They don’t solve the web search problem better than web search engines do. But most people aren’t interested in a document retrieval exercise, they have a quest

They don’t solve the web search problem better than web search engines do. But most people aren’t interested in a document retrieval exercise, they have a question and want an answer to it. The interface of posing a cryptic phrase to find a collection of “relevant” text blobs that you then have to sift and read to try to piece together an answer isn’t ideal for answering a question. When we have a question of a professor they sometimes answer with a list of papers, sometimes with a long form answer, and sometimes both. I think all three are useful, depending on the context. But the last one is clearly the most useful. It provides an intuition up front and an opportunity ask clarifying questions, as well as a way to find more detailed information and understanding from a known credible list. LLMs have a chance to offer an oracle that doesn’t answer in cryptic or evasive ways, but attempts to just give an answer. The hallucinations are a huge flaw, but one that I’m confident will be addressed with other non-LLM AI approaches. But it’s the right user interface for answering questions - it answers questions with answers, not a pile of potentially relevant documents to sort. The augmentation with citations, especially if they’re semantically revenant rather than symbolically, is a huge plus.