9 ms·

OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

345 points by notyouralias 2y ago

SeanAnderson 2y ago
Announcing a waitlist! :) Signed up either way, but really wish OpenAI announcements were for usable products.
- buremba 2y ago
  ^ this. I had a similar feeling when I saw the landing page as I have been waiting for Sora to be available after it's "announced".
- ashu1461 2y ago
  Open ai always surprises. They are yet to completely release some of the features announced an year ago, but still announced a production ready model last week. Maybe this is the difference between anthropic and open ai.. Anthropic has sharp focus on improving their core product and open ai is spread out.
  - rvz 2y ago
    > Open ai always surprises. Not this time. With this one, we were given notice about this as a rumor 3 months ago. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313359
  - viraptor 2y ago
    It's a natural consequence of size. Openai with 1200+ employees will have more projects running in parallel (and at different speeds) than Anthropic with ~500.
- herval 2y ago
  It seems all their recent major have been waitlists: sora, the voice model, now this
chachra 2y ago
Perplexity has some competition!
samiwami 2y ago
I wonder how good this will be. My employer gave us Perplexity Pro for free, and I removed Safari from my home screen and pinned Perplexity to force myself to use it… I found it really really slow and didn’t really add to my search experience
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  IMO, Perplexity does absolutely shine in a kind of search for what other engines don't compete at all. But it's way worse than normal engines for most of the things I search. Anyway, comparing it by speed isn't useful at all.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    >Tractors are slower than cars, why would you use them?
  - bfelbo 2y ago
    Can you give an example of a search query where Perplexity really shines?
nsilvestri 2y ago
I have never felt like my searches in other engines have been helped by AI. I hope SearchGPT changes that. My expectations are low.
blakesterz 2y ago
People with websites used to have a clear reason to allow bots to crawl and index our sites. Google and everyone sent us traffic. There was something of a trade off. Google has been slowly changing that trade by displaying more and more of our sites on google.com rather than sending people our way. As far as I can see there's no sending people away from SearchGPT, it just gives answers. I can't see any reason to allow AI crawlers on my sites, all they do is crawl my site and slow things down. I'm glad that most of them seem to respect robots.txt.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  If it doesn't send you to the sites, what's the difference from just using ChatGPT? My impression from the demo is it has a perplexity-like result, with the answer and references to where each part comes from.
  - wilg 2y ago
    Search is a familiar interface and chat is a bit janky sometimes.
- jpcookie 2y ago
  I clearly would not. "Slow down your site" because information is super useful when you can't search it properly.
  - mikepurvis 2y ago
    Sites might exist for reasons other than to "be useful". At a bare minimum, they may be trying to sell eyeballs to advertisers, but they also might be trying to deliver an experience, induce some deeper engagement, make a sale, build a community, whatever. All of that disappears when a bot devours whatever it assesses to be your "content" and then serves it up as a QA response, stripped of any of the surrounding context.
    - jpcookie 2y ago
      Because reading nonsense inside an infinite debatable context is fun. I know what you're talking about and frankly I'm not impressed. You know why people like these chat systems? Because it straight up saves time. When a system is made it to indexable, "context dependent", and "creating a certain experience" it just begs to be summarized and made to be something you can use. That interpretable work is.... Pointlessly difficult. A good example: discord. A vast number of communities are designed to be "experiences" where you have to pour hours of your time to adapt to their little fiefdoms if you wanted to obtain any useful information in the form of important information on a topic. Try doing this in any serious fashion and you will quickly be wasting more of your time than you want. Yeah so maybe chatgpt gives you the occasional incorrect fact. I haven't had that happen in any way, shape, or form. Furthermore: just be critical of your information. Not hard, and they are already working on fixing that. Especially for people that are bonafide adults time is worth more than "the pride of human work".
tptacek 2y ago
So, Google already does this, right? And most of the feedback I've seen is: "how the hell do we turn this off".
- MattGaiser 2y ago
  The problem with the Google one is accuracy. It told people to eat rocks. OpenAI just needs to beat that.
  - alpha_squared 2y ago
    Obvious errors make for good comedy and create obvious moments for reflection on what is actually being done. Subtle errors lead to fractured realities.
    - dheera 2y ago
      Google makes shittons of the subtle variety now as well.
  - minimaxir 2y ago
    It appears from the demo example, OpenAI is not winning in the accuracy department either: https://x.com/kifleswing/status/1816542216678179083 https://x.com/kifleswing/status/1816542216678179083 > In ChatGPT's recent search engine announcement, they ask for "music festivals in Boone North Carolina in august" > There are five results in the example image in the ChatGPT blog post : > 1: Festival in Boone ... that ends July 27 ... ChatGPT's dates are when the box office is closed [X] 2: A festival in Swannanoa, two hours away from Boone, closer to Asheville [X] 3. Free Friday night summer concerts at a community center (not a festival but close enough) [O] 4. The website to a local venue [X] 5. A festival that takes place in June, although ChatGPT's summary notes this. [Shrug]
    - patchorang 2y ago
      Not saying the SearchGPT will or will not be accurate, but this demo was certainly made in After Effects. Who knows where the copy came from.
xivzgrev 2y ago
Finally, the inevitable product we all knew was coming: going after Google’s core biz I like the follow up questions feature but how is it different than chat gpt - just providing links as well?
- ashu1461 2y ago
  Getting more richer context of the current web events and doing that in a faster way. The current website scrapping feature is too slow.
- CephalopodMD 2y ago
  That feature is also part of Google search's AI
- ignoramous 2y ago
  > going after Google’s core biz Meta is out to commodotize Google's core product (Search). Meta's foray into Open Source AI is likely to hurt more as Google's distribution advantages (via Chrome and Android) is close to insurmountable for one rival search engine to make any meaningful dent by going toe-to-toe.
mentos 2y ago
Being a separate product I wonder if they plan to introduce advertising in ways that they couldn’t with ChatGPT.
- floam 2y ago
  According to the article: this separate product is ephemeral, it’s a prototype and eventually the idea is what it does will become part of ChatGPT.
kva 2y ago
This just represents such a stark lack in originality and lends even more credo to "OpenAI wants to copy its customers"
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  They are not research focused anymore they are a product company now.
  - gbarletta 2y ago
    Maybe to the point they will rebrand themselves soon
MattDaEskimo 2y ago
I really dislike this as OpenAI has spent the past months signing sweetheart deals with any publisher willing to sell their content for training data. It ties everything to their platform and returns a regurgitation of prioritized content without indicating any sort of sponsorship. SEO will be replaced by cold hard cash, favors, and backroom deals
- jjulius 2y ago
  >SEO will be replaced by cold hard cash, favors, and backroom deals Maybe it's my pessimistic nature, but it's garbage either way to me - backroom deals in your scenario, or the SEO-gameified garbage we currently have.
  - pandeiro 2y ago
    Can't believe unfettered greed and self-interest would ruin something like this.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - tivert 2y ago
    At least with "SEO-gameified garbage" the little guy has a chance to compete by learning the SEO game.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    Cold hard cash, favors, and backroom deals have been the modus operandi of this leadership team for over a decade now, it's the only song they know.
- Topfi 2y ago
  > SEO will be replaced by cold hard cash, favors, and backroom deals Maybe this reflects my biases, but isn't that was SEO has been from the get go? Like, from the moment someone had the idea that they could influence search engine results in their favor and charge money for those services, SEO has been purely negative for internet users simply trying to find the most fitting results for their query.
rvz 2y ago
Perhaps no-one could answer my question in [0] because many (including me) knew OpenAI would release their own search engine; eventually in [0]. "Who can tell me how and why is Perplexity.ai is worth $1BN? How much revenue are they making vs the amount of money they are burning? What is the justification of this valuation?" [0] At this point with this unsurprising announcement, Perplexity is worth <$50M. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313461
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Company valuations never have an explanation. At all. It's all whatever people at the moment guessed, usually with so little information that you'd be infuriated. For non-traded companies, it's even worse, because it's less people, at fewer moments, and they don't even need to be honest. As a first approximation, non-traded companies do not have a valuation, any number you get is bullshit and you can get something with the same accuracy by just asking ChatGPT.
- mrkramer 2y ago
  It is worth $1BN because people who invested in it, think it is worth that much.
skydhash 2y ago
Search engines for me is keyword based. I want to type "pizza <town> near <street>" or "<function> <library> <language>" and get sensible result. Anytime a search engines tries to interpret my query with something far semantically and ignoring my own keywords, it's a worse experience.
- asddubs 2y ago
  you end up searching for a pub called graphite and get 10000 results about graphite bars because it's a more common term and bar = pub, right? contrived example but that seems to happen to me every other month at least
- kypro 2y ago
  I have no data to back this up, but I strongly suspect 90% of search traffic consists of dumb searches for things like, "facebook", "weather tomorrow", "gmail". While people do search for things that could benefit from some comprehension, I don't think that's a common feature. For example, my most recent searches and I'm probably a bit of an outlier given my usage: "given when then" "[some project] github" "[some person] wikipedia" "[some person] wikipedia" "act of supremacy wikipedia" "NVDA stock" "django docs onetoonefield" Perhaps one of those Wikipedia searches could have been done better as an AI search since I wanted to know something specific, but other two were just from wanting to read generally about a topic. The benefits I get from ChatGPT and similar tools are more conversational than search like. Eg, I might be trying to solve a coding problem and want some suggestions about how I might go about it. I might act for libraries, example code, and pros and cons of different approaches. I basically use it as a replacement for another senior engineer which I can bounce ideas off of, it's not for search / knowledge type stuff and I can't see why I'd ask an AI for that. If I want to know something I can just type a few keywords into google and find a reputable site that for that info.
  - Closi 2y ago
    Yes, to take it from OP's example - I'm pretty sure people just search 'pizza' and expect Google to understand that they are probably looking for pizza near them.
binary132 2y ago
Shameless Google search clone
jigneshdarji91 2y ago
I've been using Perplexity for the past 3 months on a regular basis and it has replaced DDG for most use cases. It's really nice to have answers directly. Product comparison/updates/features: > What's the difference in speedo latex cap vs elastomeric? > What's new in iOS 18 Beta 4? Documentation (esp for non-mainstream tools): > How do i find the sioyek db files? How do I move it to my local iCloud folder instead? I'd assume SearchGPT's results might be better given the partnerships with publishers and creators vs Perplexity searching the internet. More importantly, Perplexity already did the work of finding Product-Market Fit for OpenAI.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  My beef with perplexity is that there is no way to increase the number of uses of large models. People keep telling me that I can use the smaller models, but I really can't. I'm using this for work and those things are toys which just game bench marks. I'd love to give them an api key from openai or anthropic and get uses to my hearts content like phind does.
  - Havoc 2y ago
    Huh? I haven’t seen any limits yet regardless of model choice
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      You hit them after dozens of uses on the big models and hundreds on the small ones.
- freefaler 2y ago
  Perplexity is great, but they might have their rug pulled underneath them. They use google and other search providers to run the query over the results and may be they still can find a good provider. However it's either Google or Bing and they both have their own competing products. However, openAI might not execute this better and then Perplexity might have a chance... (I hope so).
charlierguo 2y ago
Have we figured out a way to monetize AI-powered search yet? Presumably a product like this (or Perplexity) will ultimately be free, in which case they'll be forced to offer ads (bringing us back to Google's status quo) or perhaps worse, we'll have "product placement" in our AI-written results.
- downrightmike 2y ago
  No, and that is a big problem, search doesn't make money either. People will not actually pay the cost for AI once they have to.
  - criddell 2y ago
    They might pay for it indirectly. For example, Apple just signed a deal with OpenAI and I could imagine a future where users of Apple devices get free access to some AI because Apple and that company made a deal.
    - PodgieTar 2y ago
      Well, maybe, but I think the huge thing missing from this assumption is that Apple are not paying OpenAI anything, and are developing their own in-house and on-device models. And a lot of what those on-model devices can do are what the average person will want. And there's going to take a lot to move people meaningfully away from google.
  - freediver 2y ago
    > No, and that is a big problem, search doesn't make money either. Kahm, Kagi (and Google) would both disagree. You can even pick your favorite business model!
- freediver 2y ago
  This is already happening, most have either announced or are already monetizing their output with ads. A few (inlcuding Kagi's LLM assisted search) will be monetized through user/customer subscriptions exclusively. As with search, these two business models will lead to different outcomes for the users.
moralestapia 2y ago
GG Google and I couldn't be more pleased. It may not be this specific iteration that kills it, but a search product with AI (and without trash) is what will dethrone it. I'm already using ChatGPT for ~30% of the queries I used to use Google for. I prefer hallucinations to ads, to be honest. They were right to call Code Red when GPT came out, but their response to it has been extremely poor, even when they had all their cards in their hands. The quality of their products has been increasingly worse with time, everyone (but their own VPs) has been telling them that, it's hardly a secret. They literally just have to go through the first two or three comments on this site (or Reddit or w/e) and fix the extremely obvious pain points people have with their products: * Bring back verbatim search, make search *actually* work. * If I search for "italian restaurants", I want a list of italian restaurants not a blog post with someone's opinion on why italian restaurants should hire more immigrants because of blah blah blah ... I want to *eat* something! * The whole "vikings were black" episode ... wtf. They kind of deserve it at this point.
- avgDev 2y ago
  ChatGPT is like a drunk expert. It says the correct words but might completely wrong. I've had some funny instances of it hallucinating.
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    "SEO-optimized" sites are equally crappy, if not worse. You still have to discard a lot of information from Google, you probably just got used to it. Even though I still use it for ~70% of my queries, what I'm actually looking for is one or two pages down the list of results, the first ones being just mediocre articles around the topic of interest. What's the first thing you do when you get Google results? You scroll down, it has become muscle memory at this point.
- chubot 2y ago
  OK but this is the same pattern as image uploading services - https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online-services.html https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... 1. google was a good search engine when it was less profitable 2. now that it is more profitable, it is bad Importantly, it was possible for Google to be good AND profitable at the same time! Roughly from 2003-2013 perhaps. 1. OpenAI is nowhere near profitable ... it seems to be heavily dependent on Microsoft, and in some sense on Microsoft's desire to compete with Google in certain areas 2. If it ever becomes profitable, does anyone want to argue it won't get significantly worse? It will probably have a bunch of bad side effects, like Google's decline did on the web itself I guess this is "normal", but it also seems pretty inefficient to me ... Part of the problem is that "free" is a special price that users like IMO it would have be nice if Google search was sustainable at a high quality -- I think it easily could have been
Topfi 2y ago
OpenAI, up to this point, has shown a willingness to outcompete some of the very companies that rely on their API to function, most famously with the release of GPTs, which had a quite severe impact on many "AI startups" [0]. In that way, they remind me of Apple with Sherlock way back in the early 2000s. Despite this, I was doubtful that they'd go so far as to release a full-on search product due to their relationship with MSFT and reliance on Azure credits. I am happy to admit that I have long stopped any attempt to properly understand how OpenAI's corporate governance and company structure work, so I have a hard time following where this falls under and who would decide on this release, as well as how they interact with the part of OpenAI cooperating with MSFT and the Bing team, but I still have a hard time seeing how releasing a clear Bing competitor wouldn't cause some trouble for their entire suite of products and maybe even hinder future expansion by limiting the resources they can rely upon. I am also interested in how this will impact search in https://chatgpt.com/ https://chatgpt.com/, which, like everything in that product, has been inconsistent to a maddening extent. Started out barely usable, failing consistently, then got reliable whilst retaining the ability to search through multiple sites and handle more than one request in a row, then lost most of those capabilities and now barely works anymore, only looking at an incredibly limited, often barely fitting selection of results, whilst also needing to be manually invoked by asking for a search, rather than before when that was done automatically whenever it seemed sensible. Like so many changes, e.g. the subjective reduction in GPT-4's abilities over time whilst retaining the model's name (not to mention the regressions they publicized in the name of efficiency, like the "turbo" variants), this is certainly done to reduce costs to the point of finally becoming financially viable at the $20,- price they charge for ChatGPT+. I might be in the minority, but I will continue to scream from the rooftops that I am more than willing to pay far more for a consistent, guaranteed, high-end LLM with web access (which sadly excludes Anthropic's efforts). [0] I still dislike using that term for companies solely relying on third-party API's, a frontend and database solution, especially since I also detest calling LLM's "AI", but it's what this crop of companies have been termed and how they collected bucket loads of VC.
- anon1358 2y ago
  [flagged]
bendecoste 2y ago
Excited to try it once it is actually open for use. Anyone else find the the product gifs hard to follow with all of the motion and zoom?
sonium 2y ago
The fact that OpenAI is releasing a fancy UI instead of an improved model says something. I'm afraid GPT-5 won't be there any time soon.
- aabhay 2y ago
  C’mon. OpenAI is a large company now with 1000+ employees. You’re really going to air this hot take? - if they release a model “they’re just releasing models without use cases” - if they release safety guardrails “they are just doing this to avoid launching models” - if the release has a waitlist “they’re losing their velocity” - if they launch without a waitlist “they weren’t considering the safety implications” - if they hired a top researcher “they’re conspiring to out spend open source” - if they fire a top researcher “there’s too much politics taking over”
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- blagie 2y ago
  You realize GPT-4o was released in May? And the new Facebook models within the past week? New models are coming fast too.
  - asadotzler 2y ago
    New models, not refinements on old models. You know what the OP was saying. Why the pedantry?
    - t0md4n 2y ago
      Aren't 'new models' always technically just refinements of old models? isn't that the point?
      - jazzyjackson 2y ago
        refinements = faster, cheaper new = better, new use cases
summerlight 2y ago
I understand OpenAI had to make it cheap enough before the launch, but it feels like they're too late for this. They should've done this in 2023 H1 when Google was completely vulnerable. Now it seems to be prepared to quickly replicate the product?
oceanplexian 2y ago
Where is GPT-5? Imo these “announcements” from OpenAI are a further sign that model capability has plateaued with GPT-4.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  It's not supposed to be out until 2025.
rfoo 2y ago
Nice, they found a way to bring ads back!
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  Bring on the ads!
iamleppert 2y ago
ChatGPT has already largely replaced Google Search in many of the cases I have. I no longer rely on Google to do basic research, it feels so out of date and clunky compared to just getting an answer to your question. No looking through multiple pages and clicking through to web sites with ads and paywalls and trying to piece together an opinion from multiple sources. ChatGPT just works, and it works quickly, and its usually right, and is a better user experience than Google Search in every way. I hope OpenAI comes out with an AI mail client so I can finally ditch Google completely.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Because it is still "usually" right, I still end up using google. Also google gives an AI generated answer at the top now, along with the sources so you can quickly check. I have caught a few bad answers like this.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41071585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41071585
jimbobthemighty 2y ago
I have found Perplexity to be very useful; if OpenAI can better Perplexity Alphabet has a big problem (at least until the opposition ruin their products by monetising them).
- RobinL 2y ago
  Agreed. Highly recommend giving it a go for anyone who hasn't tried it. I'm a heavy (paid) chat gpt user, but for anything that I know in advance the answer will benefit from a web search (because it needs recent data), I use perplexity.
  - freediver 2y ago
    How do you reconcile having to use multiple apps to get to the information you want?
    - Havoc 2y ago
      The same way people have many tabs open in browsers presumably
  - bfelbo 2y ago
    Tried it based on your recommendation, but was a bit disappointed. I asked Perplexity Pro about the difference between the Rapier and Jolt physics engines. It missed many things that’s clearly available in the docs such as determinism and JS language bindings for Jolt, which makes me afraid to trust it. Also asked about best Italian pizza places near my address to try something completely different. The top result doesn’t serve pizza and the 2nd result was many kilometers away.
zachmu 2y ago
Seems like this spells the end of any website that vends information or answers to questions, as opposed to narratives. Narrative based writing (or images) will be fine, people will still visit and see ads. But anything matching the search term "how do I" or "when was the" is toast. Most websites in this business are, generously, hot garbage. And it's getting worse. So I imagine AI search will be quite successful at displacing them. The problem moving forward: how do we keep information-based websites in business so that AI can scrape them? There's a real risk of AI eating its own seed corn here. Seems only fair that AI scrapers pay for the content since they're not generating ad views (and are in fact stealing future ad views). But I have no idea how you would enforce that.
hubraumhugo 2y ago
Too bad it's only a waitlist. iFixit apparently published fake repair guides [0] that then got crawled by ChatGPT for training [1] [0] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Data+Connector++Replacement/147712 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Data+Connector++Replacement/147... [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/e52dc4dd-77e6-48a5-a7ca-77e3dfa39eb5 https://chatgpt.com/share/e52dc4dd-77e6-48a5-a7ca-77e3dfa39e...
- GaggiX 2y ago
  >then got crawled by ChatGPT for training Not really, from the example you provided I think it's pretty clear that a custom system prompt was used and ChatGPT is using its own creativity, it doesn't have anything in common with the iFixit guide.
  - deely3 2y ago
    Actually, you can ask ChatGPT and get the same results without any prompt. No custom prompt is necessary. It takes a few seconds: https://chatgpt.com/share/2f873b1a-e487-469f-a78b-7e57fdd91b5b https://chatgpt.com/share/2f873b1a-e487-469f-a78b-7e57fdd91b...
    - GaggiX 2y ago
      This is pretty funny, it seems to work with random foods, iFixit doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.
- anon1358 2y ago
  [flagged]
- saurik 2y ago
  So... more vaporware? :( Whatever happened to that new voice interface they "announced" back in May? I wish companies would stick to "releasing" things rather than "announcing" them...
  - lossolo 2y ago
woopsn 2y ago
> Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results. Don't get me wrong, search has become extremely problematic, ... but how much effort does it take really? Compared to writing a letter, reading a map, walking half a mile etc? The google results for "music festivals in boone north carolina august" are completely adequate. If not then you search again, sure. What makes that "a lot of effort" compared to "asking follow-up questions like you would in a conversation"? According to Sequoia Capitol there is a $600B hole in this sector at the moment, which continues to grow.[1] They need to invent something akin to the global smartphone market, over the next 2-4 years. Some thing new that solves significant problems for people that aren't already solved for free. [1] https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/ https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Current search is great for facts, alright for generic questions, and annoying for answering something. AI has almost the inverse balance, pairing the two is a decent savings (and also what Bing/Google are trying to do from the opposite end of things). Whether this gets AI out of being a money pit remains to be seen.
  - OrigamiPastrami 2y ago
    > Current search is great for facts, alright for generic questions, and annoying for answering something. I feel like Google used to be pretty great at answering questions until they started pushing ads more aggressively into their results, and then intentionally gimping their results (for instance if you put quotes around a word Google will happily ignore it, whereas this used to actually be an enforced rule). I'm not sure AI is the solution to this problem at all. I think it's about misaligned incentives and trying to shoehorn a new cash cow into the mix.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      What I mean by generic questions is traditional search is pretty alright (in the past and now) if you threw at it "how to set an arbitrary bit in a number". You get plenty of generic articles answering the question just fine, even if you have to scroll past some ads these days. If you were instead using quotes to get a specific answer to something you were doing like 'How to set the "18th bit" in a "u32" using "Zig"' then that's more what I meant by "answering something" without wanting to go piece together the answer from generic articles yourself then search does and has always really sucked (unless you're extremely lucky and some dude posted exactly that example out on the web). This is where LLMs shine, you can ask that question and get an exact answer for your scenario (plus the generic explanation of why it works if that's what you really want) without having to piece together sources yourself. Misaligned incentives will of course make either side worse but search engines ~2010 were (and now still are) far from being good solutions for all types of queries, they were just closer to being good than anything else we had for them.
gwervc 2y ago
This is in a way very good, as it will be another differentiator between smart people and others: average Joe will indulge himself in hallucinations while a few will retain the knowledge of querying a search engine, citing a source and critically think of what they read.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  You can do things "the right way" (find sources, critically think about the info) in either (or other things like books), the common denominator is the person using the tool not going off the first thing they read from the tool as gospel.
  - PodgieTar 2y ago
    I don't know how fully I agree with this, to be honest. Or, yes, I do - but we obviously outsource a lot to the tools we use. Rightly or wrongly we expect our search engines to source good sources and high quality information. And that has been sort of inbred into people through years of internet use. Degrading the quality of the output of tools that were once considered reliable and safe is going to create problems, and the onus is not fully on the people using those tools, but on those creating them.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      Is that really unique to search engines vs every tool before and after them though?
- sandspar 2y ago
  I assume you see yourself as one of the special few, much better than those average Joe's.
andy_ppp 2y ago
"GPT5 is harder than we thought so maybe we can make money competing with Google?"
romanovcode 2y ago
Maybe SEO will finally die. A man can dream.
- whamlastxmas 2y ago
  I can’t remember the last time I had to wade through blogspam to find an answer to something I wanted. I also haven’t had to endlessly look at stack overflow questions for a couple years now. I’m really grateful to stay away from most of what the modern web has turned into
  - romanovcode 2y ago
    It's 50/50. The consumer is not the only one who suffers. I was speaking as a web developer. Can't stand the requirements from SEO departments at any company. - Urls must end with trailing slash - (Next head of SEO joins) Urls must not end with trailing slash - The images must be perfect size for the screen - Website must work without any javascript - The localization URL of the website must be some weird format that I created (not the ISO de-DE for example) And the list goes on.... If LLM search will actually take over none of these things will matter (finally)
- pmdr 2y ago
  Too late, now that all SEO garbage has already been fed to LLMs. It will be regurgitated for eons.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
epolanski 2y ago
Slightly OT but in the end I think this is what people ultimately want and how the internet will morph into because 99% of Google results for many queries just want to spam you with ads
sharkjacobs 2y ago
The problem with Rabbit R1 and Humane is that we're still a massive gulf away from a competent human personal assistant who I can rely on to understand what I'm saying and use common sense and reasoning to respond and perform tasks reliably. This feels like the same thing. If I ask my assistant about "music festivals in Boone North Carolina in august" and they give me 5 results, 0 of which actually match what I asked for I'm throwing my hands up and never asking them for help again. I use LLMs all the time, regularly throughout every single day, at work and home, and sometimes I really struggle to articulate what they're good at, but this doesn't feel like it. LLMs are really good at talking, so they're easy for casual users to interact with, and we keep seeing products which try to use them to "take away the friction" of various tasks, but I don't think that's it. I think they're at their best when used deliberately and critically. I think that GPTs were a good product, but not a popular one because most people haven't thought of a need which GPTs would fill. Search is a problem that everyone knows is a need and since "google sux" now its one that is ripe to be filled by a competitor. But I don't see how this is a real improvement, the problem with search is that the results are worse, not that they need to be summarized in a more friendly and accessible voice.
- Ancapistani 2y ago
  > sometimes I really struggle to articulate what they're [LLMs] good at I think of them like a person with entry level experience and an IQ of about 80. That doesn't seem super useful, only... that "entry level experience" isn't in a single field. It's in literally everything. It takes some time to figure out how to interact with them in a way that reliably gives the results you expect, but once you do, you can get a lot done. Taken to an extreme, a mid-career professional can essentially become a team lead that manages LLM-driven processes instead of a team of employees.
shmatt 2y ago
I will give OpenAI credit for having a capable product team that builds on top of the existing models. As much as I love Anthropic (the only AI company I pay), they seem to be investing almost nothing in pure product orgs. No way to manage chats, memory usage is very high on the web ui (700mb claude vs. 100mb chatgpt on my mac), artifacts can be very hit or miss. They've been hiring the brightest ML people, time to build some strong product orgs (I nominate myself, DM me anthropic people)
- elidourado 2y ago
  Hard disagree. Anthropic hired Mike Krieger. He's awesome at product. Give it time.
ray__ 2y ago
I wonder how this will compare to Arc's "Browse for me" feature–at least for a single search (I don't thing the chat-based interface will be much of a value add here beyond just running a second "Browse for me"/SearchGPT). I really like the "Browse for me" feature, but only in specific cases, and I don't think I'd ever use it if it was a standalone app and not a built-in feature of Arc that also lets me run a quick google search.
Oras 2y ago
Perplexity style is definitely better than Google. I can't remember the last time I googled something. Having it part of the OpenAI subscription, and assuming it will be accurate, I think Perplexity will have a problem. Let's see how long the waiting will last, still waiting for Sora access!
xwall 2y ago
Perplexity has never been a player in the search engine game. OpenAI, a startup, has dominated the AI space, while Google has long dominated the search engine market. Can Perplexity compete against these two solid competitors, OpenAI and Google?
- anon1358 2y ago
  [flagged]
anon1358 2y ago
[flagged]
joshstrange 2y ago
I like and use OpenAI products but I’m so sick of these announcements. Ship or GTFO. We are still waiting on a whole slew of things (like Sora or new voice chat) and I’ve lost track of what’s actually released and what’s just announced.
Hizonner 2y ago
I'm guessing this is going to be even more opinionated than, say, Google has started to be, about what I'm allowed to search for and which results it's good for me to see. And... > Publishers will have a way to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features,” Oh, goody.
mupuff1234 2y ago
"OopsGPT: OpenAI just announced a new search tool. Its demo already got something wrong." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/07/searchgpt-openai-error/679248/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/07/searc...
rich_sasha 2y ago
I'm sure this is good, but it's starting to feel like "GPT" is the new "e" or "i" or ".com" - magical letters that transform your product into something cutting edge. I guess I'll withhold my cynicism until I try this. I kind of use chatgpt as a search engine anyway, so seems like a reasonable direction.
astrostl 2y ago
Kagi's Quick Answer [1] feature is great IME. The citations are the thing. 1: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
NoPicklez 2y ago
Do I really want my search experience boiled down to this boring overly white looking interface? I understand that website quality has gone down with respect to ads, but this really doesn't make the internet very inspiring if all outputs come in this format. At least with Google I get to visit someone's website, view their content in the way they have designed it and perhaps even take a look around. Could just be my view given all I know its Search > Website > Content.
jerrygoyal 2y ago
A few months ago they made a deal with Reddit so it would be nice to see more relevant reddit results than Google.
heienicklea 2y ago
[dead]

345 points by notyouralias 2y ago

SeanAnderson 2y ago

Announcing a waitlist! :) Signed up either way, but really wish OpenAI announcements were for usable products.

buremba 2y ago
^ this. I had a similar feeling when I saw the landing page as I have been waiting for Sora to be available after it's "announced".
ashu1461 2y ago
Open ai always surprises. They are yet to completely release some of the features announced an year ago, but still announced a production ready model last week. Maybe this is the difference between anthropic and open ai.. Anthropic has sharp focus on improving their core product and open ai is spread out.
- rvz 2y ago
  > Open ai always surprises. Not this time. With this one, we were given notice about this as a rumor 3 months ago. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313359
- viraptor 2y ago
  It's a natural consequence of size. Openai with 1200+ employees will have more projects running in parallel (and at different speeds) than Anthropic with ~500.
herval 2y ago
It seems all their recent major have been waitlists: sora, the voice model, now this

chachra 2y ago

Perplexity has some competition!

samiwami 2y ago

I wonder how good this will be. My employer gave us Perplexity Pro for free, and I removed Safari from my home screen and pinned Perplexity to force myself to use it… I found it really really slow and didn’t really add to my search experience

marcosdumay 2y ago
IMO, Perplexity does absolutely shine in a kind of search for what other engines don't compete at all. But it's way worse than normal engines for most of the things I search. Anyway, comparing it by speed isn't useful at all.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  >Tractors are slower than cars, why would you use them?
- bfelbo 2y ago
  Can you give an example of a search query where Perplexity really shines?

nsilvestri 2y ago

I have never felt like my searches in other engines have been helped by AI. I hope SearchGPT changes that. My expectations are low.

blakesterz 2y ago

People with websites used to have a clear reason to allow bots to crawl and index our sites. Google and everyone sent us traffic. There was something of a trade off. Google has been slowly changing that trade by displaying more and more of our sites on google.com rather than sending people our way. As far as I can see there's no sending people away from SearchGPT, it just gives answers. I can't see any reason to allow AI crawlers on my sites, all they do is crawl my site and slow things down. I'm glad that most of them seem to respect robots.txt.

marcosdumay 2y ago
If it doesn't send you to the sites, what's the difference from just using ChatGPT? My impression from the demo is it has a perplexity-like result, with the answer and references to where each part comes from.
- wilg 2y ago
  Search is a familiar interface and chat is a bit janky sometimes.
jpcookie 2y ago
I clearly would not. "Slow down your site" because information is super useful when you can't search it properly.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Sites might exist for reasons other than to "be useful". At a bare minimum, they may be trying to sell eyeballs to advertisers, but they also might be trying to deliver an experience, induce some deeper engagement, make a sale, build a community, whatever. All of that disappears when a bot devours whatever it assesses to be your "content" and then serves it up as a QA response, stripped of any of the surrounding context.
  - jpcookie 2y ago
    Because reading nonsense inside an infinite debatable context is fun. I know what you're talking about and frankly I'm not impressed. You know why people like these chat systems? Because it straight up saves time. When a system is made it to indexable, "context dependent", and "creating a certain experience" it just begs to be summarized and made to be something you can use. That interpretable work is.... Pointlessly difficult. A good example: discord. A vast number of communities are designed to be "experiences" where you have to pour hours of your time to adapt to their little fiefdoms if you wanted to obtain any useful information in the form of important information on a topic. Try doing this in any serious fashion and you will quickly be wasting more of your time than you want. Yeah so maybe chatgpt gives you the occasional incorrect fact. I haven't had that happen in any way, shape, or form. Furthermore: just be critical of your information. Not hard, and they are already working on fixing that. Especially for people that are bonafide adults time is worth more than "the pride of human work".

tptacek 2y ago

So, Google already does this, right? And most of the feedback I've seen is: "how the hell do we turn this off".

MattGaiser 2y ago
The problem with the Google one is accuracy. It told people to eat rocks. OpenAI just needs to beat that.
- alpha_squared 2y ago
  Obvious errors make for good comedy and create obvious moments for reflection on what is actually being done. Subtle errors lead to fractured realities.
  - dheera 2y ago
    Google makes shittons of the subtle variety now as well.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  It appears from the demo example, OpenAI is not winning in the accuracy department either: https://x.com/kifleswing/status/1816542216678179083 https://x.com/kifleswing/status/1816542216678179083 > In ChatGPT's recent search engine announcement, they ask for "music festivals in Boone North Carolina in august" > There are five results in the example image in the ChatGPT blog post : > 1: Festival in Boone ... that ends July 27 ... ChatGPT's dates are when the box office is closed [X] 2: A festival in Swannanoa, two hours away from Boone, closer to Asheville [X] 3. Free Friday night summer concerts at a community center (not a festival but close enough) [O] 4. The website to a local venue [X] 5. A festival that takes place in June, although ChatGPT's summary notes this. [Shrug]
  - patchorang 2y ago
    Not saying the SearchGPT will or will not be accurate, but this demo was certainly made in After Effects. Who knows where the copy came from.

xivzgrev 2y ago

Finally, the inevitable product we all knew was coming: going after Google’s core biz I like the follow up questions feature but how is it different than chat gpt - just providing links as well?

ashu1461 2y ago
Getting more richer context of the current web events and doing that in a faster way. The current website scrapping feature is too slow.
CephalopodMD 2y ago
That feature is also part of Google search's AI
ignoramous 2y ago
> going after Google’s core biz Meta is out to commodotize Google's core product (Search). Meta's foray into Open Source AI is likely to hurt more as Google's distribution advantages (via Chrome and Android) is close to insurmountable for one rival search engine to make any meaningful dent by going toe-to-toe.

mentos 2y ago

Being a separate product I wonder if they plan to introduce advertising in ways that they couldn’t with ChatGPT.

floam 2y ago
According to the article: this separate product is ephemeral, it’s a prototype and eventually the idea is what it does will become part of ChatGPT.

kva 2y ago

This just represents such a stark lack in originality and lends even more credo to "OpenAI wants to copy its customers"

BoredPositron 2y ago
They are not research focused anymore they are a product company now.
- gbarletta 2y ago
  Maybe to the point they will rebrand themselves soon

MattDaEskimo 2y ago

I really dislike this as OpenAI has spent the past months signing sweetheart deals with any publisher willing to sell their content for training data. It ties everything to their platform and returns a regurgitation of prioritized content without indicating any sort of sponsorship. SEO will be replaced by cold hard cash, favors, and backroom deals

jjulius 2y ago
>SEO will be replaced by cold hard cash, favors, and backroom deals Maybe it's my pessimistic nature, but it's garbage either way to me - backroom deals in your scenario, or the SEO-gameified garbage we currently have.
- pandeiro 2y ago
  Can't believe unfettered greed and self-interest would ruin something like this.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- tivert 2y ago
  At least with "SEO-gameified garbage" the little guy has a chance to compete by learning the SEO game.
- benreesman 2y ago
  Cold hard cash, favors, and backroom deals have been the modus operandi of this leadership team for over a decade now, it's the only song they know.
Topfi 2y ago
> SEO will be replaced by cold hard cash, favors, and backroom deals Maybe this reflects my biases, but isn't that was SEO has been from the get go? Like, from the moment someone had the idea that they could influence search engine results in their favor and charge money for those services, SEO has been purely negative for internet users simply trying to find the most fitting results for their query.

rvz 2y ago

Perhaps no-one could answer my question in [0] because many (including me) knew OpenAI would release their own search engine; eventually in [0]. "Who can tell me how and why is Perplexity.ai is worth $1BN? How much revenue are they making vs the amount of money they are burning? What is the justification of this valuation?" [0] At this point with this unsurprising announcement, Perplexity is worth <$50M. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313461

marcosdumay 2y ago
Company valuations never have an explanation. At all. It's all whatever people at the moment guessed, usually with so little information that you'd be infuriated. For non-traded companies, it's even worse, because it's less people, at fewer moments, and they don't even need to be honest. As a first approximation, non-traded companies do not have a valuation, any number you get is bullshit and you can get something with the same accuracy by just asking ChatGPT.
mrkramer 2y ago
It is worth $1BN because people who invested in it, think it is worth that much.

skydhash 2y ago

Search engines for me is keyword based. I want to type "pizza <town> near <street>" or "<function> <library> <language>" and get sensible result. Anytime a search engines tries to interpret my query with something far semantically and ignoring my own keywords, it's a worse experience.

asddubs 2y ago
you end up searching for a pub called graphite and get 10000 results about graphite bars because it's a more common term and bar = pub, right? contrived example but that seems to happen to me every other month at least
kypro 2y ago
I have no data to back this up, but I strongly suspect 90% of search traffic consists of dumb searches for things like, "facebook", "weather tomorrow", "gmail". While people do search for things that could benefit from some comprehension, I don't think that's a common feature. For example, my most recent searches and I'm probably a bit of an outlier given my usage: "given when then" "[some project] github" "[some person] wikipedia" "[some person] wikipedia" "act of supremacy wikipedia" "NVDA stock" "django docs onetoonefield" Perhaps one of those Wikipedia searches could have been done better as an AI search since I wanted to know something specific, but other two were just from wanting to read generally about a topic. The benefits I get from ChatGPT and similar tools are more conversational than search like. Eg, I might be trying to solve a coding problem and want some suggestions about how I might go about it. I might act for libraries, example code, and pros and cons of different approaches. I basically use it as a replacement for another senior engineer which I can bounce ideas off of, it's not for search / knowledge type stuff and I can't see why I'd ask an AI for that. If I want to know something I can just type a few keywords into google and find a reputable site that for that info.
- Closi 2y ago
  Yes, to take it from OP's example - I'm pretty sure people just search 'pizza' and expect Google to understand that they are probably looking for pizza near them.

binary132 2y ago

Shameless Google search clone

jigneshdarji91 2y ago

I've been using Perplexity for the past 3 months on a regular basis and it has replaced DDG for most use cases. It's really nice to have answers directly. Product comparison/updates/features: > What's the difference in speedo latex cap vs elastomeric? > What's new in iOS 18 Beta 4? Documentation (esp for non-mainstream tools): > How do i find the sioyek db files? How do I move it to my local iCloud folder instead? I'd assume SearchGPT's results might be better given the partnerships with publishers and creators vs Perplexity searching the internet. More importantly, Perplexity already did the work of finding Product-Market Fit for OpenAI.

llm_trw 2y ago
My beef with perplexity is that there is no way to increase the number of uses of large models. People keep telling me that I can use the smaller models, but I really can't. I'm using this for work and those things are toys which just game bench marks. I'd love to give them an api key from openai or anthropic and get uses to my hearts content like phind does.
- Havoc 2y ago
  Huh? I haven’t seen any limits yet regardless of model choice
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    You hit them after dozens of uses on the big models and hundreds on the small ones.
freefaler 2y ago
Perplexity is great, but they might have their rug pulled underneath them. They use google and other search providers to run the query over the results and may be they still can find a good provider. However it's either Google or Bing and they both have their own competing products. However, openAI might not execute this better and then Perplexity might have a chance... (I hope so).

charlierguo 2y ago

Have we figured out a way to monetize AI-powered search yet? Presumably a product like this (or Perplexity) will ultimately be free, in which case they'll be forced to offer ads (bringing us back to Google's status quo) or perhaps worse, we'll have "product placement" in our AI-written results.

downrightmike 2y ago
No, and that is a big problem, search doesn't make money either. People will not actually pay the cost for AI once they have to.
- criddell 2y ago
  They might pay for it indirectly. For example, Apple just signed a deal with OpenAI and I could imagine a future where users of Apple devices get free access to some AI because Apple and that company made a deal.
  - PodgieTar 2y ago
    Well, maybe, but I think the huge thing missing from this assumption is that Apple are not paying OpenAI anything, and are developing their own in-house and on-device models. And a lot of what those on-model devices can do are what the average person will want. And there's going to take a lot to move people meaningfully away from google.
- freediver 2y ago
  > No, and that is a big problem, search doesn't make money either. Kahm, Kagi (and Google) would both disagree. You can even pick your favorite business model!
freediver 2y ago
This is already happening, most have either announced or are already monetizing their output with ads. A few (inlcuding Kagi's LLM assisted search) will be monetized through user/customer subscriptions exclusively. As with search, these two business models will lead to different outcomes for the users.

moralestapia 2y ago

GG Google and I couldn't be more pleased. It may not be this specific iteration that kills it, but a search product with AI (and without trash) is what will dethrone it. I'm already using ChatGPT for ~30% of the queries I used to use Google for. I prefer hallucinations to ads, to be honest. They were right to call Code Red when GPT came out, but their response to it has been extremely poor, even when they had all their cards in their hands. The quality of their products has been increasingly worse with time, everyone (but their own VPs) has been telling them that, it's hardly a secret. They literally just have to go through the first two or three comments on this site (or Reddit or w/e) and fix the extremely obvious pain points people have with their products: * Bring back verbatim search, make search *actually* work. * If I search for "italian restaurants", I want a list of italian restaurants not a blog post with someone's opinion on why italian restaurants should hire more immigrants because of blah blah blah ... I want to *eat* something! * The whole "vikings were black" episode ... wtf. They kind of deserve it at this point.

avgDev 2y ago
ChatGPT is like a drunk expert. It says the correct words but might completely wrong. I've had some funny instances of it hallucinating.
- moralestapia 2y ago
  "SEO-optimized" sites are equally crappy, if not worse. You still have to discard a lot of information from Google, you probably just got used to it. Even though I still use it for ~70% of my queries, what I'm actually looking for is one or two pages down the list of results, the first ones being just mediocre articles around the topic of interest. What's the first thing you do when you get Google results? You scroll down, it has become muscle memory at this point.
chubot 2y ago
OK but this is the same pattern as image uploading services - https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online-services.html https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... 1. google was a good search engine when it was less profitable 2. now that it is more profitable, it is bad Importantly, it was possible for Google to be good AND profitable at the same time! Roughly from 2003-2013 perhaps. 1. OpenAI is nowhere near profitable ... it seems to be heavily dependent on Microsoft, and in some sense on Microsoft's desire to compete with Google in certain areas 2. If it ever becomes profitable, does anyone want to argue it won't get significantly worse? It will probably have a bunch of bad side effects, like Google's decline did on the web itself I guess this is "normal", but it also seems pretty inefficient to me ... Part of the problem is that "free" is a special price that users like IMO it would have be nice if Google search was sustainable at a high quality -- I think it easily could have been

Topfi 2y ago

OpenAI, up to this point, has shown a willingness to outcompete some of the very companies that rely on their API to function, most famously with the release of GPTs, which had a quite severe impact on many "AI startups" [0]. In that way, they remind me of Apple with Sherlock way back in the early 2000s. Despite this, I was doubtful that they'd go so far as to release a full-on search product due to their relationship with MSFT and reliance on Azure credits. I am happy to admit that I have long stopped any attempt to properly understand how OpenAI's corporate governance and company structure work, so I have a hard time following where this falls under and who would decide on this release, as well as how they interact with the part of OpenAI cooperating with MSFT and the Bing team, but I still have a hard time seeing how releasing a clear Bing competitor wouldn't cause some trouble for their entire suite of products and maybe even hinder future expansion by limiting the resources they can rely upon. I am also interested in how this will impact search in https://chatgpt.com/ https://chatgpt.com/, which, like everything in that product, has been inconsistent to a maddening extent. Started out barely usable, failing consistently, then got reliable whilst retaining the ability to search through multiple sites and handle more than one request in a row, then lost most of those capabilities and now barely works anymore, only looking at an incredibly limited, often barely fitting selection of results, whilst also needing to be manually invoked by asking for a search, rather than before when that was done automatically whenever it seemed sensible. Like so many changes, e.g. the subjective reduction in GPT-4's abilities over time whilst retaining the model's name (not to mention the regressions they publicized in the name of efficiency, like the "turbo" variants), this is certainly done to reduce costs to the point of finally becoming financially viable at the $20,- price they charge for ChatGPT+. I might be in the minority, but I will continue to scream from the rooftops that I am more than willing to pay far more for a consistent, guaranteed, high-end LLM with web access (which sadly excludes Anthropic's efforts). [0] I still dislike using that term for companies solely relying on third-party API's, a frontend and database solution, especially since I also detest calling LLM's "AI", but it's what this crop of companies have been termed and how they collected bucket loads of VC.

anon1358 2y ago
[flagged]

bendecoste 2y ago

Excited to try it once it is actually open for use. Anyone else find the the product gifs hard to follow with all of the motion and zoom?

sonium 2y ago

The fact that OpenAI is releasing a fancy UI instead of an improved model says something. I'm afraid GPT-5 won't be there any time soon.

aabhay 2y ago
C’mon. OpenAI is a large company now with 1000+ employees. You’re really going to air this hot take? - if they release a model “they’re just releasing models without use cases” - if they release safety guardrails “they are just doing this to avoid launching models” - if the release has a waitlist “they’re losing their velocity” - if they launch without a waitlist “they weren’t considering the safety implications” - if they hired a top researcher “they’re conspiring to out spend open source” - if they fire a top researcher “there’s too much politics taking over”
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
blagie 2y ago
You realize GPT-4o was released in May? And the new Facebook models within the past week? New models are coming fast too.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  New models, not refinements on old models. You know what the OP was saying. Why the pedantry?
  - t0md4n 2y ago
    Aren't 'new models' always technically just refinements of old models? isn't that the point?
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      refinements = faster, cheaper new = better, new use cases

summerlight 2y ago

I understand OpenAI had to make it cheap enough before the launch, but it feels like they're too late for this. They should've done this in 2023 H1 when Google was completely vulnerable. Now it seems to be prepared to quickly replicate the product?

oceanplexian 2y ago

Where is GPT-5? Imo these “announcements” from OpenAI are a further sign that model capability has plateaued with GPT-4.

Workaccount2 2y ago
It's not supposed to be out until 2025.

rfoo 2y ago

Nice, they found a way to bring ads back!

ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
Bring on the ads!

iamleppert 2y ago

ChatGPT has already largely replaced Google Search in many of the cases I have. I no longer rely on Google to do basic research, it feels so out of date and clunky compared to just getting an answer to your question. No looking through multiple pages and clicking through to web sites with ads and paywalls and trying to piece together an opinion from multiple sources. ChatGPT just works, and it works quickly, and its usually right, and is a better user experience than Google Search in every way. I hope OpenAI comes out with an AI mail client so I can finally ditch Google completely.

Workaccount2 2y ago
Because it is still "usually" right, I still end up using google. Also google gives an AI generated answer at the top now, along with the sources so you can quickly check. I have caught a few bad answers like this.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41071585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41071585

jimbobthemighty 2y ago

I have found Perplexity to be very useful; if OpenAI can better Perplexity Alphabet has a big problem (at least until the opposition ruin their products by monetising them).

RobinL 2y ago
Agreed. Highly recommend giving it a go for anyone who hasn't tried it. I'm a heavy (paid) chat gpt user, but for anything that I know in advance the answer will benefit from a web search (because it needs recent data), I use perplexity.
- freediver 2y ago
  How do you reconcile having to use multiple apps to get to the information you want?
  - Havoc 2y ago
    The same way people have many tabs open in browsers presumably
- bfelbo 2y ago
  Tried it based on your recommendation, but was a bit disappointed. I asked Perplexity Pro about the difference between the Rapier and Jolt physics engines. It missed many things that’s clearly available in the docs such as determinism and JS language bindings for Jolt, which makes me afraid to trust it. Also asked about best Italian pizza places near my address to try something completely different. The top result doesn’t serve pizza and the 2nd result was many kilometers away.

zachmu 2y ago

Seems like this spells the end of any website that vends information or answers to questions, as opposed to narratives. Narrative based writing (or images) will be fine, people will still visit and see ads. But anything matching the search term "how do I" or "when was the" is toast. Most websites in this business are, generously, hot garbage. And it's getting worse. So I imagine AI search will be quite successful at displacing them. The problem moving forward: how do we keep information-based websites in business so that AI can scrape them? There's a real risk of AI eating its own seed corn here. Seems only fair that AI scrapers pay for the content since they're not generating ad views (and are in fact stealing future ad views). But I have no idea how you would enforce that.

hubraumhugo 2y ago

Too bad it's only a waitlist. iFixit apparently published fake repair guides [0] that then got crawled by ChatGPT for training [1] [0] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Data+Connector++Replacement/147712 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Data+Connector++Replacement/147... [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/e52dc4dd-77e6-48a5-a7ca-77e3dfa39eb5 https://chatgpt.com/share/e52dc4dd-77e6-48a5-a7ca-77e3dfa39e...

GaggiX 2y ago
>then got crawled by ChatGPT for training Not really, from the example you provided I think it's pretty clear that a custom system prompt was used and ChatGPT is using its own creativity, it doesn't have anything in common with the iFixit guide.
- deely3 2y ago
  Actually, you can ask ChatGPT and get the same results without any prompt. No custom prompt is necessary. It takes a few seconds: https://chatgpt.com/share/2f873b1a-e487-469f-a78b-7e57fdd91b5b https://chatgpt.com/share/2f873b1a-e487-469f-a78b-7e57fdd91b...
  - GaggiX 2y ago
    This is pretty funny, it seems to work with random foods, iFixit doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.
anon1358 2y ago
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saurik 2y ago
So... more vaporware? :( Whatever happened to that new voice interface they "announced" back in May? I wish companies would stick to "releasing" things rather than "announcing" them...
- lossolo 2y ago

woopsn 2y ago

> Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results. Don't get me wrong, search has become extremely problematic, ... but how much effort does it take really? Compared to writing a letter, reading a map, walking half a mile etc? The google results for "music festivals in boone north carolina august" are completely adequate. If not then you search again, sure. What makes that "a lot of effort" compared to "asking follow-up questions like you would in a conversation"? According to Sequoia Capitol there is a $600B hole in this sector at the moment, which continues to grow.[1] They need to invent something akin to the global smartphone market, over the next 2-4 years. Some thing new that solves significant problems for people that aren't already solved for free. [1] https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/ https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/

zamadatix 2y ago
Current search is great for facts, alright for generic questions, and annoying for answering something. AI has almost the inverse balance, pairing the two is a decent savings (and also what Bing/Google are trying to do from the opposite end of things). Whether this gets AI out of being a money pit remains to be seen.
- OrigamiPastrami 2y ago
  > Current search is great for facts, alright for generic questions, and annoying for answering something. I feel like Google used to be pretty great at answering questions until they started pushing ads more aggressively into their results, and then intentionally gimping their results (for instance if you put quotes around a word Google will happily ignore it, whereas this used to actually be an enforced rule). I'm not sure AI is the solution to this problem at all. I think it's about misaligned incentives and trying to shoehorn a new cash cow into the mix.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    What I mean by generic questions is traditional search is pretty alright (in the past and now) if you threw at it "how to set an arbitrary bit in a number". You get plenty of generic articles answering the question just fine, even if you have to scroll past some ads these days. If you were instead using quotes to get a specific answer to something you were doing like 'How to set the "18th bit" in a "u32" using "Zig"' then that's more what I meant by "answering something" without wanting to go piece together the answer from generic articles yourself then search does and has always really sucked (unless you're extremely lucky and some dude posted exactly that example out on the web). This is where LLMs shine, you can ask that question and get an exact answer for your scenario (plus the generic explanation of why it works if that's what you really want) without having to piece together sources yourself. Misaligned incentives will of course make either side worse but search engines ~2010 were (and now still are) far from being good solutions for all types of queries, they were just closer to being good than anything else we had for them.

gwervc 2y ago

This is in a way very good, as it will be another differentiator between smart people and others: average Joe will indulge himself in hallucinations while a few will retain the knowledge of querying a search engine, citing a source and critically think of what they read.

zamadatix 2y ago
You can do things "the right way" (find sources, critically think about the info) in either (or other things like books), the common denominator is the person using the tool not going off the first thing they read from the tool as gospel.
- PodgieTar 2y ago
  I don't know how fully I agree with this, to be honest. Or, yes, I do - but we obviously outsource a lot to the tools we use. Rightly or wrongly we expect our search engines to source good sources and high quality information. And that has been sort of inbred into people through years of internet use. Degrading the quality of the output of tools that were once considered reliable and safe is going to create problems, and the onus is not fully on the people using those tools, but on those creating them.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    Is that really unique to search engines vs every tool before and after them though?
sandspar 2y ago
I assume you see yourself as one of the special few, much better than those average Joe's.

andy_ppp 2y ago

"GPT5 is harder than we thought so maybe we can make money competing with Google?"

romanovcode 2y ago

Maybe SEO will finally die. A man can dream.

whamlastxmas 2y ago
I can’t remember the last time I had to wade through blogspam to find an answer to something I wanted. I also haven’t had to endlessly look at stack overflow questions for a couple years now. I’m really grateful to stay away from most of what the modern web has turned into
- romanovcode 2y ago
  It's 50/50. The consumer is not the only one who suffers. I was speaking as a web developer. Can't stand the requirements from SEO departments at any company. - Urls must end with trailing slash - (Next head of SEO joins) Urls must not end with trailing slash - The images must be perfect size for the screen - Website must work without any javascript - The localization URL of the website must be some weird format that I created (not the ISO de-DE for example) And the list goes on.... If LLM search will actually take over none of these things will matter (finally)
pmdr 2y ago
Too late, now that all SEO garbage has already been fed to LLMs. It will be regurgitated for eons.

deleted 2y ago

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epolanski 2y ago

Slightly OT but in the end I think this is what people ultimately want and how the internet will morph into because 99% of Google results for many queries just want to spam you with ads

sharkjacobs 2y ago

The problem with Rabbit R1 and Humane is that we're still a massive gulf away from a competent human personal assistant who I can rely on to understand what I'm saying and use common sense and reasoning to respond and perform tasks reliably. This feels like the same thing. If I ask my assistant about "music festivals in Boone North Carolina in august" and they give me 5 results, 0 of which actually match what I asked for I'm throwing my hands up and never asking them for help again. I use LLMs all the time, regularly throughout every single day, at work and home, and sometimes I really struggle to articulate what they're good at, but this doesn't feel like it. LLMs are really good at talking, so they're easy for casual users to interact with, and we keep seeing products which try to use them to "take away the friction" of various tasks, but I don't think that's it. I think they're at their best when used deliberately and critically. I think that GPTs were a good product, but not a popular one because most people haven't thought of a need which GPTs would fill. Search is a problem that everyone knows is a need and since "google sux" now its one that is ripe to be filled by a competitor. But I don't see how this is a real improvement, the problem with search is that the results are worse, not that they need to be summarized in a more friendly and accessible voice.

Ancapistani 2y ago
> sometimes I really struggle to articulate what they're [LLMs] good at I think of them like a person with entry level experience and an IQ of about 80. That doesn't seem super useful, only... that "entry level experience" isn't in a single field. It's in literally everything. It takes some time to figure out how to interact with them in a way that reliably gives the results you expect, but once you do, you can get a lot done. Taken to an extreme, a mid-career professional can essentially become a team lead that manages LLM-driven processes instead of a team of employees.

shmatt 2y ago

I will give OpenAI credit for having a capable product team that builds on top of the existing models. As much as I love Anthropic (the only AI company I pay), they seem to be investing almost nothing in pure product orgs. No way to manage chats, memory usage is very high on the web ui (700mb claude vs. 100mb chatgpt on my mac), artifacts can be very hit or miss. They've been hiring the brightest ML people, time to build some strong product orgs (I nominate myself, DM me anthropic people)

elidourado 2y ago
Hard disagree. Anthropic hired Mike Krieger. He's awesome at product. Give it time.

ray__ 2y ago

I wonder how this will compare to Arc's "Browse for me" feature–at least for a single search (I don't thing the chat-based interface will be much of a value add here beyond just running a second "Browse for me"/SearchGPT). I really like the "Browse for me" feature, but only in specific cases, and I don't think I'd ever use it if it was a standalone app and not a built-in feature of Arc that also lets me run a quick google search.

Oras 2y ago

Perplexity style is definitely better than Google. I can't remember the last time I googled something. Having it part of the OpenAI subscription, and assuming it will be accurate, I think Perplexity will have a problem. Let's see how long the waiting will last, still waiting for Sora access!

xwall 2y ago

Perplexity has never been a player in the search engine game. OpenAI, a startup, has dominated the AI space, while Google has long dominated the search engine market. Can Perplexity compete against these two solid competitors, OpenAI and Google?

anon1358 2y ago
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anon1358 2y ago

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joshstrange 2y ago

I like and use OpenAI products but I’m so sick of these announcements. Ship or GTFO. We are still waiting on a whole slew of things (like Sora or new voice chat) and I’ve lost track of what’s actually released and what’s just announced.

Hizonner 2y ago

I'm guessing this is going to be even more opinionated than, say, Google has started to be, about what I'm allowed to search for and which results it's good for me to see. And... > Publishers will have a way to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features,” Oh, goody.

mupuff1234 2y ago

"OopsGPT: OpenAI just announced a new search tool. Its demo already got something wrong." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/07/searchgpt-openai-error/679248/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/07/searc...

rich_sasha 2y ago

I'm sure this is good, but it's starting to feel like "GPT" is the new "e" or "i" or ".com" - magical letters that transform your product into something cutting edge. I guess I'll withhold my cynicism until I try this. I kind of use chatgpt as a search engine anyway, so seems like a reasonable direction.

astrostl 2y ago

Kagi's Quick Answer [1] feature is great IME. The citations are the thing. 1: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html

NoPicklez 2y ago

Do I really want my search experience boiled down to this boring overly white looking interface? I understand that website quality has gone down with respect to ads, but this really doesn't make the internet very inspiring if all outputs come in this format. At least with Google I get to visit someone's website, view their content in the way they have designed it and perhaps even take a look around. Could just be my view given all I know its Search > Website > Content.

jerrygoyal 2y ago

A few months ago they made a deal with Reddit so it would be nice to see more relevant reddit results than Google.

heienicklea 2y ago

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