why do I feel like this sentence will age poorly
But in general, to the extent "chat conversation" mimics spoken conversation between individuals, then this is the medium advertisers have the most experience with - quite literally thousands of years of experience.
This is identical to existing audio and TV ads where the personalities do the plugs. It's next generation interstitial targeted ads
It's an extremely solved problem
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...
For what it's worth, I'm not saying Google is unbeatable. I just don't think a language model trained on public data will beat Google. Maybe if it's some walled garden language model that has data that cannot be replicated, sure. That is my main point. Walled gardens will beat Google.
It's not like Google tinkered with language models and forgot about it, like Kodak and digital photography.
This is a code red.
Not because of tech but because a direct challenge to how a search engine monetizes ads.
They need a new business model.
Kodak would sell you a 1.3 megapixel SLR in 1991! That was a decade before Nikon got their products in order. It is a 100% made-up myth that Kodak did not see the potential of digital. Around 1990 their position in the digital camera market was comparable to the position of Tesla around 2015 in the electric vehicle market: the only company that understood there was demand for a technologically cutting-edge product at a pretty high price.
The reason Kodak went out of business is because they lost a phenomenal amount of money trying to become a pharmaceuticals manufacturer.
Edited to add: This is a really excellent example of the ultimate futility of ChatGPT. All it can be is a novel compression algorithm for folk wisdom, which is often wrong. I asked it why Kodak failed to make digital cameras—a misleading question because Kodak was the only player in the digital camera market prior to 1999. Here is the pack of lies it regurgitates.
"""Kodak was slow to embrace digital technology. While other companies were investing in digital camera research and development, Kodak continued to focus on its film-based products. By the time Kodak entered the digital photography market, it was already facing strong competition from companies that had been established in the digital space for some time."""
This is, again, totally false. The real history is the opposite. Kodak was the established player.
At least with these models you can easily train them on the information you want them to use.
I think it's indisputable at this point that the compressed information is being decompressed and manipulated/recombined by prompting in ways that do useful work. It's clearly not just regurgitation.
You could take one of these models such as text-davinci-003 and using the OpenAI API (or go the open source route) start fine-tuning it on more accurate information.
Also we will soon within the next year or two see multimodal models that have clear abilities to manipulate and ad-hoc query visual/spatial scenarios. Which you can already do to a limited extent with existing models in cases where language semantics happen to capture some relevant spatial concepts.
Hey, Google, can you suggest me a best android smartphone for $500? I need good camera.
ChatGPT can answer to this question (his choices are Samsung A52, Pixel 4a, OnePlus Nord, Moto G9 Plus). Is this answer honest? I have no idea.
For example: https://imgur.com/a/7ksmmvb
Just have it bias the recommendations, like spammers on Reddit do.
The EU already has pretty strict rules around product placement, which is quite similar to what purchased bias would be, only worse.
Oh, I don't see that being a problem at all.
"Tell me about the features of modern digital cameras."
Chat bot: "Here's a bunch of information. And by the way, the Nikon Pipboy3000 has all of these features and they are offering 25% off right now. Do you want more information?"
That's very easy.
If done on an Assistant-like device though, that might be a bit different.
I know which I'd prefer to talk to.
So, between the two options, both are trying to sell you stuff.
There's a myriad of ways to avoid that problem and make it socially seen as equivalent.
Then you'll have ad blockers removing sentences. This seems obvious and inevitable - a two sided marketplace with easy capitalization opportunities; it'll fit right in
I think it's great that the management woke up and understands that they need to disrupt themselves.
Jeff Dean already said externally that Google is purposefully not launching great models in the way OpenAI and others are, for all the reasons laid out in the article (and more). But, it's clear they use these things inside their products- probably not enough, because all of Google's main products that depend on ML have issues that will only be surpassed when we have a combined search/language model with a Google-scale index. Or maybe somebody will be able to do it with significantly less reference information than Google.
Increasing the effectiveness of ads is more important than cramming less effective but more numerous ads.
The 'main' AI could try to keep a neutral stance. So like current search engines, but more useful.
Because if Google sees this as a "red alert", it doesn't seem to be so laughable.
Even if Google can easily offer the same , and even superior functionality, it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation.
Even more so if competitors can offer comparable functionality.
Edit: To clarify, because this was mentioned multiple times:
There are two aspects why this might be bad for Google:
There are lot's of ways to monetize a chat bot, many of which would most likely be even much more effective than current ads, because they would feel more organic and thus more trustworthy.
But they would be highly misleading, and I would very much hope for regulators to quickly step in and require a very clear indication that a suggestion was paid for. There are already quite strict rules around product placement in the EU, and this is a lot worse.
Secondly, Google benefits a lot from people clicking on links which then lead to sites that show more Google ads. A more guided and effective "chat search" experience would probably cut out a lot of those ad impressions.