> When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google. Ordinary search has gone to the dogs. Maybe as Google goes gaga for AI, its search engine will get better again, but I doubt it. In just the last few months, I've noticed that AI-enabled search, too, has been getting crappier.

People have been complaining that Google's search results suck for at least 15 years. Google is not a search/technology company. Google is an advertising company. As long as Google makes eleventy gazillion dollars a year from advertising there is no incentive to make search results better. Just the opposite. Shitty search results make it more likely you will click on something that generates revenue for advertisers, which encourages them to advertise more with Google, which makes more money for Google.

Yeah(, (sure(. (Why)) not).)

they'll need AI to find misplaced parentheses.

... for old style AI anyway. Great for list processing and data structure creation though, but then so is Python and the C++ STL now so ... big deal.

"Proper" logic driven AI was done with Prolog, Parlog or similar logic inference languages.

The real garbage here is TFA.

"Some signs of AI model collapse" apparently means "One guy tried to look up something and failed". No screenshots, no actual proof of any kind. Just a shitty clickbait title and half of Slashdot hungrily eats up what it so desperately wants to believe.

"As usual, the a-hats crawling the web aren't paying for this additional burden."

They are participating in the same economic model you are, they are paying just as "fair" a share as you do. They pay to connect, and their connection is huge.

In past times there was a symbiotic relationship. Presumably you put things on the web so that they might be seen. Whatever resources search crawlers consumed, you got visibility in exchange. Even with stuff like Google books, if really invested a lot in the content letting google run ads while people read a chapter of your book, still ultimately translated into some book sales or profile raising citations etc.

The AI model stuff breaks a lot of this. Even if the agent does cite/link you as part of its RAG/MCP process for most users the synthesized response is all they are after so they are not encouraged to visit your site at all. Oddly model collapse and hulicinations might help here, if people become convinced they have to check the agents work all the time because it is so unreliable. Never mind that makes the agent useless in the first place. That has never stopped software people from piling more layers on before.

It would at least separate vendors who vet training content from those who just web-scrape on the cheap.

The very definition of it is that it is impossible to predict how it will look like.

The tech singularity threat was never real in the sense of the tech itself becoming a superpower.

The threat is the exponential growth and power of a company that has the most resources.

Far before AI will have any real agency of its own, it will be used by a corporation to dominate all industry, all information, etc.

We already have a small handful of groups with majority ownership of almost everything -the investment singularity. They will use their resources to exponentially increase their dominance w

> ...they have released this monster already ! Can they stop it ??

Uh, we're talking about (Beta) Google here.

If anyone can stop services, they can.

Hell, they don't even need a real reason.

The internet was already heading this way. People setup/run websites to get views and earn advertising revenue, sources that do it effectively thrived and far too often quality wasn't correlated with success. For years before AI you could pay pocket change to get content farms to produce material for your site at nominal cost where they'd just be skimming the web for easy to rip off content on other sites. People who actually do hard work to research / collate information etc often barely benefit because it

I saw this exact complaint with mail groups and network news in 1989. There is a level of trust of information, AI is at the bottom with marketing information unless you trained it yourself.

It's means it is.

> The really unfortunate part is that this isn't just the hilarious story of a bunch of assholes snorting so much VC money they forgot to not shit where they sleep; because they've managed to do it at sufficient scale that basically the entire internet has been caught up in their construction of the inhuman centipede and it's text digestion and excretion pipeline.

I've said for a few years now that the very nature of AI that was being implemented will without fail, lead to AI referencing itself, which will make truth whatever the most self referential AI "decides" is truth.

And coupled in with that, malicious actors will make certain that will happen.

This is inevitable. Between Prompt injection, and data poisoning, it is happening now. So the question will become, Will AI commit suicide by self referencing, or killed by poisoned data from the so called threat acto

> I seem to be the only one calling it." - Maybe your search skills are just bad? This is logical, has thus been predicted to make people aware who don't think by themselves and there have been articles written about it. But obviously, you don't become a journalist if you're too lazy to point out and endlessly wax about the obvious as if you're the first person who ever discovered something. (spoken from a journalist's perspective :-) )

Yah, He's apparently missing that quite a few people have been calling out the AI bubble for a good while now.

> Error is built into the architecture.

Precisely this. It is actually extraordinarily difficult to get an LLM to revert with "I don't know". It will almost always produce garbage instead of nothing.

"...they're prediction engines, nothing more. They're fancy, and they sound human, but they're built to be convincing, not to be right. Error is built into the architecture. And it's getting worse. Even without model collapse, as we attempt to fix the issues, they will get worse and worse"

The problem here is your own lack of knowledge driving your fear.

First, if LLMs are nothing more than "prediction engines", how can they be "built to be convincing"? And how is "convincing" not "right"? Wouldn't the best

Close, but not quite right. LLMs can be trained to be accurate, but that requires attention to the details of what they're trained on. And it happens at the expense of their "creativity". The more you push for accuracy, the less "creativity" you get. (Note: This general rule also applies to people.)

With LLMs it's worse, because there's no direct feedback from the universe, on that mediated by additional training and "tweaks". But in essence it's the same effect.

> But that doesn't dismiss the fact that tens of thousands of people have been prematurely laid off because of a "shift in emerging markets" (corporate greedspeak for premature AI invesi-jaculation), along with roughly eleventy-seven bazillion dollars of AI investment backing (I'm low-balling here).

> Now, unless we're already in the process of hiring back 99% of those people along with assuming that most of that eleventy-seven bazillion was nothing more than a money laundering/tax evasion scheme easily written off, I'd say we could be in for the next dot-bomb if we sit back and feed AI enough GIGO to become better than any politician at shit-talking, and just as worthless.

Oh, that collapse is going to happen in a "We'll just drive off that cliff when we come to it!" fashion.

All of that money will evaporate in a few milliseconds someday soon.

Nearly exactly what Epictetus said 2000 years ago. Deeply insightful.

I came here to make a similar point. The summary includes this quote: "The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality." To which I would quip "well, that's MAGA in a nutshell."

To which others may froth: "Demoncrats! Biden senile! Kamala's laugh! Blaaragh!" And they'd have a point: there was groupthink going on there, too.

But then again: whose in charge now? Whose demonstrably false narratives do we have to suffer through on a daily basis? Which side is bent double with cognitive di

That would give AI purveyor another tool to use--in order to steal more of other peoples' work and leave them unemployed and homeless. Firstly, AI is a failure if it fails what amounts to be a CAPCTHA. Secondly, I don't think anyone should help AI companies do anything. I am not for the centralization of wealth--to corporate thieves.

That would have been a good idea, but it's too late now. We need tough international laws to protect the combined effort of humanity.