Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google
wired.com
Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google
When Apple first released Siri, I wrote about it as a new era for how we access information. One that is more personal and interactive. Alexa and Siri took AI chatbots mainstream for basic q&a, digital assistance, and interaction. A decade later, thanks to natural language understanding, LLMs, vector indexes, and zero/few shot learning, the pot... See more
Talia Goldberg • A trillion dollar opportunity
Before the Internet, if you were in need of some facts you might actually decide to consult an old person, like the one living in your finished basement.
New Yorker • Before the Internet
We no longer search for information. Instead, we google. And as we increasingly rely on Google for answers, so our ability to search for information by ourselves diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of the Google search.
Yuval Noah Harari • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
There has been much discussion about adding truth dimensions to search engines, so that Google’s search results would display how reliable or verifiable information is, rather than only reflecting how many times content is linked or clicked.29 A different way of organising knowledge is always to combine the answer with a suggestion, steer or questi
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible
The internet is no omniscient library, but the parallels between Borges’ story are apparent. The web is a boundless compendium of information and data scattered across billions of pages—content, as we’ve loathed to call it. In this virtual information library, Google may be the closest thing we have to a librarian.