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Search requires a huge and ongoing capital investment. Keeping an index online for fast retrieval isn't cheap. LLMs are not tools for search. They are not good
by barrkel 2y ago
Search requires a huge and ongoing capital investment. Keeping an index online for fast retrieval isn't cheap. LLMs are not tools for search. They are not good at retrieving specific information. The desired outcome from training is not memorization, but generalization, which compresses facts together into pattern-generating programs. They do approximate retrieval which gets the gist of things but is often wrong in specifics. Getting reliable specifics requires augmentation to ground things in attributable facts.
They're also just not very pleasant to interact with. You have to type laboriously into a text box, composing sentences, reviewing replies - it's too much work for 90% of the population, when they're not trying to crank out an essay at the last moment for school. The activation energy, the friction, is too high. Voice modalities will be much more interesting.
Code assistance works well because code as text is already the medium of interaction, and even better, the text is structured and has grammar and types and scoped symbols to help guide generation and keep it grounded.
I suspect better applications will use the LLM (possibly prompted differently) to guide conversations in plausibly useful directions, rather than relying on direct input. But I'm not sure the best applications will have a visible text modality at all. They may instead be e.g. interacting with third party services on your behalf, figuring out how they work by reading their websites, so you don't have to - and it's not you doing the text interaction with the LLM, but the LLM doing text interaction with other machines.
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y agoEverybody seems to think AI in 10 years will be like AI now. But summarizing a PDFs and completing code is not the end of the line. It's just the beginning. Let's look at an example of how we will use AI in the future: User: Where are my socks? AI: The red ones? User: Yes AI: You threw them away last week because they had holes. User: I see. On my way from work, where can I buy a pair of the same ones? AI: At Soandsoshop in Soandsostreet. It adds 5 min to your route. User: Great, let's go there later. AI: I can also just pick them up for you right now if you like. User: Nah, I would like to check some other stuff in that area anyhow. AI: Ok, I'll drive you there in the evening. You still need search for that. Even more detailed search, with all items in all stores around the world. And you need an always on camera that sees everything the user does. And a way to process, store, backup all that. We will use way bigger datacenters than we use today.
- meiraleal 2y agoGoogle Search wouldn't be reliable enough for that tho
- tim333 2y ago>LLMs are not tools for search I've used them for search. They can be quite good sometimes. I was trying to recall the brand of filling my dentist used, which was SonicFill and ChatGPT got it straight away whereas for some reason it's near impossible to get from Google.
- barrkel 2y agoFor sure, they are good for associative and analogy searches for well connected points in concept space, but leaf nodes are totally pulled out of the ether. E.g. you can get great translation of source code from one language to another, but without extra effort, a chunk of API methods are going to be total fiction. Or you can search for a good day trip to make when a tourist, and it'll get the major landmarks just fine, but e.g. restaurant recommendations are probably going to be made up.