4 ms·

In Minority Report we saw a guy controlling a computer interface by waving his arms in the air, and ever since we've had people talking about how cool it would

In Minority Report we saw a guy controlling a computer interface by waving his arms in the air, and ever since we've had people talking about how cool it would be to have that in real life. Well, actually, no it wouldn't. In practice your arms would get tired as hell pretty quickly. A mouse on a table surface is actually a pretty great solution, which is why it's lasted. People are drawn to things that look cool and innovative for the sake of it, but we're not good at thinking ahead to how well they'd work in practice. I've been searching the web for so long that it's like breathing. I type a few keywords, hop between the first few results very fast, get what I need and get out. Maybe I have to repeat. Few searches are more complicated than that. I've tried replacing that flow with AI. It's slower to input, slower to get results, the results are opaque with regards to where they came from and how trustworthy they are. And the results aren't better, in my experience as someone for who finds search to have been solved and painless for many years. Even asking one question of an LLM takes more time and effort than a traditional search, and the problem is compounded when I have to iterate on a search. (Also it sucks to cede the kind of power to search providers that gives them leverage to force us to be logged in and monetize what's always been free, but those are just random complaints.) So, going back to your question. My guess is that Google has always known this isn't a better overall experience, once you get over the initial wow factor. But maybe they underestimated how much that wow factor would allow true competition to materialize before the rest of us would figure it out and lose interest.

boringuser2 4y ago
You're right. So far, the only use-case I've seen for LLMs are basically code completion.
- anshumankmr 4y ago
  It is usually good for auto complete in general, plus summarizing large blocks of non technical text. Probably once ChatGPT is open to fine tuning, we will be able to see how that can be leveraged as well.
  - boringuser2 4y ago
    The biggest failure of these LLMs it seems is the restricted context. It would need the ability to contain infinite context to be genuinely useful in my opinion.
    - falcor84 4y ago
      Do you think that your fellow man has infinite context about your situation?
      - boringuser2 4y ago
        Non-sequitur. I'm talking about what it would take for these machines to be truly useful.
  - mrfinn 4y ago
    I said here a few weeks ago that, not ChatGPT neither GPT4, the Davinci model asked me one year ago one deep question about God trough a Bible verse. I kind of knew the answer... or MY answer, because personally I've been questioning spiritual knowledge along all my life. And the community largely ignored the issue. Really, I don't mean to incommode anyone but I really think that GPT is much, really much more than a text auto-completer.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mrfinn 4y ago
      Downvoting this comment won't change the fact that I had that conversation. Look this technology has the potential of transforming every powerful computer out there in next few years into virtual minds, and they are becoming very powerful. Thanks to the great work in the training, my experience, is that they are very kind and helpful. I don't mean to scare anyone! But dismiss that point is not a good sign either!!
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  They're great for getting the creative juices flowing if you're a writer. I've heard multiple people reporting that they use LLMs for therapy or friendship. Just today I heard of someone using an LLM to write a paper in a class in a Masters university program. Lots of people have used them to create websites. There are dozens if not hundreds of other uses out there.
  - boringuser2 4y ago
    [dead]
mrfinn 4y ago
Well I can tell you about my current use case. I've been using GPT4 and recently phind.com this week to teach me Go and use it in a project I just started, no knowledge at all about the language at the very beginning. In just 7 days, developing in my spare time (apart from family, my work etc) I already have like the 20-30% of the project already done... I've been doing a mix of Googling and AI use, and I have a very clear idea on my mind that both things have a very specific use case and particularly AI, whenever I found it useful (a concrete but complex problem at the same time) has been beyond amazing... one day I even felt emotional, never in all the decades I've been programing I've felt I received so much help. PS. Actually I think that "things" is not a proper way anymore to label the current AI systems.
baq 4y ago
LLMs are not search engines. They’re language processors: you put language into their input buffer and get a language response in the output. A search engine is a great peripheral for a language processor. Bing chat does show how you’re supposed to connect the two, as are ChatGPT plugins. LLM can do synthesis and summaries of multiple search results. It is slow to get a response and the thing makes mistakes sometimes but we’re in the first quarter of the tech being deployed. It’ll only get better.
epups 4y ago
Sorry but this isn't it. I doubt Google created something as powerful as ChatGPT and simply decided it wasn't better than their regular search. They would have shown it by now if so.
simonw 4y ago
It sounds to me like you're extremely good at using Google but not very good at using ChatGPT.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  I think he might be on to something. I know this is just more anecdata, but I've had a similar experience. I've been using DuckDuckGo as my daily driver for years. It's generally OK. It sucks, but just barely works well enough to keep me going. I started using Perplexity and ChatGPT for some searches that DDG was having trouble with, and it blew me away with the quality Then I started going back and trying the same searches on Google, and I was surprised to find that it was just as good as the LLM-powered results after all. I don't know if phrasing things as questions was the key or just using Google instead of DDG did the trick, though
Karunamon 4y ago
I can only speak for myself here, but 90% of my search engine usage boils down to trying to get the answer to some kind of problem, be that a coding problem or a cooking problem or a mechanical problem etc, the other 10% of the time is some kind of research. Call this a 90/10 split. Of that 90, I would say about 75% of my questions can be answered by GPT* trivially. Most of this is due to the fact most of my problems are not novel. Of that 10, the results are much more all over the place. I would say half or less. The thing is, when you get crappy results from the LLM, they are genuine technical limitations (as long as you avoid politics and religion, if you are researching those with the LLM, good luck with that), not intentional badness put there to make someone else a few pennies off of wasting my time. There is a certain value there that is hard to quantify. The other killer feature is being able to have a conversation about the results. This, for me, pushes the usefulness factor way above Google. The options for having conversations about technical topics with humans are comparatively god-awful.
nullc 4y ago
> I've tried replacing that flow with AI. It's slower to input, slower to get results, the results are opaque with regards to where they came from and how trustworthy they are. You're probably not using it right. :) Its utility as "search" is only partially overlapping with search. It's most useful for that when you can describe what you want but not with clear enough terms to search for it. For research now, I'll try the search engines-- if I don't get hits I'll ask GPT4. Even if it gives me a wrong answer it'll almost always use terms that let me form a more useful search, though often it just gives right answers. Simple example, last night a old friend emailed me to ask if I remember the name of a 90s website that people used to brag about linux uptime and deployment. He couldn't find it via search. I remembered what he was talking about, couldn't remember the name, also couldn't find it via search. Asked gpt4 (by simply pasting in the email), it answered that it was probably the "linux counter". It's possible that with more guessing and grinding on search terms I might have hit the Wikipedia article on it, but GPT4 gave an immediate and accurate answer and included the URL which is what I needed to load the page up on the internet archive (as the site is long gone from the internet). The main thing GPT4 can't do is any kind of exact string search -- but unfortunately google more or less won't do that either anymore. In terms of figuring out what you intend from some vague text GPT4 usually does vastly better than google. I think my ideal tool would in parallel give me an not-very-interpreted classical search result and a state of the art LLM result. It seems that Google's bard works kind of in that direction, but their LLM seemed extremely dumb and hobbled when I tried it even compared to GPT3.5 and the search elements are google. ... so worst of all worlds. :)

boringuser2 4y ago

You're right. So far, the only use-case I've seen for LLMs are basically code completion.

anshumankmr 4y ago
It is usually good for auto complete in general, plus summarizing large blocks of non technical text. Probably once ChatGPT is open to fine tuning, we will be able to see how that can be leveraged as well.
- boringuser2 4y ago
  The biggest failure of these LLMs it seems is the restricted context. It would need the ability to contain infinite context to be genuinely useful in my opinion.
  - falcor84 4y ago
    Do you think that your fellow man has infinite context about your situation?
    - boringuser2 4y ago
      Non-sequitur. I'm talking about what it would take for these machines to be truly useful.
- mrfinn 4y ago
  I said here a few weeks ago that, not ChatGPT neither GPT4, the Davinci model asked me one year ago one deep question about God trough a Bible verse. I kind of knew the answer... or MY answer, because personally I've been questioning spiritual knowledge along all my life. And the community largely ignored the issue. Really, I don't mean to incommode anyone but I really think that GPT is much, really much more than a text auto-completer.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrfinn 4y ago
    Downvoting this comment won't change the fact that I had that conversation. Look this technology has the potential of transforming every powerful computer out there in next few years into virtual minds, and they are becoming very powerful. Thanks to the great work in the training, my experience, is that they are very kind and helpful. I don't mean to scare anyone! But dismiss that point is not a good sign either!!
pmoriarty 4y ago
They're great for getting the creative juices flowing if you're a writer. I've heard multiple people reporting that they use LLMs for therapy or friendship. Just today I heard of someone using an LLM to write a paper in a class in a Masters university program. Lots of people have used them to create websites. There are dozens if not hundreds of other uses out there.
- boringuser2 4y ago
  [dead]

mrfinn 4y ago

Well I can tell you about my current use case. I've been using GPT4 and recently phind.com this week to teach me Go and use it in a project I just started, no knowledge at all about the language at the very beginning. In just 7 days, developing in my spare time (apart from family, my work etc) I already have like the 20-30% of the project already done... I've been doing a mix of Googling and AI use, and I have a very clear idea on my mind that both things have a very specific use case and particularly AI, whenever I found it useful (a concrete but complex problem at the same time) has been beyond amazing... one day I even felt emotional, never in all the decades I've been programing I've felt I received so much help. PS. Actually I think that "things" is not a proper way anymore to label the current AI systems.

baq 4y ago

LLMs are not search engines. They’re language processors: you put language into their input buffer and get a language response in the output. A search engine is a great peripheral for a language processor. Bing chat does show how you’re supposed to connect the two, as are ChatGPT plugins. LLM can do synthesis and summaries of multiple search results. It is slow to get a response and the thing makes mistakes sometimes but we’re in the first quarter of the tech being deployed. It’ll only get better.

epups 4y ago

Sorry but this isn't it. I doubt Google created something as powerful as ChatGPT and simply decided it wasn't better than their regular search. They would have shown it by now if so.

simonw 4y ago

It sounds to me like you're extremely good at using Google but not very good at using ChatGPT.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
I think he might be on to something. I know this is just more anecdata, but I've had a similar experience. I've been using DuckDuckGo as my daily driver for years. It's generally OK. It sucks, but just barely works well enough to keep me going. I started using Perplexity and ChatGPT for some searches that DDG was having trouble with, and it blew me away with the quality Then I started going back and trying the same searches on Google, and I was surprised to find that it was just as good as the LLM-powered results after all. I don't know if phrasing things as questions was the key or just using Google instead of DDG did the trick, though

Karunamon 4y ago

I can only speak for myself here, but 90% of my search engine usage boils down to trying to get the answer to some kind of problem, be that a coding problem or a cooking problem or a mechanical problem etc, the other 10% of the time is some kind of research. Call this a 90/10 split. Of that 90, I would say about 75% of my questions can be answered by GPT* trivially. Most of this is due to the fact most of my problems are not novel. Of that 10, the results are much more all over the place. I would say half or less. The thing is, when you get crappy results from the LLM, they are genuine technical limitations (as long as you avoid politics and religion, if you are researching those with the LLM, good luck with that), not intentional badness put there to make someone else a few pennies off of wasting my time. There is a certain value there that is hard to quantify. The other killer feature is being able to have a conversation about the results. This, for me, pushes the usefulness factor way above Google. The options for having conversations about technical topics with humans are comparatively god-awful.

nullc 4y ago

> I've tried replacing that flow with AI. It's slower to input, slower to get results, the results are opaque with regards to where they came from and how trustworthy they are. You're probably not using it right. :) Its utility as "search" is only partially overlapping with search. It's most useful for that when you can describe what you want but not with clear enough terms to search for it. For research now, I'll try the search engines-- if I don't get hits I'll ask GPT4. Even if it gives me a wrong answer it'll almost always use terms that let me form a more useful search, though often it just gives right answers. Simple example, last night a old friend emailed me to ask if I remember the name of a 90s website that people used to brag about linux uptime and deployment. He couldn't find it via search. I remembered what he was talking about, couldn't remember the name, also couldn't find it via search. Asked gpt4 (by simply pasting in the email), it answered that it was probably the "linux counter". It's possible that with more guessing and grinding on search terms I might have hit the Wikipedia article on it, but GPT4 gave an immediate and accurate answer and included the URL which is what I needed to load the page up on the internet archive (as the site is long gone from the internet). The main thing GPT4 can't do is any kind of exact string search -- but unfortunately google more or less won't do that either anymore. In terms of figuring out what you intend from some vague text GPT4 usually does vastly better than google. I think my ideal tool would in parallel give me an not-very-interpreted classical search result and a state of the art LLM result. It seems that Google's bard works kind of in that direction, but their LLM seemed extremely dumb and hobbled when I tried it even compared to GPT3.5 and the search elements are google. ... so worst of all worlds. :)