[HN Gopher] Google brings Stack Overflow's knowledge base to Gem...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Google brings Stack Overflow's knowledge base to Gemini for Google
       cloud
        
       Author : onatm
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2024-02-29 17:59 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
        
       | anotherhue wrote:
       | Do we think it's going to meaningfully enrich the data?
        
         | emmanueloga_ wrote:
         | This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather
         | than facts and citations. This question has already been asked,
         | and answered. As currently written, the question lacks enough
         | detail or clarity to be answered. Your question is too broad or
         | has multiple parts and needs to be distilled into one. I'm
         | voting to close this question because it has no effort to solve
         | the problem.
         | 
         | Expect a lot of enriched answers like these coming soon from
         | Gemini/bard :-p
        
         | artninja1988 wrote:
         | The only SO data not yet incorporated into these models is that
         | which was recently created since the model has been trained. It
         | appears more like a "licensing" deal to give something back for
         | scraping all "their" data like everyone else
        
           | tracerbulletx wrote:
           | I think it's probably also about continuing to have access to
           | it for updating information.
        
       | archsurface wrote:
       | I don't understand these instances of using ML to return search
       | results. DDG, returns results; ML returns results, possibly with
       | hallucination. Even without the hallucination what's the point? I
       | find the results I need from a search engine. Solution looking
       | for a problem?
        
         | AlienRobot wrote:
         | I don't know what Google is going to do with it, but Bing is
         | absolutely ruining their search engine with AI. You search for
         | something, AI starts typing out an answer in a typewriter
         | effect. Since AI, I can't trust anymore that the snippets shown
         | at the top are verbatim quotes from a human-written article or
         | something the AI came up with (not considering they could be
         | quoting an AI-generated article!). At the bottom of the search
         | page, where the "next page" would normally be the rightmost
         | button, it's now the "chat" GPT button. I misclick it every
         | time I want to see the next page. I bet that is driving up some
         | metrics and making some engineers really confused about why
         | people keep clicking the chat button and then not chatting.
         | 
         | Overall this all feels so unimaginative. With all the resources
         | these companies have the only solution they can come up with
         | for the search problem is "just throw AI at it." I could come
         | up with that. It's not clever.
        
           | nolongerthere wrote:
           | Curious why you ever use bing to begin with?
        
             | AlienRobot wrote:
             | They sponsor my browser of choice, Vivaldi.
             | 
             | Unlike Google, I can click the second tab every time and it
             | goes to image search. Wait, actually they put "copilot"
             | there and image search is the third tab now. Either way
             | point stands: no shuffling of tabs.
             | 
             | Image search is actually better than Google. I can search
             | for exact image sizes. Google used to offer this! I can
             | just type my screen width and height and find the perfect
             | wallpaper. Wait, it says "at least" here, not "exactly," so
             | I guess it just stores the total amount of pixels of an
             | image and then multiplies the width and height you
             | inputted...
             | 
             | Can you believe this? It's 2024 and I can't even find an
             | image by size on the Internet. I can't even trust the
             | second tab is going to be the images tab. And some people
             | think AI is going to fix software. It's ridiculous. It's
             | just laughable. And so depressing.
        
         | whimsicalism wrote:
         | GPT4 is much faster for searching through results than I am
         | typically and can pull out exactly what I need.
         | 
         | I've basically completely replaced Google in my day-to-day
         | unless i need to look up a specific location of something in
         | the physical world or something that recently happened.
        
           | nicetryguy wrote:
           | > I've basically completely replaced Google in my day-to-day
           | (for GPT4)
           | 
           | That's ...not good.
           | 
           | GPTx gets alot of surface topics right but when you delve
           | into gritty specific details it will just start rambling like
           | a straight jacket lunatic with the confidence of a used car
           | salesman. The rubber meets the road when i try to compile
           | code that uses libraries or functions that don't exist or it
           | leads me to hallucinated imaginary github repos. I worry that
           | this use of GPTx would be like getting water from lead pipes:
           | it would seem fine on the day-to-day while my mind is slowly
           | poisoned with nonsense and insanity.
           | 
           | Google has certainly taken a nosedive in result quality for
           | sure the last few years but Kagi has been amazing for me
           | lately.
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | Your usage of 'GPTx' makes me think you are conflating
             | chatgpt and GPT4. I find chatgpt useless, so hopefully
             | that's not what you're talking about.
             | 
             | None of the things you are describing happen to me,
             | especially if you do basic trust+verify which you should be
             | doing for Google anyways.
        
               | diputsmonro wrote:
               | Could you explain the difference and how you use GPT4? If
               | all you're doing is hitting the GPT4 api, I don't see how
               | it's different.
               | 
               | And, of course, you wouldn't _know_ that your mind is
               | being poisoned with hallucinate half-truths. Maybe you
               | can pick some out because of prior knowledge, but what
               | about the ones you can 't? What about the little things
               | you learn that you don't deem important enough to verify,
               | but then remember later without remembering that they
               | snuck in through an untrusted source? That's precisely
               | the danger - you can't accurately tell truth from
               | fiction, and the stuff you already know isn't the stuff
               | you're asking about (otherwise you wouldn't be asking)
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | > Could you explain the difference and how you use GPT4?
               | If all you're doing is hitting the GPT4 api, I don't see
               | how it's different.
               | 
               | The difference is that the models are completely
               | different? I don't really find that GPT-4 hallucinates
               | all that frequently (only in very nitty gritty details
               | _rarely_ ).
               | 
               | > And, of course, you wouldn't know that your mind is
               | being poisoned with hallucinate half-truths
               | 
               | Okay, so it appears you have some non-falsifiable theory
               | of mind that somehow renders Google better because my
               | mind is being poisoned. Not sure what sort of appeal to
               | objectivity I could use to demonstrate otherwise.
               | 
               | > the stuff you already know isn't the stuff you're
               | asking about (otherwise you wouldn't be asking)
               | 
               | True for Google - less true for GPT4, who I ask to give
               | me practice problems and worked solutions of various
               | things I already know about to practice.
        
       | benpopper1 wrote:
       | One comment to add here - regardless of where you stand on this
       | particular LLM provider:
       | 
       | Do we want knowledge communities like Stack Overflow or Reddit to
       | continue to exist? Should big AI providers that train on their
       | data share some of the value back to the community? Is there an
       | ethical way for web communities to license data to AI providers?
       | 
       | I hope the answer is yes and that there is a path to a productive
       | partnership, one that allows public communities where knowledge
       | is shared freely to thrive, while also bringing more grounded and
       | vetted content to AI systems that are often closed and require a
       | subscription to access.
        
         | ForHackernews wrote:
         | > Should big AI providers that train on their data share some
         | of the value back to the community?
         | 
         | How would they do that? So far, the LLMs can't be trusted to
         | produce accurate answers. The AI companies can pay money to the
         | data sources, but they can't really offer back anything useful
         | (yet, imho).
        
           | Crye wrote:
           | For free integrate back into stack overflow. there are tons
           | of questions that never get answered. This also provides a
           | public forum for that response to be corrected and provided
           | feedback. symbiosis.
        
             | ForHackernews wrote:
             | By definition, aren't those difficult questions to answer?
             | Is there any reason to think the LLMs would succeed where
             | humans have failed? I mean, I'm sure they would produce
             | _some_ output...but is a misleadingly-incorrect answer
             | better than no answer to a thorny obscure question?
        
       | croes wrote:
       | Stackoverflow's knowledge?
       | 
       | Isn't it the knowledge of its users?
        
         | YesThatTom2 wrote:
         | Don't anthropomorphize computers--they hate it.
        
       | johnny_canuck wrote:
       | I'm curious about the longevity of these sort of collaborations -
       | in the future who is contributing to these knowledge bases? I
       | imagine the communities that surround these places will fade away
       | if new users are unaware of them and content creation begins to
       | halt.
       | 
       | Though I suppose that is a short sighted concern in itself given
       | the way in which we work will begin to evolve quickly as AI
       | becomes more powerful.
       | 
       | In the end, I guess they end up being a positive press story for
       | Google / Open AI / etc.?
        
         | kemotep wrote:
         | Yeah does the AI then go and upvote or downvote sources to its
         | responses based on the end user feedback?
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | So much for deep and thoughtful adoption of AI. We're just gonna
       | go full-speed ahead and damn the consequences.
        
         | jgalt212 wrote:
         | If it doesn't work, then Stack Overflow got some free money. If
         | it does work, new knowledge production / acquisition will
         | suffer. Or will Gemeni pay for answers to questions it does not
         | know. Then some script kiddie using OpenAI will answer then,
         | and then our internet hive mind will take the shape of a
         | Habsburg Jaw.
        
       | StimDeck wrote:
       | My experience of stack overflow is that the question in the title
       | is too often not answered directly. The specific issue is
       | tangentially related to the title and the answer can amount to a
       | typo or a bad assumption.
       | 
       | There are often clues in the comments that are more helpful than
       | the "answer" and often outdated answers have the most votes.
       | 
       | All this to ask, how on earth is something like an LLM expected
       | to reconcile those issues.
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Official Stack Overflow post:
       | https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/02/29/defining-socially-resp...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-02-29 23:02 UTC)