6 ms·

I feel like I’m missing out on something but other than to summarize text or fill pointless and lazy homework assignments I don’t have much of a use of gpt sear

I feel like I’m missing out on something but other than to summarize text or fill pointless and lazy homework assignments I don’t have much of a use of gpt search. I think I have a trust issue with it and I rather get the raw result and process it myself than to believe that what this model “understood” is right. Anyone else feels this way?

Invictus0 4y ago
Yup, and maybe we're just getting old. There are still people on HN complaining about Google removing the OR and AND modifiers, meanwhile the younger generations write queries like "where should I eat breakfast today"
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  I'm fine with writing queries like "Where should I eat breakfast" But I hate seeing the top half of the screen are ads for huge chains, and then the top results are blog posts about "Where are the top 10 places to eat in your city" and not a list of restaurant web pages.
- detaro 4y ago
  Those aren't really exclusive. Different problems, different query types. (I wouldn't quite do the second example like that, but "where can I get food here" is fundamentally different problem than "I hope there is somewhere out there a bootleg copy of the datasheet for this very weird part and no I don't mean any of these 5 easily-confused other things", which is when the lack/ignoring of detailed modifiers drives you up the wall)
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    I'm just trying to point out that that query would have returned nothing much at all back in the age of keyword-lookup search.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  I used to try to be surgical with my queries but I've given up and just type a question at my search engine because if that's what they want as a query well they're going to get it.
BrianOnHN 4y ago
Not since Google results became such garbage. Plus, the chats provide references. So easy to verify.
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  I love that Bing Chat actually links to references. It felt like something was missing from ChatGPT without it.
  - HeavyFeather 4y ago
    Just because it does, it doesn’t mean they’re being interpreted correctly, so watch out for https://xkcd.com/906/ https://xkcd.com/906/
    - AviationAtom 4y ago
      In the context of LLMs they aren't really sources, just additional reference material. I'd trust what Bing Chat tells me far before I'd trust Google's new Bard AI. It legit started making up non-existent commands for me to use.
  - rtsil 4y ago
    If I have to check each reference, what's the added value compared to just giving me a list of links (i.e. a good old search engine)? Chat search tools are only useful if (when?) they achieve a 99.99% reliability (I'm fine with one mistake per 1000 searches).
nperez 4y ago
I find it useful in Edge where it's aware of the tab contents. It's nice to be able to ask it to summarize a long article, or find Reddit comments about it and summarize those. I think it uses Bing's search index because it does not seem to be aware of my personal data on my tabs
- gorjusborg 4y ago
  Is that an opt-in option or a default 'feature'?
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  I thought the same but it is actually able to interpret URLs that are not indexed by Bing. It doesn't work all the time though, don't know why.
lumb63 4y ago
I agree with your sentiment exactly. But your comment made me think about this an interesting way that I hadn’t thought about before, that made me better understand why I am “anti-GPT search”. All the same things that the model makes an effort to “understand” are things that can contribute to your own understanding. When it “understands”, you do not. You get the summary and miss out on a great amount of nuance that can come with learning and finding the right answer for yourself. For instance, it is very common that in the search for why X is happening in my code, I will find tons of information that don’t answer my question but help me form an understanding of why it is happening, how the system is working, etc. This is especially visible in science. Many papers outright conflict with each other. Some have better or worse methodologies than others. Some have better analyses. Some state outright falsehoods without citation or misinterpret citations. Having a GPT “understand” this to produce understanding in humans is going to end very badly. It takes several hours for a human (in my experience) to understand even a single academic paper on its own. I suppose the appropriate cliche is “it’s the journey, not the destination”.
- ambicapter 4y ago
  A great quote from an article I read on HN recently > Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don’t learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    As opposed to the thing we did before, which is when kids asked something they were told something that's wrong and told to "stop talking back" and "go to your room". I think this is still an improvement.
    - ambicapter 4y ago
      > As opposed to the thing we did before, which is when kids asked something they were told something that's wrong and told to "stop talking back" and "go to your room" Not everyone had your childhood.
smoe 4y ago
I certainly have the trust issues for things where correctness matters. For things were it doesn't and I already know how to do something but don't have it memorized, I think it is very very convenient. I use it various times a week for cooking. E.g. "basic recipe bechamel sauce in metric" ChatGPT: Within a couple seconds I get the ingredients in metric and a step by step guide. Google: The provided summaries are useless to me since they are not in metric. So I have to click on a link and then start scrolling around all the noise of history of bechamel sauce, anecdotes about someones grandparents, pretty pictures, etc to find the actual information. Without ad blocker it would be an even bigger nightmare.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Before a few keywords and quick website scan. Now you have to engage in a conversation and get the 'a feel lucky' version where before you got to look through different more visual recipes
  - smoe 4y ago
    I don't need to engage in a conversation. Query was exactly the same for both. There is a difference whether I'm looking for interesting, more complicated dishes I haven't done before, or fairly standardized, simple recipes I have done many times and remember the technique but not things like ratios. For the former I use a select few recipe sites or youtube channels directly. Google is miserable for discovery in my opinion. For the latter I use either my own recipe notebook or more recently ChatGPT as well.
bradly 4y ago
Here is what I have asked it the past few days with great results: - What is the trim stop attachment that comes with the Festool DF 500 used for? - What are some options for water for a home with no municiple water or well access? - What dimensions drawer should I make when using 18" Blum Blumotion full extension drawer slides if the drawer opening is 20 inches wide, 18 inches deep and seven inches tall? - Can the smaller Laguna 14 bandsaw motor be replaced with the 3HP version? - What's the best way to get ChatGPT support if the official support page is not working? - I'm trying to remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience.
- noah_buddy 4y ago
  You have touched on something I am incredibly excited about. ChatGPT is going to do away with a lot of the intro level questions you ask researching certain sorts of technical problems, especially as it becomes better able to understand images. ChatGPT removes the need for you to ever open a manual (unless you want a deep understanding). How do I turn off this feature in my car? How do I replace the fan in my fridge’s compressor? Why is windows repair not working in this scenario with this PC? This tool is going to be incredibly deflationary in many services geared around repair when now it can tell you almost exactly what to do and soon it’ll be able to produce videos or images of each step on demand.
  - ByThyGrace 4y ago
    > and soon it’ll be able to produce videos or images of each step on demand As long as they're not hallucinated media...
    - Dma54rhs 4y ago
      Most of the Googles SERP results already are delusional or hallucinating spam, so the bar is low and for me at least ChatGTP is less bullshit.
      - 4y ago
user3939382 4y ago
For me it’s not even theoretical. I’ve already wasted my time trying to sus out subtle garbage mixed into its answers. It’s the same reason I stopped using copilot. I don’t need or want that.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  Funny, so far i've been just asking it things i normally ask Google. Same paranoia of answers that StackOverflow/etc give me, but far quicker and more responsive. TBH i'm not sure under what scenarios people search into Google expecting perfect answers. Ie where we're disappointed by incorrect information. I filter through a dozen wrong answers on Google every day. Why is it different if it's from ChatGPT?
  - user3939382 4y ago
    I guess one difference is that I have a lot (decades?) of experience in the types of errors humans tend to make. Humans have certain biases, certain blindspots, etc. In programming for sure, there are very strong patterns in the types of mistakes we make that tend to be a function of skill or experience. So you (I) look for those without even thinking about it. Violation of YAGNI, ACID, DRY, pre-mature optimization, etc. Even before getting to an answer I can often judge how trustworthy or skilled the author/speaker is likely to be by all kinds of little signals or keywords in their speech. ChatGPT (and Github co-pilot) disables that highly tuned error detection and correction experience. It makes unpredictable mistakes, which is peculiarly pernicious. I'm sure it varies by the temperament of the user. Personally I don't have the patience for that.
    - unshavedyak 4y ago
      Good points. I think it also helps that i purposefully avoid asking for things that i can't validate. The easier it is to validate the more likely i am to ask. I find ChatGPT especially great with giving starting points. It kinda feels like 10 (or something... time?) years ago when i discovered how good Google was at finding movies based on vague wishy-washy definitions. If i don't know what to call something ChatGPT does a better job at pointing me in the right direction. Often giving the right answer. But i'm not saying it has lasting power. We'll see. So far i'm using Search engines less than ever.
cmelbye 4y ago
I've found that if you push through the trust issue with the expectation that it's not a final answer, it's just getting you closer to it a lot more quickly, then that ends up being very helpful in a lot of cases.
jacamera 4y ago
The most illuminating thing about ChatGPT for me is just how terrible most programmers on HN apparently are. I thought it was just a funny meme that all we do is copy/paste from Stack Overflow but apparently that is literally what a lot of people are doing all day.
- saberience 4y ago
  This comment is giving me “Look at me I’m so very smart” vibes. If you don’t have enough insight to understand how GPT4 could be useful for engineers you’re not as enlightened as you think you are.
  - deely3 4y ago
    Did you suddenly become defensive?
  - aPoCoMiLogin 4y ago
    This comment is giving me “Look at me I’m so very smart” vibes.
    - saberience 4y ago
      I don't think I'm so smart, what I am saying is the GP is being extremely dismissive of other engineers here on Hackernews. Every post about LLMs is full of engineers stating how these have been useful to them. GP simply asserts that these are all "terrible engineers." Do we think that's REALLY the case or in fact LLMs can be very useful, especially when for example learning a new language or framework they haven't used before. Example: recently I was curious about cross-platform UI development so I used ChatGPT for research into different frameworks and made several apps in Java and .Net. Not being an engineer who's built many GUIs before, ChatGPT was amazingly useful for this and help speed my progress. Does this make me a terrible engineer?
      - aPoCoMiLogin 4y ago
        some engineers != all engineers, that's classic unrepresentative sample. nice it helps you, hope you won't forget how to code in future, or you will be handicapped in case of openapi outage.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Do you have Plus? chatGPT was annoying when I was using the free version - I would have to keep logging in again and again and the service was unreliable. Ever since I switched the Plus, it's (usually) always on and doesn't log me out. Makes it much easier to use as a general search engine
- culopatin 4y ago
  I don’t spend that much time in it to even consider that, and so little time that signing in again is not a problem for me. I guess I don’t know what to ask of it.
pastacacioepepe 4y ago
Well, Microsoft forced me to use Edge to open Bing chat, so I did that and asked it "how can you use bing chat on chrome?". It pointed me to a chrome extension that allows that. See, it's useful.
twobitshifter 4y ago
A director at my company is feeding sparse conference call notes to chatgpt to get coherent written summaries

Invictus0 4y ago

Yup, and maybe we're just getting old. There are still people on HN complaining about Google removing the OR and AND modifiers, meanwhile the younger generations write queries like "where should I eat breakfast today"

bluefirebrand 4y ago
I'm fine with writing queries like "Where should I eat breakfast" But I hate seeing the top half of the screen are ads for huge chains, and then the top results are blog posts about "Where are the top 10 places to eat in your city" and not a list of restaurant web pages.
detaro 4y ago
Those aren't really exclusive. Different problems, different query types. (I wouldn't quite do the second example like that, but "where can I get food here" is fundamentally different problem than "I hope there is somewhere out there a bootleg copy of the datasheet for this very weird part and no I don't mean any of these 5 easily-confused other things", which is when the lack/ignoring of detailed modifiers drives you up the wall)
- Invictus0 4y ago
  I'm just trying to point out that that query would have returned nothing much at all back in the age of keyword-lookup search.
bentcorner 4y ago
I used to try to be surgical with my queries but I've given up and just type a question at my search engine because if that's what they want as a query well they're going to get it.

BrianOnHN 4y ago

Not since Google results became such garbage. Plus, the chats provide references. So easy to verify.

AviationAtom 4y ago
I love that Bing Chat actually links to references. It felt like something was missing from ChatGPT without it.
- HeavyFeather 4y ago
  Just because it does, it doesn’t mean they’re being interpreted correctly, so watch out for https://xkcd.com/906/ https://xkcd.com/906/
  - AviationAtom 4y ago
    In the context of LLMs they aren't really sources, just additional reference material. I'd trust what Bing Chat tells me far before I'd trust Google's new Bard AI. It legit started making up non-existent commands for me to use.
- rtsil 4y ago
  If I have to check each reference, what's the added value compared to just giving me a list of links (i.e. a good old search engine)? Chat search tools are only useful if (when?) they achieve a 99.99% reliability (I'm fine with one mistake per 1000 searches).

nperez 4y ago

I find it useful in Edge where it's aware of the tab contents. It's nice to be able to ask it to summarize a long article, or find Reddit comments about it and summarize those. I think it uses Bing's search index because it does not seem to be aware of my personal data on my tabs

gorjusborg 4y ago
Is that an opt-in option or a default 'feature'?
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
I thought the same but it is actually able to interpret URLs that are not indexed by Bing. It doesn't work all the time though, don't know why.

lumb63 4y ago

I agree with your sentiment exactly. But your comment made me think about this an interesting way that I hadn’t thought about before, that made me better understand why I am “anti-GPT search”. All the same things that the model makes an effort to “understand” are things that can contribute to your own understanding. When it “understands”, you do not. You get the summary and miss out on a great amount of nuance that can come with learning and finding the right answer for yourself. For instance, it is very common that in the search for why X is happening in my code, I will find tons of information that don’t answer my question but help me form an understanding of why it is happening, how the system is working, etc. This is especially visible in science. Many papers outright conflict with each other. Some have better or worse methodologies than others. Some have better analyses. Some state outright falsehoods without citation or misinterpret citations. Having a GPT “understand” this to produce understanding in humans is going to end very badly. It takes several hours for a human (in my experience) to understand even a single academic paper on its own. I suppose the appropriate cliche is “it’s the journey, not the destination”.

ambicapter 4y ago
A great quote from an article I read on HN recently > Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don’t learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  As opposed to the thing we did before, which is when kids asked something they were told something that's wrong and told to "stop talking back" and "go to your room". I think this is still an improvement.
  - ambicapter 4y ago
    > As opposed to the thing we did before, which is when kids asked something they were told something that's wrong and told to "stop talking back" and "go to your room" Not everyone had your childhood.

smoe 4y ago

I certainly have the trust issues for things where correctness matters. For things were it doesn't and I already know how to do something but don't have it memorized, I think it is very very convenient. I use it various times a week for cooking. E.g. "basic recipe bechamel sauce in metric" ChatGPT: Within a couple seconds I get the ingredients in metric and a step by step guide. Google: The provided summaries are useless to me since they are not in metric. So I have to click on a link and then start scrolling around all the noise of history of bechamel sauce, anecdotes about someones grandparents, pretty pictures, etc to find the actual information. Without ad blocker it would be an even bigger nightmare.

ipaddr 4y ago
Before a few keywords and quick website scan. Now you have to engage in a conversation and get the 'a feel lucky' version where before you got to look through different more visual recipes
- smoe 4y ago
  I don't need to engage in a conversation. Query was exactly the same for both. There is a difference whether I'm looking for interesting, more complicated dishes I haven't done before, or fairly standardized, simple recipes I have done many times and remember the technique but not things like ratios. For the former I use a select few recipe sites or youtube channels directly. Google is miserable for discovery in my opinion. For the latter I use either my own recipe notebook or more recently ChatGPT as well.

bradly 4y ago

Here is what I have asked it the past few days with great results: - What is the trim stop attachment that comes with the Festool DF 500 used for? - What are some options for water for a home with no municiple water or well access? - What dimensions drawer should I make when using 18" Blum Blumotion full extension drawer slides if the drawer opening is 20 inches wide, 18 inches deep and seven inches tall? - Can the smaller Laguna 14 bandsaw motor be replaced with the 3HP version? - What's the best way to get ChatGPT support if the official support page is not working? - I'm trying to remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience.

noah_buddy 4y ago
You have touched on something I am incredibly excited about. ChatGPT is going to do away with a lot of the intro level questions you ask researching certain sorts of technical problems, especially as it becomes better able to understand images. ChatGPT removes the need for you to ever open a manual (unless you want a deep understanding). How do I turn off this feature in my car? How do I replace the fan in my fridge’s compressor? Why is windows repair not working in this scenario with this PC? This tool is going to be incredibly deflationary in many services geared around repair when now it can tell you almost exactly what to do and soon it’ll be able to produce videos or images of each step on demand.
- ByThyGrace 4y ago
  > and soon it’ll be able to produce videos or images of each step on demand As long as they're not hallucinated media...
  - Dma54rhs 4y ago
    Most of the Googles SERP results already are delusional or hallucinating spam, so the bar is low and for me at least ChatGTP is less bullshit.
    - 4y ago

user3939382 4y ago

For me it’s not even theoretical. I’ve already wasted my time trying to sus out subtle garbage mixed into its answers. It’s the same reason I stopped using copilot. I don’t need or want that.

unshavedyak 4y ago
Funny, so far i've been just asking it things i normally ask Google. Same paranoia of answers that StackOverflow/etc give me, but far quicker and more responsive. TBH i'm not sure under what scenarios people search into Google expecting perfect answers. Ie where we're disappointed by incorrect information. I filter through a dozen wrong answers on Google every day. Why is it different if it's from ChatGPT?
- user3939382 4y ago
  I guess one difference is that I have a lot (decades?) of experience in the types of errors humans tend to make. Humans have certain biases, certain blindspots, etc. In programming for sure, there are very strong patterns in the types of mistakes we make that tend to be a function of skill or experience. So you (I) look for those without even thinking about it. Violation of YAGNI, ACID, DRY, pre-mature optimization, etc. Even before getting to an answer I can often judge how trustworthy or skilled the author/speaker is likely to be by all kinds of little signals or keywords in their speech. ChatGPT (and Github co-pilot) disables that highly tuned error detection and correction experience. It makes unpredictable mistakes, which is peculiarly pernicious. I'm sure it varies by the temperament of the user. Personally I don't have the patience for that.
  - unshavedyak 4y ago
    Good points. I think it also helps that i purposefully avoid asking for things that i can't validate. The easier it is to validate the more likely i am to ask. I find ChatGPT especially great with giving starting points. It kinda feels like 10 (or something... time?) years ago when i discovered how good Google was at finding movies based on vague wishy-washy definitions. If i don't know what to call something ChatGPT does a better job at pointing me in the right direction. Often giving the right answer. But i'm not saying it has lasting power. We'll see. So far i'm using Search engines less than ever.

cmelbye 4y ago

I've found that if you push through the trust issue with the expectation that it's not a final answer, it's just getting you closer to it a lot more quickly, then that ends up being very helpful in a lot of cases.

jacamera 4y ago

The most illuminating thing about ChatGPT for me is just how terrible most programmers on HN apparently are. I thought it was just a funny meme that all we do is copy/paste from Stack Overflow but apparently that is literally what a lot of people are doing all day.

saberience 4y ago
This comment is giving me “Look at me I’m so very smart” vibes. If you don’t have enough insight to understand how GPT4 could be useful for engineers you’re not as enlightened as you think you are.
- deely3 4y ago
  Did you suddenly become defensive?
- aPoCoMiLogin 4y ago
  This comment is giving me “Look at me I’m so very smart” vibes.
  - saberience 4y ago
    I don't think I'm so smart, what I am saying is the GP is being extremely dismissive of other engineers here on Hackernews. Every post about LLMs is full of engineers stating how these have been useful to them. GP simply asserts that these are all "terrible engineers." Do we think that's REALLY the case or in fact LLMs can be very useful, especially when for example learning a new language or framework they haven't used before. Example: recently I was curious about cross-platform UI development so I used ChatGPT for research into different frameworks and made several apps in Java and .Net. Not being an engineer who's built many GUIs before, ChatGPT was amazingly useful for this and help speed my progress. Does this make me a terrible engineer?
    - aPoCoMiLogin 4y ago
      some engineers != all engineers, that's classic unrepresentative sample. nice it helps you, hope you won't forget how to code in future, or you will be handicapped in case of openapi outage.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Do you have Plus? chatGPT was annoying when I was using the free version - I would have to keep logging in again and again and the service was unreliable. Ever since I switched the Plus, it's (usually) always on and doesn't log me out. Makes it much easier to use as a general search engine

culopatin 4y ago
I don’t spend that much time in it to even consider that, and so little time that signing in again is not a problem for me. I guess I don’t know what to ask of it.

pastacacioepepe 4y ago

Well, Microsoft forced me to use Edge to open Bing chat, so I did that and asked it "how can you use bing chat on chrome?". It pointed me to a chrome extension that allows that. See, it's useful.

twobitshifter 4y ago

A director at my company is feeding sparse conference call notes to chatgpt to get coherent written summaries