Thursday, July 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 July 2023

Worse Is Better Edition

Top Story

  • You can't compete with free.  (The Verge)

    Neeva was a search engine startup founded by ex-Google engineers - back when Google still had engineers - to build a better search engine.

    The founders noted a fundamental problem with Google.  Being funded by advertising, and having a limited number of ads per page, there was a deep incentive not to push the best search results to the top.

    So Neeeva built their own search engine focusing on paying customers - and went broke, because people didn't want to pay for a better solution when the bad solution was free.

    How do we get out of this bind?

    I see two possible avenues, both generally applicable:

    One, an organisation that benefits from good search tools internally and is in competition with Google in other areas open-sources their work because first this gets lots of developers to contribute free work, and second it blows a hole in the competition's revenue stream.  Facebook has done this with its AI research, clearly aiming at wrecking OpenAI and accidentally doing some good in the process.

    Two, collaborative effort.  One company can't afford $10 billion to develop a better search engine, but millions of developers pooling their resources?  It's not Facebook's own AI research that has doomed OpenAI to extinction, but hobbyists frantically iterating on incomprehensibly sophisticated algorithms at 3AM so they can produce funny videos.


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Disclaimer: Oh no!  I think I've just been outwitted by a toaster.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:20 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Home brew AI background ad-clickers are the future of ecommerce.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 28 2023 12:15 AM (zx18t)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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