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The whole point is that an LLM is not a search engine and obviously anyone who treats it as one is going to be unsatisfied. It's just not a sensible comparison.
by agentcoops 2y ago
The whole point is that an LLM is not a search engine and obviously anyone who treats it as one is going to be unsatisfied. It's just not a sensible comparison. You should compare working with an LLM to working with an old "state of the art" language tool like Python NLTK -- or, indeed, specifying a problem in Python versus specifying it in the form of a prompt -- to understand the unbridgeable gap between what we have today and what seemed to be the best even a few years ago. I understand when a popular science author or my relatives haven't understood this several years after mass access to LLMs, but I admit to being surprised when software developers have not.
Hosted and free or subscription-based DeepResearch like tools that integrate LLMs with search functionality (the whole domain of "RAG" or "Retrieval Augmented Generation") will be elementary for a long time yet simply because the cost of the average query starts to go up exponentially and there isn't that much money in it yet. Many people have and will continue to build their own research tools where they can determine how much compute time and API access cost they're willing to spend on a given query. OCR remains a hard problem, let alone appropriately chunking potentially hundreds of long documents into context length and synthesizing the outputs of potentially thousands of LLM outputs into a single response.
- throwawaymaths 2y agoto be fair a few? one? years ago LLMs were touted? marketed? as a "search killer", and a lot of people do use it in that fashion.
- joquarky 2y agoA lot of people need to improve their critical thinking skills to deconstruct the marketing hype, and then choose the right tool for the job.
- throwawaymaths 2y agosure. isn't that effectively what Sabine is doing though? She just doesn't have as compelling a use in the cases where LLMs are strong.
- agentcoops 2y agoCertainly. I agree of course as to the problem of hype and I'm aware of how many people use LLMs today. I tried to emphasize in my earlier post that I can understand why someone like Sabine has the opinion she does -- I'm more confused how there's still similar positions to be found among software developers, evidenced often within Hacker News threads like the one we're in. I don't intend that to refer to you, who clearly has more than a passing knowledge of LLM internals, but more to the original commenter I was responding to. More than marketing, I think from my experience it's chat with little control over context as the primary interface of most non-engineers with LLMs that leads to (mis)expectations of the tool in front of them. Having so little control over what is actually being input to the model makes it difficult to learn to treat a prompt as something more like a program.