The British entrepreneur says search results are plagued with ‘clickbait’

Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”

He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.

  • @madnificentEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    Do you fact-check the answers?

    • @RedredmeEnglish
      11•1 year ago

      That’s such a strange question. It’s almost like you imply that Google results do not need fact checking.

      They do. Everything found online does.

      • OtterEnglish
        12•1 year ago

        With google, it depends on what webpage you end up on. Some require more checking than others, which are more trustworthy

        Generative AI can hallucinate about anything

        • DojanEnglish
          27•1 year ago

          There are no countries in Africa starting with K.

          LLMs aren’t trained to give correct answers, they’re trained to generate human-like text. That’s a significant difference.

          • @TakumideshEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            They also aren’t valuable for asking direct questions like this.

            There value comes in with call and response discussions. Being able to pair program and work through a problem for example. It isn’t about it spitting out a working problem, but about it being able to assess a piece of information in a different way than you can, which creates a new analysis of the information.

            It’s extraordinarily good at finding things you miss in text.

            • DojanEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              Yeah. There’s definitely tasks suited to LLMs. I’ve used it to condense text, write emails, and even project planning because they do give decently good ideas if you prompt them right.

              Not sure I’d use them for finding information though, even with the ability to search for it. I’d much rather just search for it myself so I can select the sources, then have the LLM process it.

      • @madnificentEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Agree.

        I found it more tempting to accept the initial answers I got from GPT4 (and derivatives) because they are so well written. I know there are more like me.

        With the advent of working LLMs, reference manuals should gain importance too. I check them more often than before because LLMs have forced me to. Could be very positive.