21 ms·

ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

• rogerthis 4y ago
  Every time I read things like this I take the opposite as the most likely.
• WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  True, but it does not have to. ChatGPT is it's own thing. It has functions search engines can never accomplish. You can say the same thing the other way around, "Why Search Engines won't replace ChatGPT?" The essence of what ChatGPT is is here to stay. We'll be seeing different flavors and it will be a big part of everyone's life.
  • kyrra 4y ago
    Googler opinions are my own. (I know nothing about search). Google has LaMDA, which I could see them putting the answers from it into the knowledge box at the top of searches. There is no reason they have to be mutually exclusive, a search engine can provide answers from both. Google search is already an aggregation of multiple sources (images, web index, knowledge, shopping, video, flights, etc...). Adding another source seems like the obvious path forward (assuming accuracy and cost make sense).
    • WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
      Very true, they already have different sections in the results pages. There's no reason why they can't have one more. They can also use the box as a way to improve accuracy by having user vote on the quality of the result.
    • waynesonfire 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • dang 4y ago
        We really need you to stop posting so aggressively. If you can't or won't, we're going to have to ban you. You've been breaking the site guidelines frequently. That's not ok, and I warned you about this once recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33860364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33860364. I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things and if you'd simply follow the site guidelines you'd be a good contributor, but the current pattern is a problem. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fixing this, we'd be grateful.
        • waynesonfire 4y ago
          Thanks will do
    • antihipocrat 4y ago
      If we don't need to click a link does google receives less revenue? I think including more direct answers from a search query would require changes to Google's business model.
      • aflag 4y ago
        The ads would still be clickable. Clicking the actual results doesn't really help google much.
        • antihipocrat 4y ago
          Except for any ads embedded in the referred sites.
• greatpostman 4y ago
  -written by company selling outdated search solutions
  • CharlesW 4y ago
    I think it's worth noting the potential bias, but Algolia's the furthest thing from outdated.
    • kekkidy 4y ago
      [dead]
  • berkle4455 4y ago
    Outdated? How so? The primary thing Algolia is guilty of is being massively overpriced to the point it’s a non-starter for any platform with even moderate usage. But their full-text search functions quite well and is very fast.
    • sitkack 4y ago
      Vector search over any corpus that fits in memory is quite fast. Hell, a naive inverted index performs quite well for 90% of tasks.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • fifilura 4y ago
    More from the same publisher: "Why touch screen phones won't replace clamshell phones any time soon" "Why electric light bulbs won't replace gas lighting anytime soon" "Why transistors won't replace radio tubes anytime soon" "Why drones won't replace fighter aircraft anytime soon" "Why electric cars won't replace combustion engines anytime soon" "Why linux desktop won't replace windows anytime soon"
    • 4y ago
• tluyben2 4y ago
  It won’t have to replace; it can just augment and be very successful at it. I’m just unsure how to cover the massive costs of running this thing with millions of req/sec.
• cs702 4y ago
  ...But ChatGPT's successors just might. I, for one, look forward to a future in which I can ask a digital assistant to find and summarize information on anything: "Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me like I'm five years old." "Computer, what are the latest Covid-19 infection stats in my city?" "Computer, who is Claude Shannon and why is he important?" "Computer, what are the top three stories on HN today?" "Computer, what's on my calendar?" etc.
  • IanCal 4y ago
    I'll be the first to say that chatgpt already does very well at the first and third examples. WebGPT sounds like the right approach for the others (understanding how to formulate a search query, then searching, then summarising the results) Edit I think the direction of these models seems clear, and their capabilities however limited at the moment are outstanding. I think the best measure of performance is what the naysayers complain about. We've quickly gone from "actual gibberish that looks like paragraphs" to "yes but it loses track after a few sentences" to "yes it's kind of coherent but doesn't make sense totally" and are now at "it's like an overconfident human at many tasks, when they're only somewhat qualified in the area". People are pointing out where it's got an API call wrong, without it having any ability to look up the answer and see if the function actually exists. I spoke to it about distributed computation design and discovered something new I can actually implement in my design. I'm very excited about where this will all go because it seems useful now and I'd be very surprised if this is the best that it ever reaches.
    • cs702 4y ago
      I agree (with minor caveats). The important thing is that these AI systems are only going to get better over time. IMHO, the early 2020's for conversational AI is akin to the 1980's for personal computers.
      • IanCal 4y ago
        Absolutely, I totally agree. I edited my comment to add in more as I realised I'd not addressed that. It's surprisingly good right now, and given that it's useful that feeds into even more attention and money being spent on making it better. Anyone not looking at chatgpt and thinking "what if this was even just a bit better? Or had better iterations or lookups?" is missing out on what I think is a revolutionary change coming probably sooner than people expect.
• nowherebeen 4y ago
  ChatGPT will flood the internet with articles like how SEO was used to hack search. It might not replace search engine, but search results will becomes even more irrelevant.
  • chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Which will ultimately drive more people directly to ChatGPT and just cut out the search middle-person.
    • nowherebeen 4y ago
      Not necessary. The google search function still works fine, its just the content becomes worst. If the content is generated from ChatGPT, I don't see how it will cut out the middle-person. I believe a more likely scenario is people appending site:reddit.com for all of their search. It will be domain specific.
      • chiefalchemist 4y ago
        Eventually, the masses will understand that 75%+ on the first SERP page are AI sourced. Why bother with the middle if it adds too little value?
  • wut42 4y ago
    I can imagine AI replacing search engines in a somewhat far future, but in the meantime, it'll mostly be used to flood the internet with many low quality articles. Consequence will be as you said, but I also wonder if it won't lower the quality of new AI trainings as well.
    • pixl97 4y ago
      How long before the AI learning from itself dominates the literature people read influencing how we speak and think?
      • 4y ago
• sitkack 4y ago
  Machine translation won't replace human translation any time soon.
  • twojacobtwo 4y ago
    I can see that being true for the top 5% (arbitrarily chosen small %) of difficult translations with professional requirements, but I think for the vast majority of day-to-day translation between the major languages (maybe only within the same language family), it is already sufficient and improving. I only have the anecdata of my friends and myself, but we have yet to encounter a casual conversation type translation that DeepL or Google translate have failed on for Spanish <-> English <-> French. Granted, it doesn't always return the most optimal translation, but it has always given the intended core idea.
    • sitkack 4y ago
      Exactly! ChatGPT might not replace search (entirely), but for many many use cases, it has already replaced search. When pure machine translation was starting out, there were lots of similar posts about it how it can't YYY, but in short amount of time it has become very effective. ChatGPT for me is a much better StackOverflow. In fact, I'd rather people be asking and answering SO style question in a format that is easier for machines to understand. ChatGPT is better at searching for a concept, if it was unencumbered, I could better constrain the concept space it was searching over.
      • twojacobtwo 4y ago
        Oh, I see. I completely missed the tone/intent of your original post. I'm in complete agreement with you there. Thank you for elaborating.
• tlogan 4y ago
  If Google search actually searches (find articles or sites with keyword) then yes: ChatGTP or it’s successor would never replace Google search. But Google search so broken (at least for me) so it looks more like broken or badly implemented ChatGTP.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > But Google search so broken (at least for me) Every single time I've seen this claim made and the person shared their methodology for searching on Google, it becomes very apparent that the problem is not Google, but the user.
    • alvah 4y ago
      That’s a bit harsh. Early Google didn’t really require any special skills or knowledge on the user’s part. Current day Google requires hacks and workarounds to avoid both SEO spam and Corporate Google’s attempts to sell you something.
• tomlue 4y ago
  Article claims that chatgpt is overly sensitive to queries eg -gate suffix and come lad vs cum laude. This seems like a weak argument based on a temporary shortcoming. Any NLP methods search engines use for word meanings should be trivially integrated into chatgpt. Comes off as a company that sells search solutions looking for reasons this tech won't replace it. I'm sure the author is better informed, but what about the scalability of search? I'm not sure if the neural network approaches are as cost efficient (today) as some of our current search algorithms when it comes to answering queries.
  • dustincoates 4y ago
    Author here. I was surprised to see my post on here while scrolling! My point about those examples is less that ChatGPT got it wrong, but that it's impossible to know really when it does, because it seems so confident and you only get the one result. To be fair, this is a problem with webpages, but you at least get multiple choices. > Comes off as a company that sells search solutions looking for reasons this tech won't replace it. I can see why you'd say that, but that wasn't the goal. I originally wrote this as my own POV for my own blog. I really do think there's a UX problem in this (and, as I mentioned, I am a big fan of recent LLMs). > [What] about the scalability of search? You're right, the NN aren't as performant as lexical search. They're getting a lot better though. (We're actually working on this at the moment.) LLMs, though, have a ways to go, so it's hard to use them right now for real time search.
• raegis 4y ago
  Just heard of this, so I logged in with my google account. The mistake it makes below is interesting. If this were a human response, I would assume a brain fart. Not expecting this type of error from "A.I." Me> Find the area of an ellipse with semimajor axis 5 and semiminor axis 4. ChatGPT> The area of an ellipse with semimajor axis 5 and semiminor axis 4 is 40π. You can find the area of an ellipse using the formula: A = πab, where A is the area of the ellipse, a is the length of the semimajor axis, and b is the length of the semiminor axis. In this case, the semimajor axis has length 5 and the semiminor axis has length 4, so plugging these values into the formula gives us: A = π(5)(4) = 40π.
  • skybrian 4y ago
    The trick is to get it to show its work first and then calculate the answer. If it guesses the wrong answer first and then writes out the steps, it won't correct it. This works: "Find the area of an ellipse with semimajor axis 5 and semiminor axis 4. Don't calculate the result until the end."
    • raegis 4y ago
      After computing your example, I tried my original question which now gives the correct answer. In fact, it gives essentially the same response for both forms of the question. I guess the training works as it should.
  • tarl0s 4y ago
    Being not very good with numbers is one of the limitations of the current model. I imagine that in the future we will see integrations with a number of different tools to overcome these limits - WolframAlpha being the first one that comes to mind when talking about algebra and calculus.
    • raegis 4y ago
      A friend told me students were using this for cheating on math exams, so I assumed (incorrectly) it had something like Wolfram Alpha built in.
• bloodyplonker22 4y ago
  Algolia's main product is search related. You can tell from this article that they are scared about ChatGPT even partially replacing search. They are very scared of losing business, and anyone who is scared of ChatGPT will be writing articles like this, badmouthing ChatGPT.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Try to Google: Does Jeff Bezos shop at Whole Foods?
  • throwuxiytayq 4y ago
    Precisely my experience with 95% of stuff I google. I don’t know if that’s just the nature of the things I usually search for (primarily technical subjects where the query shouldn’t be “dumbed down” and reinterpreted or you get a completely different meaning), but I’ve become incredibly dissatisfied with Google over the past few years. I imagine it’s a fine search engine if you’re looking up the URL for Netflix.
• emrah 4y ago
  Google already provides a chatgpt-like experience with the questions it displays based on the query. It is unlike chatgpt in that google comes up with those questions but they are usually spot on and you can see the source where the answers are coming from. Perhaps all google has to do is provide a chatgpt like interface to that subsection of search results so it feels more interactive like chatgpt
• throwaway71271 4y ago
  Have they not heard of it? The web is dead and as the poet said, giants will roam the earth once more. Every time I interact with davinci-003 it makes me feel more and more like the first real paradigm change is coming. We are still using our computers and writing our programs in the same way as 70 years ago, I emplore you to read 'structured programming' debates and see how we argue about the same things now. Every business product basically still competes with a word processor and spreadsheet. We have made hundreds of thousands of lines of code so we can auto focus the next field on a form, and it still doesnt work on 99% of the cases. The GUI was not a paradigm change, it was more of the same, maybe even worse, mobile overpromised, anything besides video is just worse desktop. Lists and tables.. for 70 years This is the first real change. -- "And what doeth the saint in the forest?" asked Zarathustra. The saint answered: "I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise God. With singing, weeping, laughing, and mumbling do I praise the God who is my God. But what dost thou bring us as a gift?" When Zarathustra had heard these words, he bowed to the saint and said: "What should I have to give thee! Let me rather hurry hence lest I take aught away from thee!"--And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing like schoolboys. When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that god is dead!"
• Sozar2000 4y ago
  I think this was framed around using google to answer a question vs using Chatgpt. For example. Asking "How can I tie my shoes?" to google requires that I click on a link (or multiple) and hope for the best. Meanwhile Chatgpt is likely to give me a detailed walkthrough and answer any follow up questions. Another good example someone mentioned was "How did ww2 start?". Google gives you a path to find the answer, but Chatgpt will outright give you an answer. I'd say Chatgpt's competition is really google assistant and siri vs google search. Personally, if I'm using "Okay Google", I don't want to be referred to links as that requires me having to pickup my phone.
• factsarelolz 4y ago
  Oh wow, thanks!
• mymyairduster 4y ago
  reminds me of when i said 'my girlfrind won't replace my wife' ... whoops!
• TrackerFF 4y ago
  I used (still use) Wolfram Alpha for the longest time. Back in the day, I was amazed that it could calculate a bunch of things that were way out of range for Google, etc. - and I always envisioned future search engines to be sort of hybrids, you'll get linked to the correct websites, but you can also ask them for whatever you want. I don't need ChatGPT or similar models to replace search engines, I just want to use them in parallel. I'm excited to see what Google does with their LaMDA model, now that Bing will incorporate ChatGPT.
• kyleyeats 4y ago
  Bing announced their ChatGPT deal the next day: https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/04/microsoft_openai_chatgpt_bing/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/04/microsoft_openai_chat...
  • wut42 4y ago
    I really wonder how the economics of running chatgpt for Bing's request will work. GPT is anything but cheap to run, IIRC, it requires more than four A100 GPU cards.
    • rapsey 4y ago
      The bill is already largely footed by MS probably. OpenAI and MS are a partnership and they run on azure cloud.
      • wut42 4y ago
        Of course- it makes sense to run ChatGPT free now (reminded that it's an experiment) for training & betatesting. But running it even larger, and on a search engine ? It's a magnitude of difference imo, and totally different than a short-time bill for an experiment.
        • waynesonfire 4y ago
          Who gives a shit how much it costs. The value is massive and 10x better than Google results. Are you comprehending what that means? After competing with Google for over 10 years with nothing to show for it, Microsoft is drooling over this technology.
          • coredog64 4y ago
            There’s a very old story about Microsoft and Win 3.x pen computing. One of the leads was explaining that they worked on it, and someone else opined that it was too bad that they didn’t provide anything useful for MS. The lead replied that the goal wasn’t actually pen computing, it was a special teams “block that kick” play that kneecapped a competitor and so achieved its goal. If MS can reduce the absolute firehose of money that ads provide to Google, it will totally be worth it even if it takes lighting money on fire to do it.
• Kibae 4y ago
  I've been using ChatGPT to suggest me books similar to books I've liked and so far the results have been good. Many of the books that are recommended are books I've read and enjoyed so the remaining ones on the list are added to my reading list.
  • theSoenke 4y ago
    For me it suggested fictional book names that do not exist
• kyaghmour 4y ago
  How long would it take for "ChatGPT farms" to crop up and try to influence the results? How much harder will it be to "clean" the results from any learned data set?
• shon 4y ago
  It already has replaced Google for some of my needs. If I want a simple answer to queries like: How to make a Sazarac What’s a good waffle recipe How do I change the O2 sensor on a 1982 911SC I find ChatGPT issues perfectly good answers without all of the superfluous results, words, clickbait, and ads. And for many other questions that are technical, medical, or trivial in nature I prefer its simple one-shot response. Is it perfect? No. But neither is Google. I still at times neees to use quotes and booleans to get Google to bring me the results I want. As a side note, Google is the Microsoft of 1997. Dominant and content. It doesn’t really want change. That’s why it’s time for a new challenger.
  • owlglass 4y ago
    Perhaps we'll see OpenAI grow to be the Google of 2022?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jki275 4y ago
  The problem with chatgpt is that I can't evaluate the source it used to learn the information to see if I think it's credible, and chatgpt can't give me any indication of whether it's credible or not, and its answer will be just as authoritative in tone if it's completely incorrect as if it's correct. I asked it for a schematic to connect an i2c device to a microcontroller, it told me to directly connect the device to the microcontroller. I asked it if pull-up resistors were required, it said yes, and then drew what it called "pull-up resistors" (describing them correctly) incorrectly in series between the bus and the device. I know that's wrong, but someone who doesn't really know what a pull-up resistor does or why they are there would be at least somewhat confused by that interchange, and would be misled into doing it wrong. Meanwhile, I can type in "i2c schematic" to google and get thousands of correct schematics back to look at.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  I remember when web search engines were new. And boy did they suck. You wouldn’t get what you wanted a lot of the time, and they were very finicky about the input query. These days you can just throw stuff at it like “that movie about the depressed guy with a plane engine that falls on their house” I’m not sure ChatGPT is going to replace search engines, but I’m confident that it is incredibly young and will evolve considerably.
  • helloworld11 4y ago
    Donnie Darko, btw.
  • Eisenstein 4y ago
    Yeah but in those days you could call up the local video store and ask the clerk that question and he or she would tell you it was Donnie Darko.
    • coredog64 4y ago
      I thought it was “The World According To Garp”
  • uconnectlol 4y ago
    In 2001-2003, browsers crashed every 5 minutes then and Google's search didn't crash nor freeze nor slow it due to not being covered in ads and popups (having only 1-3 ad results at the top of the page with green text was a massive improvement). On tech forums back then, people would say, "is this even sustainable?" Microsoft search and the other ones were just "there was an attempt" tier and gave complete nonsense results. When Google debuted, it was the only time web search substantially improved. There were no other big innovations in web searches ever, from that day on. > These days you can just throw stuff at it like “that movie about the depressed guy with a plane engine that falls on their house” I have looked for obscure queries like yours for 10 years and have not found them. For example "that movie where police vehicles are dispatched and they all crash for seemingly no reason on the way to the scene". It just won't find it because nobody talked about it (in a manner that would cause words that stick out to match), simple. And now days it's even worse because it does that new "rounding" thing and gives me: - The 25 Best Police Movies of All Time - Dispatched (2014) That first result simply contains nothing to do with my query other than the world "police" and "movie". Now days when you try to use a web search, you can't be smart and search strings that are likely to be used by someone discussing your topic of interest anymore, because it will always "round" them. It will also look at each word as if they are the literal thing you are in search for. I don't know if it's still possible to search bodies of text to get around that, but I'm not sure if that feature even ever worked. Back in 2005 when all these people were raving about intitle: inurl: inbody: whatever, none of them worked consistently, and you would also get scolded for hacking if you used them "wrong". Even searching something like "powered by phpbb" got me banned or scolded once when I wasn't even using it for hacking but rather as a workaround to narrow my search to only forum websites.
• lossolo 4y ago
  It seems like an article from Kodak or Nokia. It's only a matter of time, and it will be sooner rather than later, that multimodal LLMs will replace search engines. All of the problems mentioned in the article are being addressed as we speak. Advanced retrieval transformer + RLHF + LAMBADA[1] = RIP old search engines. 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13894 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13894
  • emkoemko 4y ago
    how do you replace search engines? where is the data coming from? and why would anyone give it away for free? most of the web runs off ads
• briga 4y ago
  Au contraire, ChatGPT has already replaced search engines for me, at least for generalized knowledge searches. It provides better and more personalized answers to my questions than Google and is an excellent way to learn about new topics. It's not 100% accurate and can even be misleading, but that is hardly different than other search engines. Once more people catch on to how incredibly useful ChatGPT is its use will become ubiquitous (and we've barely even scratched the surface of what these tools can do)
  • gunshai 4y ago
    ChatGPT is miles above Google search for me when it comes to learning the "hello world" of just about anything at this point. From there it's a simple prompt of where to go next and asking for references to work that dig deeper. Even if it's wrong, it almost doesn't matter because I can just say "are you sure?" given this extra information, and it corrects itself. Even then if it's still wrong you can prompt it in a ways to give you potential search terms to put into Google.
  • aflag 4y ago
    Also, in a further iteration, people could upvote and downvote results, or even parts of it, so that it learns what it knows and what it doesn't. If it just say "I don't know" for bad results or omit the bad parts, it would already improve things quite a bit. Doing so is quite simple, really.
  • coredog64 4y ago
    One of the challenges with ChatGPT compared to Google is that most employers, even the really paranoid ones, don’t mind you using a search engine to answer questions. That goes out the window for ChatGPT: My current employer won’t even let me use translate.google.com, let alone copy/paste some IP into someone else’s LLM.
    • briga 4y ago
      I fully expect enterprise versions of ChatGPT to become widespread in the near-term. Modern tech firms already give their IP to dozens of third party tools and services, I don’t see why this should be any different
• ahstilde 4y ago
  Personally, I believe the future of search is video. Most of the world uses mobile devices, and video is better on mobile devices than text. This is why Google and TikTok are shifting to short-form video for search. At my company, we're seeing significant search traffic through YT shorts, currently ~2500 views per day: https://www.youtube.com/@wyndly/shorts https://www.youtube.com/@wyndly/shorts
  • waynesonfire 4y ago
    You're seeing shorts on YT is because Google has changed their ranking algorithm. It seems that the quality of shorts has really declined lately. It's almost as if they are being made with the assumption that the only audience they will have is comprised of members of the gen-z generation, who are known for having short attention spans and being easily captivated by quick, sensational videos. These types of videos often feature someone doing something seemingly ordinary, like crossing the street, but with a dramatic caption promising that the viewer won't be able to believe what happens next if they continue watching. It's truly sad to see the decline in quality of these shorts, and the reliance on cheap tricks to grab and hold onto the viewer's attention.
• fakedang 4y ago
  I want to add here that I'm building an app at the moment with code solely generated through prompts for ChatGPT. So far, except for a few issues and manual refactoring, it has done very well. ChatGPT even apologized when it suggested proprietary Firebase, when I told it to use Supabase instead.
• baxtr 4y ago
  A bit tangential, but still worth asking since I haven’t seen it addressed anywhere else: When I type a query into Google, it returns results almost instantaneously. With ChatGPT, it has latency PLUS it writes out answers annoyingly slow. Does anyone know why that spell out every answer like that? Is that a UX gimmick or related to the latency?
  • KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
    Transformers (the frontend in GPT at least) are autoregressive i.e. they require previous state.
• ranting-moth 4y ago
  They might not replace them, but it fulfills a role that Google could do previously. Try to find out what type of a spring is in a spring clamp using google? "What type of a spring is in a spring clamp?" Or use whatever query you want. The top 10 results won't tell me the answer. Ask ChatGPT. It'll tell you (spoiler: it's a tension spring or a torsion spring. It's not a coil spring.) 8 out of 10 Google results are trying to sell me spring clamps. Seriously Google, do you not see that your search engine is FUBAR?
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > Ask ChatGPT. It'll tell you Without any way for you to know if it's the right answer or not. Wow, so useful.
    • emkoemko 4y ago
      thats one good thing about search you get multiple results and different opinions
    • azemetre 4y ago
      How is this any different than Google? The only thing Google exceeds at is serving you SEO garbage on every query.
      • qayxc 4y ago
        Google results(plural!) give you alternatives and references, i.e. you know where each answer is coming from and SEO spam is easily identifiable. ChatGPT just gives you an answer that's confidentially wrong sometimes.
        • sgc 4y ago
          But isn't that just a UI problem at heart? It would be easy to ask for references for its conclusion.
          • 4y ago
• option 4y ago
  Right, but the most powerful and useful AI would be ChatGPT like dialogue based system augmented with search engine. Not the other way around.
• idopmstuff 4y ago
  These feel like really strange criticisms, since they're just so straightforward to resolve. Can't figure out typos? That's a solved problem. Doesn't understand all questions correctly? It's going to get much better at that very, very quickly. Chat results don't give context? You can put AI search results in whatever UI you want. Not shocking to hear a search company say AI won't disrupt search, but if this is the best they can do, I feel pretty confident saying that AI will disrupt search very soon.
• varunkmohan 4y ago
  This feels like what a company that hasn't accepted the future would say. Yes, ChatGPT doesn't do exactly what Google does. Can it be augmented by well understood search retrieval engines to generate a much better response? I think for a lot of cases that seems to be undoubtedly true.
  • dustincoates 4y ago
    I'm (the author) actually in agreement with you. LLMs are going to be a big part of search in the future. I alluded to that I'm the post. I'm less convinced about search as a chat interface. But LLMs for query understanding, ranking, etc.? Of course.
    • goatlover 4y ago
      How do you see LLMs handling the constant flow of new data, given spam, SEO hacking, fake news and what not? Can the training be reliably automated and performed that quickly? It seems the chatGPT folks are allowing free access so they can test and fix abuses with human intervention. But that's hard to do in real time.
• transitivebs 4y ago
  Agreed that chat-based search won't replace traditional search any time soon. BUT even in this article, the author mentions that hybrid semantic search is actively being integrated into Algolia. Both have pros & cons and the best solutions over the coming years will be hybrids.
• zerop 4y ago
  Does anyone think it will replace or reduce software developers work
  • uconnectlol 4y ago
    [flagged]
• lonelyasacloud 4y ago
  What's going to really slow their adoption down is creators of the raw information on which they are trained are going to need some way of being paid for their work. Until payment is figured out it seems likely that creators will increasingly restrict access to their information and that will impact the utility and adoption of the models. Google's probably got the advantage in terms of figuring that side of it out if it can overcome its inertia.
  • emkoemko 4y ago
    yea if this gets popular i can't see any incentive for someone to give the data away for free to the model
• nineteen999 4y ago
  I'm curious what will happen in future systems where the AI can continually learn and update it's model on the fly. I note that ChatGPT can't download a URL from the Internet and summarise it for example, or apply it as new knowledge. Of course it seems ripe for exploitation since there is so much misinformation on the Internet anyway.
• lukifer 4y ago
  Honestly, for many simple programming tasks/questions, I find it’s already rivaling Stack Overflow and Google for quick results. Just last night it flawlessly wrote me a scaffolding for a Bash script that parses specific command line flags
• bottlepalm 4y ago
  Funny how it already has for me.
• animitronix 4y ago
  I'm using it more than Google these days, but ok...
• einpoklum 4y ago
  Well, I asked ChatGPT, and it said ChatGPT may replace search engines soon. So there!
• baq 4y ago
  is soon a year or a decade? the author says he's at his workplace for 7 years, I think chatgpt 2030 will absolutely destroy google search 2023. the question is what google search 2030 will be?
• seydor 4y ago
  but chat is not a search engine, so it will not replace them but it will make them obsolete. I dont see any of this obstacles as substantial. conversational systems will take us back to the original, "bladerunner" concept of technology as something that gives us answers, not something that gives us the books to find the answers The main hurdle for openAI is that it must find a way to link back to the web so that people have an incentive to keep creating content for their training sets. But it seems this could be fixed if the model provides direct links to e.g. buy stuff in its answers.
  • charlieflowers 4y ago
    Yeah, I agree. I do think Microsoft is capable of messing it up and blowing their first mover advantage. They have messed a whole lot of things up over the years. But they haven't messed up Github, VS Code, Typescript, several other things (IMO anyway). It'll be interesting to see how hard they try to stick to the Bing vision versus what they should do, which is replace it with something conversational.
  • goatlover 4y ago
    > not something that gives us the books to find the answers And what if you want more than the generic summary answer? You could keep asking questions, but at some point, you might not know what to ask or what the alternative answers might be, particularly on a controversial topic, or one where the answer isn't fully known. And there could be lots of reasons you might want to visit a site over just getting an answer. If search is replaced, something else needs to link to those sites. Maybe I'd rather watch a video, look at videos, or find a discussion.
    • Agraillo 4y ago
      Good point and that's why I recently came to an interpretation that search engines return some kind of "tables" for us (but not in the tabular form). List of links are rows, and for every link we have properties ("columns"): the title of the page, the date, the snippet with phrases containing our terms. The same is true for stackexchange.com/stackoverflow.com pages, the answers are rows, the text, score, comments are properties of this row. We are used to scanning this "tables" either for finding best answers or exploring multiple variants of answers. But single answer for everything is too limiting.
• benmorris 4y ago
  ChatGPT is already chipping away at my Google searches. I'm more and more just starting there for coding related questions. I've had chatgpt help me with the following just this week among other things. - solved a complex issue with scaling and transformations using pixijs upon providing a code example. The solution was 99% there and saved me hours of debugging. - refactored JavaScript to the async/await pattern - simplified a complex nested logic in c# with citations - scaffolded a MySQL create table statement upon providing several c# classes. Again saved me the tedious steps of typing them out.
  • mrg3_2013 4y ago
    How did you do #1) ? I am curious. Did you past the code and ask GPT to analyze it ?
    • benmorris 4y ago
      Yep, provided as much detail as possible with code samples. Pretty much as if you were emailing someone for help.
  • throwawaymaths 4y ago
    ChatGPT struggled to tell me how to pin the bottom of a div to the bottom of its parent when scrolling (like a chat window does). It gave me the first thing that I tried (which is wrong). Eventually I figured it out, then confronted ChatGPT about it and it insisted on the wrong answer, and blithely dismissed the correct answer.
    • lamontcg 4y ago
      I've been trying to get ChatGPT to solve pretty basic calculus questions and it is often either totally wrong or wrong in some tiny detail. I got into an argument over dimensional analysis a few weeks ago where it felt like it was gaslighting me.
      • throwawaymaths 4y ago
• kristofferR 4y ago
  Google is abhorrent for certain searches: Google result: https://i.imgur.com/uaFGs2D.png https://i.imgur.com/uaFGs2D.png ChatGPT: https://i.imgur.com/On6Ol1D.png https://i.imgur.com/On6Ol1D.png
• mfDjB 4y ago
  For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam, most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" just to get good results. At the same time, ChatGPT has frequently impressed me, not with everything (my expectations are reasonably low) but it has performed amazing work for me (typing out form letters, code language conversions). For what it's worth I wouldn't use ChatGPT for search like I do with Google, but what it has done is taken away time I would be Googling for things like "how to write X form letter". I expect as it matures, it will take more time away from me Googling. All these takes underestimate the following: 1) How quickly ChatGPT and its ilk will advance to solve relatively low hanging fruit like "ChatGPT is wrong about this one thing". The delta is extremely important here. 2) How slowly the Google bureaucracy will grind when releasing anything remotely like ChatGPT. All the committees and the burdensome processes in place in Google will keep this new technology locked up for years, and ensure that the final result is a camel (horse designed by committee). It doesn't matter if they have superior technology if they never use it or release it. 3) How much Search means to Google will mean they will treat any product changes to it extremely carefully while Microsoft will be willing to experiment with Bing like they have with Co-Pilot and GitHub. Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future.
  • elboru 4y ago
    Same feeling, the other day I spent just too much time trying to find a chart comparing Messi against Ronaldinho. I mean two of the greatest players ever, how is it possible that I couldn’t find a good page, tons of SEO garbage pages.
    • graeme 4y ago
      Is this a good chart? First result for “Messi vs. Ronaldinho stats” https://fbref.com/en/stathead/player_comparison.cgi?show_form=1&request=1&sum=0&comp_type=by_type&dom_lg=1&player_id1=34edcab0&player_id2=d70ce98e&player_id3=dea698d9&player_id4=e342ad68&player_id5=42fd9c7f&player_id6=69384e5d https://fbref.com/en/stathead/player_comparison.cgi?show_for... Searching without stats had a lot of other stuff, but this was near top. And searching without stats shows broader potential interests.
• mojomark 4y ago
  I've already supplanted about 1/3 of my searches to chatGPT, so...
• ravenstine 4y ago
  With maybe one exception, search engines are already replacing themselves. They're "answer" engines now, but that's really a pretense for stealing content and telling the user what their interests are. While that might line someone's pockets, turns out that's not really useful for much other than the casual normie trivia question. ChatGPT is an actual question engine. Even if ChatGPT doesn't live on in its current form, the institution of ChatGPT is the future of asking the internet a question and getting an answer. That and many other things, including (non)human relationships. I hope it succeeds in making The Google's questionable value proposition all that much more clear. Yet if it goes down the road that The Google went, things can become much worse. I can't imagine governments are going to just sit back and relax while the next generation of manufacturing consent is manifesting before them.
• qwertox 4y ago
  Sometimes I just want to know something, not search for something. Up until now I've used Google for both, but lately I've just asked ChatGPT on things I want to know about, as if it were a conversation partner. It still lacks knowledge and one must distrust the information, but this is the beginning of something very big, like a new age. I enjoy the ability to be able to ask questions without having the other party feeling either attacked due to their lack of knowledge or my corrections, but just be able to focus on the topic, even if it starts getting weird like it telling me about "clockwork energy" as if it were a thing which existed, without being able to name me scientists which have dealt with the analysis of this topic (it started with my question "could time a form of energy?" after we were talking about the different energy forms which exist. It had the idea that in thermodynamics there exists the concept of "clockwork energy" which isn't mainstream, but wasn't able to offer me additional information about it). It's fun, 100%.
  • angstrom 4y ago
    It's doing what the voice assistants were supposed to: solve problems by assisting you with more context in a conversational manner. Text to speech queries solve the problem of my hands being broken. ChatGPT solves the problem of my brain being contextually broken and I need more context, not higher relevant search results at the bottom of the screen after the ads that I then slog through to wind up changing my query and searching again like some sadistic freemium ad driven Sisyphean task that flies in the face of innovation to help me reach a contextual nugget.
  • gl-prod 4y ago
    One note, though: you can't tell whether its statement is true or made up.
• kgbcia 4y ago
  If google or chatgpt were behind paywalls, which would you pay for?
• hourago 4y ago
  I wrote in the input: What is the name of that Nintendo game with animals and they live their life and do stuff? ChatGPT: It sounds like you're thinking of the game "Animal Crossing." In Animal Crossing, you play as a character who lives in a village inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, and you can do a variety of activities such as fishing, bug catching, and decorating your home. Is this the game you were thinking of? Google: Animal Crossing is a social simulation game, dubbed a "communication game" by Nintendo. It is open-ended, and the player's character can live a separate life with very little set plot or mandatory tasks. Animal Crossing (video game) - Wikipedia ChatGPT-like question analysis is already integrated into Google search engine, for the good and for the bad.
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  ChatGPT isn't search! For gods' sakes! It's not even related to search, ChatGPT threatening search is a meme put around by VC tech bros. Which is ironic - because ChatGPT is a tech bro - it knows about everything, talks authoritatively, and is mostly wrong. The only thing to worry about in this entire conversation is how search is broken. Search is so broken, that we're willing to just replace it with some tech bro. That's what we have with ChatGPT. Oh don't Google it, just assume some tech bro instead. What's the likelihood the techbro actually knows the answer? Pretty low.... but he'll sound very convincing. Search is broken, and if ChatGPT is the answer, I dispair.
• dqpb 4y ago
  It will for content that doesn't exist yet.
• zxcvbnm 4y ago
  ChatGPT
• conqrr 4y ago
  One thing the article misses is that users don't just use Search engines/Google/etc to just search. We use it to solve a problem we have. Find the nearest X, Cheapest Y, Answer to Z. A few of these can be done with the localized data that ChatGPT has. Ofcourse, scaling it to search engine levels is an insanely hard challenge. But it doesn't need to go all the way in to do that. Selectively targeting certain portions of what we use Search for can easily get you to a lot of daily queries that you google. Imagine if ChatGPT didn't need to crawl but you as a Service/Business had to integrate with it, that would could evolve into something different from Search engines and yet eat Search engines.
• zxcvbnm 4y ago
  I give ChatGPT a question on how to do X in some programming environment. So far same as googling. But then ok, for me that solution gives errors, or function doesn't exist, 2nd question to ChatGPT, bam half the time it gives something that puts me on the right track. I can't tell google that my python/postgres problem is special, so please do That example, but with such and such restrictions.
• tdesilva 4y ago
  I'm sure ChatGPT has it's uses for some people, but the few times I've tried to use it for tasks I would have used search for it's been confidently, eloquently wrong. A search engine you can't trust, or at least evaluate it's sources, is completely useless. Recent publicity on LLM has been incredibly successful at over-inflating the hype, largely because the technology fulfills the fantasy of being able to interact with technology in plain language and get plausible, seemingly coherent responses.
• drakmo 4y ago
  Google is just a lightning fast but messed up index combined with really good graphs. ChatGPT now is only one tool Soon it will be just one piece in a box filled with a combination of tools that let you just know whatever you want to in a depth of detail you specify it to be laid out: - large conversational language model that generates the piece of information - fact checking model that applies post checks on logic and consistency - recitational graph model that backs the propositions with sources and ratings - geospatial and locational model that adds references in space - recognitions development model that can classify how realizations and knowldege develop over time - social trend model that can adjust to conversations of the society as a whole All this in combination will bring any knowledge in any level of detail with a defined level of certainty. Do you want to know more?
  • janalsncm 4y ago
    I would like to know more about the fast fact checking model. This will require some kind of symbolic NLP approach that doesn’t exist yet.
    • drakmo 4y ago
      Here is a good recent overview of where automated fact checking is positioned right now: https://aclanthology.org/2022.tacl-1.11.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2022.tacl-1.11.pdf Fact checking of AI generated content can potentially be optimized for this use case. And for speed: I think many of the computations for several layers of AI processing can be decentralized in the future and re-establish the heart of the Internet. The contributions for such computations need a high level of trust and therefore a public immutable ledger might be a viable approach. So perhaps decentralized AI might be the use case where finally some "blockchain-crypto-cringe" might actually be useful ;-) We need to be aware that we just entered the steep part of the exponential growth graph. Amazing times ahead.
• pleb_nz 4y ago
  I'm blown away at how many tech savvy people on hackernews still persist with Google search or talk about it like it's the only choice when there better and/or equal less evil alternatives. I say this as I would expect more use of alternatives here of all places.
• jonbaer 4y ago
  For any chatbot I will ask only 2 questions, one is about myself (since I placed an easter egg in software AOL took and used back in the day) and what time is it? ChatGPT thankfully may or may not be connected to the internet @ prompt but that is usually a good giveaway. IMO Google blew it when they took away Google via SMS, this is the hole ChatGPT(x) can fill.
  • freediver 4y ago
    > IMO Google blew it when they took away Google via SMS, this is the hole ChatGPT(x) can fill. This is curious. What is the use case for this?
    • jonbaer 4y ago
      Once upon a time, https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/5.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
      • freediver 4y ago
        Thanks for sharing that. I am wondering are there situatios today where you would have SMS but not have web access? Or is there somethng else appealing about SMS search?
• megablast 4y ago
  Google has ruined the web. Websites that showed you the answer in the search result have disappeared. Re pie websites have gone to crap with fir records stories.
• elforce002 4y ago
  This is interesting. Garbage in = Garbage out. I'm using chatGPT for some repetitive things but I have to double check the answer every time just to be sure. There's also the reality that you need to literally know what do you want and tell that to chatGPT, then analyze the answer and try to incorporate it in your flow and, in some environments, double check with legal just in case. So, yeah. It won't replace searching nor us ATM.
• forrestthewoods 4y ago
  And yet this thread is full of examples of people using ChatGPT instead of a search engine. Phrasing the problem as a binary is wrong. The correct framing is “what is ChatGPT good at today? What are LLMs likely to be good at over the next 5 years?”. It isn’t everything. But it’s a hell of a lot more than nothing.
• cenriqueortiz 4y ago
  It is already happening.
• amelius 4y ago
  So I guess by the end of the year we know if we are either in the next AI winter, or in the singularity.
• holoduke 4y ago
  I am absolutely sure that if Chatgpt created a google like interface on a domain like askme.com. without a required login, it would become immensely popular. Possibly eating away a lot from traditional search engines. Google search is becoming the new Yahoo. Its becoming bloated if not already. And its just time for a new era in which a chatgpt like product perfectly fits.
  • azinman2 4y ago
    Bing supposedly will be doing this in a few months.
  • Ozzie_osman 4y ago
    Well, you.com already built this so we just need to sit back and watch https://you.com/search?q=who+are+you&tbm=youchat https://you.com/search?q=who+are+you&tbm=youchat
  • TheRealNGenius 4y ago
    [dead]
• jamesrom 4y ago
  The main argument of this article is: 1. ChatGPT gets tripped up in some edge conditions. 2. Search engines provide some interesting features that ChatGPT doesn't. These are both bad assumptions looking forward: 1. It's evident that ChatGPT or other chat-based text generation will only improve over time. These kinds of quirky edge cases will _always_ exist, but will be harder and harder to contrive. 2. These sorts of features, categorization, images, etc can be discovered via conversation. And there's no reason to think these features are exclusive to a search product. Code snippets embeds are already built into ChatGPT, it's not hard to imagine other useful embeds. Finally, I'd ask the author to think of it this way: As more text is generated, and those pages end up at the top of search results, the quality of the search results approaches that of a text generation model anyway. Search will soon be the unnecessary middleman.
  • azinman2 4y ago
    I think the LLMs are better if you want knowledge synthesized, assuming it can be done correctly (it is very confidently wrong a lot of the time). But if you’re trying to find something specific, often you want the complete work published by a human as is.
    • jamesrom 4y ago
      Do you have any reason to think LLM cannot reference published work?
      • azinman2 4y ago
        Yes - you’re in an embedded space that’s the result of effectively compressing knowledge into something higher order. LLMs are not grounded, so to ask it to ground something would not be reasonable. It’s not a lookup aka search engine where references are maintained.
  • munchler 4y ago
    > ChatGPT gets tripped up in some edge conditions. No. ChatGPT has no idea of the truth value of anything it produces. That's fine for writing fiction, but it's not an "edge condition" when searching for actual information.
• janalsncm 4y ago
  I’m a bit surprised that a product manager for a search team would put forward arguments like this. ChatGPT isn’t a search engine, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a significant part of a search engine product. Query correction is a common component in search engines. “Did you mean” is everywhere. It is just one component in a search pipeline. The stupid simple integration I’m sure Google will release is to put ChatGPT on top of the search results rather than the query itself. The question at that point is the economics of it: how much does it cost per query, and how much extra value can Google derive (or avoid lost value i.e. lost customers). This is an advantage that Google has over upstarts like Kagi and DDG: Google can keep their cost per query much lower since they don’t buy their results from other sources.
• azinman2 4y ago
  This reads like an onion headline: “search engine won’t become obsolete, says search engine maker”
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• nmca 4y ago
  This will age badly.
• d_sem 4y ago
  My biggest worry is that search engines combine ChatGPT like functionality with the existing ads based business model. Combing ChatGPTs persuasive/confident responses with brand bias feels socially destructive.
• bitlicker 4y ago
  I already see videos and tiktoks where people search a question on google and post the aggregated result. That’s the kind of engagement that people go for and ChaptGPT is a seamless next step
• ugh123 4y ago
  Maybe we just need to re-think what it means to "Search" or "Learn" with a new kind of tool. Maybe we've been doing it wrong all these years? To me, Google Search was a minor evolution from yahoo/altavista back in the day. But that paradigm stuck around too long...
• tristanz 4y ago
  ChatGTP maybe, but OpenAI hasn't even tried to train a model to replace search. Until somebody tries to fine-tune a model using RLHF explicitly with the goal of replacing Google it's very hard to know what the resulting experience would look like. It could be shocking if ChatGTP is any guide.
• daguava 4y ago
  When ChatGPT first arrived, it felt amazing and revolutionary. Since then it's been so neutered that while still feeling pretty cool, it's settling into gimmick level :( .
• lovelearning 4y ago
  Sometimes I want deep discovery and filtered UI for product searches. And other times, I want Star Trek-style omniscient chatty search: "computer, select a blue woolen sweater $50-100 that ships before Tuesday." Both types of searches are necessary. ChatGPT is already one of my frequently-used search engines now, especially for conceptual overviews.
• revskill 4y ago
  The website is really bad, as the header counts for 30% of vertical content. What an example enterprise standard.
• la64710 4y ago
  I don’t know about the author but for me personally chatGPT has already replaced 70% of what I used to go to google for. More importantly it saves me lot of time. That is just incredible.
• sizzle 4y ago
  Maybe the first version but I can see several iterations later where this technology makes Siri and Alexa actually Wizard-of-Oz levels of smart where knowledge based tasks that used to require search engines and multiple queries to refine your results will no longer require this level of user input.
• xp84 4y ago
  "That will NEVER replace search engines!!" -Search engine vendor "Those things will NEVER replace the horse and buggy!" -Buggy whip vendor but seriously. Search engines are (1) a virtual monopoly for one company. (2) hopelessly conflicted due to being run ONLY in an ad-supported model, just because that early business model was never revisited. (3) prone to a neverending trench warfare against spam and black hat SEO. Not that AI based replacements for search might not end up with the same flaws, but for the above reasons, I'm rooting for whatever comes out of OpenAI to completely upend Google's current business model (whether or not GOOG ends up being smart enough to be one of the leaders in that space or not).
• m3kw9 4y ago
  When they actually commercialize ChatGPT as a search engine, and when enough people get burned on nice looking answers, it’s gonna get relegated back to hobby/fun thing to use.
• flir 4y ago
  I've found that if I give it a pair of questions ("Why does X breed faster than Y", "Why does Y breed faster than X") it'll give me two neat little responses that explain why both these statements are true. That doesn't sound useful on the surface of things, but the additional information in the responses allowed me to craft more traditional search queries I wouldn't have thought of (in my example I learned that species X is hermaphroditic, and that water temperature may be having an impact). So replace? No. Enhance, if used carefully? Maybe, for now.
• cloudking 4y ago
  I think folks are really underestimating Google in this space. They have: 1) access to way more data than what ChatGPT was trained on 2) access to data freshness through their crawlers 3) knowledge graph for a source of truth https://blog.google/products/search/about-knowledge-graph-and-knowledge-panels/ https://blog.google/products/search/about-knowledge-graph-an... 4) their own large language model LaMDA, that is apparently so good it convinced a senior AI researcher that it was sentient https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/ https://www.engadget.com/blake-lemoide-fired-google-lamda-sentient-001746197.html https://www.engadget.com/blake-lemoide-fired-google-lamda-se... 5) researchers that invented Transformers that GPT is modeled after https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-network.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-n... 6) Ray Kurzweil leading the Google Brain team with a mission to make computers understand natural language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil Google pioneered this space. They also happen to already have an Assistant that is on billions of devices...
  • xp84 4y ago
    They clearly have the ability to compete -- STRONGLY -- in this space. The only question is if they want to, or if they'll act like the carmakers did 10 years ago when EVs were heading toward feasibility. They felt like they wouldn't be as profitable as gas cars, so they mostly ignored the concept and forfeited the chance to be first movers. Then when Tesla finally started moving significant numbers they were caught with their pants down and are still playing catch-up. If Google treats AI as a threat to their ad business, that's what might cause them to screw this up and squander the massive early lead they could have taken. Eventually every business model is upended. If Apple hadn't killed the iPod juggernaut by making the iPhone someone else surely would have. You have to be the one to kill your own cash cow before someone else does.
    • spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Any shift from monetizing search via AdWords to monetizing single-answer responses via a chatGPT-like interface is going to involve major revenue disruptions. Meta is a great example. The company is still reporting exceptional revenue results, but because Mark is forcing the company in a new direction, the stock has been crashing since there is no more guaranteed revenue growth in the near future. Zuckerberg can still do it because he is a founder-CEO and the way the board is structured. If Google announces tomorrow that it’s shifting to a chatGPT-like model and will likely see revenue disruptions for the next N quarters, the stock will crash hard. Does Pichai have the pull to withstand quarter after quarter of declining revenue? I don’t think so.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nomilk 4y ago
  This isn't a binary (yes/no) answer. ChatGPT already replaced search engines for some (about 3-8%) of my questions. Search engines really suck at answering complicated questions that use the same word in >1 context. For example ChatGPT answers this with ease (whereas google doesn't get close): > Are there any currencies which have two or more units of currency and whose major unit is comprised of more than one hundred subunits?
• jononomo 4y ago
  I remember when Google first arrived on the scene -- I had been using Alta Vista before then and Google's search was like a miracle. But Google these days just feels like Alta Vista in the 1999, except that the haystack is a lot bigger now and more of it is spam.
• flippinburgers 4y ago
  Relatively soon someone will figure out how to automate having chatgpt stand up barely functional (over time) servers. Then they will be able to ask chatgpt to create websites about x, y, or z. At that point, knowledge and our ability to trust the internet, which was already on shaky ground, will completely evaporate.
• palata 4y ago
  There are two things I have been wondering about ChatGPT: 1. What impact will it have on search engines? With ChatGPT, it will be easy to automate the creation of websites, which will be referenced by search engines, right? So maybe someday half of the results will just be generated websites that may or may not say complete nonsense in an authoritative way. 2. Will the successors of ChatGPT learn from websites generated by ChatGPT, too? What happens when the new model learns from outputs from previous iterations?
  • trentearl 4y ago
    Information pollution. Training future models with the result of earlier models will result in a delusional feedback loop. It will be interesting to see the solutions we come up with for this issue.
• leesec 4y ago
  Counter point: yes it will
• iambateman 4y ago
  In the days of the Romans, tech writers carefully explained all the reasons Hannibal would never get elephants over the mountains… More seriously, Google seems capable of learning from and acquiring similar technology. In that sense, I think their market position will remain. But ChatGPT is a threat to Google in the sense that it’s already drawing search volume away for some searches for some influential people. ChatGPT is much worse at some things than Google - timely relevance and over-confidence come to mind. But it is astonishingly better at a surprising number of search queries. Given the rate of improvement and the ability for young developers to plug into the ecosystem and make unexpected new stuff, Google has plenty to be concerned about.
• college_physics 4y ago
  All the whoopla was about raising some capital and we all once again dutifully amplified the pitch
• kin 4y ago
  Maybe, but its articles have been replacing my search results.
• gnicholas 4y ago
  Yesterday my wife mentioned she was looking for a book with a summary of Hong Kong history. I asked ChatGPT and it spit out a list of 5 books, authors, and short descriptions. Like much of ChatGPT's output, it appeared authoritative but was complete bunk. The books weren't real. The authors were names of real people, and in some cases actual scholars. But the list was useless.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• schappim 4y ago
  I can imagine the Algolia founders had a lot of questions from their investors...
• wonderfuly 4y ago
  But it can enhance them https://chatgpt4google.com https://chatgpt4google.com
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• macco 4y ago
  In my opinion, ChatGPT is a big threat for close-ended questions: What is a car? What I am not so sure about, is this really the majority of searches? I assume a big part of searching is about discovery — finding articles, products, images, etc. For that, you need a good ranking and efficient crawling. Two things ChatGPT doesn't have. Given the strong brand of Google, only time will tell if ChatGPT will eat a large chunk of Google's market share.
• gerash 4y ago
  I have experience with large NLP models and here are my humble thoughts: In a large language model you can refine your original request via conversation. In a search engine you tend to rewrite your query to refine it. LLM conversation is much more stateful than an almost stateless query to a search engine. However a search engine shows you more than one answer. With LLMs you can't easily add knowledge graph style facts (subject predicate object). I has either memorized a fact from the training set or not and you can't easily insert one more fact in there. retaining LLMs is not cheap by the way. An ideal search engine for me is conversational, up to date and one that gives you multiple answers.
• tjmehta 4y ago
  But will it replace search engine “frontends”? You -> ChatGPT -> Search Engine. Any examples of Chat GPT querying data live? I’m no AI expert.. but it feels like this would make a lot of sense.. it’s seems like what current voice assistants are doing right?
  • kbns 4y ago
    Bing is going to do the same.
• spritefs 4y ago
  why the hell would anyone trade a bunch of factual sources, documentation, and actual expert opinion for an LLM that's consistently and confidently wrong for a significant portion of queries? I can see this thing being useful as a summarizer. Even then I don't trust it to be correct and have to fact check every single thing that comes out of it against results I find in a search engine You know what's even better than an LLM? Actual experts (bullshitters excluded). Having books written by people leading in their respective fields, professors, managers, people above you who have experience and know what the hell they're talking about. Why? Because they understand what you need to know in that context I'm probably being too hard on chatgpt, I'm sure it will find a commercial use that's beneficial to society. I just hope search engine providers don't hop on this fad and raise a generation of people educated on word salad masquerading as authoritative information
• josefrichter 4y ago
  Isn’t the main benefit of chatGPT that it combines multiple resources to weave the answer? Things like handling typos or formulation nuances sound auxiliary to me, probably non-goals at this stage. It’s still less than 1 month old..
• snehk 4y ago
  I personally think that this is true and false. I think there are two types of people who use search engines. The first person is the one who just types in whatever they want to know and sees if Google gives them a good result. They're also the ones who use TikTok or Instagram just like a search engine. Whenever there's a search bar, this type of user profits from the search term being fed into some AI to get the best result possible. Then there's "me and everyone else who has complained about Google getting worse and worse over time". Basically people who are very good at googling things. This might sound arrogant or something but one of my skills is that I know (or knew) how to use Google. I would not just type in whatever I needed to find, I would know to exclude specific terms using "-term", put parts of a sentence in quotation marks, add other terms I knew would be on the site where the answer could be found and whatnot. The search is then very specific and if I didn't get a satisfying answer it was because I needed to improve my query. Now whenever I do that, Google takes this query and modifies it without me knowing what they're actually doing. It seems harder and harder to tell Google to just work like it used to. It has become frustrating because I still google the same way thinking this is the best way to get to relevant results. It seemingly isn't anymore and I find myself just typing in whatever these days, getting results without me needing to specify what I'm actually looking for.
• nfcampos 4y ago
  This post reads like Nokia/Microsoft reacting to the first iPhone — myopic
  • swyx 4y ago
    and notably it is authored by a search engine vendor, lol
• flippinburgers 4y ago
  With an approachable interface I can see it replacing a large chunk of search extremely quickly. Lets be honest here: humans cannot even settle on what the "truth" is so whether or not truthful answers are returned is probably less important to the success of such a service...
• leobg 4y ago
  False dichotomy. It’s not one or the other. Combining the two is what is going to be powerful. In fact, this is already happening.
• amai 4y ago
  ChatGPT will make search engines useless. But not by replacing them. It will produce so much and so high quality SEO spam websites, that you won‘t find any real content anymore. It will increase the noise level in the internet so much, that automatically finding a signal with search engines will not work anymore. We will be back to manually curated lists of webpages as in the good old days of Yahoo.
• amai 4y ago
  Can chatGPT understand negations? Then it would already be an improvement to existing SOTA of search engines: https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes
• penciltwirler 4y ago
  Why does every game have to be zero-sum? Why can't chatgpt live alongside search engines as just another category for results? Like "Images" and "Maps"? In fact, I look forward to Bing integrating with chatgpt.