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The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect docum

by gukov 4y ago

The way I see it: - 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.

mehdix 4y ago
Can't agree more. 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.
- rasz 4y ago
  as long as what you wanted were imaginary "facts"
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    I think we are many to focus on the current shortcomings but it’s not unreasonable to think that a future chatGPT will be better at stating wrong things with a high confidence.
    - noitpmeder 4y ago
      It is incredibly unreasonable to think this! GPT, by definition, is a language model. Unless the underlying architecture is fundamentally altered it will never be able to accurately assess the correctness of its answer. If such an architecture is ever created it will almost certainly not be a "GPT"-like model.
      - speedgoose 4y ago
        Yes it would need some architectural changes obviously.
dilap 4y ago
ChatGPT can give you websites, too, if you ask: "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.
- williamtrask 4y ago
  It’s not that google can’t do this. It’s that the incentives prevent it. Chatbots may be worse because there’s a plausible way to only give you one answer and to really make it feel real.
  - bg24 4y ago
    When the incentives are 70% of your revenue, very difficult to change track in 1-2 years.
- gukov 4y ago
  Another way to look at ChatGPT is it being a smart RSS reader. It's the way it discards all the WordPress layout junk giving you just the meat in a text format. The biggest advantage Google currently has is their massive indexing ability. ChatGPT is oblivious to something that just happened (ie was posted) an hour ago, a day ago, heck, a month ago.
WJW 4y ago
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).
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  I wish ChatGPT would give you the score(s) of the results it returns, so you could understand how correct it "thinks" the response is. I wonder if those confidently wrong answers are also low scoring.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    you could probably ask it
    - dpkirchner 4y ago
      I'd considered that -- in some cases it says it's absolutely confident, like with basic arithmetic, and in others it says: > Without more information, I cannot estimate the accuracy or reliability of these claims. It is important to note that there may be conflicting or inaccurate information available online, and it is always a good idea to verify information from multiple sources before accepting it as fact. which seems pretty reasonable.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      You can ask it, and it may generate text with a score, but there is no particular reason that the score generated in the text would reflect any internal score it has.
  - geoffreypoirier 4y ago
    I had a long requirements chat last night and did just that: There are many self-hosted solutions that could potentially meet the requirements you have listed for your RSS aggregator and reader project. Here is a list of some popular options, ranked in order of their approximate percentage of compatibility with the features you have specified: RSS Aggregator | Percentage Score | URL | | --- | --- | | 90% | https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ | | 85% | https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/ | | 80% | https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/ | | 75% | https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters | | 70% | https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds | | 65% | https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews | | 60% | https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ | RSS Reader | Percentage Score | URL | | --- | --- | | 90% | https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ | | 85% | https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/ | | 80% | https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/ | | 75% | https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters | | 70% | https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds | | 65% | https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews | | 60% | https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ | Please note that these percentages are approximate and are intended only as a rough guide. You may want to consider other factors such as the user interface, performance, security, and integration with other tools when choosing a solution for your project.
krisoft 4y ago
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.
- williamtrask 4y ago
  I don't think accuracy matters as much as the ability to describe various opinions and attribute them to sources.
forrest2 4y ago
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.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Why just public info stagnation? It will be dwarfed by believable content generated by swarms of internet bots. Once a stable diffusion like open source GPT-3 appears, it will be used to create fake news all the time. Like imagine 70 different outlets all with relatively large clout on social networks suddenly announce that Elon Musk is running for president. Nevermind that he wasn’t born in the USA… somehow mysteriously none of them address it: Yes it is here and it’s already being spread but that is just a tiny sliver of what will happen in the next 5 years: https://youtu.be/LSlv4AsChwg https://youtu.be/LSlv4AsChwg Such stuff can be used to move markets, pump and dump assets and even start new wars!
  - brookst 4y ago
    What’s different about AI? People are cheap. Anyone who wants to do this can already do it just with mechanical Turk or just hiring writers in low income countries.
    - doliveira 4y ago
      AI is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster, not to mention amoral.
      - 4y ago
anothernewdude 4y ago
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.
- mrkramer 4y ago
  It seems like ChatGPT-like solution can supplement and assist the user in searching the Web not completely replace the search engine itself(at least not for now).
lolinder 4y ago
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. [0] https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-3-experiments/blob/master/examples/unicorn/output_0_7.md https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-3-experiments/blob/master/e...
- Valakas_ 4y ago
  I can't wait for a few years, when ChatGPT is replaced by something 10^x more powerful, and then comments like this look like nonsense of someone who lived in a past era just like we now similarly make fun of comments from people that made in past eras about how certain technologies, criticized in their current state without the ability of the person to look ahead. Even though the person you're replying to mentioned ChatGPT, ChatGPT is just the FIRST of many. Imagine somebody saying in 1803 "Car is unusable because you have to keep filling the coal, it's just not convenient, and a horse will always have a future."
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  devils advocate, but Google wasn’t designed to make sure the links it aggregates at the top are accurate/isn’t just blog spam designed to cater to specialized SEO tricks
accurrent 4y ago
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.
Julesman 4y ago
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?
wolpoli 4y ago
> Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents Today's search engines will give you 500 results per query. Your point still stands - sorting through 500 results is hard work.
tmpburning 4y ago
> I am ready to pay for something like ChatGPT. they put too many restrictions on which answers ChatGPT is allowed to give though...
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Maybe they didnt want another nazi chatbot headline https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
22289d 4y ago
> ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents 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.
- scarface74 4y ago
  In my specific specialty - AWS - I asked it a lot of questions like I would at an interview and it answered the questions well enough that I would have passed a candidate who gave me the same answers. I didn’t just ask definitions. I asked your standard compare and contrast, why would you use, is X and appropriate use of Y, etc. It can also write Python code, modify existing code based on plain English sentences and do passable code reviews when I asked it “how would you improve this code” when I gave it a 200 line script I wrote. Then I asked it to make the changes it suggested like unhardcode some values, add exception handling, test for existence of a property it was trying to access.
  - 22289d 4y ago
    That's awesome, it does seem to be quite good at writing code. But in that case, you can test for it's weaknesses by asking it anything recent. The models are only trained on data through X date. Ask it something after X and it wont have the data to answer you correctly. Like about some new framework or feature.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Hell I work at AWS in Professional Services and you could ask me anything recent to test my weaknesses. I can’t keep up with all of the announcements.
      - 22289d 4y ago
        Google can though :) The context here was comparing ChatGPT and Google.
  - 4y ago
heavyset_go 4y ago
> 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.
- jjcon 4y ago
  I mean, it happens in stages - I’m already using chatgpt for plenty of useful tasks that I would otherwise google (and then some). Similarly self driving cars are better than humans at plenty of specific things (collision detection/aversion for instance) but not a wholesale replacement of humans just yet obviously.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I was willing to give ChatGPT the benefit of the doubt after being initially impressed with its results, but I've also had it confidently tell me blatantly wrong information when the correct information is a Google search away at most or no human would confidently make such a mistake. What makes it worse is that it spits out paragraphs confidently, where some of it might be right or close to right, but the rest might be subtly incorrect. Without domain knowledge, you might not pick up on it. Hell, you might even be convinced of the false information based on the arguments for it that the AI writes out. At least with search engines you can cross reference multiple sources if you aren't confident in your ability to assess the first thing you read.
- kosh2 4y ago
  Self-driving cars are much more difficult than one might think because the AI has to interface with the real world, something that humans have evolved for over millions of years. Like others have said, worry more about every job that primarily interfaces with a computer.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Computers don't exist in a vacuum, what goes on in the computer is often determined by interfacing with the real world, reflecting real world intentions, observations, input, predictions, etc. This generation of AI is great when the universe of values can be generalized. When the universe of values is literally the universe, it shows its limitations.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
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.
- machiaweliczny 4y ago
  For me it’s better than search engine. If promted correctly it can summarise and synthetise hours of work.
- eks391 4y ago
  > Today I have zero confidence in chatGPT, OR my ability to evaluate and correct it's inaccuracies strictly from within its interface. Definitely not within chatgpt itself. I was using chatgpt recently for the first time and came to the conclusion to take its output with the weight of a trusted friend. I was asking questions on topics I had genuine curiousity about and that I didnt know the answer, and it led me to some information that I thought interesting, so I wanted to know more. Thats where I turned to my fav search engine and looked into, continuing my session with chatgpt to clear passages it spat. It steered me in a direction I didnt know existed, and I used the internet to verify the information and acquire me detail. Yesterday I tried out asking it for help on a coding project, and it introduced me to a helpful package I didnt know about, but the code it suggested using didnt actually work and was riddled with errors as I tried to use it in the way it suggested. I would have been blown away if it worked, so this was no big deal. I think I would have been faster just using stackexchange though. > So today I don't see it replacing search engine for me. I will continue to use the resources I already use to find respective authenticatable information, but I do think it is still useful for those things where I have no idea where to begin, so it can set me in a direction where resources already exist.
destroy-2A 4y ago
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.
e40 4y ago
> 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. Clearly Google thinks so, too: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/ai-chatgpt-google-search.html 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?
paulcole 4y ago
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?
andreyk 4y ago
But that assumes search just involves document searching for retrieving information. 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!
EvgeniyZh 4y ago
Have you already replaced Google with ChatGPT whole it's free? What are your Google usecases?
gloosx 4y ago
>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.
- jddj 4y ago
  > who would ever want this? Anyone who has ever asked anyone to prepare a list of anything.
  - gloosx 4y ago
    So they want indexation, in order to navigate the sources more effectively, which AI obscures and abstracts away (into cool funny neurons thou)
raindropm 4y ago
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)
rasz 4y ago
>perfect you keep using that word
anonytrary 4y ago
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.
- datpiff 4y ago
  > ChatGPT is a synthesis engine This is exactly what ChatGPT cannot do!
numpad0 4y ago
- A document search engine, in its prototypical forms, finds a document matching queries, whereas, - 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.
oxfordmale 4y ago
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.
Dwolb 4y ago
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?
schmorptron 4y ago
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.
- mrkramer 4y ago
  Google finally stared to pay licencing fees to the news publishers for using their news articles for creation of headlines and summaries for Google search results and for the Google News[0]. If AI chatbots want to thrive they need to employ this business model in which they would pay licensing fees to the content creators in order to use their content to feed the AI algorithm. And ofc they(AI chatbots) would need to link(quote) content sources in hope and in order for users to follow the links and drive traffic to the original content creators. That's how Wikipedia operates; volunteers are crowdsourcing Wikipedia pages with information gathered from all around the Web(plus books and research papers) and they quote information sources. But in the AI chatbot case the selection and the analysis of information is done by the AI unlike Wikipedia which uses human volunteers to do the job. AI chatbot and its content providers would be incentivized by profit while Wikipedia and its volunteers are motivated by altruism. Which brings me to the conclusion that AI chatbot would actually provide you with better information than Wikipedia(taking in consideration for-profit competition between content creators) or any other non-profit but Wikipedia is still useful and relevant with the regard to quality. [0] https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/google-licenses-content-from-news-publishers-under-the-eu-copyright-directive/ https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/google-li...
hutzlibu 4y ago
"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.

by gukov 4y ago

mehdix 4y ago

Can't agree more. 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.

rasz 4y ago
as long as what you wanted were imaginary "facts"
- speedgoose 4y ago
  I think we are many to focus on the current shortcomings but it’s not unreasonable to think that a future chatGPT will be better at stating wrong things with a high confidence.
  - noitpmeder 4y ago
    It is incredibly unreasonable to think this! GPT, by definition, is a language model. Unless the underlying architecture is fundamentally altered it will never be able to accurately assess the correctness of its answer. If such an architecture is ever created it will almost certainly not be a "GPT"-like model.
    - speedgoose 4y ago
      Yes it would need some architectural changes obviously.

dilap 4y ago

ChatGPT can give you websites, too, if you ask: "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.

williamtrask 4y ago
It’s not that google can’t do this. It’s that the incentives prevent it. Chatbots may be worse because there’s a plausible way to only give you one answer and to really make it feel real.
- bg24 4y ago
  When the incentives are 70% of your revenue, very difficult to change track in 1-2 years.
gukov 4y ago
Another way to look at ChatGPT is it being a smart RSS reader. It's the way it discards all the WordPress layout junk giving you just the meat in a text format. The biggest advantage Google currently has is their massive indexing ability. ChatGPT is oblivious to something that just happened (ie was posted) an hour ago, a day ago, heck, a month ago.

WJW 4y ago

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).

dpkirchner 4y ago
I wish ChatGPT would give you the score(s) of the results it returns, so you could understand how correct it "thinks" the response is. I wonder if those confidently wrong answers are also low scoring.
- permo-w 4y ago
  you could probably ask it
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    I'd considered that -- in some cases it says it's absolutely confident, like with basic arithmetic, and in others it says: > Without more information, I cannot estimate the accuracy or reliability of these claims. It is important to note that there may be conflicting or inaccurate information available online, and it is always a good idea to verify information from multiple sources before accepting it as fact. which seems pretty reasonable.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    You can ask it, and it may generate text with a score, but there is no particular reason that the score generated in the text would reflect any internal score it has.
- geoffreypoirier 4y ago
  I had a long requirements chat last night and did just that: There are many self-hosted solutions that could potentially meet the requirements you have listed for your RSS aggregator and reader project. Here is a list of some popular options, ranked in order of their approximate percentage of compatibility with the features you have specified: RSS Aggregator | Percentage Score | URL | | --- | --- | | 90% | https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ | | 85% | https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/ | | 80% | https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/ | | 75% | https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters | | 70% | https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds | | 65% | https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews | | 60% | https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ | RSS Reader | Percentage Score | URL | | --- | --- | | 90% | https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ | | 85% | https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/ | | 80% | https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/ | | 75% | https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters | | 70% | https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds | | 65% | https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews | | 60% | https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ | Please note that these percentages are approximate and are intended only as a rough guide. You may want to consider other factors such as the user interface, performance, security, and integration with other tools when choosing a solution for your project.

krisoft 4y ago

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.

williamtrask 4y ago
I don't think accuracy matters as much as the ability to describe various opinions and attribute them to sources.

forrest2 4y ago

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.

EGreg 4y ago
Why just public info stagnation? It will be dwarfed by believable content generated by swarms of internet bots. Once a stable diffusion like open source GPT-3 appears, it will be used to create fake news all the time. Like imagine 70 different outlets all with relatively large clout on social networks suddenly announce that Elon Musk is running for president. Nevermind that he wasn’t born in the USA… somehow mysteriously none of them address it: Yes it is here and it’s already being spread but that is just a tiny sliver of what will happen in the next 5 years: https://youtu.be/LSlv4AsChwg https://youtu.be/LSlv4AsChwg Such stuff can be used to move markets, pump and dump assets and even start new wars!
- brookst 4y ago
  What’s different about AI? People are cheap. Anyone who wants to do this can already do it just with mechanical Turk or just hiring writers in low income countries.
  - doliveira 4y ago
    AI is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster, not to mention amoral.
    - 4y ago

anothernewdude 4y ago

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.

mrkramer 4y ago
It seems like ChatGPT-like solution can supplement and assist the user in searching the Web not completely replace the search engine itself(at least not for now).

lolinder 4y ago

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. [0] https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-3-experiments/blob/master/examples/unicorn/output_0_7.md https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-3-experiments/blob/master/e...

Valakas_ 4y ago
I can't wait for a few years, when ChatGPT is replaced by something 10^x more powerful, and then comments like this look like nonsense of someone who lived in a past era just like we now similarly make fun of comments from people that made in past eras about how certain technologies, criticized in their current state without the ability of the person to look ahead. Even though the person you're replying to mentioned ChatGPT, ChatGPT is just the FIRST of many. Imagine somebody saying in 1803 "Car is unusable because you have to keep filling the coal, it's just not convenient, and a horse will always have a future."
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
devils advocate, but Google wasn’t designed to make sure the links it aggregates at the top are accurate/isn’t just blog spam designed to cater to specialized SEO tricks

accurrent 4y ago

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.

Julesman 4y ago

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?

wolpoli 4y ago

> Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents Today's search engines will give you 500 results per query. Your point still stands - sorting through 500 results is hard work.

tmpburning 4y ago

> I am ready to pay for something like ChatGPT. they put too many restrictions on which answers ChatGPT is allowed to give though...

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
Maybe they didnt want another nazi chatbot headline https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...

22289d 4y ago

> ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents 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.

scarface74 4y ago
In my specific specialty - AWS - I asked it a lot of questions like I would at an interview and it answered the questions well enough that I would have passed a candidate who gave me the same answers. I didn’t just ask definitions. I asked your standard compare and contrast, why would you use, is X and appropriate use of Y, etc. It can also write Python code, modify existing code based on plain English sentences and do passable code reviews when I asked it “how would you improve this code” when I gave it a 200 line script I wrote. Then I asked it to make the changes it suggested like unhardcode some values, add exception handling, test for existence of a property it was trying to access.
- 22289d 4y ago
  That's awesome, it does seem to be quite good at writing code. But in that case, you can test for it's weaknesses by asking it anything recent. The models are only trained on data through X date. Ask it something after X and it wont have the data to answer you correctly. Like about some new framework or feature.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Hell I work at AWS in Professional Services and you could ask me anything recent to test my weaknesses. I can’t keep up with all of the announcements.
    - 22289d 4y ago
      Google can though :) The context here was comparing ChatGPT and Google.
- 4y ago

heavyset_go 4y ago

> 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.

jjcon 4y ago
I mean, it happens in stages - I’m already using chatgpt for plenty of useful tasks that I would otherwise google (and then some). Similarly self driving cars are better than humans at plenty of specific things (collision detection/aversion for instance) but not a wholesale replacement of humans just yet obviously.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I was willing to give ChatGPT the benefit of the doubt after being initially impressed with its results, but I've also had it confidently tell me blatantly wrong information when the correct information is a Google search away at most or no human would confidently make such a mistake. What makes it worse is that it spits out paragraphs confidently, where some of it might be right or close to right, but the rest might be subtly incorrect. Without domain knowledge, you might not pick up on it. Hell, you might even be convinced of the false information based on the arguments for it that the AI writes out. At least with search engines you can cross reference multiple sources if you aren't confident in your ability to assess the first thing you read.
kosh2 4y ago
Self-driving cars are much more difficult than one might think because the AI has to interface with the real world, something that humans have evolved for over millions of years. Like others have said, worry more about every job that primarily interfaces with a computer.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Computers don't exist in a vacuum, what goes on in the computer is often determined by interfacing with the real world, reflecting real world intentions, observations, input, predictions, etc. This generation of AI is great when the universe of values can be generalized. When the universe of values is literally the universe, it shows its limitations.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

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.

machiaweliczny 4y ago
For me it’s better than search engine. If promted correctly it can summarise and synthetise hours of work.
eks391 4y ago
> Today I have zero confidence in chatGPT, OR my ability to evaluate and correct it's inaccuracies strictly from within its interface. Definitely not within chatgpt itself. I was using chatgpt recently for the first time and came to the conclusion to take its output with the weight of a trusted friend. I was asking questions on topics I had genuine curiousity about and that I didnt know the answer, and it led me to some information that I thought interesting, so I wanted to know more. Thats where I turned to my fav search engine and looked into, continuing my session with chatgpt to clear passages it spat. It steered me in a direction I didnt know existed, and I used the internet to verify the information and acquire me detail. Yesterday I tried out asking it for help on a coding project, and it introduced me to a helpful package I didnt know about, but the code it suggested using didnt actually work and was riddled with errors as I tried to use it in the way it suggested. I would have been blown away if it worked, so this was no big deal. I think I would have been faster just using stackexchange though. > So today I don't see it replacing search engine for me. I will continue to use the resources I already use to find respective authenticatable information, but I do think it is still useful for those things where I have no idea where to begin, so it can set me in a direction where resources already exist.

destroy-2A 4y ago

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.

e40 4y ago

> 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. Clearly Google thinks so, too: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/ai-chatgpt-google-search.html 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?

paulcole 4y ago

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?

andreyk 4y ago

But that assumes search just involves document searching for retrieving information. 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!

EvgeniyZh 4y ago

Have you already replaced Google with ChatGPT whole it's free? What are your Google usecases?

gloosx 4y ago

>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.

jddj 4y ago
> who would ever want this? Anyone who has ever asked anyone to prepare a list of anything.
- gloosx 4y ago
  So they want indexation, in order to navigate the sources more effectively, which AI obscures and abstracts away (into cool funny neurons thou)

raindropm 4y ago

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)

rasz 4y ago

>perfect you keep using that word

anonytrary 4y ago

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.

datpiff 4y ago
> ChatGPT is a synthesis engine This is exactly what ChatGPT cannot do!

numpad0 4y ago

- A document search engine, in its prototypical forms, finds a document matching queries, whereas, - 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.

oxfordmale 4y ago

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.

Dwolb 4y ago

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?

schmorptron 4y ago

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.

mrkramer 4y ago
Google finally stared to pay licencing fees to the news publishers for using their news articles for creation of headlines and summaries for Google search results and for the Google News[0]. If AI chatbots want to thrive they need to employ this business model in which they would pay licensing fees to the content creators in order to use their content to feed the AI algorithm. And ofc they(AI chatbots) would need to link(quote) content sources in hope and in order for users to follow the links and drive traffic to the original content creators. That's how Wikipedia operates; volunteers are crowdsourcing Wikipedia pages with information gathered from all around the Web(plus books and research papers) and they quote information sources. But in the AI chatbot case the selection and the analysis of information is done by the AI unlike Wikipedia which uses human volunteers to do the job. AI chatbot and its content providers would be incentivized by profit while Wikipedia and its volunteers are motivated by altruism. Which brings me to the conclusion that AI chatbot would actually provide you with better information than Wikipedia(taking in consideration for-profit competition between content creators) or any other non-profit but Wikipedia is still useful and relevant with the regard to quality. [0] https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/google-licenses-content-from-news-publishers-under-the-eu-copyright-directive/ https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/google-li...

hutzlibu 4y ago

"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.