My guess is they're they'll use Imagen and LaMDA to build a "conversational" search experience of some kind. So, instead of providing a list of websites to go to, they'll synthesize an answer to the search query, with imagery to go along with it, and so on.
I don't know about the market at large, but I do not want that.
I want the a search engine to just have a huge database of websites, and look up stuff in that database based on my query, spitting out a link to the page that matches best, then the one that matches second best etc etc.
Using ML to determine the order of matches is absolutely fine, but to "digest" the internet and cook up an answer to what I'm looking for without proper sourcing? I do not want that. I don't want to try and guess what biases the language model might have. It's way easier for me to gauge the bias of another human, and for that, I need to be sent to a page a human has written.
(Of course, I realize that the "blog written by a bot" genre of writing is also becoming more convincing, making this whole thing harder...)
Yah I would love someone to convince me this isn't like touchscreen interfaces becoming prevalent in cars over physical control surfaces. It is sold as technological advancement that is good for everyone but in reality it is just corporations figuring out how to make something worse for cheaper and force consumers into it.
I already feel like google search sucks. It is partially googles fault partially the internets fault. The best source of information was and will always be forums full of knowledgable people having genuine conversations and everybody moved to discord because.... because... om I dont know and besides google doesnt get paid to elevate tiny ass forum websites in the search results.
Plans to build conversational agents always seem to ignore Moravec’s paradox. The hard bit of building such an agent is in building a tolerably human-like conversational partner, not in searching and sorting data.
It’s like the “AI” projects that spend all their time building a fancy sci-fi-looking robot body, ignoring the fact that how much of a “person” a robot seems has almost nothing to do with how physically anthropomorphic it is. Johnny 5 and Wall-e are proof enough that the mind, not the geometry of the body, is what’s important.
