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This was how Epinions worked for products - you built a graph of product reviewers you trusted and you inherit a relevance score for a product based on the transitive trust amplifying product reviews. It was a brilliant model (it was a bunch of folks from Netscape including guha and the Nextdoor CEO, got acquired a few times and google shopping killed their model, eventually acquired by eBay for the product catalog taxonomy system - which I helped to build)

I would say the current model of information retrieval against a mountain of spam is already broken and LLM will just kick it over into impossible. I feel like we are already back to the world of Lycos, Excite, and Altavista where searches give you a semi relevant cluster of crap and you have to query craft to find the right document. In some ways I think the LLM chatbot isn’t a bad way to get information if it can validate itself against a semantic verification system and IR systems. I also think the semantic web might have a bigger role by structuring knowledge in a verifiable way rather than in blobs of ascii.




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