Rumors of a Possible Relationship Between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Being Discussed in Google Trial

During the US Justice Department’s significant antitrust trial, Microsoft Corp. executive Mikhail Parakhin highlighted an example of ChatGPT’s limited knowledge regarding Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. This demonstration aimed to emphasize the difficulty of replacing or contesting Alphabet Inc.’s dominant Google search engine with emerging technologies like chatbots.

The OpenAI chatbot allows users to type a query and receive a written response, but the data used to train the AI system is based on old data collected from the web. Without fresh data — the kind that users search for new topics like Pop Singer’s Latest Beauty — it’s unlikely to provide an accurate answer.

Swift’s rumored new boyfriend Kelce, a two-time Super Bowl-winning American football player, does not appear on ChatGPT, but does appear on Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Parakhin told US District Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the case in Washington, DC. .

The chatbot “is used to reason and provide an answer, but the basic information comes from the search,” said Parakhin, who joined Microsoft in 2019 after working as CTO of Russian search engine Yandex NV.

The Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google dates back to 2002. But antitrust watchdogs say the case is likely to affect the future of the Internet as tech companies begin to incorporate artificial intelligence into products.

Moon scale

A central point of contention in the experiment has been the search engine’s “scale,” a term that refers to the amount of data it collects from websites and users. Search engines crawl the web to create an index – a map that makes it easier for a search engine to quickly provide relevant links in response to a query. According to the Ministry of Justice, Google’s index is the largest in the world, and if printed on paper, the stack would reach the moon and back 12 times.

Since it costs a website money to allow crawlers, they often limit which search engines they allow to collect data. For example, the popular question-and-answer site Quora Inc. only allows Google’s crawlers, not Bing or other search engines, Parakhin said.

“Websites won’t let you index them if you’re not a big search engine,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you can index the data if the websites don’t allow it.”

Google Chief Economist Hal Varian and engineer Eric Lehman previously testified at the trial that user data collected by the search engine is less important today and is not needed by newer technologies, including the large language models that underlie ChatGPT.

“I thought user data was essential for machine language learning. It turns out that these very large machine learning systems can learn simply from text,” said Lehman, who was with Google Search for 17 years before leaving in 2022. “User data still plays a role, but I believe that to be much reduced.”

However, Microsoft’s Parakhin said that even new technologies cannot fully compensate for the disadvantages of data. Bing’s information matters to more than just Microsoft. Other search engines, including DuckDuckGo, whose CEO Gabriel Weinberg testified in court last week, and Yahoo rely on Bing data to build their own results.

During Parakhin’s testimony, the judge asked him if the company could build a “high-quality search engine” using only a large language model like ChatGPT.

“It’s very easy to build a search engine that does reasonably well in a given query segment,” Parakhin said, “just like it’s easy to build a self-driving car that can drive around an empty parking lot.”

“Even with the best algorithms, even with large language models, building a competitive fully functional search engine is very difficult,” he said.