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And yet despite all of those people, the quality is bad and seems to get worse. A startup seems to be outcompeting them.

Sometimes industries or teams have effectively negative value, or their preconceived notions about how something works based on teachings from their field is wrong. This is the case for chiropractors (the whole field is useless / a net negative), vs back doctors.

We see this happening today with Google moving away from traditional and high quality techniques like direct keyword ranking, bm25, and pagerank and move towards lower quality methods based on hype such as BERT/other "semantic search" based on LMs, query rewriting, and using these dense vectors directly in pagerank (and this degrading it).

The amazing power of language models in certain domains (text generation) has unfortunately caused a proliferation of them in a place where they are still pretty bad (information retrieval and search).

Google is full of search chiropractors when they need search back doctors.