The fact that web searches are getting worse is biasing your ability to objectively evaluate AI searches
Web searches were getting worse long before AI came along, SEO spam has been a thing since forever, maybe we’re rose tinting our own glasses because Google was so much better than Dogpile and Altavista?
Ironically, the bot articles are being written by the AI that you’re defending
I know and I think the search engines should do something about them (however I suspect they won’t as it’ll make their results even worse somehow), if I want AI results I will use AI, I wish wikipedia had a health portal that was more personalised? like something to replace all the health websites like webmd/healthline/verywellhealth which now that I look at them closer appear to be slightly done up AI websites anyway, eg. just summarising research papers… so now that I think about it they might be next to go so long as ai is quoting sources which:
Unless I can cite the results of a search it’s useless to me
Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:
A bubble in finance is when the price of an asset or security rises far above its true value due to speculation and hype, fueled by investors buying with the expectation of selling at a higher price. Prices rise based on market sentiment rather than fundamental value, creating a self-reinforcing cycle until enough investors realize the bubble’s unsustainability and sell, leading to a sharp decline in price and potential losses for those who bought during the bubble phase.
I’m certain there are plenty of companies that have latched onto AI and gotten a temporary stock price boost, Nvidia is doing extremely well based on its hardware being king for AI, out of this but I’m not sure where the dot com style bubble is?
In crypto it’s easy to point out, the whole thing is practically a bubble that never seems to pop, but where is the bubble in AI? Is it not a financial bubble you’re talking about but a hype one?
Maybe some AI companies will go broke (maybe openai? or claude? or mistral? maybe?) but we still have all the open source models so the tech will still be here, it ain’t going anywhere
Not only that but from all the examples I’ve given you, AI to me provides a ton of genuine value, it is valuable to me as a programmer, it does provide search results that I find useful, it does generate images that I think are useful, people are using it to make music videos that are popular (11 million views in a month):
It’s hard to say it’s a bubble when the value is clearly present, whether you can make a ton of money off that value is something else, but the value is definitely there
Do you actually trust the shit the AI feeds you?
About as much as I trust anything on the internet or reddit, if I’m not sure, I just search a bit more, there’s no limit to searching, I can search all day ^^
They’re investing into huge, energy intensive compute resources that aren’t going to pay off for at least a decade, and meanwhile investors are going to want returns on those investments ASAP. They need to fill warehouses with compute and power them with nuclear reactors, but there’s no profitability model. That means stranded assets, especially if investment dries up and they can’t pay or if demand shifts away from their models. This is set up to be a massive crash.
NVIDIA will probably be fine though.
Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:
Yeah, and what they’ll do is invent sources from thin air or draw made up conclusions from real sources. They’re just LLMs, no matter how much data you feed them and how much the results are tinkered with they only regurgitate a statistically likely answer. Perplexity is a bullshit machine. It’s fine if you don’t really care about the answer and are just kind of curious, but no serious researcher should ever rely on a chatbot.
For who? Who is going to crash massively? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Are you are expecting these massively diversified trillion dollar companies to fail due to AI?
Yeah, and what they’ll do is invent sources from thin air
The sources are right there next to it? You click on them and it takes you to the source, could you maybe try it for 5 seconds and then get back to me before you just make stuff up? what are you, an AI?
or draw made up conclusions from real sources
This feels like I’m having a conversation with a boomer talking about wikipedia.
Yeah, it’s always best to check the original sources and not just believe everything you read on the internet, no different than clicking on results in google and getting a page full of misinformation which people are doing every minute of every hour of every day, and don’t even get me started on social media.
For who? Who is going to crash massively? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Are you are expecting these massively diversified trillion dollar companies to fail due to AI?
Open AI is going to implode after it goes for-profit. As for the others they’ll weather the storm, they have enough diversity in their assets to handle the AI bubble popping, but there will be big tech layoffs and lots of assets will get sold off to private equity.
You click on them and it takes you to the source, could you maybe try it for 5 seconds and then get back to me before you just make stuff up?
So what’s the point?
This feels like I’m having a conversation with a boomer talking about wikipedia.
Rude. Wikipedia is, at least, peer reviewed by wikipedia editors. Chatbots don’t have that. They will just make shit up and you have to manually double check their sources yourself. At that point, why are you even using AI? It saved you no time or effort.
This feels like having a conversation with someone inside a hype bubble. If Wikipedia already exists, what purpose does AI fulfill? It’s just a more expensive, more energy intensive way to do the exact same thing. There’s no profitability case. It’s useful, but it isn’t more useful than the much cheaper and much less energy/resource intensive alternatives. So, what’s the point?
Yeah, it’s always best to check the original sources and not just believe everything you read on the internet, no different than clicking on results in google and getting a page full of misinformation which people are doing every minute of every hour of every day, and don’t even get me started on social media.
Okay, but then, why is AI useful? If you’re going to look at sources anyway, what’s the point? You’re just using a massive amount of energy and compute for something that can be done much more efficiently.
The only useful product I’ve seen come out of this is hype bubble is text-to-image models. Being able to tell a bot to generate an image is really interesting and useful for people without skills in creating or editing their own images. That’s an actual use case that could maybe justify the amount of resources being poured into it, it could maybe even be profitable.
Okay, but then, why is AI useful? If you’re going to look at sources anyway, what’s the point?
Because it summarises the results, it’s like a search engine but better
The rest? It’s wasteful and it won’t last.
I’m using it for coding in a way that it isn’t going anywhere, I’m using LM Studio with Qwen2.5 Coder and Mistral 7b, these are offline models so even if Alibaba or Mistral go broke they’ll continue to work.
Example of what it looks like:
It seems like lots of people are using it in a similar way, no longer searching the web and clicking on sometimes 100 results trying to figure out a problem but instead using AI to answer questions:
While originally it was constantly making mistakes there’s now Chain of Thought and code sandboxing, it has gotten so much better so quickly
So now I’ve got: web search summarisation, a far better reddit/forum search and summarisation, text to image generation and personal coding assistant, each of these in and of themselves would be an amazing program used by millions and that’s ignoring using it for assistance with language learning:
If it wasn’t for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I’ve seen since the iphone.
I have heard that these LLMs are really good as coding assistants, so good point. I shouldn’t dismiss that. I don’t think they’re good at music, and really the art isn’t that good either, but I’m sure people without artistic training like being able to make images and songs. Not sure it’s worth the cost, since it’s all built on plagiarism and so massively wasteful.
As for web searches, really? I don’t think they’re trustworthy. They can, and do, make shit up. No, that’s not the same as the boomerism of saying “anyone can edit Wikipedia so you can’t trust it” because Wikipedia has quality control. LLMs don’t. There’s literally nothing stopping it from spitting out lies and so it’s up to the user to double check whatever the LLM spits out, which means I might as well just search through results myself. And if you don’t always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.
If it wasn’t for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I’ve seen since the iphone.
If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web! AI summarization is only “useful” in the sense that the search engines have destroyed themselves in their search for profitability, google is garbage now and we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.
So really, the problems that are causing AI slop to pollute search results are the same problems that made search engines so bad over the past ten years.
If we demonetized and de-enshitified the search engines by nationalizing google I don’t think AI result summaries would be useful at all.
Web searches were getting worse long before AI came along, SEO spam has been a thing since forever, maybe we’re rose tinting our own glasses because Google was so much better than Dogpile and Altavista?
I know and I think the search engines should do something about them (however I suspect they won’t as it’ll make their results even worse somehow), if I want AI results I will use AI, I wish wikipedia had a health portal that was more personalised? like something to replace all the health websites like webmd/healthline/verywellhealth which now that I look at them closer appear to be slightly done up AI websites anyway, eg. just summarising research papers… so now that I think about it they might be next to go so long as ai is quoting sources which:
Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-lemmy-ml-Q_mHphL3T.i2dA16PDKtAw
When using social it’s summarising reddit, when using Academic it uses academic sources:
You can also use AI for language learning:
https://morpheem.org/
To quote Mistral 7b:
I’m certain there are plenty of companies that have latched onto AI and gotten a temporary stock price boost, Nvidia is doing extremely well based on its hardware being king for AI, out of this but I’m not sure where the dot com style bubble is?
In crypto it’s easy to point out, the whole thing is practically a bubble that never seems to pop, but where is the bubble in AI? Is it not a financial bubble you’re talking about but a hype one?
Maybe some AI companies will go broke (maybe openai? or claude? or mistral? maybe?) but we still have all the open source models so the tech will still be here, it ain’t going anywhere
https://huggingface.co/models?sort=trending
Not only that but from all the examples I’ve given you, AI to me provides a ton of genuine value, it is valuable to me as a programmer, it does provide search results that I find useful, it does generate images that I think are useful, people are using it to make music videos that are popular (11 million views in a month):
The Drill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbXZoMocpM8
Songs: AI Took My Job https://suno.com/song/14572e0f-a446-4625-90ff-3676a790a886
It’s hard to say it’s a bubble when the value is clearly present, whether you can make a ton of money off that value is something else, but the value is definitely there
About as much as I trust anything on the internet or reddit, if I’m not sure, I just search a bit more, there’s no limit to searching, I can search all day ^^
They’re investing into huge, energy intensive compute resources that aren’t going to pay off for at least a decade, and meanwhile investors are going to want returns on those investments ASAP. They need to fill warehouses with compute and power them with nuclear reactors, but there’s no profitability model. That means stranded assets, especially if investment dries up and they can’t pay or if demand shifts away from their models. This is set up to be a massive crash.
NVIDIA will probably be fine though.
Yeah, and what they’ll do is invent sources from thin air or draw made up conclusions from real sources. They’re just LLMs, no matter how much data you feed them and how much the results are tinkered with they only regurgitate a statistically likely answer. Perplexity is a bullshit machine. It’s fine if you don’t really care about the answer and are just kind of curious, but no serious researcher should ever rely on a chatbot.
For who? Who is going to crash massively? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Are you are expecting these massively diversified trillion dollar companies to fail due to AI?
The sources are right there next to it? You click on them and it takes you to the source, could you maybe try it for 5 seconds and then get back to me before you just make stuff up? what are you, an AI?
This feels like I’m having a conversation with a boomer talking about wikipedia.
Yeah, it’s always best to check the original sources and not just believe everything you read on the internet, no different than clicking on results in google and getting a page full of misinformation which people are doing every minute of every hour of every day, and don’t even get me started on social media.
Open AI is going to implode after it goes for-profit. As for the others they’ll weather the storm, they have enough diversity in their assets to handle the AI bubble popping, but there will be big tech layoffs and lots of assets will get sold off to private equity.
So what’s the point?
Rude. Wikipedia is, at least, peer reviewed by wikipedia editors. Chatbots don’t have that. They will just make shit up and you have to manually double check their sources yourself. At that point, why are you even using AI? It saved you no time or effort.
This feels like having a conversation with someone inside a hype bubble. If Wikipedia already exists, what purpose does AI fulfill? It’s just a more expensive, more energy intensive way to do the exact same thing. There’s no profitability case. It’s useful, but it isn’t more useful than the much cheaper and much less energy/resource intensive alternatives. So, what’s the point?
Okay, but then, why is AI useful? If you’re going to look at sources anyway, what’s the point? You’re just using a massive amount of energy and compute for something that can be done much more efficiently.
The only useful product I’ve seen come out of this is hype bubble is text-to-image models. Being able to tell a bot to generate an image is really interesting and useful for people without skills in creating or editing their own images. That’s an actual use case that could maybe justify the amount of resources being poured into it, it could maybe even be profitable.
The rest? It’s wasteful and it won’t last.
Because it summarises the results, it’s like a search engine but better
I’m using it for coding in a way that it isn’t going anywhere, I’m using LM Studio with Qwen2.5 Coder and Mistral 7b, these are offline models so even if Alibaba or Mistral go broke they’ll continue to work.
Example of what it looks like:
It seems like lots of people are using it in a similar way, no longer searching the web and clicking on sometimes 100 results trying to figure out a problem but instead using AI to answer questions:
While originally it was constantly making mistakes there’s now Chain of Thought and code sandboxing, it has gotten so much better so quickly
So now I’ve got: web search summarisation, a far better reddit/forum search and summarisation, text to image generation and personal coding assistant, each of these in and of themselves would be an amazing program used by millions and that’s ignoring using it for assistance with language learning:
https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/
song making
https://suno.com/explore
etcetc
If it wasn’t for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I’ve seen since the iphone.
I have heard that these LLMs are really good as coding assistants, so good point. I shouldn’t dismiss that. I don’t think they’re good at music, and really the art isn’t that good either, but I’m sure people without artistic training like being able to make images and songs. Not sure it’s worth the cost, since it’s all built on plagiarism and so massively wasteful.
As for web searches, really? I don’t think they’re trustworthy. They can, and do, make shit up. No, that’s not the same as the boomerism of saying “anyone can edit Wikipedia so you can’t trust it” because Wikipedia has quality control. LLMs don’t. There’s literally nothing stopping it from spitting out lies and so it’s up to the user to double check whatever the LLM spits out, which means I might as well just search through results myself. And if you don’t always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.
If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web! AI summarization is only “useful” in the sense that the search engines have destroyed themselves in their search for profitability, google is garbage now and we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.
So really, the problems that are causing AI slop to pollute search results are the same problems that made search engines so bad over the past ten years.
If we demonetized and de-enshitified the search engines by nationalizing google I don’t think AI result summaries would be useful at all.