Watch Computer Scientist Answers Computer Questions From Twitter | Tech Support

Hello world.

My name is Professor David J. Malan,

I teach computer science at Harvard,

and I’m here today to answer your questions from Twitter.

This is Computer Science Support.

[upbeat music]

First up from tadproletarian,

How do search engines work so fast?

Well, the short answer really is distributed computing,

which is to say that Google and Bing,

and other such search engines,

they don’t just have one server

and they don’t even have just one really big server,

rather they have hundreds, thousands,

probably hundreds of thousands or more servers nowadays

around the world.

And so when you and I go in and to Google or Bing

and maybe type in a word to search for like, cats,

it’s quite possible that when you hit enter

and that keyword like cats is sent over the internet

to Google or to Bing, it’s actually spread out ultimately

across multiple servers,

some of which are grabbing the first 10 results,

some of which are grabbing the next 10 results,

the next 10 results,

so that you see just one collection of results,

but a lot of those ideas,

a lot of those search results came from different places.

And this eliminates

what could potentially be a bottleneck of sorts

if all of the information you needed

had to come from one specific server

that might very well be busy when you have that question.

Nick asks, Will computer programming jobs be taken

over by AI within the next 5 to 10 years?

This is such a frequently asked question nowadays

and I don’t think the answer will be yes.

And I think we’ve seen evidence of this already

in that early on when people were creating websites,

they were literally writing out code

in a language called HTML by hand.

But then of course, software came along,

tools like Dreamweaver that you could download

on your own computer

that would generate some of that same code for you.

More recently though, now you can just sign up for websites

like Squarespace, and Wix, and others

whereby click, click, click

and the website is generated for you.

So I dare say certainly in some domains,

that AI is really just an evolution of that trend

and it hasn’t put humans out of business

as much as it has made you and AI much more productive.

AI, I think, and the ability soon to be able

to program with natural language

is just going to enhance what you and I

can already do logically, but much more mechanically.

And I think too it’s worth considering

that there’s just so many bugs

or mistakes in software in the world

and there’s so many features

that humans wish existed in products present and future

that are to-do list, so to speak,

is way longer than we’ll ever have time

to finish in our lifetimes.

And so I think the prospect

of having an artificial intelligence boost our productivity

and work alongside us, so to

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Microsoft justifies AI’s ‘usefully wrong’ answers

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the company’s Ignite Spotlight occasion in Seoul on Nov. 15, 2022.

SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Thanks to latest improvements in artificial intelligence, new applications like ChatGPT are wowing individuals with their capacity to create compelling crafting primarily based on people’s queries and prompts.

Even though these AI-powered applications have gotten substantially better at making innovative and from time to time humorous responses, they usually contain inaccurate facts.

For occasion, in February when Microsoft debuted its Bing chat device, created working with the GPT-4 engineering created by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, persons found that the instrument was furnishing mistaken answers all through a demo linked to economic earnings reports. Like other AI language applications, which includes comparable software package from Google, the Bing chat characteristic can once in a while present faux info that consumers may possibly believe to be the floor reality, a phenomenon that researchers call a “hallucination.”

These complications with the facts haven’t slowed down the AI race amongst the two tech giants.

On Tuesday, Google announced it was bringing AI-driven chat technologies to Gmail and Google Docs, letting it enable composing e-mail or documents. On Thursday, Microsoft claimed that its preferred enterprise applications like Phrase and Excel would soon come bundled with ChatGPT-like know-how dubbed Copilot.

But this time, Microsoft is pitching the technologies as currently being “usefully wrong.”

In an online presentation about the new Copilot capabilities, Microsoft executives brought up the software’s tendency to make inaccurate responses, but pitched that as some thing that could be useful. As long as people today understand that Copilot’s responses could be sloppy with the info, they can edit the inaccuracies and extra rapidly send their email messages or finish their presentation slides.

For occasion, if a person wants to develop an e mail wishing a family members member a satisfied birthday, Copilot can even now be helpful even if it provides the wrong delivery day. In Microsoft’s perspective, the mere fact that the tool created textual content saved a individual some time and is hence valuable. Men and women just need to just take excess care and make sure the textual content does not include any mistakes.

Researchers might disagree.

In truth, some technologists like Noah Giansiracusa and Gary Marcus have voiced considerations that individuals might location also a lot believe in in modern day-working day AI, using to coronary heart assistance resources like ChatGPT present when they ask questions about overall health, finance and other superior-stakes topics.

“ChatGPT’s toxicity guardrails are conveniently evaded by people bent on utilizing it for evil and as we noticed earlier this 7 days, all the new search engines go on to hallucinate,” the two wrote in a latest Time feeling piece. “But after we get past the opening day jitters, what will really depend is no matter whether any of the large players can make synthetic intelligence that we can genuinely have confidence in.”

It really is unclear how dependable

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