#22 Who is Choosing Your Information Diet?
The Rise of AI Summaries and Their Influence
Life Update: I am thrilled to announce my graduation from San Jose State University's Software Engineering program! After taking a break from the working world to invest in my education, I am super excited to get back to tackle some real-world challenges.
There are a lot of changes happening at god speed in the technology, particularly with Gen AI. Every week new benchmarks, new models and debates about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
While I strongly believe definition of AGI takes different shapes for different people, orgs, and communities — there is going to be one common ground that we might be overlooking here. So I want to take a step back and reflect on who is choosing what you are reading now and before.
Pre-ChatGPT era
In the pre-ChatGPT era, it’s all hyperlinks on a white page when you want to read or learn about anything and that’s where Google has curated world wide information.
It always seems strange to me that Google has 1000s of pages and yet, I never went to second page.
Let’s think about variables involved here:
Adwords (biggest revenue generator for Google)
SEO optimized keywords for any webpage
More money = more visibility of a business / better ranking
Across all of these, the authentic or valuable content might be hidden sometimes because from the millions of content sources and links, Google decided to give you 8-10 links and then you go one by one to read and find the information and finally you choose the source that you want to believe in.
This entire experience itself is not as fair as it should be but at least you are choosing from those 10 links and decide which one you want to believe in.
Post-ChatGPT era
Here, ChatGPT made that choice for us and directly gave the answer. At first it seems magical because the amount of time we spend on reading different links and deciding is saved but your power of choice has been taken!
Hallucination of GPT is a different concept — whatever it answers is correct or not is different problem but the point I am highlighting is our choice of choosing what to read, and what to believe in has been taken from us.
There comes Perplexity — a better version of ChatGPT + Wikipedia / Google.
Adding citations to content is absolutely brilliant way of providing reference to what and where it has read from by exposing the source pages/links.
Even though Perplexity is deciding and summarizing content with references from web, how can it choose out of 1000 matches for “cosmic energy” brings 5 reference links as it read from just those 5. (there could be indexing, ranking etc.., but you are not choosing what you want to read at first place)
Is there a better way?
In my opinion, here is a potential way that could make this better experience:
Semi-Personalization <> no need to understand about a user completely (because there is no 100% to it), so why can’t we just ask user to provide their preference: “reddit”, “techcrunch”, “yahoo finance” — as the main sources that they like to read and believe in.
This can help AI summaries to go deep into only these sources at first place and also balancing user’s choice of sources.
If a user doesn’t provide, learn in time and can dig into those sources at first — it’s about balancing the choice for readers/users.
Conclusion
There is a huge need for curating and improving your information diet, particularly with the rise of AI summaries everywhere because if everyone reads same content, same ideas emerge and you are blinded to the innovation.
To create space for healthy debates and conversations, it’s always good and wise to choose your information diet carefully to stand out from the crowd and look at problem from the lost-angle.
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What I enjoyed learning this week?
Emily Chang’s interview with Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator.
I’m a huge fan of Lenny’s Podcast and watch him live with Figma CEO Dylan Field
And finally… the future of web development is here….people are calling it:
Generative UI
I created 3 websites (not best but good enough) in 10 seconds using
Read more about it on my LinkedIn post.