The problem with ChatGPT as a replacement for Google is that it was not designed to produce accurate facts, and it shows. This model cut its teeth writing articles about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes[0] for goodness sake! It's a language model, and a very impressive one at that, but language is used to express falsehoods and fiction just as regularly as it is used to express truth.
This doesn't mean that it can't produce accurate facts, most of the time it does! But when it does produce nonsense, it does it in exactly the same tone of authority, so if you don't already know the answer you may well walk away believing an AI hallucination.
And the trouble is it doesn't really matter if everyone here thinks "well, I would follow up each request with research to verify the answer", because most people won't! This is like the Google answer extracts, which fairly frequently mislead by extracting out-of-context quotes, except that there's no way to get the original context and there may in fact be no original context! This makes follow-up research much more complicated than with Google and therefore unlikely to happen. If ChatGPT replaces Google, the amount of nonsense on the internet will get even worse, which is something that until 2022 I never thought was possible.
What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the future) is that there is no way to know if you've actually asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early on, though that seems to have been fixed (although that may have been just through hardcoding).
There is flywheel issue with generative search: content producers, information curators or outlets, etc need to get paid.
People are okay-ish with Google in part because it drives traffic and traffic can be profitable. Fancy features that snatch website content and show them in Google's result pages are already not appreciated by indexed websites.
If generative search becomes the dominant interface, we will eventually see severe public info stagnation until alternative business models can grow around it or avoid it altogether. I suspect we'll see more platforms like Spotify for X and a continued shift toward subscription platforms and youtube.
Of course, what's to stop the bots from watching all of Netflix, listening to every podcast, etc? It will be an interesting decade for law / regulation / licensing.
> ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents
This is the "self-driving cars will obviously be better than human drivers given that they're trained on millions of humans' driving behavior" of chatbots.
In my experience, this is a huge stretch and wishful thinking.
Yeah, it is so obviously a usefull user interface pattern. The real question is if it can be made accurate.
I have asked chatGPT about my
boss (a well published researcher) and it managed to summarise his work quite well, name the field he has worked in and even write about some of his previous projects. It also insisted on that he is already dead. Which made it very funny when I have shown it to him. :)
But funny doesn’t win one a trophy in information retrieval. Clearly it knows a lot about a lot of things, but the accuracy is hit and miss. Can this be fixed? Then this is the future. If it can’t, because this is a fundamental property of these systems then it won’t be a usefull replacement of search.
I'll take the links many times over a generated document.
I can't buy from a storefront generated by ChatGPT. I can't cite a document written by ChatGPT, I can't trust news generated by ChatGPT, I can't comment on a forum generated by ChatGPT, I can't watch videos that ChatGPT describes, the recipes ChatGPT creates may not be possible to cook, and will probably still contain a fake life story before it.
Today I have zero confidence in chatGPT, OR my ability to evaluate and correct it's inaccuracies strictly from within its interface. I feel I can compensate for search engine and arrive at answer I seek within my confidence interval via search engine. It's a tool that can get me there.
That may change in the future. Based on my limited understanding on how chatgpt works,I don't see how though - it explicitly is not designed to evaluate or "understand".
So today I don't see it replacing search engine for me.
>one perfect document based on millions of the documents
this literally sounds like a super-lossy compression, who would ever want this? People want crystal-clear, lossless information from original source, not a compressed mess with random artifacts.
OpenAI’s advances threaten the entire information production ecosystem Google has created.
That is, Google has created an incredible incentive structure for virtually every (dollar weighted, by market cap) business on the planet needs to produce information, buy relevant queries, and measure how well its information converts (proxy for accuracy).
How might this ecosystem evolve if a language model isn’t doling out the same incentives to information producers?
One of the use cases I have for google is just as a sort of fuzzy grep. This is often useful for finding solutions to obscure bug reports on open source projects. Similarly, I often use google to search for things like flights, reviews, business operating hours, weather and hotels. This is entirely diffrent from chatGPT. I think viewing both as competitors to each other is weird.
ChatGPT can give incorrect answers with a high degree of confidence. ChatGPT is overhyped. Undoubtedly, it is going to make an impact, however, it will be an incremental one. It may, for example, make online chatbots feel more natural. However, the current version will not replace Google.
This is a great way to formulate the difference. In my mind, Google does search, which is not the same as synthesis. ChatGPT is a synthesis engine. I think there is room for engines like ChatGPT to also return links to the training documents that were most relevant to producing an answer. At that point, it would be doing search and synthesis at the same time.
I am not sure if neural networks have been trained to do this yet, but it would be very cool to see a network that produces both generated output and the most relevant input data that led to that output, by somehow keeping track of the influence certain inputs have on various learned features and internal structure of the network. I think of this as an index.
You make a good point about SEO. SEO is going to be obsolete in the near future. The SEO game is basically an adversarial attack on Google, which Google itself actually promotes and encourages website builders to do! In the future, we are going to look back on the cat-and-mouse game of SEO and see it as primitive and antithetical to the goal of search.
"especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently."
Well, if engines like ChatGPT are about to replace google, guess where the SEO and ad spam is going to go?
I don't think they are immune to it, if the spammers really want to get in. And then you have very awesome subtle product placements mixed in everything.
I think where this eventually falls apart is there would be no more incentive for people to write articles containing new information anymore if everyone doesn't visit their page and just gets the summarized version anymore.
My favourite use for chatGPT is to ask it for cooking recipes, no more wading through soe sob story’s about how this tomato inspired them to write this article with 10000 ads.
Entirely agree. I find this article a bit premature in it's confidence. And it seems to counter the one thing everyone who uses it is saying, which is that getting one best answer (which you can confirm as necessary) by software that has some sense of what your are asking for is just faster.
As in, it would be faster for me to look something up on GhatGPT and confirm it with a Google search than just starting with a google search.
And then how inevitable is an AI product from Google, et al?
But I can fact check/compare-contrast with said links to millions of documents myself...and I think that's crucial to overall intellectual of humanity than ready-to-eat answer.
Imagine the world that you have the perfect answer to everything, curated by algorithm. It's cool, but...are those answers really perfect?
It's creepy. or at least that's what I feel when I play with ChatGPT(after the initial jawdrop, of course)
I’m assuming models will be updated in near real-time to reflect searches with results that often change unexpectedly? Like what time my physician’s office is open on Christmas Day vs. tomorrow vs. Black Friday?
I could have written it myself, but that would take some effort.
I could google it, scroll past the ads. Click on the first result, hope it is kinda what I need. On that page scroll past the ads and SEO blabla-text. Copy the information that I need. Paste it in a doc. Rewrite it to what I need. Fill in my information.
I went to ChatGPT told him what kind of letter I need. Told him what personal information it should put in. Got a good enough text back. Told it what to correct. Copy pasted it and formatted it a bit. Done.
The key thing to understand about Google (the search product) is that it does search somewhat well but it is extremely bad at synthesis. When it comes to big data, synthesis is just as important as search. The UX with traditional 2000-era search engines involves the user being given a library's worth of information rabbit holes to dig through. With synthesis engines, the UX is completely different and they might even be solving different user problems.
As per your example, nobody currently uses Google as a way to draft letters, but rather as a way to learn how to draft letters. I think the distinction is pretty key in understanding the difference between the two problem spaces. I would think that "write me a letter" is a problem that isn't in Google's domain. I do not think synthesis engines will necessarily replace search engines, but the two will both be useful.
The premise of Google's interaction design is that you will be taken to an external resource. Google in recent years has started adding widgets and blurbs at the top of the search results for common things like stocks, covid-cases chart, weather, etc. but this synthesized content isn't their primary focus and are likely hard-coded to a large extent.
They are not a replacement, but unfortunately search engines are turning into AI chatbots too.
When I think of a search engine I want a "grep for the Internet", not an "AI".
Looking up part numbers for ICs and other electronic components is the most prominent application where search engines like Google have gotten far worse in recent years, and AI ain't going to work there either.
I think AI chatbots will replace some of the use cases for search engines, but I also think that is a good thing. It will let search engines do what they do even better. Search engines right now do a lot of things, arguably a bit too many, which has the actual search-aspect suffer a bit.
A significant design obstacle with almost all search engines is that it's not entirely clear what you can do with them. They're just a search box, after all. You need either external training or a trial-and-error loop to figure out what you can do with them. This also means that if you change how they work, users get confused because their queries no longer give them what they expect (this is likely a big contributor to the "google is broken"-sentiment that's been going around).
This becomes a problem when the search engine caters to too many modalities of search, as there's an element of guesswork what the user want. Two users may even enter the same query, but look for different results. If I enter the name of a video game, do I want to buy it, or do I want information about it, or maybe fanfiction or something other than the game that shares the same name? Who the heck knows.
I agree that chat bots aren’t the proper modality for replacing search. So what? Currently, Google search results stink. ChatGPT results are way better in a number of domains. Does it need to be a chat bot? No. But Google still stinks now. I’ll take anything that can just find the correct information.
The big drawback chatGPT has is that on many topics it walks on eggshells.
It can’t give me a direct answer. It couches the answers in nonsensical caveats. Adding stilted context that really does not add value to an answer and actually makes the search more tedious.
If I ask it the male female breakdown for crime statistics it begins to get defensive and gives me general answers. I can prod it to finally give me government statistics but it doest it begrudgingly. And that’s for a far away country not steeped in any unusual crime controversy.
I ask chatgpt and it tells me how to mute notifications, I clarify "no the thing where you're typing and windows can't do it so it plays a sound" and chatgpt happily informed me on how to mute the windows hard stop sound.
For situations where you don't really know what you're looking for, chatgpt is already competitive with Google. Failing abysmally in some cases, and far surpassing Google in others.
For me, ChatGPT has already replaced Google for most queries, so the point is moot.
Even if ChatGPT is flawed, it's still way better than Google. Using Google feels stupid; trying different search terms and clicking through dozens of websites with cookie popups and skimming all the bloated content for an answer which might be close to something you're looking for. ChatGPT gives the answer instantly.
I don't believe there's any future for Google (and Google-optimized websites).
It seems the only thing that's missing is some type of fact-checking function. The interaction, from a user perspective, is much nicer than sorting through Google results.But the results can be confidentially wrong and if you're not familiar with the subject matter already, you won't really know that.
That said, I'm basically using it as a replacement for Google for stuff that isn't up-to-date (code, philosophy) then double checking the output to see how it's wrong.
Google is more "chatty" than it was a few years ago and ChatGPT is a quickly moving target it seems - it's answers seem more "search-like" than they seemed when I started playing with it just a few weeks ago (more caveats and more likely to give multiple options, etc). It seems like we'll have fusion soon.
I agree the results will be unpleasant. I already despise Google's fucking "looks like there aren't many results" message and there will be more to hate down the road. But still, appearing to give "an answer" rather than reporting information seems like a winning quality to bring in the masses. As someone pointed out, Google's target audience is inherently those credulous enough to be valuable targets for their advertisers.
Not sure if I'm missing something but if the authors claim:
1. That chatbots don't understand what they are producing -> a search engine doesn't either.
2. The benefit of search is that you engage in sense-making -> you actually need to do that with a chatbot too.
3. You would want access to the sources -> that's already fixed for today's chatbots (see perplexity.ai, for example, which offers links next to its claims).
4. We may trust chatbots more easily because of their language: we already have that problem with search results.
I understand the idea that there will not be an ever-knowing AI and we will probably don't even want one. But what we have today seems an improvement over a search engine (not necessarily a replacement).
Eventually Chatbots will start inserting product placement ads as well. So comparing the ads on Google with the ad free ChatGPT experience is detracting from the real value of ChatGPT.
Google results are mostly ok. But I have to do the synthesis. ChatGPT does the synthesis for me saving me time and mental bandwidth. This is the part that I find valuable.
By the time Google even was started, Excite had been searching the web for 7 years and Lycos had been around for 3 years.
I don't think it's a 1:1 replacement, but let's not judge a product that's been out for less than a month against a trillion dollar behemoth that launched 24 years ago.
I had a recent example of ChatGPT clearly beating Google:
"how to debug a Chrome extension in VSCode?"
After 10 minutes of reformulating this, I couldn't get a good answer from Google, but ChatGPT got it on the first try. Many Google results were about a depreciated extension for VSCode called Chrome Debugger. Maybe if I was normally doing a lot of front-end coding, it would be trivial.
Google needs to get going with their version of fine-tuning PaLM from human preferences, get a good classifier based on user characteristics and query to decide when to use it, some checks to make sure they're not committing copyright infringement, and some text ads in the middle of the generated text, and mark it experimental and let it loose on the search results pages. Listing references, online updates, etc. can be added later. It won't be profitable even if they only enable it on a small percentage of queries, but they're risking the whole business if they don't do it.
What the near future would look like is-
1. Google: will implement some form of LLM on their engine and the contextual answers will significantly improve(~close to what ChatGPT produces) satisfying most people. But also displays the top links that contributed to the context. This is difficult to do but somehow they gotta figure out or risk their entire core business getting affected.
2. ChatGPT and other LLMs: will take some more time to meaningfully compete with google(as in becoming a noun) and in the mean time they would provide APIs to their models so that large orgs(businesses, scientists etc) can plug it in with their own data and use. They may or may not charge a fee for it.
In both cases there is one big pro and con:
Pro: Death of SEO and ads as we know it
Con: The model dictates what majority of internet users read, change their views or manipulate. And eventually becomes an AI weapon.
Today I experienced just the opposite. Chatgpt answered some business questions in less than a minute. I would have spent 30 mins in seo optimized sites to find the exact same info.
I worked on a chat bot to help solve technical issues. It would parse what the user wanted and then search the already established articles we had that were ingested into Elasticsearch.
At first, we started with a goal of fully conversational AI. So, for example, it would ask a question based on the article and give you a choice, you could then type your choice. This became a nightmare for the model so we added buttons instead.
Then, before we knew it, this “bot” was just a glorified search engine that feigned being a bot. Towards the end of it I scratched my head and said “did we even replace the current knowledgebase? are we spending thousands on something that adds no value?”
I don’t think chatbots are it either. I think we could have just replaced the KB search with Elasticsearch and been done with it, no need for any ML.
This was written by a human? It could have been but it reads like it was unfolded from 1 perhaps 2 lines of.. lets say beef. There is very little going on in the text, the blog post is the [now usual] short form free from interesting references to previous writings around this argument, as if the topic was entirely original and invented here
Good references, more than anything, suggest to me an author knows his topic.
The www as a festival of sharing knowledge is really not what we thought it would become or perhaps could or should have.
The author, like most, is definitely capable of writing, sourcing and building(!) something into the chronology of the topic.
But ok, to entertain the idea: I think a chat bot the way companies and government tried to glue it onto their knowledge base (and mostly failed) will now become a real possibility, it will be able to find the most likely document you are looking for and know when the match is to crappy to mention.
An all knowing AI is not required. Have one per domain and let them exchange words.
Real time learning from the conversation is still off but I imagine that could easily change.
Thinking about it, if you want request all information about you from the data hoarders you could build quite the interface to represent you in the bot net. It doesn't have to know hoe to fill taxes as long as there is a tax bot available for 7.3241 dollar per query. Your personal assistant can learn the bits of tax code relevant to your disposition. Seems fun.
Yeah, but they will be. I use it exclusively instead of Google for fact finding. Yes, you can't find a restaurant with it. But it's incredible for teaching programming and general known knowledge.
I cannot understand why the tech crowd has blinders on for AI. I'm 40 years old and have been a programmer since I started playing with BASIC since I was in elementary school.
The shit GPT is doing, I thought I'd never seen in my lifetime.
Maybe people are afraid of being replaced, or not being "special magical beings". Y'all are biological robots. You need to accept that.
AI is going to trounce humans in literally everything in a matter of a few years.
Maybe it's an existential problem, I don't know, but I feel everyone is missing the forest for the trees.
[+] [-] gukov|3 years ago|reply
- Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents
- ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents
To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently.
I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for something like ChatGPT.
Google has an issue on their hands and is probably working overtime to lobby the threat of ChatGPT away.
[+] [-] lolinder|3 years ago|reply
This doesn't mean that it can't produce accurate facts, most of the time it does! But when it does produce nonsense, it does it in exactly the same tone of authority, so if you don't already know the answer you may well walk away believing an AI hallucination.
And the trouble is it doesn't really matter if everyone here thinks "well, I would follow up each request with research to verify the answer", because most people won't! This is like the Google answer extracts, which fairly frequently mislead by extracting out-of-context quotes, except that there's no way to get the original context and there may in fact be no original context! This makes follow-up research much more complicated than with Google and therefore unlikely to happen. If ChatGPT replaces Google, the amount of nonsense on the internet will get even worse, which is something that until 2022 I never thought was possible.
[0] https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-3-experiments/blob/master/e...
[+] [-] WJW|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forrest2|3 years ago|reply
People are okay-ish with Google in part because it drives traffic and traffic can be profitable. Fancy features that snatch website content and show them in Google's result pages are already not appreciated by indexed websites.
If generative search becomes the dominant interface, we will eventually see severe public info stagnation until alternative business models can grow around it or avoid it altogether. I suspect we'll see more platforms like Spotify for X and a continued shift toward subscription platforms and youtube.
Of course, what's to stop the bots from watching all of Netflix, listening to every podcast, etc? It will be an interesting decade for law / regulation / licensing.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|3 years ago|reply
This is the "self-driving cars will obviously be better than human drivers given that they're trained on millions of humans' driving behavior" of chatbots.
In my experience, this is a huge stretch and wishful thinking.
[+] [-] krisoft|3 years ago|reply
I have asked chatGPT about my boss (a well published researcher) and it managed to summarise his work quite well, name the field he has worked in and even write about some of his previous projects. It also insisted on that he is already dead. Which made it very funny when I have shown it to him. :)
But funny doesn’t win one a trophy in information retrieval. Clearly it knows a lot about a lot of things, but the accuracy is hit and miss. Can this be fixed? Then this is the future. If it can’t, because this is a fundamental property of these systems then it won’t be a usefull replacement of search.
[+] [-] dilap|3 years ago|reply
"What's a good social website for people of a technical bent"
It recommended: Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Exchange, Quora, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, GitHub
That's a pretty good list!
Tried the same search on Google, and the first result was some spammy site "15 top social networks," #1 being facebook. Not very useful.
I definitely think chatbots will replace many uses of search engines. It's already way more useful for lots of stuff for me.
[+] [-] anothernewdude|3 years ago|reply
I can't buy from a storefront generated by ChatGPT. I can't cite a document written by ChatGPT, I can't trust news generated by ChatGPT, I can't comment on a forum generated by ChatGPT, I can't watch videos that ChatGPT describes, the recipes ChatGPT creates may not be possible to cook, and will probably still contain a fake life story before it.
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|3 years ago|reply
That may change in the future. Based on my limited understanding on how chatgpt works,I don't see how though - it explicitly is not designed to evaluate or "understand".
So today I don't see it replacing search engine for me.
[+] [-] gloosx|3 years ago|reply
this literally sounds like a super-lossy compression, who would ever want this? People want crystal-clear, lossless information from original source, not a compressed mess with random artifacts.
[+] [-] Dwolb|3 years ago|reply
That is, Google has created an incredible incentive structure for virtually every (dollar weighted, by market cap) business on the planet needs to produce information, buy relevant queries, and measure how well its information converts (proxy for accuracy).
How might this ecosystem evolve if a language model isn’t doling out the same incentives to information producers?
[+] [-] accurrent|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreyk|3 years ago|reply
What about, I don't know, searching for a website with certain functionality/services?
What people really mean when they say LLMs will replace search is that it'll replace Quora/stack overflow/etc, which is clearly not the same thing!
[+] [-] oxfordmale|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 22289d|3 years ago|reply
Not yet. Today, ChatGPT is bad with facts. Don't rely on what it tells you.
But that appears to be the future. And it sounds great.
[+] [-] anonytrary|3 years ago|reply
I am not sure if neural networks have been trained to do this yet, but it would be very cool to see a network that produces both generated output and the most relevant input data that led to that output, by somehow keeping track of the influence certain inputs have on various learned features and internal structure of the network. I think of this as an index.
You make a good point about SEO. SEO is going to be obsolete in the near future. The SEO game is basically an adversarial attack on Google, which Google itself actually promotes and encourages website builders to do! In the future, we are going to look back on the cat-and-mouse game of SEO and see it as primitive and antithetical to the goal of search.
[+] [-] hutzlibu|3 years ago|reply
Well, if engines like ChatGPT are about to replace google, guess where the SEO and ad spam is going to go? I don't think they are immune to it, if the spammers really want to get in. And then you have very awesome subtle product placements mixed in everything.
[+] [-] schmorptron|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|3 years ago|reply
Clearly Google thinks so, too:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/ai-chatgpt-goo...
The podcast Hard Fork discussed the idea of searching being enhanced with this tech in their first ChatGPT episode.
Microsoft invested $1B in OpenAI. (As Hard Fork said) will we all be using Bing in 5 years?
[+] [-] mehdix|3 years ago|reply
When using Google & co. most of my time is wasted trying to filter low quality sponsored or high SEO reaults.
ChatGPT gives me an excellent summary of what I wanted to know without all the noise.
[+] [-] wolpoli|3 years ago|reply
Today's search engines will give you 500 results per query. Your point still stands - sorting through 500 results is hard work.
[+] [-] destroy-2A|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Julesman|3 years ago|reply
As in, it would be faster for me to look something up on GhatGPT and confirm it with a Google search than just starting with a google search.
And then how inevitable is an AI product from Google, et al?
[+] [-] raindropm|3 years ago|reply
Imagine the world that you have the perfect answer to everything, curated by algorithm. It's cool, but...are those answers really perfect?
It's creepy. or at least that's what I feel when I play with ChatGPT(after the initial jawdrop, of course)
[+] [-] numpad0|3 years ago|reply
- Modern Google Search, and ChatGPT too, tries to answer a question.
And here is the difference. A document search engine does not answer any questions.
[+] [-] paulcole|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|3 years ago|reply
you keep using that word
[+] [-] tmpburning|3 years ago|reply
they put too many restrictions on which answers ChatGPT is allowed to give though...
[+] [-] EvgeniyZh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franze|3 years ago|reply
I could have written it myself, but that would take some effort.
I could google it, scroll past the ads. Click on the first result, hope it is kinda what I need. On that page scroll past the ads and SEO blabla-text. Copy the information that I need. Paste it in a doc. Rewrite it to what I need. Fill in my information.
I went to ChatGPT told him what kind of letter I need. Told him what personal information it should put in. Got a good enough text back. Told it what to correct. Copy pasted it and formatted it a bit. Done.
way better experience then with Google.
Google is in trouble, and they know it.
[+] [-] anonytrary|3 years ago|reply
As per your example, nobody currently uses Google as a way to draft letters, but rather as a way to learn how to draft letters. I think the distinction is pretty key in understanding the difference between the two problem spaces. I would think that "write me a letter" is a problem that isn't in Google's domain. I do not think synthesis engines will necessarily replace search engines, but the two will both be useful.
The premise of Google's interaction design is that you will be taken to an external resource. Google in recent years has started adding widgets and blurbs at the top of the search results for common things like stocks, covid-cases chart, weather, etc. but this synthesized content isn't their primary focus and are likely hard-coded to a large extent.
[+] [-] rasz|3 years ago|reply
2 you gave openai your personal information?
[+] [-] userbinator|3 years ago|reply
When I think of a search engine I want a "grep for the Internet", not an "AI".
Looking up part numbers for ICs and other electronic components is the most prominent application where search engines like Google have gotten far worse in recent years, and AI ain't going to work there either.
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|3 years ago|reply
A significant design obstacle with almost all search engines is that it's not entirely clear what you can do with them. They're just a search box, after all. You need either external training or a trial-and-error loop to figure out what you can do with them. This also means that if you change how they work, users get confused because their queries no longer give them what they expect (this is likely a big contributor to the "google is broken"-sentiment that's been going around).
This becomes a problem when the search engine caters to too many modalities of search, as there's an element of guesswork what the user want. Two users may even enter the same query, but look for different results. If I enter the name of a video game, do I want to buy it, or do I want information about it, or maybe fanfiction or something other than the game that shares the same name? Who the heck knows.
[+] [-] n0tth3dro1ds|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
It can’t give me a direct answer. It couches the answers in nonsensical caveats. Adding stilted context that really does not add value to an answer and actually makes the search more tedious.
If I ask it the male female breakdown for crime statistics it begins to get defensive and gives me general answers. I can prod it to finally give me government statistics but it doest it begrudgingly. And that’s for a far away country not steeped in any unusual crime controversy.
[+] [-] TOMDM|3 years ago|reply
Not knowing the terminology, Google was useless.
I ask chatgpt and it tells me how to mute notifications, I clarify "no the thing where you're typing and windows can't do it so it plays a sound" and chatgpt happily informed me on how to mute the windows hard stop sound.
For situations where you don't really know what you're looking for, chatgpt is already competitive with Google. Failing abysmally in some cases, and far surpassing Google in others.
[+] [-] Geee|3 years ago|reply
Even if ChatGPT is flawed, it's still way better than Google. Using Google feels stupid; trying different search terms and clicking through dozens of websites with cookie popups and skimming all the bloated content for an answer which might be close to something you're looking for. ChatGPT gives the answer instantly.
I don't believe there's any future for Google (and Google-optimized websites).
[+] [-] type4|3 years ago|reply
That said, I'm basically using it as a replacement for Google for stuff that isn't up-to-date (code, philosophy) then double checking the output to see how it's wrong.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|3 years ago|reply
I agree the results will be unpleasant. I already despise Google's fucking "looks like there aren't many results" message and there will be more to hate down the road. But still, appearing to give "an answer" rather than reporting information seems like a winning quality to bring in the masses. As someone pointed out, Google's target audience is inherently those credulous enough to be valuable targets for their advertisers.
[+] [-] dr__mario|3 years ago|reply
1. That chatbots don't understand what they are producing -> a search engine doesn't either.
2. The benefit of search is that you engage in sense-making -> you actually need to do that with a chatbot too.
3. You would want access to the sources -> that's already fixed for today's chatbots (see perplexity.ai, for example, which offers links next to its claims).
4. We may trust chatbots more easily because of their language: we already have that problem with search results.
I understand the idea that there will not be an ever-knowing AI and we will probably don't even want one. But what we have today seems an improvement over a search engine (not necessarily a replacement).
[+] [-] asimjalis|3 years ago|reply
Google results are mostly ok. But I have to do the synthesis. ChatGPT does the synthesis for me saving me time and mental bandwidth. This is the part that I find valuable.
[+] [-] gkoberger|3 years ago|reply
By the time Google even was started, Excite had been searching the web for 7 years and Lycos had been around for 3 years.
I don't think it's a 1:1 replacement, but let's not judge a product that's been out for less than a month against a trillion dollar behemoth that launched 24 years ago.
[+] [-] zone411|3 years ago|reply
After 10 minutes of reformulating this, I couldn't get a good answer from Google, but ChatGPT got it on the first try. Many Google results were about a depreciated extension for VSCode called Chrome Debugger. Maybe if I was normally doing a lot of front-end coding, it would be trivial.
Google needs to get going with their version of fine-tuning PaLM from human preferences, get a good classifier based on user characteristics and query to decide when to use it, some checks to make sure they're not committing copyright infringement, and some text ads in the middle of the generated text, and mark it experimental and let it loose on the search results pages. Listing references, online updates, etc. can be added later. It won't be profitable even if they only enable it on a small percentage of queries, but they're risking the whole business if they don't do it.
[+] [-] jayant_kaushik|3 years ago|reply
2. ChatGPT and other LLMs: will take some more time to meaningfully compete with google(as in becoming a noun) and in the mean time they would provide APIs to their models so that large orgs(businesses, scientists etc) can plug it in with their own data and use. They may or may not charge a fee for it.
In both cases there is one big pro and con: Pro: Death of SEO and ads as we know it Con: The model dictates what majority of internet users read, change their views or manipulate. And eventually becomes an AI weapon.
[+] [-] Renaud|3 years ago|reply
I still have to do all the work of synthesising the knowledge I need from the results.
It’s like having to go through the list of references of a scientific paper or Wikipedia article without having access to the article itself.
ChatGPT is giving you the article, it summarised that knowledge for you, a much effective way of getting what you actually want.
The ideal would be a combined system where I get my answer and also the relevant references that shaped it.
[+] [-] halukakin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yakattak|3 years ago|reply
At first, we started with a goal of fully conversational AI. So, for example, it would ask a question based on the article and give you a choice, you could then type your choice. This became a nightmare for the model so we added buttons instead.
Then, before we knew it, this “bot” was just a glorified search engine that feigned being a bot. Towards the end of it I scratched my head and said “did we even replace the current knowledgebase? are we spending thousands on something that adds no value?”
I don’t think chatbots are it either. I think we could have just replaced the KB search with Elasticsearch and been done with it, no need for any ML.
[+] [-] throwaway14356|3 years ago|reply
Good references, more than anything, suggest to me an author knows his topic.
The www as a festival of sharing knowledge is really not what we thought it would become or perhaps could or should have.
The author, like most, is definitely capable of writing, sourcing and building(!) something into the chronology of the topic.
But ok, to entertain the idea: I think a chat bot the way companies and government tried to glue it onto their knowledge base (and mostly failed) will now become a real possibility, it will be able to find the most likely document you are looking for and know when the match is to crappy to mention.
An all knowing AI is not required. Have one per domain and let them exchange words.
Real time learning from the conversation is still off but I imagine that could easily change.
Thinking about it, if you want request all information about you from the data hoarders you could build quite the interface to represent you in the bot net. It doesn't have to know hoe to fill taxes as long as there is a tax bot available for 7.3241 dollar per query. Your personal assistant can learn the bits of tax code relevant to your disposition. Seems fun.
[+] [-] alar44|3 years ago|reply
I cannot understand why the tech crowd has blinders on for AI. I'm 40 years old and have been a programmer since I started playing with BASIC since I was in elementary school.
The shit GPT is doing, I thought I'd never seen in my lifetime.
Maybe people are afraid of being replaced, or not being "special magical beings". Y'all are biological robots. You need to accept that.
AI is going to trounce humans in literally everything in a matter of a few years.
Maybe it's an existential problem, I don't know, but I feel everyone is missing the forest for the trees.