You must log in or register to comment.
Friends don’t let friends use Google.
I can’t remember the name, but when the internet was just starting and there were a lot of search engines with no dominate ones, there was an aggregator program that you could input many search engines into, then use it as the searching tool. It would query all the engines and combine, sort, rank, and remove duplicate finds.
Edit: more specific - It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you’d load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
The reason I mention it is because we’re sort of back at that point. Google is failing, Bing never was great, and all the alternatives have their issues, usually with not having the same database to work with. So if you gathered all the best ones, the ones without ties to corporate or AI, then put their results together, maybe you’d have something like what Google was at its peak before “do no evil” got painted over.
Incidentally, Google became what it was/is because it gobbled up a lot of those early search engines’ databases. I miss you, Hotbot. You were a good one.
Was it MetaCrawler? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler
SearXNG is the spiritual successor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearXNG
Search used to be so good. I had an old Honda civic that suddenly wouldn’t start. It wasn’t the starter, alternator, or battery. I managed to find a forum post with my exact issue, which was that a small rubber piece on the clutch pressed a button to “tell” the starter it was okay to start. Twenty minutes later I had zip tied a piece of plastic into place and had a working car again.
If I tried to diagnose that same issue today, it’d be dozens of SEO garbage slop sites without any actual useful information.
I asked gpt5 and it told me to check the clutch safety switch. The thing you fixed.
Don’t be a meat proxy.
The death of Stackoverflow is one of these events where the site has been completely killed by AI and yet its contents is completely necessary for AI to know about solving programming problems. Its death will mark the end of AIs ability to learn how to solve programming issues. Its cannibalizing itself in the process, as it destroys its sources it destroys its own ability to learn.
It’s not just that, it’s shitting where it eats. People are using it to fill the internet with disinformation, then it trains itself on it’s own disinformation, and breeds even worse disinformation. This is why AI can never be smarter than it was in 2021.
On top of that, due to the indiscriminate DDOSing of the entire internet by AI bots, websites have been blocking any web crawlers that are not Google, which just contributes to their monopoly.
I’m pretty sure AI is objectively smarter today than it was 5 years ago.
How can something with no intelligence be smarter?
It is evident that it has intelligence, it outputs intelligent responses usually adequate to its input, even if it’s badly phrased. What it doesn’t have is sentience, conscience, and a learning loop.
Evident to whom exactly?
To anyone who interacts with it? Would you deny that a program automate mental labor in the same way that a sawmill automates manual labor? Isn’t that some degree of intelligence?
Now, we have very imperfect LLMs who nevertheless can be instructed not with program code, but actual natural language, and they react accordingly. Isn’t that also intelligence? Computers that understood natural language was the realm of science fiction just five years ago.
I get it that people hate LLMs, both because how idiots use them, and how corporations push them everywhere; but not recognizing the intelligence in those programs is naive at best.
No, none of that is intelligence. By any definition.
I have deep concerns as to the competence of anyone who interacts with these LLMs and hallucinates that they are intelligent.
This is true, depending on what you mean by smarter. They are undeniably more capable. However, the trendy, cool thing is to hate on AI, rejecting all else. Sure, capitalism sucks, and the powerful rich people and companies who control AI suck. AI itself, though, can very easily result in massive benefits for humanity as a whole.
This is why AI can never be smarter than it was in 2021.
You’re completely wrong. First of all, datasets are getting bigger and objectively better. Secondly, technologies and methods of model training become dramatically more complex. Yes, AI content can create echo for itself, but it’s a solvable issue.
Anyone who disagrees with this fact should do a reality check and learn a little more about the current AI state. In 2021 we didn’t even have reasoning in models.
The model architecture will still improve obviously. But the quality of the training data has been irreversibly altered and will only get worse with time.
