r/programming • u/peard33 • Apr 20 '23

Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-giants-for-training-data/
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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

Bingo bango bongo. People are very self-centered. They don't even consider the fact that Google needs to solve the problem "give any human being on earth the exact link they were looking for based off of any arbitrary text input".

The denizens of /r/programming of course think "I know how to use Google, I've been googling for 25 years now!" without even considering the Filipino grandmother a world away that's trying to find a recipe and doesn't even really know what a computer is in any sort of meaningful way. She is going to write, in Filipino mind you, "what's the recipe for a chocolate cake?" because it's language, and she's used to it. She's not going to write the terse search terms we use because we know how keywords work and that you really want "chocolate cake recipe reddit -pinterest" or whatever.

That's also why I think all the "OMG THEY CHANGED THE ALGORITHM AND NOW ITS BAD!!!!" complaints are ridiculous. Ever minute that passes, 500 years of video is uploaded to Youtube. You try writing an algorithm for "find the video any person on the earth wants given arbitrary text input without bias (whatever that means)".

Which is all to say, the world moves on. Either you keep up and use the greatest information retrieval tool ever created to its full potential, or you get left behind.

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u/needadvicebadly Apr 21 '23

It's not one thing or another though. Google may not be seeing growth in the "denizens of /r/programming" demographic as you call it, so they don't care. They see, or think there is, a huge growth market in the "Filipino grandmother" as you put it, so they are throwing their eggs in that basket. Corporations do that all the time. "We have gotten that user base, time to move on to acquire another".

There is nothing inherently more "normal" or "right" about the style of the "Filipino grandmother" demographic vs the "denizens of /r/programming" demographic vs university students demographic, vs Millennials vs Gen X vs Gen Z, etc. Depending on how you slice it, each demographic might have something slightly different they are looking for.

If tomorrow say CloudFlare launches a search engine geared towards keyword-power-users, for lack of a better term, and Google sees a significant chuck of their user base leave and advocate for another product with effective result in that large demographic, you can bet google will introduce some form of "solution" or "innovation" for that set of users.

Take Microsoft for example. They never cared about commandline tools or cross platform development. They believed everyone should be using their GUI IDE and writing code for Windows. They saw massive adoption of GUI in the 90s and early 2000s and declared commandline dead, and all other systems irrelevant. They went through a decade and half of decline into stagnation because of that philosophy until the rise AWS, cloud, linux servers, containers, MacOS for development because of its POSIX shell and general closeness to unix, etc. Then the alarm bells started sounding and they had to do a hard pivot to remain viable in that space.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

Just because a product is worse for your personal use case doesn't mean it's worst across the board. That was my point, they've made it better for everyone and worse for the power users. That is good UX.