FWIW, I think a lot of that is an echo chamber distortion here at HN. In the real world, frankly the best AI-enhanced search provider[1] is... Google. And honestly it isn't really very close. Have you tried asking questions at the Google search prompt recently? My sense is that most HN commenters don't, on principle.
[1] And yes, I work there, but on boring firmware and wouldn't know a transformer if you hit me with one. I'm just a consumer who's recently learned that typing detailed questions into the search prompt gives shockingly great summary answers with references.
> Have you tried asking questions at the Google search prompt recently?
I do sometimes. It's not too bad when it comes to answers to simple programming questions lately, but I've found I mostly can't trust it with answers to other things, like medical or news or history. It sounds right but I dig into the actual articles and find it misinterpreted things often enough I can't trust it. But I also don't use ChatGPT for that purpose either (but Google insists on giving me those answers anyway when I'm just trying to search for articles).
I actually wish it didn't do A.I. responses by default. Like I'd rather it didn't spend the processing power for that when I actually really want to use it for a search engine and not for A.I. (I heard that A.I. uses approximately 10x more compute power than a standard search, on average... I'm not certain that's true, but I don't doubt it's at least significantly more than a search).
I'd rather only use processing power for A.I. when I specifically want to do so. I'm actually contemplating switching my standard search engine away from Google so I don't keep getting A.I. responses.
It’s like saying Netflix is competing in cable television because people switched from
Comcast. Netflix changed the experience so significantly we came up with a new category of streaming entertainment. OpenAI and Google aren’t competing on search per se (Bing, DDG, etc), they are competing in something more abstract which is organizing information which could include full text search of a crawled index or generative AI techniques like LLM. The space they are actually “competing” in is so broad it’s hard to say they are direct competitors. Further to my point, ChatGPT is so not a search engine that it relies on Bing for accessing indexed website content.
ajross|9 months ago
[1] And yes, I work there, but on boring firmware and wouldn't know a transformer if you hit me with one. I'm just a consumer who's recently learned that typing detailed questions into the search prompt gives shockingly great summary answers with references.
cableshaft|9 months ago
I do sometimes. It's not too bad when it comes to answers to simple programming questions lately, but I've found I mostly can't trust it with answers to other things, like medical or news or history. It sounds right but I dig into the actual articles and find it misinterpreted things often enough I can't trust it. But I also don't use ChatGPT for that purpose either (but Google insists on giving me those answers anyway when I'm just trying to search for articles).
I actually wish it didn't do A.I. responses by default. Like I'd rather it didn't spend the processing power for that when I actually really want to use it for a search engine and not for A.I. (I heard that A.I. uses approximately 10x more compute power than a standard search, on average... I'm not certain that's true, but I don't doubt it's at least significantly more than a search).
I'd rather only use processing power for A.I. when I specifically want to do so. I'm actually contemplating switching my standard search engine away from Google so I don't keep getting A.I. responses.
iwontberude|9 months ago
nemomarx|9 months ago