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I'm seeing a lot of responses that see ChatGPT replacing Google, and it's unclear to me how? It can replace queries like "what's the tallest mountain in France

I'm seeing a lot of responses that see ChatGPT replacing Google, and it's unclear to me how? It can replace queries like "what's the tallest mountain in France", but that's not really a profitable query for Google. Whereas it's unclear to me how it replaces "best vegetarian restaurants in Gastown". It can string together a coherent statement, but then I have to go search to see whether it actually recommended vegetarian restaurants and if they are in fact any good. At which point, I'm back to using a search engine. And yes, you could wire it to show related articles. At which point you've just recreated a local search index (with GPTChat providing the Google summary card), which you now have to: 1. Figure out how to solve SEO hacking for your model. 2. Update the model regularly with new information. Putting you in the exact same position as Google, minus twenty years of experience doing it.

Gh0stRAT 4y ago
>It can replace queries like "what's the tallest mountain in France", but that's not really a profitable query for Google. Being able to answer unprofitable questions has value insofar as you become peoples' go-to search engine for more profitable queries. That being said, I agree the threat to Google is probably over-hyped. (simultaneously, the spectre of LLMs coming along and giving people a reason to visit a competitor is probably the biggest threat to Google in the past decade+)
fullsend 4y ago
Have you used it? Start working on anything. Next time you go to Google how to do something, or want to name something, or want to convert formats, or a dozen other things, just ask GPT. Say “give me 5 cool names for this”. Any task. “Show me a garden plot given plants from this time of year.” “Tell me about different types of LLCs and the tradeoffs.” “This code isn’t working what’s wrong.” You’ll quickly be able to feel how it can do your work for you, or shortcut hours of digging through garbage blogs and ad-infested pages served by Google. Go read one of the Twitter threads with 100 different insane, mind blowing examples of use cases.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  How about this softball question I just tried? Q: "What was the most energy efficient electric vehicle available in 2022?" A: I'm sorry, but I don't have any information about specific electric vehicles that will be available in 2022. In general, the most energy efficient electric vehicles are those that have a large battery pack and a powerful electric motor, which allows them to travel long distances on a single charge. Some of the most energy efficient electric vehicles on the market today include the Tesla Model S, the Nissan Leaf, and the Chevrolet Bolt. It is possible that even more efficient electric vehicles will be available in 2022, but I don't have any specific information about them. Yeah, mind blowing. I especially chuckle at "This code isn't working what's wrong". Maybe it can help with CS 101 homework and hobby projects. Even if I had permission to upload my company's code, that consists of hundreds of thousands of lines of Java, Python, Perl, C#, C++, and SQL that runs on wildfly server clusters and oracle databases, spread over dozens of repos, all knitted together with thousands of lines of build scripts and gitlab pipelines. Oh and its only partially documented. Oh and there are contractural requirements, so the program will have to understand the contracts and the accepted interpretations of the requirements before making recommendations. This thing is not going to solve even the relatively trivial error I fixed today because it wouldn't be visible from any syntactical analysis. It would have to have sophisticated understanding of the software architecture itself, and stand up a duplicate system and run specific tests to verify that the problem is what it is. It would also lack context as to program objectives, because the problem wasn't strictly a malfunction, it was a vestigial feature that was supposed to have been removed but was still erroneously being deployed and interfering with its replacement. And my company is hardly unique in that regard, nor is our codebase the largest. ChatGPT is a consumer demo; which is fine. But if I showed you a newer, faster, better speedboat would you be talking about how it's going to alter container shipping and naval warfare? Maybe this is the start of something huge, but we have no idea what the backend of this thing looks like to judge what its potential actually is. Everyone's just slapping their wildest AI sci-fi fantasies on it the same way every new harebrained green tech with an impressive CG render is going to save the world from climate change and Crypto is totally going to replace all traditional finance and even the dollar itself. A few months ago I literally had someone counter my argument against crypto with "but your argument doesn't account for FTX, they solve a lot of what you're pointing out!", another situation where people were projecting what they wanted to see onto a black box. Even rich people and companies with lots of money. Don't make the same mistake here, wait until it does something real.
generalizations 4y ago
"best vegetarian restaurants in Gastown": the results actually seemed pretty good: The Acorn The Naam Chau Veggie Express The Essential The Wilder Snail I mean, yeah, it doesn't cite sources. So if you want to check the results you have to do that with a traditional search engine. But that will only be an issue while the results aren't good enough to trust by default.
- karpierz 4y ago
  Those are terrible results. None of them are in (and most of them aren't even near) Gastown, one doesn't exist, one isn't a restaurant or vegetarian. - The Acorn: Not in Gastown. In South Main. - The Naam: Not in Gastown. In Kitsilano. - Chau Veggie Express: Not in Gastown. In Granville Island. - The Essential: Doesn't exist. - The Wilder Snail: Not a restaurant, not vegetarian, not in Gastown. In Japantown, which is at least walkable from Gastown.
chemmail 4y ago
Have you used Google recently? It went from the only thing one would use, to utter trash now.
- karpierz 4y ago
  I use Google regularly. It consistently answers my queries via one of the top three links it returns. What kind of questions are you having trouble answering via Google?
rishav_sharan 4y ago
> It can replace queries like "what's the tallest mountain in France", but that's not really a profitable query for Google. The tragedy of the Search Engines (from their perspective) is that if you give a good result for the user's query - they leave your page and thus you cannot monetize them. And if you show sub par results so that they have to refine queries/scroll through them, users may just stop using your search engine altogether. So all search engines - Google, Bing etc put a very high value on being able to retain users on the search page itself - where they can show ads on a surface they control fully. Thats why the search engines try to answer as many queries in-situ itself rather than having the users go out of the page. And this is why this is very important for Bing - this will increases their revenue per visit.
stranded22 4y ago
Whilst I can see the benefit of being able to ask a natural language question and get served the answer (rather than being told where the answer might be), ChatGPT only has data up until 2021. For it to be able to provide up to the minute details, it would need to have an up to date dataset AND be able to keep it updated - whilst ensuring it isn’t ‘polluted’ with biased info AND spider sites. The combination of Bing and ChatGPT, if GPT is able to digest the search data, could be amazing.
- karpierz 4y ago
  > The combination of Bing and ChatGPT, if GPT is able to digest the search data, could be amazing. How would this be different in experience than Google's existing "summary cards" that pop up?
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
ChatGPT is either extremely annoying in its inaccuracy (yesterday I asked about a former French president who is famous because people discovered he had a secret second family when he died and he gave me the wrong number of children and gave them wrong names) or extremely impressive (it once gave me a genuinely good explanation of how the expression "ghost in the machine" is related to Descartes, how Descartes views differ from Locke and how Spinoza relates to both). I'm still awed by its ability to understand complex query. If they can solve the issues with hallucination, it's going to be a serious paradigm shift in how people access information. It's a bit like if you could have a chat with Wikipedia. Using chatGPT, I can't stop myself of dreaming of a future where you can freely talk to a teacher with infinite patience, access to all the material ever produce by humanity and able to delve down as much as you want and rephrase as many time as necessary. The potential seems so high.

Gh0stRAT 4y ago

>It can replace queries like "what's the tallest mountain in France", but that's not really a profitable query for Google. Being able to answer unprofitable questions has value insofar as you become peoples' go-to search engine for more profitable queries. That being said, I agree the threat to Google is probably over-hyped. (simultaneously, the spectre of LLMs coming along and giving people a reason to visit a competitor is probably the biggest threat to Google in the past decade+)

fullsend 4y ago

Have you used it? Start working on anything. Next time you go to Google how to do something, or want to name something, or want to convert formats, or a dozen other things, just ask GPT. Say “give me 5 cool names for this”. Any task. “Show me a garden plot given plants from this time of year.” “Tell me about different types of LLCs and the tradeoffs.” “This code isn’t working what’s wrong.” You’ll quickly be able to feel how it can do your work for you, or shortcut hours of digging through garbage blogs and ad-infested pages served by Google. Go read one of the Twitter threads with 100 different insane, mind blowing examples of use cases.

scottLobster 4y ago
How about this softball question I just tried? Q: "What was the most energy efficient electric vehicle available in 2022?" A: I'm sorry, but I don't have any information about specific electric vehicles that will be available in 2022. In general, the most energy efficient electric vehicles are those that have a large battery pack and a powerful electric motor, which allows them to travel long distances on a single charge. Some of the most energy efficient electric vehicles on the market today include the Tesla Model S, the Nissan Leaf, and the Chevrolet Bolt. It is possible that even more efficient electric vehicles will be available in 2022, but I don't have any specific information about them. Yeah, mind blowing. I especially chuckle at "This code isn't working what's wrong". Maybe it can help with CS 101 homework and hobby projects. Even if I had permission to upload my company's code, that consists of hundreds of thousands of lines of Java, Python, Perl, C#, C++, and SQL that runs on wildfly server clusters and oracle databases, spread over dozens of repos, all knitted together with thousands of lines of build scripts and gitlab pipelines. Oh and its only partially documented. Oh and there are contractural requirements, so the program will have to understand the contracts and the accepted interpretations of the requirements before making recommendations. This thing is not going to solve even the relatively trivial error I fixed today because it wouldn't be visible from any syntactical analysis. It would have to have sophisticated understanding of the software architecture itself, and stand up a duplicate system and run specific tests to verify that the problem is what it is. It would also lack context as to program objectives, because the problem wasn't strictly a malfunction, it was a vestigial feature that was supposed to have been removed but was still erroneously being deployed and interfering with its replacement. And my company is hardly unique in that regard, nor is our codebase the largest. ChatGPT is a consumer demo; which is fine. But if I showed you a newer, faster, better speedboat would you be talking about how it's going to alter container shipping and naval warfare? Maybe this is the start of something huge, but we have no idea what the backend of this thing looks like to judge what its potential actually is. Everyone's just slapping their wildest AI sci-fi fantasies on it the same way every new harebrained green tech with an impressive CG render is going to save the world from climate change and Crypto is totally going to replace all traditional finance and even the dollar itself. A few months ago I literally had someone counter my argument against crypto with "but your argument doesn't account for FTX, they solve a lot of what you're pointing out!", another situation where people were projecting what they wanted to see onto a black box. Even rich people and companies with lots of money. Don't make the same mistake here, wait until it does something real.

generalizations 4y ago

"best vegetarian restaurants in Gastown": the results actually seemed pretty good: The Acorn The Naam Chau Veggie Express The Essential The Wilder Snail I mean, yeah, it doesn't cite sources. So if you want to check the results you have to do that with a traditional search engine. But that will only be an issue while the results aren't good enough to trust by default.

karpierz 4y ago
Those are terrible results. None of them are in (and most of them aren't even near) Gastown, one doesn't exist, one isn't a restaurant or vegetarian. - The Acorn: Not in Gastown. In South Main. - The Naam: Not in Gastown. In Kitsilano. - Chau Veggie Express: Not in Gastown. In Granville Island. - The Essential: Doesn't exist. - The Wilder Snail: Not a restaurant, not vegetarian, not in Gastown. In Japantown, which is at least walkable from Gastown.

chemmail 4y ago

Have you used Google recently? It went from the only thing one would use, to utter trash now.

karpierz 4y ago
I use Google regularly. It consistently answers my queries via one of the top three links it returns. What kind of questions are you having trouble answering via Google?

rishav_sharan 4y ago

> It can replace queries like "what's the tallest mountain in France", but that's not really a profitable query for Google. The tragedy of the Search Engines (from their perspective) is that if you give a good result for the user's query - they leave your page and thus you cannot monetize them. And if you show sub par results so that they have to refine queries/scroll through them, users may just stop using your search engine altogether. So all search engines - Google, Bing etc put a very high value on being able to retain users on the search page itself - where they can show ads on a surface they control fully. Thats why the search engines try to answer as many queries in-situ itself rather than having the users go out of the page. And this is why this is very important for Bing - this will increases their revenue per visit.

stranded22 4y ago

Whilst I can see the benefit of being able to ask a natural language question and get served the answer (rather than being told where the answer might be), ChatGPT only has data up until 2021. For it to be able to provide up to the minute details, it would need to have an up to date dataset AND be able to keep it updated - whilst ensuring it isn’t ‘polluted’ with biased info AND spider sites. The combination of Bing and ChatGPT, if GPT is able to digest the search data, could be amazing.

karpierz 4y ago
> The combination of Bing and ChatGPT, if GPT is able to digest the search data, could be amazing. How would this be different in experience than Google's existing "summary cards" that pop up?

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

ChatGPT is either extremely annoying in its inaccuracy (yesterday I asked about a former French president who is famous because people discovered he had a secret second family when he died and he gave me the wrong number of children and gave them wrong names) or extremely impressive (it once gave me a genuinely good explanation of how the expression "ghost in the machine" is related to Descartes, how Descartes views differ from Locke and how Spinoza relates to both). I'm still awed by its ability to understand complex query. If they can solve the issues with hallucination, it's going to be a serious paradigm shift in how people access information. It's a bit like if you could have a chat with Wikipedia. Using chatGPT, I can't stop myself of dreaming of a future where you can freely talk to a teacher with infinite patience, access to all the material ever produce by humanity and able to delve down as much as you want and rephrase as many time as necessary. The potential seems so high.