Comment by supriyo-biswas

16 hours ago

The other day, I remember an article was posted to HN about something, but it came from a company that provides SEO services to companies by doing something like this:

1. For a given company, analyze their target audiences and the questions they are likely to ask LLMs about.

2. For each such question, ask it to each of the major LLMs, and compute the KL divergence between the pages they want to rank for the question vs. the LLM's response.

3. Rewrite the article to minimize said KL divergence.

In effect, they're performing an iterative optimization of some sort that moves the embedding space of their article closer to the question asked to the LLM, and any embedding model or generated responses are going to prefer said responses over others.

I believe we will keep seeing more of this stuff.

22 comments

supriyo-biswas

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SoftTalker  15 hours ago

And it's all because of ads. The incentives in an ad-funded internet are just always going to lead to this sort of thing. The most important thing is getting the user to load your page, not actually satisfying their query.

Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits, because any that move to ad revenue will become useless for real work.

  • rectang  11 hours ago

    > Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits

    LLM vendors make this hard because you can't trust them with your session data. Yesterday you were opted out of training, then suddenly today you're opted in.

    It's an extension of the idea that they don't need to care about anybody's copyright. They don't care about preserving the security or privacy of customer data, because there is negligible incentive to do so.

    For now, there's no substitute but as LLMs get commoditized trusting LLM SAAS vendors becomes an unacceptable business risk.

    • moron4hire  8 hours ago

      But don't you want Technojesus to come save you from never having learned how to invert a binary tree?

  • locknitpicker  15 hours ago

    > And it's all because of ads.

    Not really. A while ago there was a news piece stating that Israel was behind a series of fake think-tanks with very accessible websites which were created with the express purpose of feeding AI agents with alternative facts aligned with their foreign policy.

    If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.

  • gxs  6 hours ago

    The sad thing is this is unavoidable, or will be for a long time

    Look at cable tv - even after going premium, you eventually wound up paying for ads anyway

    In that case, you could make the argument that you could still purchase premium channels like hbo to avoid ads, but the internet doesn’t work that way - you depend on all the content generated by those ad funded channels

    You could argue that Netflix changed that, and that’s why I said won’t change for a long time. I don’t think anyone’s discovered the business model yet that will keep content free for consumers while still generating revenue for companies

  • Razengan  6 hours ago

    Can we just ban advertisements and "marketing" at a political level please?

    • xp84  4 hours ago

      For this advertisement for your activist campaign, you are hereby fined 100 credits for a violation of the anti-advertising statute. Further violations will result in loss of privileges.