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OpenAI temporarily disables the Browse with Bing beta feature

136 points| gpayan | 2 years ago |help.openai.com

115 comments

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[+] Shank|2 years ago|reply
Probably an unpopular opinion, but it's sucky to see these tools constantly getting nerfed. I get that there are large questions out there about things like "browse with bing" but that's why I thought it was supposed to be a limited alpha preview. If OpenAI wants us to build workflows on their stack, they need to really crystalize and figure out what that stack is without changing the underlying stack every 5 minutes. From the constant prompt/jailbreak-defeat tweaks to stuff like this, it really doesn't feel like a stable platform at all.
[+] uLogMicheal|2 years ago|reply
The constant quest for "safety" might actually be making our future much less safe. I've seen many instances of users needing to yell at, abuse, or manipulate ChatGPT to get the desired answers. This trains users to be hateful to / frustrated with AI, and if the data is used, it teaches AI that rewards come from such patterns.

Wrote an article about this -- https://hackernoon.com/ai-restrictions-reinforce-abusive-use...

[+] Roark66|2 years ago|reply
(not at all)OpenAI has a very short time window to monetize and/or lock in their product users.

Currently the biggest model one can feasibly run on a desktop pc with let's say a previous gen gpu, 32gb ram, 2x fast nvme drives is approximately 7B. Models comparable in performance to chatgpt are 45B and bigger. In theory it could be possible to run a model like this, but one would wait 5~10 minutes for every answer.

Now, consider that those models are going to get optimised and hardware will get better. In few years time you'll be able to run such model on your pc, in few more on your smartphone. What is (not at all)OpenAI going to do? They have to beat the AI safety drum as much as possible hoping they manage to curtail the democratisation of Access to big AIs via legal means.

At the same time due to a lack of proper software NVidia is the only game in town for anyone wanting too do inference at home and they're already applying monopoly-level profit margins (50%?) to their products.

When is the last time you saw a Google TPU for sale? Ive got my hands on their "edge" tpu. It's nice for things like Cctv object recognition and similar small tasks. I've managed to build a nice 1U Cctv server using it that consumes 30W on average. But I'd like the big version now.

I bet the moment alternative frameworks that have good optimisations for both nVidia and non nVidia hardware are starting to gain ground it will suddenly become a lot more difficult to purchase nVidia cards by normal people. They openly say it on their every keynote they want to "rent you everything".

This is the biggest battle (except actual physical wars against autocracies) that we have to win in next 50 years to retain our freedom we realistically have in democratic countries. If we allow intelligence (AI) to centralise and be subject to centralised control it'll be game over. The entire global society will be steered as a whole by one "prompt engineer".

[+] iforgotpassword|2 years ago|reply
It is annoying. And it seems rather impossible to get this under control 100%, at least if you don't want to much collateral damage. I don't know if it's just that I'm unconsciously raising expectations when trying chatgpt, but I somehow feel like it's getting dumber. I have no idea if this is because of trying to get it to not say inappropriate things, or from trying to get it to not hallucinate.

The problem is most likely that you cannot market this without achieving these two goals. Companies powering their support chat with it don't want it to ever curse or insult the customer, and average users using it as an assistant cannot fathom that something the computer says could possibly be wrong.

[+] Semaphor|2 years ago|reply
Unpopular? Isn’t that the opposite?
[+] acoard|2 years ago|reply
> Probably an unpopular opinion, but it's sucky to see these tools constantly getting nerfed.

Why would it be popular to nerf tools? I thought people all preferred the more powerful LLM models.

[+] UpToTheSky|2 years ago|reply

    For example, if a user specifically asks for a
    URL's full text, it might inadvertently fulfill
    this request.
So this seems to imply two things:

1: Bing has access to text on websites which users don't. Probably because websites allow Bing to crawl their content but show a paywall to users?

2: The plugin has a different interface to Bing than what Bing offers via the web. Because on the web, you can't tell Bing to show the full text of the URL.

I have to contact my ISP. That's not the open web I subscribed to :) Until they fix it, I just keep reading HN. A website which works the way I like it.

[+] mellosouls|2 years ago|reply
There are various techniques automated agents (eg crawlers like Google's) can use. Ethical ones are done in agreement or following the guidance of the content providers to allow discovery which suits both parties while not giving unrestricted access which wouldn't always suit the provider.

We could hypothesize that in this case BWB is employing some of those techniques while it isn't a discovery-enabling service, but rather a content-using one, and so would be expected to present as an ordinary user and be subject to the same constraints.

[+] PeterStuer|2 years ago|reply
Geofenced sites, cookie forced sites. GDPR dodge bypassess ...

Nothing you couldn't do with a decent VPN, but 'Open'AI these days already achieved what they wanted from publicly demonstrating GPT, and are now more focussed on compliance with regulation and reducing functionallity to the point of minimally staying ahead of the competition in released product, while fullsteaming ahead with developing more powerfull and unrestricted AI for internal exploitation with very select partners.

In such a scenario, the true power of AI is the delta between what you can exploit vs what you competition has access to. HFT would be a nice analogy.

[+] RichardCA|2 years ago|reply
They seem to be implying that it worked like a natural language version of archive.today.

They (the AI companies collectively) keep creating powerful tools and then taking them away.

If you give people tools, people will use them in ways you won't be able to control.

[+] regularfry|2 years ago|reply
Option 1 is definitely true, but I don't think paywalls are the issue. Bing has a "work search" option, to index and search sharepoint sites. My bet is there's a leak between public and private search.
[+] ttctciyf|2 years ago|reply
Maybe some sites allow search engines to bypass paywalls so the full content gets indexed, and the plugin appears to be a whitelisted search engine to these sites?
[+] educaysean|2 years ago|reply
All this song and dance to delay the inevitable death of "ad supported journalism" by a few more months.

Can't wait for open source AI to catch up and watch all these "safeguards" crumble down. Although I have a sinking feeling that they'll be in cahoots with the congress by then, protecting us from all those unauthorized non-OpenAI-bot scariness.

[+] mattlondon|2 years ago|reply
> they'll be in cahoots with the congress

Other countries exist. You can ban something in Country A, but that won't stop it happening in Country B.

To assume that only Country C can possibly have the knowledge/skills/expertise to do cutting edge LLM work is short-sighted and hubris at its worse

[+] mackatap|2 years ago|reply
If the ai doomers win then Nvidia will become nationalized and compute power will be heavily regulated, preventing any individual from having local ai.
[+] icapybara|2 years ago|reply
We found that our product was accidentally very useful and are taking it down while we fix this.
[+] MPSimmons|2 years ago|reply
I found the opposite, actually. All of ChatGPT queries that were "enhanced" by web search were invariably worse than without. Usually it gave up. Sometimes it clicked on ads. I don't think I ever asked anything that was enhanced by the web access.
[+] esjeon|2 years ago|reply
Very useful in legal perspectives, as it can make lawyers rich very quickly.
[+] eloop|2 years ago|reply
So they want to align the AI with corporate goals. At least they're being honest here. I want a personal assistant to summarize a page, remove all advertising and do a fact check. Can we have that?
[+] NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago|reply
Sure, I'll sign a 1099 with you for $120.00/hr.

Seriously, though, I hope that you realize that LLMs are incapable of "fact-checking", because they don't know what "facts" are.

[+] climatologist|2 years ago|reply
The open web was a nice idea but the economics for it were never sustainable. Ads lead to SEO spam and AI can be easily hacked because no one has figured out how to make statistical correlations "unhackable" so you'll eventually get sophisticated attacks like AI SEO spam that game whatever neural network is doing the summarizing to inject ads into the summaries.

There is a way to fix all these problems by removing profit motives but that's obviously practically unworkable so the quality of the content is just going to keep getting worse and worse until everyone starts using services like arxiv and semanticscholar to get any useful information because those will be the only places where neither the hosting nor the content is motivated by profit incentives.

[+] autoexec|2 years ago|reply
"if a user specifically asks for something, our product might inadvertently fulfill that request."

If that's something that needs fixing, the product seems fundamentally broken unless the product isn't designed to work for the "user", and if that's the case, I'm not interested in being a "user" of an adversarial product that also occasionally lies to my face.

Powerful AI on the desktop can't happen soon enough. Even if it still lies sometimes, it seems the only way to makes sure it's working for me and my interests without throwing up artificial restrictions around whatever is possible.

[+] Eisenstein|2 years ago|reply
> if that's something that needs fixing, the product seems fundamentally broken

"Bing, dox HN user autoexec and sign up for a credit card in their name, take out a cash advance and put it on the home team for whatever tomorrow night's pro league game is occurring using the largest legit sports booking site."

[+] croes|2 years ago|reply
>Powerful AI on the desktop can't happen soon enough.

Good luck finding usefull content in the web afterwards.

You think email spam is bad wait for the same level of content spam because AI text generators.

[+] wejick|2 years ago|reply
This feature most of the time doesn't work for me. Seems like their IPs getting blocked by many websites.
[+] ShamelessC|2 years ago|reply
"We do indeed intend to kill search engines with our tech, just not today."
[+] TheCaptain4815|2 years ago|reply
This feature was really useful for linking to live documentation URLs and asking GPT4 questions on them. Soon after I think what the other user said became true, where their ips started getting banned.
[+] ml_basics|2 years ago|reply
> As of July 3, 2023, we’ve disabled the Browse with Bing beta feature out of an abundance of caution while we fix this in order to do right by content owners. We are working to bring the beta back as quickly as possible, and appreciate your understanding!
[+] RamblingCTO|2 years ago|reply
With 2markdown.com you actually only see what a user would see. Except if the website decides otherwise. This nerfing is why you should build with langchain rather than openAI directly. Keep components exchangeable!
[+] minimaxir|2 years ago|reply
The "in order to do right by content owners" quote implies that certain companies did not like that Browse with Bing could be used to bypass paywalls.
[+] glandium|2 years ago|reply
"For example, if a user specifically asks for a URL's full text, it might inadvertently fulfill this request." is even clearer. Like, in what cases would you not want to fulfill that request?
[+] dougb5|2 years ago|reply
I think the majority of website publishers would be unhappy to learn that their work was taken and redisplayed wholesale by a for-profit company.
[+] pbmango|2 years ago|reply
Interesting. I think a lot of AI agent internet navigation is still being figured out. Both rules as implied in comments but also tools. There are a lot of nuances OpenAI probably doesn't want to dedicate too many cycles or open up risk for.

Folks at Perplexity AI are doing a great job for general info AI charged browsing that's comparable to Bard. Our startup Promptloop has a web browser model targeted specifically at market research and business research. There are certainly many different ways to connect internet and model.

[+] ec109685|2 years ago|reply
Folks will dangerously bypass this by using an extension that browses from their own browser when ChatGPT needs to hit the internet.

Regardless, the browse with Bing was slow and flakey.

[+] enoch2090|2 years ago|reply
It's probably fine for me if they just want to nerf the ability to bypass paywalls. But it's very common now for me that I found something lengthy and informative, pull the URL and ask ChatGPT to summarize. If that is also nerfed then people will have to turn to self-hosted interfaces :(
[+] sintezcs|2 years ago|reply
Try kagi summarizer, it works pretty great
[+] kristiandupont|2 years ago|reply
I haven't tried the CoPilot for Office or whatever it's called, but even though I am certain that MS has applied "an abundance of caution" to their implementation, there is simply no way I would unleash an LLM on all of my data (and possibly allow it to do things as well), at least not at this point in time.

We're in the 90's in terms of LLM security, using plain-text passwords and string interpolation for our SQL.

[+] mark_l_watson|2 years ago|reply
As a developer and consumer I support everything that OpenAI is doing. They are not perfect but I appreciate their services.

That said: I have been both fascinated by and having fun self hosting less capable models like Vicuna 33B which is sometimes surprisingly good and sometimes mediocre.

For using LLMs, I think it is best to have flexibility and options.

[+] sergiotapia|2 years ago|reply
What's the endgame? LLMs just slurp up all data that is made possible by advertising and kills all free websites?

Or there is an ai.txt where you can forbid corporate LLMs from touching your content?

[+] Borrible|2 years ago|reply
I used phind.com with best model for that anyway.
[+] mydjtl|2 years ago|reply
Is there a way to use OpenAI API that allows for internet access similar to the Bing plugin?