A frenzy of activity from tech giants and startups alike is reshaping what people want from search—for better or worse.
It’s a good time to be a search startup. When I spoke to Richard Socher, the CEO of You.com, last week he was buzzing: “Man, what an exciting day—looks like another record for us,” he exclaimed. “Never had this many users. It’s been a whirlwind.” You wouldn’t know that two of the biggest firms in the world had just revealed rival versions of his company’s product.
In back-to-back announcements last week, Microsoft and Google staked out their respective claims to the future of search, showing off chatbots that can respond to queries with fluid sentences rather than lists of links. Microsoft has upgraded its search engine Bing with a version of ChatGPT, the popular chatbot released by San Francisco–based OpenAI last year; Google is working on a ChatGPT rival, called Bard. Read More
Daily Archives: February 21, 2023
Why *is* Bing so reckless?
And how did some prominent journalists utterly miss this initially?
Anyone who watched the last week unfold will realize that the new Bing has (or had1) a tendency to get really wild, from declaring a love that it didn’t really have to encouraging people to get divorced to blackmailing them to teaching people how to commit crimes, and so on.
A lot of us were left scratching our heads. ChatGPT tended not to do this kind of stuff (unless you used “jailbreaking” techniques to try to trick it), whereas from what I can tell, Bing went off the rails really fast. And the thing is, the two systems are basically close siblings; OpenAI built ChatGPT, and is now presumed to be working very closely with Microsoft, using the same technology. ChatGPT was, I believe, mainly powered by GPT 3.5 plus a module known as RLHF (which combines Reinforcement learning with human feedback, to put some guardrails in place). We all assumed that Bing’s Chatbot was more or less the same thing, but powered instead by a bigger, newer version of 3.5, which I’ll call GPT 3.6. (Or maybe it’s GPT-4; Microsoft has been very coy about this.) Read More
Why Do Companies Focus on Data Structures and Algorithms in Tech Interviews?
Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA), is a skill you must learn if you want to work as a programmer/developer or data scientist, particularly in large tech giants. Although it may not directly relate to coding, having a solid understanding of DSA helps the software development process run well. It assists a programmer in adopting a reasoned strategy for understanding and resolving a problem.
Most businesses use DSA to evaluate a candidate’s skills. The importance of DSA for your coding career is discussed in this blog, along with tips on how to get ready for interviews. Read More
Algorithms Will Make Critical Talent Decisions in the Next Recession—Here’s How To Ensure They’re the Right Ones
Nearly all HR leaders say their department will use software and algorithms to reduce labor costs in a 2023 recession, but only half are completely confident their tech will produce unbiased recommendations.
Entering 2023, the dreaded “R” word—recession—is top of mind for companies around the country. In a Capterra survey of 300 HR leaders in the U.S., 72% say their employer has already started preparing for a possible recession, while 24% plan to start preparing soon.*
As in previous economic downturns, organizations will need to figure out ways to reduce labor costs, including deciding which employees to lay off if it comes to that. Where 2023 differs is that HR is both more strategically involved in these high-level labor decisions and more data-driven than ever before, supported by cutting-edge HR software systems that can aggregate massive amounts of employee information and turn it into actionable insights and recommendations. Read More
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