?? AI and the future of the Web
?? Today’s edition is brought to you by Sana: Unlocking knowledge with AI.
Google debuted its “AI Overviews”, a box which summarises some users’ search results using genAI. It is less than reliable so far, as dozens of examples shared on social media have shown. For example, its AI overviews have recommended adding glue to a pizza to stop cheese from sliding off, suggested that Google’s AI dataset contains child sexual abuse material and pointed out that a depressed person could jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.?
If and when AI Overviews become reliable, they’ll change the web experience. Users will spend less time clicking and visiting websites as Google search summaries improve and become useful enough. The few remaining clicks may increasingly go to the highest bidder, as ads start to appear in the summaries.
Companies including OpenAI are on a quest for licensing deals with publishers, some of which have already succeeded (Axel Springer SE, Newscorp), but as journalist Hamilton Nolan points out, this is akin to “selling your own house for firewood”. A leaked deck from OpenAI’s “Preferred Publisher Program” promises that members of the program will get priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations. Results from AI systems may be influenced by sponsored deals even more covertly.
Set against this trend is the sad disappearance of the Web. One estimate shows that 38% of web pages from 2013 are no longer accessible.
There are many moving pieces, but it is clear that our online knowledge ecosystem is likely to undergo a radical shift. More and more of our information will become written and curated by AI, whose data provenance is unclear. Worse, the webs heritage may be lost as pages die, never to reach search indexes of language models.
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Two things are needed in this emergent knowledge ecosystem. First, a better understanding of how LLMs transform sources of information into structured outputs in an auditable way. Just this week, AI safety and research company Anthropic managed a breakthrough in this, more specifically what is called mechanistic interpretability. The team found that the model contained a map of related concepts that could be adjusted manually, pointing to a promising avenue of safety research. Second, there needs to be an active effort to maintain and preserve the Web’s rich information heritage
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A tidal wave of change in the digital realm awaits us; exciting times ahead! ?? Azeem Azhar
Director of Sales | HPC, AI, Storage, and Cloud solutions for Public Sector & Service Providers | Vision, Action, Results
9 个月Not just the disappearance of the web. In yesterday's The Guardian, Maria Ressa, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2021, was quoted: “With generative AI, the quality of information you’re getting is already getting crappier.” She cites a recent study "A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated": https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05749
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9 个月It's interesting that mega-scale tech companies are acting like early stage startups with genAI and live testing beta solutions. Very interesting to see how chatGPT started that trend and how users are fairly forgiving.
Making sense of the Exponential Age
9 个月cc Tim O'Reilly Jimmy Wales
Senior Researcher │ Emerging technology at Exponential View
9 个月I'm just surprised at how bad a lot of Google's AI summaries are, they're going to need to put in a fair amount of work before they become anywhere near trustworthy