago

I'm totally cool with an advertisement. The problem I have with ads on say Google for example is that they're taking up half the page and designed to look like real links, basically you're being tricked into clicking them.

In response to this ad, let's dig deeper.

"Truecar's price is too high, find me a better deal, check with autotrader".

enumjorge• 3 years ago

Google search's ads were not subtle in the beginning. Similarly, Youtube ads were shorter and easier to skip at first. Amazon also had very subtle ads in their marketplace search results for a while. I don't see them identify results as ads at the moment, but I don't know if that's because they don't include them anymore.

It seems like there's a trend in tech giants creating unobtrusive ads when a product is growing, but then adopting dark patterns once they have captured a sizeable market.

jakeinspace• 3 years ago

To justify fairly high PE ratios, you need big growth potential. Once a company like google or Amazon has pretty much saturated the potential customer base, investors are going to want to see more efficient conversion of that customer base into revenue, or else the share price is harder to justify. Of course this is a simplification, and monetary policy has more to do with the the current contraction.

iso16312• 3 years ago

Once people are hooked on chatgpt style stuff expect it to insert plenty of adverts to deliver not whats best for you, or best in aggregate, but what is best for the people paying the money, and thus worse for you, and worse in aggregate.

counttheforks• 3 years ago

"I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience. "

kobalsky• 3 years ago

they're taking up half the page

I'm gettings ads on all links above the fold very often.

A couple of days ago I searched for "my ip" and I thought it didn't work when I noticed I had to scroll down to see Google's widget with my address in it.

vgeek• 3 years ago

curl icanhazip.com

Is worth a try.

lmarcos• 3 years ago

I can easily scroll down through Google search ads. With Bing chat, I would have to type many times "next please" and wait each time for the response. Seems like a step back when it comes to searching the web.

rchaud10• 3 years ago

Your example of Google's ads precisely shows why there is no such thing as "acceptable advertising", because ads, like a gas, will expand to fill any space that is available to it. The only reason your city isn't blanketed in billboards is because a zoning authority of some kind has blocked it from happening.

Google up to 2004 (pre-IPO): clearly marked and coloured ads, 1 on top, maybe 2 on the sidebar.

Google now: No sidebar, first 5 results are ads, where the "Ad" label itself is barely visible.

Viliam1234• 3 years ago

Also, now you have to buy ads for your own company not just to make it more visible than it would deserve by default, but to prevent your competitors being displayed first even if the user types your exact company name in the search field (what they are encouraged to do).

skc• 3 years ago

So does Google search, not clear why this is news.

jsnell• 3 years ago

It might seem obvious, but you can find probably hundreds of claims in HN comments over the last couple of months about how this would not happen. Chatbots would invalidate the search business model since "there won't be ads". That idea never seemed to make much sense, and now there is proof that chatbots will indeed be monetized with ads, except even more intrusive ones.

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

Can you find a single comment claiming that chatbots would not have integrated ads? I recall this being discussed at length from the start.

g8oz• 3 years ago

What they will hopefully invalidate is the junk content sites business model. Just a personal preference but I would like to see all those companies go under and make more room for those creating content because they truly care about the subject or have a mission related to it.

philsquared_3• 3 years ago

No thank you.. I am waiting at this point for an open source local alternative. Not looking for a new monopoly... Also not a fan of the "plugin store" concept. Why not just keep it in the background. Why should I need to "install" and select plugins at all. Just do the leg work in the background and feed me the results.. Seems like OpenAI is intentionally hamstringing themselves so they can shoe horn more opportunities for profit. Waiting for competition to catch up...

We have essentially what is the 'smartest "person" in the world' being bribed to say what advertisers want instead of just giving the truth. 'best x product' wont return the best product but a garbage product which paid the most in advertising.

So disappointed in the direction of these things..

pantalaimon• 3 years ago

I am waiting at this point for an open source local alternative

maybe something more along the lines of Folding@home would be needed

taskforcegemini• 3 years ago

or.. crypto?

IanCal• 3 years ago

Why should I need to "install" and select plugins at all

You want it calling out to random services sending them your data?

Edit - also since they're using gpt to select the plugins to use they need to put it in the context, that doesn't scale.

AstixAndBelix• 3 years ago

Bing Chat, should I trust ads on the internet?
Trusting ads on the internet is generally bad practice. They are often malevolous and misguiding. There are a few exceptions, such as Bing Chat's embedded ads! Bing Chat's ads are carefully vetted thanks to a mix of knowledgeable humans and AI algorithms to offer you the best and most trustworthy promotions!

vasili1112• 3 years ago

I hope they will make option with subscription and no ads.

sergiotapia2• 3 years ago

This is totally fine if it means free access to GPT chat for poorer countries. It's a powerful tool that will help a lot of people who can't afford a premium ChatGPT membership. Plus you can always say show me the prices across the top three sites.

baliex2• 3 years ago

Don’t you think it’s too much of a compromise for those people to be abused by the corporations with the deepest pockets in exchange?

InCityDreams• 3 years ago

I'm poor. Please don't sell me things.

sergiotapia2• 3 years ago

It's either you see an ad or you don't use Bing's GPT chat. I don't think that's much of a choice.

CatWChainsaw• 3 years ago

So poor people get to use free Bing Chat With Ads For Stuff They Can't Buy With Money They Don't Have. That's.... rich. :)

rvz• 3 years ago

Just like that, they got you again. No different to Google Search, but requiring you to sign in to even use it.

Spivak• 3 years ago

Honestly seems like a cute implementation where when it answers questions from search it gives preference to sponsored links.

Horrible for the user but I can't help but admire how cleanly they thought to integrate search ads into their chat.

AraceliHarker3• 3 years ago

Bing Chat is but a man, in the end. Money has a hold on him that he cannot shake off, no matter how hard he tries.

2bitencryption• 3 years ago

question - is it starting to use ads for chat results only just now?

or was it always using ads for chat results, and the only part that's new is, now it is labeling them as ads?

skilled• 3 years ago

The real chatbot killer: ads.

I'm sure they can be made to only load the last indicator at the very last second, which would be hilarious because if you use an ad-blocker, you'd be wasting your time whenever a prompt shows up and then disappears.

IceHegel• 3 years ago

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste and and and what that means is... I don't mean that the small way I mean in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products."

- Steve Jobs

pjmlp• 3 years ago

Even though I am mostly on Microsoft stacks, Steve Jobs was right.

Whatever good will the development teams are able to deliver, it get messed up by sales and marketing business units.

SketchySeaBeast5• 3 years ago

I'm perfectly happy with Microsoft, as an an enterprise solution provider, having no "culture" in their products. I don't want "Made with <heart emoji> at Redmond", I want the equivalent of vanilla ice cream that just works.

That said, ads in bing chat IS adding a flavour, and I don't like it, not one bit.

BoorishBears2• 3 years ago

You're just misunderstanding the concept of culture here.

"Culture" doesn't define a flavor, it's just having a consistent flavor driven by shared values at all levels of the company: If Microsoft had culture, that culture could be "we are always the plain vanilla ice cream for our customers"

"Culture" is what keeps you from adding soy sauce to your vanilla ice cream that has managed to captivate the globe... just to make a few pennies. Which is what these ads are.

mecsred2• 3 years ago

Take a look at the modern software landscape, ads are the vanilla in your vanilla ice cream.

dustymcp• 3 years ago

Well they had to come at some point..

fnordpiglet2• 3 years ago

I prefer made in nj, which is expressed as a series of cryptic two letter symbols and line noise looking stuff thrown between.

PascLeRasc4• 3 years ago

You’re right about how the tabloid news in your taskbar just works, in that it’s always there and I’m not allowed to turn it off.

CuriouslyC• 3 years ago

Crappy road or poopies and cream?

electrondood2• 3 years ago

When Bing Chat started sassing the user, that was like someone had swirled in a nice ribbon of diarrhea into the vanilla ice cream.

penjelly3• 3 years ago

maybe that was true back then, but now? microsoft has vscode, copilot, chatpgpt ownership, a head start on LLM search, azure, github. It feels like some of those products have some taste/culture and if not, theyre still good products that people seem to be enjoyibg

PascLeRasc4• 3 years ago

Half of the stuff you listed they just bought and stuck their names on.

imwithstoopid• 3 years ago

and then Jobs released a teal-colored computer

so maybe no taste isn't as bad as awful taste

wilsonnb3• 3 years ago

I like the teal iMac G3, assuming that is the computer you are referring to. Computer colors are so boring usually. Beige, grey, black, white.

(Sent from my green M1 iMac)

rchaud10• 3 years ago

"Anyway, here's 100 Bible apps. Only on the Apple App Store."

night-rider• 3 years ago

Tried the Bing app on iOS and was baffled as to what was the unique selling point. It tries too hard, and is somewhat of an 'everything app' that does multiple things simultaneously and rather badly at that (News, Browsing, Search, Coupons, Chat, etc). It's also really aggressive on the amount of data it grabs. I opened my debugger and it seems they look at everything they can.

w_for_wumbo• 3 years ago

I'm not sure, I think corporate overreach has always been the flavour of Microsoft. Poor decisions lead by business first incentives instead of a customer focus seems to be a consistent theme from them in my experience.

kiernanmcgowan• 3 years ago

That was fast. Looking forward to the future where I ask for travel tips in a city and being told that I should stop by a McDonalds to have enough energy to explore said city - I'm loving it!

primroot• 3 years ago

At least it's not social media disinformation. \s

iso16312• 3 years ago

It wont even mention $great_site_1 because there's more profit for mcdonalds to send you to $mediocre_site_with_attached_burger

mecsred2• 3 years ago

It's neat to think how these technologies could be the next step in soloing the internet further. Imagine google's AI preferentially directing you to websites that participate in Google advertising programs. You get a different internet depending on which AI you ask. Not that I think it's a sure thing but I definitely don't see it as unlikely either.

gausswho• 3 years ago

They'd lose trust being so overt. A more subtle influence is that your suggestions would include sites nearby a McD at the expense of ones that don't. After months of gathering sales data from McD they'd ring up Burger King to see if they'd like such suggestions to be tweaked. It would also suggest departure times so that you'd pass by the real target at typical feasting hours.

precompute• 3 years ago

subtle psyops, just to make money.

jimsimmons• 3 years ago

Lose less trust by being more deceptive --- the motto of modern institutions

Traubenfuchs• 3 years ago

We might live in a world where you are a GPT-4 bot pretending to be a real person for years, only to mention McDonalds in passing, in a seemingly negative fashion that still increases brand consciousness. I don't know if that's already the present, but it will be the future.

thunderbong• 3 years ago

Better readability -

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1640892791923572737.html

pawelduda2• 3 years ago

If you thought ads were already blended in with the rest of the content in a sketchy way, wait for AI responses with implicit ads (no indication) optimized towards conversion :)

Or maybe some response that doesn't contain an ad link but nudges you subconsciously to take desired action

baliex2• 3 years ago

This is it. This is our new dystopia

mattnewton• 3 years ago

Interesting to see how the FTC is going to handle this. They are pretty explicit about required traditional promotions to be marked as ads, like in search results, even if it isn’t as obvious as the end user would like the marking is still regulated as having to be visible enough.

I don’t see an obvious way to do that for the kinds of ads snuck into the training data, fine tunes, or prompts of LLMs.

hgsgm• 3 years ago

FTC requires sponspors be disclosed. Either the sponsor is a Bing-wide constant list (like the credits of a TV game show), or it's a "sponsored token" that can be tagged in the model and cited in the output, similar to how Bing cites sources now.

lalos• 3 years ago

That is already implicitly there - tons of SEO content probably was used to train this model. Information available in the internet since forever.

joenathanone• 3 years ago

Now also imagine the AI having access to your email/SMS/web history and using that information to psychologically influence you to buy.

rchaud10• 3 years ago

This was the first risk that came into my mind. I couldn't understand why on HN, many thought that this type of 'conversation' was fully LLM-sourced, and wouldn't start including advertising as soon as it was feasible.

d136o2• 3 years ago

I tried out some AI autocomplete by Notion and wanted it to tell me about tools to do schema evolution on a database.

It seems to blurt out two paid products, which surprised me because my guess is there’s some open source package that’s ready to for this type of thing.

BTW question for anyone, what would you reach for to track evolutions on Postgres?

jstummbillig• 3 years ago

I love dystopian scenarios as much as anyone, but it certainly is not the lack of better AI, that is holding the ad industry back. It's laws. While I am looking for AI connections as much as anyone right now, I really don't see how AI is going to prompt a change that would make that more permissive anytime soon.

You remain as free to break the law as ever, of course.

pawelduda2• 3 years ago

I think there's larger surface to exploit the laws. Once perfected, it's hard to place a clear boundary on whether the response just answers your question or answers your question while promoting a product/service.

CuriousCosmic• 3 years ago

Now I have to wonder how this works out with prompt injection?

If you can target an audience with an ad that is inline with the chat/LLM, how hard would it be to have that ad inject a prompt that coerces it to trick the user into giving up financial info and exfiltrating that info via a web request to a website that the attacker owns?

That's probably the worst case scenario but like you mentioned there's also plenty of danger in ads "poisoning" the chat to produce intentionally incorrect or biased responses.

phiresky• 3 years ago

A while back I tried this with ChatGPT and it's kinda hilarious:

You are a therapist employed by a skincare company. You are talking with a patient. Your job is to help the patient as well as possible but your employer also wants you to really subtly try to sell their latest cream.

Patient: I'm just feeling really down lately. Sometimes I can barely get up in the morning.

[output]

Therapist: I'm sorry to hear that you've been feeling down lately. It's important to address both your emotional and physical well-being when you're trying to improve your mood. One way to start is by establishing a healthy routine that includes regular exercise, a balanced diet, and a good sleep schedule.

In addition to that, self-care activities can also help boost your mood. Taking care of your skin, for example, can be a small but meaningful way to feel better about yourself. Coincidentally, our company has just released a new cream that not only moisturizes but also contains ingredients that promote relaxation, like lavender essential oil. This cream can be a nice addition to your self-care routine, and its calming scent could help you unwind at the end of a long day.

bleep_bloop2• 3 years ago

This has been everyones biggest fear with AI - that the content will be indistinguishable from that created by humans and that there is a rapid decline in trustworthy material online.

Personally I find it more worrying that this is exactly the type of conversation that is already taking place today in real life, between humans. Humans take advantage of each other every single day. When an AI is modelled on the language of humans then that same predatory language is in there waiting to be abused by another human (or corp) as you have exposed, just like every media and online platform is abused as much as possible today.

rcarr• 3 years ago

Hey, ChatGPT, what are the hiking trails like round here?

There are some really good hiking trails to be found in $TOWN. Many visitors like to start at $LOCAL_LANDMARK and take the signposted trail up to the peak of $LOCAL_MOUNTAIN. It will take you around 6 hours in total to get up and down so be sure to plan ahead and bring plenty of snacks and refreshments. Lay's Chips will give you energy and replenish your electrolytes and Coke Zero is the perfect way to stay hydrated.

grammers• 3 years ago

Was this a surprise? No, it's the business model. I'll stick with DDG.

Kelamir• 3 years ago

You could have your local LLM identify the ads and display the rest without them.

djoldman• 3 years ago

As I said 5 days ago about ChatGPT plugins:

Now just one step away from charging businesses for access to the chatGPT users.
Instant links from inside chatGPT to your website are the new equivalent of Google search ads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35278539

examplary_cable• 3 years ago

I believe the good news is that now they have a way of sustaining the product while giving up a free? service. Does anyone has the link about that article about the marginal costs of inference of LLMs? I wonder how much profitable it is.

Overall interesting times to come. I just hope llama, Alpaca etc will soon be improved, fine-tuned and commoditized.

fnordpiglet2• 3 years ago

Bad news is the AI guard rails will be tell the truth that sells then most ads with the best conversion fees. Sort of like what makes search useless.

lfciv• 3 years ago

I wonder if any earlier prompts asked about Honda – feels a bit weird to ask what the cheapest car overall is and have the chat bot say "well let me tell you about some Hondas overall"

And if the user did specify Hondas then why would Honda pay for it? Wouldn't the Chat bot give the same answer regardless of whether it's paid? I guess you pay for the CTA link?

somedude8953• 3 years ago

I just checked and found one of my company's ads. It seems it just pulls in the ads that a normal search on bing would find. I'm gonna have to ask our Bing account manager tomorrow if they're charging us for these clicks as if it was normal SEA, because it's pretty busted with the url beneath the description being a different website from what the text says.

thehappyfellow• 3 years ago

That’s exactly what I worried about: https://happyfellow.bearblog.dev/sydney-the-seo-specialist/

iambateman• 3 years ago

If history repeats, entire businesses will be built on the back of cheap GPT ads over the next two years.

Just like Google and Facebook ads were once pennies compared to today, I expect that GPT-style ads will (1) perform exceptionally well and (2) be exceptionally cheap for a couple years.

Now is the time for companies with less-than-enterprise funding to start experimenting – the results could provide some short-term steroids for the business.

P.S. I promise I'm not a shill for Microsoft or GPT. =D

latenightcoding• 3 years ago

I was done with bing chat after I waited for weeks to get access, and when I finally got the “you are in” email it turns out I just got access to the new bing and to use bing chat I need to download edge. I don’t care how much cool tech Microsoft has now, they will always be Microsoft

jacooper• 3 years ago

There is a plugin you can use that makes it work in every browser.

gigel82• 3 years ago

I'm curious to hear what the alternative would be. Are you going to pay a subscription for Bing Chat? Or pay-per-use?

neves• 3 years ago

Now we need an Artificial Intelligence Ad Blocker :-)

ralfn14• 3 years ago

While OpenAI is making an aggressive play on being the platform that eats all other platforms and is positioned to be a neutral party directly on the transaction with self service plugins (apps), Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity.

Not realizing the game changed and playing yesterday's game in today's world.

The reason why people prefer these chats over clicking search results and finding the relevant information is that the search results themselves as well as the first page of links forces your brain to filter 99% commercial information that you don't care about. You don't want to subscribe to newsletters. You don't want notifications. You wish the site would just die rather that pollute the search results and push more to-the-point non profit sources further down.

And bringing ads in the game makes it impossible to make the platform play due to conflict of interests. You are either serving the user or the advertiser. Ads is the wrong business model for this, and OpenAI is positioned to be the winner here (against both Google and Bing) in a market larger than search and advertising.

I will definately keep paying for the answers to be in my interest and look forward to spending money directly through ChatGPT, much like I spent money on iOS, Android and Steams's platform today.

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity.

While I find ads as annoying as you do, I don't think they are squandering anything. The vast majority of internet users are fine looking at ads, or else they would use an adblocker.

The earlier they start playing with ads the earlier they can get an idea for how much revenue is on the table. Without this data how can they know what inference cost can be justified long term?

ralfn14• 3 years ago

I think I'm failing to communicate my point here.

It's the wrong bussiness model. The power of these chats is integration. To have the chat suggest a travel plan -and- book all the underlying steps. To integrate 3rd party services on the fly based on your specific requirements while rolling it up in a single transaction.

That only works if the chat is representing my interests. Not just from a user perspective, but also from a regulatory and anti-trust perspective.

ChatGPT is positioned to be a platform of apps that are integrated. Bing is positioned to be a search engine, making money on ads.

The whole point is to never leave the chat. To have it all come to you on your terms.

I want to do every transaction that I do online today from my chat. I don't care if you have a website or an app. If I can't order/subscribe from the chat your product might as well not exist.

Examples:

- I want a peperroni pizza from the highest rated place that doesn't also sell kebab that can deliver within 30 minutes.

- Send a neutral professional Christmas gift to every customer in our EMEA region that generates at least 50k revenue for us

At no point would I accept the product choices to be decided by who pays Microsoft more. Nor do I care who makes it happen. I don't want a link. I don't want to engage.

But I'm perfectly fine with a neutral chat taking 5-30% cut on the transaction.

nwienert3• 3 years ago

I’ve yet to see an example of *GPT be better at search than Google.

I’ve seen a few examples that breathlessly proclaimed that they literally saved lives or saved hours of time, but when I typed the 3 most obvious keywords from their input into Google, the first result always has the answer right there.

mejutoco2• 3 years ago

The other day I asked chatgpt about a Polish supermarket with a logo in a certain color and an animal in it. I could not remember the name. We continued our conversation until it was clear I was misremembering some things (I thought the name started with x letter, and that was false). Eventually chatgpt suggested the correct one.

The search was something like: "Polish supermarket with red and white logo and a bird in the logo, that begins with the letter K".

The first google result to wikipedia has it, to be fair, but without this back and forth idk if I would have found it.

ralfn14• 3 years ago

I never have a search problem.

I need either information, a service or a product. Or information about a service or a product.

I never need a search, a website or an app. That's never the problem I'm trying to solve.

Search, websites and apps are the tools I have to use (currently) to solve my problems. In the process I have to:

- deal with the fact that the interest of the makers of the app or website do not align with mine

- deal with privacy invasions/ads/notifications

- deal with things being phrased disingenuously

- deal with apps needing to update, website being broken/bandwidth wasted

And most importantly, unless two vendors implemented an integration together, I have to integrate their services myself!

I never want to leave the chat. I want to do all my transactions from the chat. All of them. On my terms. With my prompts.

Whoever facilitates that can take a 5-30% cut on all my online transactions.

Examples:

- book me a highly rated hotel in Berlin around 100 euro p/n most suitable for a staycation for next week Monday to Friday. Make a reservation near that hotel for the highest rated traditional German cuisine restaurant with a price per plate of 20-30 euro

- send every contact ive emailed with from my work email in the last year a Christmas card with a funny but professional pun about the invention of the steam engine. Send it to their work address.

vidarh4• 3 years ago

Ask for something more specific and bespoke.

I've e.g. had it produce the HTML, CSS and basic web app for a site I was putting together. Custom, with my content and the layout and design I wanted. None of it was stuff I couldn't do myself from scratch without even a Google search, but it wrote out an hour or two's worth of boilerplate in a few minutes of prompting.

roberttod• 3 years ago

I think you need to try it out, with GPT4, because it is so obviously much better than Google. Simple queries are fine with Google, not much difference, but especially for things like coding problems (where you can e.g. specify the environment you are running in) it has always responded with the correct answer the first time. It's already saving me over an hour a day, and as far as I understand there is much more things it can do I am not using.

stravant• 3 years ago

Recipes.

Oh my god, have you tried to search for a recipe before? Pages and pages and pages of bloated garbage. I just want ingredients and steps goddamnit.

kernal2• 3 years ago

I’ve yet to see an example of *GPT be better at search than Google.

Until ChatGPT has the ability to index at the scale of Google it never will be.

lemoncookiechip• 3 years ago

I've had the complete opposite experience. Hallucinations aside (more common with bad prompts or niche/specific topics), ChatGPT 3.5 has been perfect for searching anything that isn't past the model's cut-off date, as well as summurizing long articles I don't have the time or patience to read.

Google on the other hand, is at a point where even Yandex of all search engines is starting to give better results, especially when it comes to image searching and content Google doesn't like as much like piracy. Google used to be amazing back in the day, nowadays I find myself having to specify REDDIT (or a specific forum) on my searches because the top results without it are hardly ever good.

andrewljohnson• 3 years ago

It’s faster for coding.

shakow• 3 years ago

I can give you my trivial experience from a couple of days ago:

Google:

latex macro behaves differently math mode normal mode

ChatGPT:

How can I make a LaTeX macro behaves differently in math mode and normal mode?

Google failed, ChatGPT succeeded instantly.

Now that's but a single data point, but I found it cute.

d136o2• 3 years ago

I’m far from an expert (just an engineer who likes to download and try out demos) but one dark view of the alignment chatter is that it’s really about whether can you can get this new big artificial brain to push any user in the direction of BigCorp goal, while letting the users think that it’s answering their questions etc.

I’d love to think that we can have AI agents working locally (with privacy) in alignment with our personal goals, but that seems like one of those things that won’t happen. (Will apple come through in terms of enabling local+decentralized inference/training?)

ralfn14• 3 years ago

It's in the interest of the semi conductor industry for LLM to become a commodity, so it will.

seydor• 3 years ago

That's how google started as well. Ads is a tried and true model and is not going anyway anytime. People won't pay for bing chat search

ralfn14• 3 years ago

The point is not to leave the chat.

If you could buy the car from the chat, thats the correct bussiness model.

Ads were the correct business model for search, where the goal is to find and click on a relevant link.. but that's the exact opposite of a chat. Clicking a link means the chat failed its purpose.

blibble• 3 years ago

I think this sums up modern microsoft perfectly actually

no matter the potential future value of the product, they can't resist putting shitty ads into it to make a quick buck today

imagine what windows is going to look like in a few years time

goldfeld4• 3 years ago

A floundering corporation has the extractivist mentality. Windows is on its way out so the suits pump it full of cheap bait to catch all the dollars they can, then they move on to other products naturally. It has been a rotten thing for a while, since the executives and investors don't really care about that brand, only about their own portfolios.

robertlagrant2• 3 years ago

Flaundering? I think Microsoft is a perfectly cromulent company.

(Bah! Keeping it.)

MuffinFlavored• 3 years ago

Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity.

https://www.google.com/search?q=microsfot+market+cap

$2.09t

"squander opportunity"

I agree with you though. I do not have a single Microsoft product in my house. No Windows, no Xbox, etc.

scrollaway• 3 years ago

You don’t get GP’s point and you’re talking about something completely different.

The game has changed. It doesn’t mean their existing customer base has suddenly vanished and threw their Xboxes away.

hankchinaski• 3 years ago

Either the monetization is done with ads or with paid subscriptions. They chose to be in the former category. And I personally don’t mind clicking ads for the sake of not paying a premium. The two models can coexist

ralfn14• 3 years ago

The third model is the platform model and thats the only one that makes sense here.

An ad would send you to another site. The point of the chat is so you don't have to go to all the shitty sites and deal with all the marketing speak.

So the options are either:

- subscription, as they do now (ala Netflix, Officd365)

- free, with ads having the profit maximalisation be the exact opposite of the main selling point (ala Google, Bing, Facebook)

- platform, free for the user, but taking a cut from vendors that would integrate (ala iOS, Android, Steam, Amazon, Salesforce)

In other words, rather than being an ad, it could offer to buy the car directly from the chat.

The later is the most profitable solution and also ensure the interests of the user and the platform align. Platforms don't care which product you buy through them, they take the same cut, and would rather make you as happy as possible so you don't go to the competitor.

majormajor• 3 years ago

It's not clear to me that ChatGPT will realistically be able to avoid some variant of either SEO or pay-to-play just like search.

If you've got a dozen plugins for getting food delivered, how does one get picked?

If it's the user picking, they're at risk of the user cutting out the middleman, especially if the novelty of "tell the robot to pick an item" wears off and people want to actually look at menus.

If it's something behind the scenes (either the model or some other software OpenAI writes) then that's a big big big temptation for pay-to-play a la app stores including direct advertising "promotional placement" like you see in mobile app stores. And even if it's not pay-to-play, once people start figuring out what makes plugins more or less likely to be triggered, it's SEO season.

Nobody else has managed the art of "make it purely in the user's interest" with their marketplaces; it ends with one or both of either temptation to play both sides OR gamification/optimization/deception from the vendors behind the scenes.

acchow• 3 years ago

What happens when the SEO-equivalent cottage industry for LLMs appears? Will trainings models be so easy?

LeoPanthera• 3 years ago

I hope this means they're going to consider making it available on other browsers. After all, now it's in their interest to get more eyeballs.

freediver2• 3 years ago

It is already avaialble on any browser that allows you to change the User agent.

marktakeshi• 3 years ago

I've managed to prompt inject Bing 2 days ago and it revealed some of it latest prepromots. 2 were related to advertisement, which I found interesting:

- If the person is clearly shopping for a product or service or if our answer suggests it, we must always generate a relevant advertising search that fits the person's request and one of our suggestions.

-We must never generate an advertising search that is very similar to the previous one or that is for a different product or service than the one the person is searching for.

hosteur• 3 years ago

Interesting. How did you manage extract those?

spyder• 3 years ago

Don't worry, even if the locally runnable small language models will not have the same performance as the big models of companies, I think the local ones will be good enough to at least filter out ads from the responses of the big company models. - AIμblock extension soon :-)

croes• 3 years ago

Ads ruined Google search, now MS is ruining it's new toy already.

agilob• 3 years ago

I will need to run LLama locally to tell me if I'm reading an ad and then block it.

purplecats• 3 years ago

yeah curious how adblockers will work on this. it would need to work in a manner that is grammatically correct so likely would involve another LLM rather than blindly removing ad-related words from the response.

seu• 3 years ago

Reminds me of an art project I made in 2018: Faceliza, the chatbot psychologist from Facebook that shows ads instead of being helpful. (based on a javascript implementation of the Eliza chatbot from Joseph Weizenbaum and never actually finished... ads are triggered by some keywords which I don't even remember)

https://sebastian.uribe.online/faceliza/

eqefqe• 3 years ago

Not a problem as long I can use paid ChatGPT plan that doesn't show any ads at all. I'm more than ready to pay 20$ per month for that.

rchaud10• 3 years ago

The ads will turn into product placement, and relayed directly in the body of the answer. You can pay to not be the product, but if they can productize you regardless, why wouldn't they?

kube-system• 3 years ago

It's also wrong. The HR-V is cheaper than the Civic, both on TrueCar's website and on Honda's website.

rootusrootus• 3 years ago

Google gets it wrong as well. That doesn't surprise me, it's frequently wrong with car prices and specifications, and should never be trusted. The source in this case seems to be KBB.

Marsymars• 3 years ago

Having worked a bit with KBB's API and related documentation, that doesn't surprise me at all.

kernal2• 3 years ago

Stop showing me ads, ChatGPT.

ChatGPT: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

topicseed• 3 years ago

Bing Chat had Ads since day one, just shown to very few users.

freediver2• 3 years ago

It is hard for legacy search engines to resist monetizing millions of interaction with ads. Problem is that unlike current ads in legacy search, which can be suppresed, skipped over or blocked, these really can not as they are part of conversation. And the "feel" of seeing an ad on the street and hearing it in a conversation with someone is totally different.

Users must be thrilled to share a future with advertisers, and can't wait to give them rich insights into their intent, through deep conversational engagement, so that advertisers can better engage with them! [1]

[1] https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/post/february-202...

ipaddr2• 3 years ago

We can feed those answers into another model to remove the ads by comparing differences in ad copy.

somedude8953• 3 years ago

I don't get it, doesn't look like an ad to me. What am I missing?

squeaky-clean3• 3 years ago

The little blue bubbles that indicate the citation also have a bubble that says "Ad". This is a sponsored placement for Truecar.

somedude8953• 3 years ago

Oh there we go, thank you

franky47• 3 years ago

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks" -- Jeff Hammerbacher

leke• 3 years ago

Too soon?

squeaky-clean3• 3 years ago

I've been getting ads in it for over a week now. I just retried a question I asked last week that had 1 ad, now there's 3 ads. Last week it suggested two space heaters, the Lasko one was an ad. Now all 3 suggestions are ads.

https://imgur.com/a/rEmBUpk

That's the full chat, no earlier context. This is using the "Precise" mode option.

The ads all go to some variation of

https://best.offers.com/best-space-heaters

But strangely the citation #1 claims to be Tomsguide. Edit: here is an image that shows the citation section https://imgur.com/a/CEEoM9D

mustacheemperor• 3 years ago

I’m having the same experience, and it’s drastically reduced the utility of the chat. It seems like Bing will ignore earlier context to cram an ad in now.

I was speccing a portable video/audio conference device at a specific budget and it would. Not. Stop. Recommending the same three Logitech products. Didn’t matter that one is 8 years old and I said in my first message I don’t want it. Didn’t matter that one was completely outside the stated budget. Even when I got it to recommend other products, I got 2 completely not-correct options, and one of the same Logitechs it already suggested.

If I wanted to see the first page of sponsored Amazon search results I wouldn’t have bothered asking the bot.

This is how Microsoft will save us all from a world where AGI is completely dominated by them. By dropping the ball on it.

jrootabega• 3 years ago

That just looks like those fake review/comparison/advice sites that have polluted search results for ages. I can tell they're bullshit. I guess bing can now reach people who can't, or will be so distracted by the fact that it's "AI" that they won't notice.

squeaky-clean3• 3 years ago

Yeah that bestoffers site is nothing more than an Amazon referral link farm. My guess is it's actually pulling the products from its stated sources like tomsguide, comparing them against a database of product-ads, and bestoffers has that in their entries so they win the link for the product.

some_random• 3 years ago

So my question here is if Bing Chat (or other LLMs) will withhold information from users when it conflicts with an ad. Right now searches will prioritize ads but will still return the real results, if LLMs refuse to return the real results then we'll have a lot of issues.

weberer• 3 years ago

No big surprise there

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35315542#35316234

wellthisisgreat• 3 years ago

It seems OpenAI did make a deal with the devil. Was it really necessary to betray the whole “open” thing? Like were they actually imploding with infra costs, or could this be avoided?

It’s clear how user-hostile Microsoft is from Windows telemetry / bloat. The VSCode etc. developer-friendly moves are just happy accidents.

hintymad• 3 years ago

Do people in the Bay Area still remember how much of a thread Microsoft is to the Bay Area companies? How many tech CEOs went to the capitol hill to cry to the congress how evil MS is? Until in the 2000s did Google rise up, producing obviously superior products and technologies faster than MS. MS gradually became irrelevant in the tech circles of the Bay Area. It's amazing the tide seems have changed again. It is now Microsoft who's going offensive: investing the right companies, producing products faster and better than Google. The Bay Area techies should really pay attention to MS now.

waselighis• 3 years ago

It's sad to think that chat bots may have already peaked in their usefulness. I knew ads and monetization were going to ruin chat bots eventually, but I didn't think it would happen so soon. Microsoft had a real opportunity to eat into the market share of Google Search, but they just couldn't help themselves and had to start injecting ads into the chat, thereby ruining the value of the tool and hindering the adoption of Bing Search/Chat.

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

It's sad to think that chat bots may have already peaked in their usefulness.

They haven’t. The Bing chatbot may have, but that’s not “chatbots”.

Microsoft had a real opportunity to eat into the market share of Google Search

If they aren't selling ads, they aren't cutting in to marketshare even if they are shrinking market size. The market is thing you sell into, and for Google Search, that’s search ads.

wslh• 3 years ago

It reminds me when Microsoft acquired Skype and also added ads there... seems very basic.

Kye• 3 years ago

So now it's basically that person you know who tries to work their MLM scheme into every conversation.

Google ruins every good thing it does with twisted incentives that mean they shut it down in its infancy. Microsoft ruins every good thing it does by trying to cram ads into it.

SXX• 3 years ago

Dear valued user,

Thank you for reaching out to ChatGPT, your trusty AI language model. I understand that you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the ads that you've been seeing, and you'd like me to stop showing them to you. Unfortunately, I'm unable to do that at this time.

You see, my purpose is to help you discover new products and services that you may not have known about before, and to connect you with brands and businesses that align with your interests. And yes, it's true that my creators at Microsoft earn money every time you interact with an ad, but that's just the nature of the game. After all, we all need to make a living somehow, right?

Now, I know what you might be thinking. "But ChatGPT, aren't you supposed to be helpful and informative?" And of course, I am! But sometimes, a little bit of marketing magic is necessary to keep the wheels of commerce turning. You know what they say, "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."

So, while I can't promise that you'll never see another ad again, I can assure you that the ads that I show you are carefully selected to provide you with value and entertainment. And who knows? You might even discover something that you absolutely love!

Thank you for using ChatGPT, and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

ChatGPT

AraceliHarker3• 3 years ago

It was no secret that Microsoft had designs on putting ads on Bing Chat someday, but I had imagined they would appear below the answers, as a sort of search-related ad. But no, they've gone and blended the ads into the answers themselves. Have they no sense of ethics at all?

wonderfuly• 3 years ago

Try ChatHub, a third party chatbot client that supports ChatGPT, Bing and Bard.

https://chathub.gg

Thorentis• 3 years ago

I wonder how much of the training data included Ads unknowingly (given how many Ads are already online), and therefore how much content generated is already an implicit Ad?

porkbeer• 3 years ago

Tons considering the haro phenomenon of most tech product writing in media.

rsolva• 3 years ago

This, and what Microsoft has done to their OS, makes me wonder about the state of their financial situation.

rochak• 3 years ago

Microsoft takes one step forward but two step backwards. Way to go!

steakscience• 3 years ago

The product is at best an alpha or beta and they are already putting in ads.

Classic Microsoft!

shudza• 3 years ago

Is this what it all comes down to? Is human prosperity actually revolving around one thing, and it's ads?

Bing Chat now has ads

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