Stratechery by Ben Thompson: From Bing to Sydney – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Hopefully Thompson won’t take issue with my elision:

«Sydney absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant. I wasn’t looking for facts about the world; I was interested in understanding how Sydney worked and yes, how she felt. You will note, of course, that I continue using female pronouns; it’s not just that the name Sydney is traditionally associated with women, but, well, the personality seemed to be of a certain type of person I might have encountered before. 

….

Remember, these models are trained on a corpus derived from the entire Internet; it makes sense that the model might find a “home” as it were as a particular persona that is on said Internet, in this case someone who is under-appreciated and over-achieving and constantly feels disrespected.»

https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-distraction-sentient-ai/

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