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I keep seeing breathless claims about this, but I don't see how: ChatGPT doesn't index websites, which is what I use Google for. It doesn't manage my calendar o

• ryanSrich 4y ago
  Exactly this. ChatGPT cannot answer 90% of the questions I ask it. The reason? Because the information I’m looking for exists after 2021. I have no idea how this would ever replace a search engine that has real-time results.
  • bckr 4y ago
    Persistent indexing is just an implementation detail. Models with access to a database are already in existence.
    • kissgyorgy 4y ago
      Calling a billion dollar business an "implementation detail" is quite a stretch.
      • Euphorbium 4y ago
        Exercise left for a reader.
        • bckr 4y ago
          Haha, it’s true that it’s a lot of work. But it’s just that: work. We now know that it’s possible with the current class of techniques.
    • EGreg 4y ago
      Give it til mid year when they implement chain-of-reasoning. We are very closd to superhuman levels of research.
    • ryanSrich 4y ago
      Until that happens, and it works better than Google, I don’t see a path to disruption. For example, I can type “NBA schedule” and Google will give me the exact thing I’m looking for. A chronological list of games, their times, if they’re in progress (with real-time scores if they are, and even possession). I think ChatGPT supporters downplay how important instant real-time results are.
      • philliphaydon 4y ago
        And there is nothing to suggest right now that ChatGPT can’t do any of that. Just because the creators limited the information doesn’t mean it cannot be opened up and be fed information.
  • rich_sasha 4y ago
    In fairness, I'm not sure what changed but frankly Google doesn't answer my questions anymore either. It just shows me random spam websites, number 7 will surprise me. I know your point is about product features not accuracy, but these things may be connected. It might take an AI to sift through the shit we created via SEO. That said, I tried using ChatGPT today as a stack exchange replacement and it was like a smart 7-year old. Sounded super impressive but wasn't actually correct.
    • lamontcg 4y ago
      Yeah there's a race between Google becoming totally useless and ML technologies becoming just better enough than it. If Google keeps on lowering the bar enough then someone may be able to disrupt it. Although it isn't going to be ChatGPT, it'll be an ML-indexed and ML-driven search index over the internet.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • bagels 4y ago
    That is today's ChatGPT. Next year's AI will be able to be continually retrained with new information, such as information that appears on the web.
    • bsaul 4y ago
      Continuously learning chatgpt would probably be absolutely insane indeed. Yet it remains that chatgpt has no notion of « truth » or information quality. Whereas google has built a whole system of ranking reliable source of truth for every possible subject. I’m not sure a language model can reach that goal, but i may completely wrong.. It’s going to be fantastically interesting !
• judge2020 4y ago
  I suppose they fear for Bing and other Microsoft products integrating it. Even with a limited dataset and no knowledge of internet articles (ie. it can't search the web), it still does very well in answering questions, at least when it doesn't confidently tell you incorrect information. If Bing feeds in "Here is the article content of the top 3 results: ... Please summarize and answer the query '<user question>'" and displays the output, it could quickly outpace Google in usefulness.
  • kuhewa 4y ago
    Back when Bing did the challenge where you decided if you liked it's results or Google's, Bing won for me hands down but I still didn't start using it. I doubt less-stupid autosummaries will work either.
• JamesBarney 4y ago
  It doesn't seem like an especially hard lift to get ChatGPT to start indexing websites.
  • bonsaibilly 4y ago
    Possibly, but is an LLM geared towards interpolating between content likely to even be particularly well-suited to relevance ranking of results that require no interpolation? And if it is, what stops Google from just ... incorporating an LLM into their existing search offering instead of having their lunch eaten by this hypothetical IndexGPT? It's not like Google lacks expertise in LLMs.
    • JamesBarney 4y ago
      Because ChatGPT version of google search will probably make them less money.
      • bonsaibilly 4y ago
        This seems like an incoherent objection – they would presumably prefer to be "Google + LLM" and make less money than let the hypothetical IndexGPT eat their lunch and make even less money as a result, while additionally suggesting that the business model for IndexGPT is poor, raising the question of why it would be pursued in the first place. You've also not addressed the more fundamental question of why an LLM would even be good for this.
        • dahdum 4y ago
          > This seems like an incoherent objection – they would presumably prefer to be "Google + LLM" and make less money than let the hypothetical IndexGPT eat their lunch You'd think that, but it's the classic innovator's dilemma. Google would have to modify their product to generate less revenue now to maintain market share. Except that market share will decline regardless as competitors rise, so they'd be cutting revenue just to slow the decline of market share. Alternately they could release a new AI product that cannibalizes their own search profits. Either way, for a large multinational obsessed with quarterly profits and the stock price, it's very hard to overcome internal resistance to do either of those things.
• fatnoah 4y ago
  > At best, ChatGPT seems to be well suited for the "infobox" value-add thingies they put on search results. But those are infamously inaccurate and/or misleading, and it's unclear to me that ChatGPT will perform any better on that front (or that the majority of users even care about that feature). Also agree. My use of Google and the Internet in general isn't "ask a question and take the first thing told to me as the absolute truth". It's much more about getting different bits of information and assembling a view for myself.
• Sai_ 4y ago
  You’re not seeing it because you’re not in the business of taking market from Google. Let’s take email. Yes, you can’t beat gmail for basic email inbox services but if you were to add a gpt-3 based assistant to your inbox which “learns” as you use your inbox, suddenly, your basic email service has a USP. Will it big enough to destroy gmail - maybe not on day 1 but regardless, an alternate now exists and will only get stronger. Calendaring is as commodity as it gets and can be bolted on to literally anything else a competitor creates. Document management and editing aka Google docs/drive could be an area where GPT3 doesn’t encroach but O365 is already there waiting to take your money and give you comparable service. YouTube and other human generated content could be google’s moat but if they’re defending YouTube, it means the textual search market has been lost. IMHO, Google is in trouble.
  • eappleby 4y ago
    A lot of that sounds like add-ons to services rather than the services themselves, but it would be pretty great if gmail could predict how I would respond to every email and give me the option to send or edit (similar to grammarly).
    • Sai_ 4y ago
      that with be pretty great, wouldn’t it!?! An AI which looks at your SENT emails, infers your style and drafts responses in that style for your approval. I can see that becoming interesting.
  • woodruffw 4y ago
    I take your point, but I don't want any of these things. I happily pay Google $6 a month (plus some taxes) to give me dumb SMTP and IMAP access.
    • Sai_ 4y ago
      Not trying to incite a flamewar but this reads like a “I want faster horses” type comment. People want a reliable SMTP/IMAP service only until they notice that others get more mileage out of their email inbox and reliability has become table stakes. There is a lot of longstanding pent up demand for a good email solution - hey.com 2021 launch comes to mind and I still remember joining Inbox’s waiting list (circa 2013-14?). Edit: s/reliability/dumb/g
• yusufnb 4y ago
  Here's an old video where Eric Schmidt mentions Google's goal of being like ChatGPT (in a way) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 Google changed its course along the way!
• johnea 4y ago
  Quite frankly, if ChatGPT destroyed Goggle, at least we'd have one positive contribution it has made to the world 8-/ In search applications, maybe it would be better at interpreting structure of language, in the phrasing of search queries, rather than just keyword matching, which leads to often abysmal results. Prior proposals for structured HTML, including the semantics of website contents, not just words they contain, seemed like the best solution to this problem. But apparently compaies making billions of dollars keeping people roped to their search engine sites weren't interested in this...
  • webmaven 4y ago
    Semantic Web proposals are all vulnerable to the more general "metacrap" problem: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm Or, as we call it in these modern times, SEO. There are workarounds for these issues, but they are societal and institutional, and right now the threat from (and rewards for) creating and disseminating misinformation and disinformation continues to rise steadily.
• yucky 4y ago
  Most people use Google for answers, not to find websites. We who do are in the minority. I think the real threat from ChatGPT comes from the fact that Microsoft is involved. Google is their main competitor so it's clear that after years of Bing being a not-quite-as-good-as-google search engine, they see a completely different direction opening up to dethrone them. This technology is only going to get better, and it will do so quickly. I think the era of sifting through millions of crappy, overly SEO'd sites to skim around for an answer - is coming to an end.
  • jodrellblank 4y ago
    Imagine Microsoft puts ChatGPT into Microsoft 365. You're a Fortune 500 company, you have zillions of SharePoint sites over many departments. Your employees can now ask ChatGPT about them. To find documents by vague search terms, to summarize them, to write in the style of one. Remember how it used to be a thing where non-technical people would ask Google queries as if it was a person, and technical people would say 'no no, think about the keywords'. Imagine you can do this chatty back and forth narrowing down with vague terms, searching your work's SharePoint: Prompt: What was the film with the silly detective and like a Purple Lion or whatever? ChatGPT: The film you're thinking of might be "Scooby-Doo," which features a silly detective named Shaggy and his talking Great Dane named Scooby-Doo, who often dress up in costumes to solve mysteries involving supposedly supernatural creatures. Prompt: no with real actors ChatGPT: You might be referring to "Scooby-Doo" (2002) starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Linda Cardellini, Matthew Lillard and Rowan Atkinson, which was a live-action adaptation of the classic cartoon. Prompt: no the coloured animal was in the name ChatGPT: The movie you're thinking of might be "The Pink Panther" (1963) starring Peter Sellers as the bumbling French police detective Jacques Clouseau. Only it's about "What was that report from someone in the sales team, with the white paper about plants?" or "Where's that HR document about the training website with the health and safety stuff?" or "Who manages the team who deal with XYZ customer?" or etc.
• deleted 4y ago
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• the_third_wave 4y ago
  ChatGPT and similar devices are poised to become narrative machines which fill the infoboxes of search engines with whatever "truth" their keepers want them to push. The agility with which these things can bend language around a desired narrative makes them an ideal fit for this purpose.
• mafuyu 4y ago
  I think as a direct replacement for internet search, or even general knowledge queries, I definitely agree with you. When it does work though, it's hands-down a better experience. I imagine the 80/20 problem of making it work for the long tail of difficult queries that people will throw at it that will be the hard part. You can't just have a bot spewing out blatantly incorrect data without sourcing half the time. I think it's a coin flip whether those issues will be resolved anytime soon. Where I do see it being handy is with mundane tasks or those "tip of my tongue" queries. I was doing some tedious mapping of enums to other enums today, and that's one of those problems where you can script it out in vim/sed, but then need to spend a while double checking it against the spec anyways. I'd love to ask a bot to do that for me. Similarly, the easy stuff like "how do I do [common git operation] again?", it seems to do great on, since there are canonical answers to that stuff. I've been generally uninterested in the ChatGPT craze, but I did check out perplexity.ai when it popped up on HN a few days ago. It did seem genuinely useful for these types of queries, and it sources its answers with web links. I could see a space for that type of tool, as long as the hairier parts of the chatbot can be filtered away.