The fear of investors and, to some extent, Google, is that LLMs will supplant traditional search and by the time enough people are catching on to affect metrics the momentum will be too great to stop. My experience with LLMs has not led me to believe that is all that likely but opinions differ there.
Just like how it is hard to fact-check Wikipedia now that it's used a reference. A thought came to me - perhaps it's Wikipedia that should be worried that it'll be supplanted by LLMs.
The phenomenon they're referring to is when something spurious is posted on Wikipedia with no or poor citations, then used as the source for a "reputable" article (without citations), then the article is cited by Wikipedia, making the spurious information look more trustworthy.
The user experience with ChatGPT is pretty good. No ads, no spam results. There are downsides too of course: the hallucinations, and the way the ChatGPT site wants me to log back on now and then.
I was very happy with Google but recently on my iPhone the Google website started nagging me to log in every time I do a search. This is a poor experience, add to that the ad results that have gotten harder and harder over time to distinguish from real results.
People here are praying very hard for Twitter to fail. Nearly any social media post nowadays has 50-100 comments predicting Twitter's failure and ranting about Musk. He is living rent-free in many heads now.
Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.
Many bigots are revealed as self-hating closet cases and fetishists, so I could see a naïve analysis attempt to flip it around and assume it must go both ways.
I actually think the "living rent free in heads" peaked awhile ago. At this point it's just clear in a more pedestrian way that things aren't going well over there.
It reminds me of the Trump thing, it seems people really lose all rationality when they are faced with a man who publically doesn't care and does whatever he wants and is successful at it. I wonder if we will one day have a psychological name for this. It must be related to something in the human brain that touches on social repression and decades of instilled moral codes like "Don't say this, nobody will like you" and then when somebody does it anyway, you feel like it's an invader from a different tribe or a tribe member violating the fabric of what holds together the tribe. When really, he's not doing much different at all and they'd privately do the same exact jokes as a kid like "Twitter is Titter! haha! Like titties get it?" I bet lots of people had such a dumb thought but repressed it and when a supposed adult and major social figure acts like that, it evokes anger that the tribe is in danger.
I’d argue that one of the reasons Tesla and SpaceX are successful is not just because Elno is a “visionary” (or functional equivalent). It’s because he was/is supported by a cadre of “true believers” (eg that we must disrupt the auto industry in order to do something radical about climate change). Those true believers (like all true believers), are willing to put up with lots of strange behaviour in the name of that belief.
Twitter on the other hand was bought with a management layer that could fairly be characterised as the opposite of true believers in whatever Elon is selling. Hence the implosion.
Yeah you're right about this, but it isn't irrational. Human societies have been as successful as they have because of social contracts. The phenomenon you're highlighting here is just society's immune system to protect itself against violators of those contracts.
When Chrome launched, it only launched with ~2-3% market share in the first week compared to Firefox. Everyone thought that Chrome wasn't that good and Firefox would be fine. However I knew on day one that Firefox was in serious trouble and I switched browsers immediately. But what I didn't know is that Firefox would do nothing to compete for 10 years.
How many of the companies with the largest market cap (top 15) were also in the top 15 20 years ago? Why do you think Google will be an exception to this reality?
I think the answer is network effect. As soon as there appears a properly working easy accessible alternative (not Mastodon), people with will start moving to it. At first it won’t be visible in twitter’s popularity, but when the new service reaches some critical mass of users - the popularity will start falling quickly.
Let’s see if Notes is this alternative.
By the time there is a dent, it's too late.