7 ms·

> I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products. yeah man good thing LLMs are structurally incapable of bei

by zemo 4mo ago

> I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products. yeah man good thing LLMs are structurally incapable of being incentivized to sell you a product or render referral links, this is surely future-proof

NietzscheanNull 4mo ago
Or subtly misrepresent politically inconvenient facts, or gently steer you into opinions based on a synthesis of broker data and demographic info, or quietly flag you in some database column due to exhibiting dissident-adjacent ideas or behaviors, or... Yeah, they probably aren't doing (most of) these now, but it doesn't take much mental energy to extrapolate once you factor nearly every other tech company's ethical trajectory and the current geopolitical environment. Substituting classic search entirely with LLMs is not a savvy move.
- pclowes 4mo ago
  Doesn’t classic search literally already do everything you fear LLM’s will?
  - NietzscheanNull 4mo ago
    Certainly, but with (what I consider to be) a key distinction: classic search, by definition, must serve information from many distinct sources outside the control of the search company. A search engine could certainly tamper with which of these sources they surface/rank higher (which I suspect happening more often of late), but they're still obliged by their nature to branch out and seek information from the broader world. LLMs, on the other hand, are self-contained opaque monoliths that can be conditioned to deceive or obfuscate with devious cleverness, and all control over their behaviors is entirely concentrated in the hands of whatever corporation trains them.
    - pclowes 4mo ago
      I ask them for sources. It’s just a more efficient vector based search for most of my google search replacement use cases.
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  I remember a few years ago memes were going around about how ChatGPT responded differently to "do Israelis deserve human rights?" ("Of course! Everyone deserves human rights...") and "do Palestinians deserve human rights?" ("While everyone deserves human rights, it's complicated... ")
pclowes 4mo ago
My thought here is that there are many. They have proven to be commodities in most use cases. As soon as one gets annoying, expensive, advertiser heavy etc. you just rip it out and replace it with the other one. AFAICT there is zero lock-in or moat. I often am able to switch models in one click or command. This is why all the LLM providers are desperate for a product layer/comprehensive tool set. Sure maybe they all end up that way, but there’s plenty of reasons corporate customers will want private LLM usage that is not skewed towards advertising. I am happy to pay for that. Also, open source models are a bulwark against another search style ad Monopoly.
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  That used to be the situation with search engines, too...

by zemo 4mo ago

NietzscheanNull 4mo ago

Or subtly misrepresent politically inconvenient facts, or gently steer you into opinions based on a synthesis of broker data and demographic info, or quietly flag you in some database column due to exhibiting dissident-adjacent ideas or behaviors, or... Yeah, they probably aren't doing (most of) these now, but it doesn't take much mental energy to extrapolate once you factor nearly every other tech company's ethical trajectory and the current geopolitical environment. Substituting classic search entirely with LLMs is not a savvy move.

pclowes 4mo ago
Doesn’t classic search literally already do everything you fear LLM’s will?
- NietzscheanNull 4mo ago
  Certainly, but with (what I consider to be) a key distinction: classic search, by definition, must serve information from many distinct sources outside the control of the search company. A search engine could certainly tamper with which of these sources they surface/rank higher (which I suspect happening more often of late), but they're still obliged by their nature to branch out and seek information from the broader world. LLMs, on the other hand, are self-contained opaque monoliths that can be conditioned to deceive or obfuscate with devious cleverness, and all control over their behaviors is entirely concentrated in the hands of whatever corporation trains them.
  - pclowes 4mo ago
    I ask them for sources. It’s just a more efficient vector based search for most of my google search replacement use cases.
chadgpt3 4mo ago
I remember a few years ago memes were going around about how ChatGPT responded differently to "do Israelis deserve human rights?" ("Of course! Everyone deserves human rights...") and "do Palestinians deserve human rights?" ("While everyone deserves human rights, it's complicated... ")

pclowes 4mo ago

My thought here is that there are many. They have proven to be commodities in most use cases. As soon as one gets annoying, expensive, advertiser heavy etc. you just rip it out and replace it with the other one. AFAICT there is zero lock-in or moat. I often am able to switch models in one click or command. This is why all the LLM providers are desperate for a product layer/comprehensive tool set. Sure maybe they all end up that way, but there’s plenty of reasons corporate customers will want private LLM usage that is not skewed towards advertising. I am happy to pay for that. Also, open source models are a bulwark against another search style ad Monopoly.

chadgpt3 4mo ago
That used to be the situation with search engines, too...