6 ms·

I really do not understand the benefits supposedly of this tech over a traditional search engine. All it's doing is pulling the top hit from Bing and saying it

I really do not understand the benefits supposedly of this tech over a traditional search engine. All it's doing is pulling the top hit from Bing and saying it back to you in a chat format. The AI doesn't understand what IP Scanning software is, nor does it understand malware, nor does it understand anything about what you're saying, it literally just doesn't. It takes what you asked, stuffs it into bing, and reads out the results to you. I understand why people want AI search engines, the problem is, this is not an AI search engine. None of them are to my knowledge. It's just an ML bot mediating a search between you and the engine. The web page accomplishes the exact same task, without the unearned air of authority. Like, the IDEA of an AI search engine, an artificial intelligence that knows all this stuff and can weigh in alongside you with insight and comprehension, that's incredibly cool. But this is not that. ChatGPT knows much but understands nothing.

yid 3y ago
A lot of the value comes from follow-up questions. Imagine being able to interrogate a StackOverflow answer with new constraints and details. Not always correct, but in some cases, faster that typing in a new search term and parsing a screen full of links.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  But again, the AI doesn't know. It's going to search around the internet and probably take a closer look at what it already told you, but that's it. It takes a plethora of information and attempts to digest it into knowledge but it lacks the understanding with which to accomplish this task. Unless I guess you train an AI on a given topic, like a few languages or a database or something. But given ChatGPT's apparent vulnerability to just making shit up, you'll have to call me skeptical if this has any real use.
  - radlad 3y ago
    Because having the AI do it for you is faster than doing it yourself. Not as accurate, but faster. For some people - I am reluctant to say "for some use cases" - that's very appealing.
    - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
      I am dreadfully curious what use cases you're envisioning where a fast, bad/wrong answer is better for anything than a correct, slower answer. Like hell, if that's the standard, I'll be ChatGPT. You won't need an outrageous graphics card to ask me a question and I'll get you an answer right away. It'll almost certainly be the wrong answer, and is just an ass-pulled guess, but if that's all you want, I'll setup a chat website for myself and start taking queries today. Then investors can give me 10 billion dollars.
      - empath-nirvana 3y ago
        ChatGPT doesn't "almost certainly" give you a wrong answer (especially if you're not asking it math problems). The reason that it hallucinating sometimes is so bad is that it happens _rarely_. If it happened all the time, you'd never use it or trust it. It's just that it happens _enough_ that it's annoying to have to double check everything.
        latexr 3y ago
        > It's just that it happens _enough_ that it's annoying to have to double check everything. If you “have to double check everything”, what’s the point? Skip the AI and do the check you were going to do anyway.
      - verdagon 3y ago
        Sometimes, having a quick, inaccurate, but easily-verifiable answer is better. For example, when you're trying to remember the name of that one function to call, or ideas on where to travel next month. Also, not super relevant, but in e.g. combat situations one is often better off running now in any direction rather than pondering which direction is absolutely optimal for running from the lion. You'll know soon enough whether it was the right direction. There's probably a metaphor somewhere in there.
      - radlad 3y ago
        > I am dreadfully curious what use cases you're envisioning where a fast, bad/wrong answer is better for anything than a correct, slower answer. >> For some people - I am reluctant to say "for some use cases" - that's very appealing. You're preaching to the choir. However, do keep in mind that even authoritative sources found during your own research may be inaccurate. And for some questions, which answer is "right" or "wrong" may not be black and white.
  - empath-nirvana 3y ago
    GPT4 "knows" a lot more about most topics than any single human does. People have this idea that it absolutely needs to be perfectly correct at all times to be useful, but would never hold a human being to that standard. How many times have you asked a co-worker about something and they gave you a convincing answer that was totally wrong? Did it make you stop asking co-workers for help?
    - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      > Did it make you stop asking co-workers for help? That specific unreliable coworker who doesn’t properly qualify that they aren’t completely certain … I believe for most people, yes. We tend not to trust bullshitters.
    - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
      I VERY much more trust a coworker to know things than I do this AI, especially given not just the subject of this thread, but the larger conversation around it. ChatGPT has a reputation already for just spewing out complete nonsense. Didn't Bing's implementation argue with someone about what freaking year it was not awfully long ago? These chat bots "know" a shit ton and a half of stuff in that they are connected to the largest collection of knowledge known to man, the Internet. But "knowing" and "understanding" are two different things. The various search engines also "know" a ton about where to find things online, that doesn't mean they know shit about those things. And as we're seeing here: without the context to know that when someone wants an IP scanner, they want something good, that won't give their computer malware, that'll be reasonably priced or even open source, or even what platform, it just gives an answer based on a search. You could just search for ip scanning software and gotten all the information BingGPT shared with the author of the piece. And like, if you wanted to be charitable, you could say "well the author should've given more information about what they wanted" but again, that's not different from an existing search engine and more crucially: the AI didn't ask questions. Didn't ask for platform, how much they wanted to spend, if they preferred open source, or even something more general like what they were trying to accomplish. Nada. Just did a search, and reported results.
      - 3y ago
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > the AI doesn't know. It's going to search around the internet and probably take a closer look at what it already told you, but that's it F/k/a Putting a thing on the internet for randos to identify and explain. As long as it cites the LLM cites its sources, general questions in the form of "what is this" or "what's going on here" while you point to a page or an image or in a general direction are not well suited for search engines.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fragmede 3y ago
If I already know the name of what I'm looking for, a traditional search engine is great. But if I'm in unfamiliar territory; say I'm a programmer and not an accountant, how long would I need to search in a traditional engine to find the magic word ERP?
collaborative 3y ago
Neither Google nor MS will ever get AI search right because the only applicable use of AI in a search engine is to remove the seo/junk/ads/clickbait and give the user what he is looking for. This goes against their core business (ads) Engines like you.com, phind.com, aisearch.vip, or kagi have the advantage because their business model doesn't depend on this
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  Hmm, a fiduciary disclosure for AIs isn't a bad idea. Basically, taking how the AI was fine tuned and turning it into comprehensible disclosures as to how much you can trust it to have your, versus its creator's, best interests in "mind." For example, injecting ads and even content moderation to keep ChatGPT from joining Hitler's Youth, could both be considered non-fiduciary functions.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  > Engines like you.com, phind.com, aisearch.vip These websites don’t use “AI search”? It seems the problem has nothing to do with AI, it’s the business model.
  - collaborative 3y ago
    That's correct. But AI can further increase the quality of search results by neutralizing click-bait. Click-bait is where their $ is at
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  Right, Google already had that in 2015.
fragmede 3y ago
What would you consider proof of understanding? What question could we ask that would convince you that a hypothetical future system actually understands what it's spitting out, regardless of if it were based on current LLM technology or not?
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >What would you consider proof of understanding? In the search engine/chatbot context pretty straight forward, having the capacity to automatically correct obviously illogical or non/counter factual info. Say I do a historical search and bing or chatgpt hallucinate something that's wildly implausible or straight up makes no sense. If it could spot that on its own and say. "I'll consult some credible sources specifically to resolve that, as what I have found doesn't check out" and then comes up with something that's congruent, that'd show understanding. Same with code. Understanding code would imply something like being able to run a code snippet through a debugger, interpret the meaning of the error message, and fixing what's broken. Right now these things give you nothing more but a stochastic guess. This is not a philosophical argument about what it "means" to understand btw, just real limitations. Right now it is always the user who has to supplement the understanding and coax these systems into fixing any mistake they make.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    I don't know about historical search but as far as running code, the advanced data analysis will run python code, and you can ask it to iterate until it works. here we have an example where it output an answer, decided it wasn't good enough, and then came out with a second answer. https://chat.openai.com/share/0cec4f44-2245-45fd-b4c6-304e10c6b7f4 https://chat.openai.com/share/0cec4f44-2245-45fd-b4c6-304e10... Personally, I think we need new words to describe these things. Understanding, thinking, and reasoning don't really capture the meat of what it is and isn't doing. It's very good at a very specific slice of tasks, but it can also get fooled and be shown to be the stochastic parrot that lies beneath. But I spout incomprehensible gibberish when I get drunk, so, honestly, humans do that too.
    - 3y ago
mcpackieh 3y ago
> this is not an AI search engine. [...] It's just an ML bot mediating a search between you and the engine Pure semantics. This whole class of "it's not AI, it's ML" argument is incredibly tedious, these arguments rely on implicit special snowflake definitions of AI. Arguments like "real AI can understand things" are completely ass-pulled. Who ever said that true understanding, whatever the hell that even means, is a necessary quality of an AI? This isn't taught in any university AI course (which teach even ELIZA as an early form of AI), nor is such a meaning implicit in popular culture, so where is it even coming from?
- eichin 3y ago
  There's a meme in some AI circles that "once we understand it, it isn't AI anymore" and things like ML, NLP, and most of the Machine Vision field, while they came from AI, have "escaped" and are no longer AI because we've actually figured them out. That's probably some of what you're seeing; it's probably also colliding with "AI is an umbrella over a bunch of technologies, AGI is scifi/fantasy" which is pushing the other way - that one is a little tainted by the whole "intelligence is uniquely human" bit of wishful thinking, where the former is expressing the simpler idea that "I can estimate and ship a product that uses NLP; any estimate about an AI product is a lie"...
A1kmm 3y ago
Most 'traditional' search engines are likely to already be 'AI' search engines anyway - there is a good chance you are transforming your query into a vector in a latent space, and searching for documents that are themselves annotated with a vector approximately close to your search vector (so they are already semantic search). The difference is more just what output format they give you the results in - bespoke text, or a set of links most relevant to the query. The extra layer of text2text processing probably doesn't add much if the top result already answers your query. What people really want to do though, is to set custom criteria that synthesise data across multiple different sets to draw novel conclusions that aren't in any webpage. That is probably very expensive computationally though, hence there still being a need for bespoke sites that semantically index data for certain types of queries.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> do not understand the benefits supposedly of this tech over a traditional search engine I can't wait for Cupertino to do LLMs. If I'm walking down a street, I could ask Siri "what's the building to my right." It's not noncritical information, just slaking curiosity, and entirely unsuited for a text-based search engine. The way I'd answer it, today, would be to look it uourp on a map or ask someone near me. The problem is our Gen1 LLMS are all liars. Oops. (Fortunately, so are most kids.) If we can solve the trust issue, where the LLM is able to self evaluate confidence in its answers, it's game over for search as a mainstream product.
cyanydeez 3y ago
Novelty. Current search is determinative (in theory, Google ad-meddling aside). New search is stochastic. Two queries may yield different paths. I mean, it's blatantly a new level of dark patterns, but it's being seized up on by the psychopaths and sociopaths for that. It feels instantly novel.
tomjen3 3y ago
It has an annoying tendency to make it a bing search, but if you ask it to either look up something or you give it a query for which no good results exists it will actually act intelligently. ChatGPT is badly in need of a content update - too much has happend since 2021. And naturally ChatGPT understands nothing. We created the Chinese room as software, it doesn't have to understand anything.
callalex 3y ago
>All it's doing is pulling the top hit from Bing and saying it back to you in a chat format. I totally agree with you, and I will never understand the core concept either. But everyone should be forced to work for tier 1 tech support for two weeks of conscripted service. The entire job can be summarized by your one sentence, and yet MASSIVE quantities of people insist on getting the first answer from the FAQ read to them by a human bean for some reason.

yid 3y ago

A lot of the value comes from follow-up questions. Imagine being able to interrogate a StackOverflow answer with new constraints and details. Not always correct, but in some cases, faster that typing in a new search term and parsing a screen full of links.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
But again, the AI doesn't know. It's going to search around the internet and probably take a closer look at what it already told you, but that's it. It takes a plethora of information and attempts to digest it into knowledge but it lacks the understanding with which to accomplish this task. Unless I guess you train an AI on a given topic, like a few languages or a database or something. But given ChatGPT's apparent vulnerability to just making shit up, you'll have to call me skeptical if this has any real use.
- radlad 3y ago
  Because having the AI do it for you is faster than doing it yourself. Not as accurate, but faster. For some people - I am reluctant to say "for some use cases" - that's very appealing.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    I am dreadfully curious what use cases you're envisioning where a fast, bad/wrong answer is better for anything than a correct, slower answer. Like hell, if that's the standard, I'll be ChatGPT. You won't need an outrageous graphics card to ask me a question and I'll get you an answer right away. It'll almost certainly be the wrong answer, and is just an ass-pulled guess, but if that's all you want, I'll setup a chat website for myself and start taking queries today. Then investors can give me 10 billion dollars.
    - empath-nirvana 3y ago
      ChatGPT doesn't "almost certainly" give you a wrong answer (especially if you're not asking it math problems). The reason that it hallucinating sometimes is so bad is that it happens _rarely_. If it happened all the time, you'd never use it or trust it. It's just that it happens _enough_ that it's annoying to have to double check everything.
      - latexr 3y ago
        > It's just that it happens _enough_ that it's annoying to have to double check everything. If you “have to double check everything”, what’s the point? Skip the AI and do the check you were going to do anyway.
    - verdagon 3y ago
      Sometimes, having a quick, inaccurate, but easily-verifiable answer is better. For example, when you're trying to remember the name of that one function to call, or ideas on where to travel next month. Also, not super relevant, but in e.g. combat situations one is often better off running now in any direction rather than pondering which direction is absolutely optimal for running from the lion. You'll know soon enough whether it was the right direction. There's probably a metaphor somewhere in there.
    - radlad 3y ago
      > I am dreadfully curious what use cases you're envisioning where a fast, bad/wrong answer is better for anything than a correct, slower answer. >> For some people - I am reluctant to say "for some use cases" - that's very appealing. You're preaching to the choir. However, do keep in mind that even authoritative sources found during your own research may be inaccurate. And for some questions, which answer is "right" or "wrong" may not be black and white.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  GPT4 "knows" a lot more about most topics than any single human does. People have this idea that it absolutely needs to be perfectly correct at all times to be useful, but would never hold a human being to that standard. How many times have you asked a co-worker about something and they gave you a convincing answer that was totally wrong? Did it make you stop asking co-workers for help?
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    > Did it make you stop asking co-workers for help? That specific unreliable coworker who doesn’t properly qualify that they aren’t completely certain … I believe for most people, yes. We tend not to trust bullshitters.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    I VERY much more trust a coworker to know things than I do this AI, especially given not just the subject of this thread, but the larger conversation around it. ChatGPT has a reputation already for just spewing out complete nonsense. Didn't Bing's implementation argue with someone about what freaking year it was not awfully long ago? These chat bots "know" a shit ton and a half of stuff in that they are connected to the largest collection of knowledge known to man, the Internet. But "knowing" and "understanding" are two different things. The various search engines also "know" a ton about where to find things online, that doesn't mean they know shit about those things. And as we're seeing here: without the context to know that when someone wants an IP scanner, they want something good, that won't give their computer malware, that'll be reasonably priced or even open source, or even what platform, it just gives an answer based on a search. You could just search for ip scanning software and gotten all the information BingGPT shared with the author of the piece. And like, if you wanted to be charitable, you could say "well the author should've given more information about what they wanted" but again, that's not different from an existing search engine and more crucially: the AI didn't ask questions. Didn't ask for platform, how much they wanted to spend, if they preferred open source, or even something more general like what they were trying to accomplish. Nada. Just did a search, and reported results.
    - 3y ago
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > the AI doesn't know. It's going to search around the internet and probably take a closer look at what it already told you, but that's it F/k/a Putting a thing on the internet for randos to identify and explain. As long as it cites the LLM cites its sources, general questions in the form of "what is this" or "what's going on here" while you point to a page or an image or in a general direction are not well suited for search engines.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fragmede 3y ago

If I already know the name of what I'm looking for, a traditional search engine is great. But if I'm in unfamiliar territory; say I'm a programmer and not an accountant, how long would I need to search in a traditional engine to find the magic word ERP?

collaborative 3y ago

Neither Google nor MS will ever get AI search right because the only applicable use of AI in a search engine is to remove the seo/junk/ads/clickbait and give the user what he is looking for. This goes against their core business (ads) Engines like you.com, phind.com, aisearch.vip, or kagi have the advantage because their business model doesn't depend on this

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
Hmm, a fiduciary disclosure for AIs isn't a bad idea. Basically, taking how the AI was fine tuned and turning it into comprehensible disclosures as to how much you can trust it to have your, versus its creator's, best interests in "mind." For example, injecting ads and even content moderation to keep ChatGPT from joining Hitler's Youth, could both be considered non-fiduciary functions.
janalsncm 3y ago
> Engines like you.com, phind.com, aisearch.vip These websites don’t use “AI search”? It seems the problem has nothing to do with AI, it’s the business model.
- collaborative 3y ago
  That's correct. But AI can further increase the quality of search results by neutralizing click-bait. Click-bait is where their $ is at
cyanydeez 3y ago
Right, Google already had that in 2015.

fragmede 3y ago

What would you consider proof of understanding? What question could we ask that would convince you that a hypothetical future system actually understands what it's spitting out, regardless of if it were based on current LLM technology or not?

Barrin92 3y ago
>What would you consider proof of understanding? In the search engine/chatbot context pretty straight forward, having the capacity to automatically correct obviously illogical or non/counter factual info. Say I do a historical search and bing or chatgpt hallucinate something that's wildly implausible or straight up makes no sense. If it could spot that on its own and say. "I'll consult some credible sources specifically to resolve that, as what I have found doesn't check out" and then comes up with something that's congruent, that'd show understanding. Same with code. Understanding code would imply something like being able to run a code snippet through a debugger, interpret the meaning of the error message, and fixing what's broken. Right now these things give you nothing more but a stochastic guess. This is not a philosophical argument about what it "means" to understand btw, just real limitations. Right now it is always the user who has to supplement the understanding and coax these systems into fixing any mistake they make.
- fragmede 3y ago
  I don't know about historical search but as far as running code, the advanced data analysis will run python code, and you can ask it to iterate until it works. here we have an example where it output an answer, decided it wasn't good enough, and then came out with a second answer. https://chat.openai.com/share/0cec4f44-2245-45fd-b4c6-304e10c6b7f4 https://chat.openai.com/share/0cec4f44-2245-45fd-b4c6-304e10... Personally, I think we need new words to describe these things. Understanding, thinking, and reasoning don't really capture the meat of what it is and isn't doing. It's very good at a very specific slice of tasks, but it can also get fooled and be shown to be the stochastic parrot that lies beneath. But I spout incomprehensible gibberish when I get drunk, so, honestly, humans do that too.
  - 3y ago

mcpackieh 3y ago

> this is not an AI search engine. [...] It's just an ML bot mediating a search between you and the engine Pure semantics. This whole class of "it's not AI, it's ML" argument is incredibly tedious, these arguments rely on implicit special snowflake definitions of AI. Arguments like "real AI can understand things" are completely ass-pulled. Who ever said that true understanding, whatever the hell that even means, is a necessary quality of an AI? This isn't taught in any university AI course (which teach even ELIZA as an early form of AI), nor is such a meaning implicit in popular culture, so where is it even coming from?

eichin 3y ago
There's a meme in some AI circles that "once we understand it, it isn't AI anymore" and things like ML, NLP, and most of the Machine Vision field, while they came from AI, have "escaped" and are no longer AI because we've actually figured them out. That's probably some of what you're seeing; it's probably also colliding with "AI is an umbrella over a bunch of technologies, AGI is scifi/fantasy" which is pushing the other way - that one is a little tainted by the whole "intelligence is uniquely human" bit of wishful thinking, where the former is expressing the simpler idea that "I can estimate and ship a product that uses NLP; any estimate about an AI product is a lie"...

A1kmm 3y ago

Most 'traditional' search engines are likely to already be 'AI' search engines anyway - there is a good chance you are transforming your query into a vector in a latent space, and searching for documents that are themselves annotated with a vector approximately close to your search vector (so they are already semantic search). The difference is more just what output format they give you the results in - bespoke text, or a set of links most relevant to the query. The extra layer of text2text processing probably doesn't add much if the top result already answers your query. What people really want to do though, is to set custom criteria that synthesise data across multiple different sets to draw novel conclusions that aren't in any webpage. That is probably very expensive computationally though, hence there still being a need for bespoke sites that semantically index data for certain types of queries.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> do not understand the benefits supposedly of this tech over a traditional search engine I can't wait for Cupertino to do LLMs. If I'm walking down a street, I could ask Siri "what's the building to my right." It's not noncritical information, just slaking curiosity, and entirely unsuited for a text-based search engine. The way I'd answer it, today, would be to look it uourp on a map or ask someone near me. The problem is our Gen1 LLMS are all liars. Oops. (Fortunately, so are most kids.) If we can solve the trust issue, where the LLM is able to self evaluate confidence in its answers, it's game over for search as a mainstream product.

cyanydeez 3y ago

Novelty. Current search is determinative (in theory, Google ad-meddling aside). New search is stochastic. Two queries may yield different paths. I mean, it's blatantly a new level of dark patterns, but it's being seized up on by the psychopaths and sociopaths for that. It feels instantly novel.

tomjen3 3y ago

It has an annoying tendency to make it a bing search, but if you ask it to either look up something or you give it a query for which no good results exists it will actually act intelligently. ChatGPT is badly in need of a content update - too much has happend since 2021. And naturally ChatGPT understands nothing. We created the Chinese room as software, it doesn't have to understand anything.

callalex 3y ago

>All it's doing is pulling the top hit from Bing and saying it back to you in a chat format. I totally agree with you, and I will never understand the core concept either. But everyone should be forced to work for tier 1 tech support for two weeks of conscripted service. The entire job can be summarized by your one sentence, and yet MASSIVE quantities of people insist on getting the first answer from the FAQ read to them by a human bean for some reason.