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When Bard (now known as Gemini) first came out in Europe, I think mid 2023, I tested it out. AI search was still a new thing in those days, and I was excited to

by andai 6mo ago

When Bard (now known as Gemini) first came out in Europe, I think mid 2023, I tested it out. AI search was still a new thing in those days, and I was excited to see what Google's solution would be like. I had high hopes. I asked it a question I knew the answer to. It searched the web, and told me the opposite of the truth. (Not nonsense, but a logical inversion of the actual fact. A common failure mode with earlier LLMs.) Puzzled, I checked the sources. It cited two. Both AI SEO slop. Bizarrely, I Googled it myself and couldn't even find those pages on Google. Maybe it was using a different search engine? ;)

flail 6mo ago
Fundamentally, yes, it is a different "search engine." BTW, as critical as I can be to AI, using an argument that something didn't work 3 years ago, so it must be crap, doesn't work in this context. 3 years ago, AI could barely generate several lines of consistent code. Now, it generates working apps with a prompt (it's another discussion how good the code is, but still). I guess 3 years ago, Gemini couldn't tell how many r's are in the word refrigerator. Same for research. At some point, I switched from ChatGPT and Gemini to Perplexity as it promised AI-powered search. It worked visibly better. Until it didn't, as GPT and Gemini models made a leap. Back to the point, as long as we understand that, for now, it's all just a probabilistic machine generating the most likely output, no one should expect bulletproof answers. Search was/is way more deterministic than LLMs.
- andai 6mo ago
  > 3 years ago, AI could barely generate several lines of consistent code Nah, not really. The same summer I made a self-modifying AI programmer. Or more precisely, GPT-4 made it. I copy pasted the classes from the chat one by one. (I also told it what was wrong with the previous attempt at such a system, so it designed around that.) That model was also scary good at deobfuscation. I think it did have that issue about randomly saying the opposite of facts though (the fact but stated in the negative for some reason).

by andai 6mo ago

flail 6mo ago

Fundamentally, yes, it is a different "search engine." BTW, as critical as I can be to AI, using an argument that something didn't work 3 years ago, so it must be crap, doesn't work in this context. 3 years ago, AI could barely generate several lines of consistent code. Now, it generates working apps with a prompt (it's another discussion how good the code is, but still). I guess 3 years ago, Gemini couldn't tell how many r's are in the word refrigerator. Same for research. At some point, I switched from ChatGPT and Gemini to Perplexity as it promised AI-powered search. It worked visibly better. Until it didn't, as GPT and Gemini models made a leap. Back to the point, as long as we understand that, for now, it's all just a probabilistic machine generating the most likely output, no one should expect bulletproof answers. Search was/is way more deterministic than LLMs.

andai 6mo ago
> 3 years ago, AI could barely generate several lines of consistent code Nah, not really. The same summer I made a self-modifying AI programmer. Or more precisely, GPT-4 made it. I copy pasted the classes from the chat one by one. (I also told it what was wrong with the previous attempt at such a system, so it designed around that.) That model was also scary good at deobfuscation. I think it did have that issue about randomly saying the opposite of facts though (the fact but stated in the negative for some reason).