AI is so helpful…

“Its search, Jim, but not as we know it”

AI is helping us…

AI is our friend. Its what we wanted and its moving so quickly. So they say.

I accidentally found the “Googling Stuff… Then and Now” meme when I was on Reddit ‘searching’ for something because I’m still ‘old school’.

It was about a month ago but already needs updating… on the ‘Now’ side its forgotten to show that the first thing you now get is the ‘AI Answer Box’. The Copilot is the one we are most familiar with and is terrible. Its usually some confusing response that vaguely makes sense in the context of your search phrase. If you are using Bing the use of Copilot is unbelievably invasive. Google Gemini is also now out but seems a bit gentler in its UI push. I have not downloaded the Gemini app yet as all the early reviews I have been reading seem terrible – its strange really – a sense its all being rushed to capture audience.

The fundamental problem here is we all are still naturally doing search rather than asking a question using a prompt. I mean honestly, who even knew what an AI prompt was 12-months ago? – and now prompt is killing search.

But solutions move as quickly as problems. So its all ok as we are starting to be able to use AI to help us generate the right prompt so we can ask the right search question – is prompting the end of searching?

Over at sites like promptbase with its comprehensive marketplace you can find almost any prompt you might want. And they are all very reasonably priced. They can help you use AI to search for what you want – instead of searching (mmmmh).

Of course you will need some degree of trust in the answer. And prompting is definitely about more than searching. Its about ‘creating the new’.

In the Promptbase marketplace its great as you can search for prompts by the category of which AI engine you want to use (e.g. ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-e) and what you want to create with your prompt (e.g. an answer or perhaps an essay, an image, a photograph – or a search result).

I digress for a moment… I am not sure if you create a photograph that it is actually a ‘photograph’, but I guess that will sort itself out quickly. For example, I’m in a ‘Brutalist Architecture’ FB Group and the debate about AI generated photos of non-existent Eastern European styled brutalist buildings (located in dark wintery very realistic dystopian or soviet era cityscapes) is, well, brutal – almost existential – the message to all is do not post AI photographs. Especially if the members can prove they are not real. Thats getting harder. Did they exist (once) and now they are gone? – who can be bothered to try and verify – the members or the moderators give it a crack – for the moment. But the group now has a reliable rule “Do not post AI generated images of brutalist architecture’. I’ll trust that protection – I have no other choice.

We are helping AI…

I love how big tech like Meta and Microsoft are forcing us (literally) to use AI (just like the search meme above). This is to help ensure the best outcomes for users and heavily involve users in this (or to put it another way – this is to speed up testing so they can move more quickly to obtain market advantage). We are all being enlisted as a Global Test Team for AI – and a free test team. Well maybe not free as I had to pay an extra subscription to get the Copilot extension added into my home Office365 subscription. But I guess I feel good as I am now part of the Copilot Test Team and for Facebook’s shocking ‘in your face’ AI testing I’m in the much better sounding ‘Meta-Beta’ Test Team.

Disintermediation

New ways + new entrants

Are we seeing the disintermediation of ‘search’?

I have been checking out the Perplexity AI engine. Its tagline is ‘Where Knowledge Begins’. Not bad. Under the search bar you can select the question ‘What is Perplexity AI?’ and get some good understandable information on how it works. Nut I still decided to go search for info on Reddit.

I got a good answer in Reddit.

“Actually, there is an AI search engine called perplexity that I have been digging recently. It uses ai to filter through google’s trash results, and it uses (mostly) credible sources. It is also very good at filtering through misinformation (conspiracy theories)”

Then a better one including how it helps with Copilot.

“In its most basic form, it tries to understand your question, rephrase it to be better for a Google search, searches, picks a handful of results and summarizes it for you with GPT.

If you use their Copilot feature, it gets much better. It will try to understand your question, split that into multiple focused Google searches, picks a lot of results (sometimes like 25) and condense them into a summary with GPT-4 (or any top model you wish to use). That summary can get lengthy (I’ve got 2-page ones) as your query gets more complicated. It will also sometimes ask follow-up questions to clarify up your query.

You also have the option to complete an “AI Profile”, in which you introduce yourself to their model and answer a few questions about yourself. The model will use those info to try to tailor the results to your needs. This profile will be passed on as part of the system prompt in all searches, although Copilot seems to understand it better.

There is a feature called “Focus” where you can instruct the engine to only search through focused areas, like academic papers. You can also focus it on writing to have it not search and just generate text”.

The big criticism of Perplexity was its slow – especially for research. I was perplexed (ha ha) and find that criticism a bit ironic as I can remember using search to do research back in the 90s with powerful tools like Yahoo.

I also heard that Google are dealing with a huge internal disintermediation challenge as prompt starts to displace (replace?) search. Of course, it makes sense just think about it – all the search algorithms are impacted and somehow have to be recreated and new plumbing added for prompt. Search has decades of development and technical and commercial optimization behind it. Prompt will have to compete for sponsorship dollars and with the ‘quality’ of the results – like competing ‘service lines’ and that is just within Google. Lets keep Watching this space.

Lets try and keep up with it all. There are some great recent stats Exploding Topics here. I liked these ones:

Top AI Statistics (Editor’s Picks)

1. The global AI market is valued at over $196 billion.
2. AI industry value is projected to increase by over 13x over the next 7 years.
3. The US AI market is forecast to reach $299.64 billion by 2026.
4. The AI market is expanding at a CAGR of 38.1% between 2022 to 2030.
5. By 2025, as many as 97 million people will work in the AI space.
6. AI market size is expected to grow by at least 120% year-over-year.
7. 83% of companies claim that AI is a top priority in their business plans.
8. Netflix makes $1 billion annually from automated personalized recommendations.
9. 48% of businesses use some form of AI to utilize big data effectively.
10. 38% of medical providers use computers as part of their diagnosis.