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AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

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Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#41

Post by WJW »

gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the future) is that there is no way to know if you've actually asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early on, though that seems to have been fixed (although that may have been just through hardcoding).

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#42

Post by KhoomeiK »

Recent paper showing how LMs "struggle with less popular factual knowledge, and that scaling fails to appreciably improve memorization of factual knowledge in the tail". In other words, simply scaling LLMs will not result in replacing Google as a search engine. Approaches like theirs ie retrieval augmentation are needed.

https://akariasai.github.io/files/llm_memorization.pdf

This is essentially what I'm building for the content marketing vertical.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#44

Post by TOMDM »

Today I wanted to mute the bark on windows 11.

Not knowing the terminology, Google was useless.

I ask chatgpt and it tells me how to mute notifications, I clarify "no the thing where you're typing and windows can't do it so it plays a sound" and chatgpt happily informed me on how to mute the windows hard stop sound.

For situations where you don't really know what you're looking for, chatgpt is already competitive with Google. Failing abysmally in some cases, and far surpassing Google in others.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#47

Post by gkoberger »

I mean, ChatGPT came out 2 weeks ago.

By the time Google even was started, Excite had been searching the web for 7 years and Lycos had been around for 3 years.

I don't think it's a 1:1 replacement, but let's not judge a product that's been out for less than a month against a trillion dollar behemoth that launched 24 years ago.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#48

Post by dpkirchner »

WJW wrote: post #41
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the future) is that there is no way to know if you've actually asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early…

I wish ChatGPT would give you the score(s) of the results it returns, so you could understand how correct it "thinks" the response is. I wonder if those confidently wrong answers are also low scoring.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#49

Post by krisoft »

gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

Yeah, it is so obviously a usefull user interface pattern. The real question is if it can be made accurate.

I have asked chatGPT about my boss (a well published researcher) and it managed to summarise his work quite well, name the field he has worked in and even write about some of his previous projects. It also insisted on that he is already dead. Which made it very funny when I have shown it to him. :)

But funny doesn’t win one a trophy in information retrieval. Clearly it knows a lot about a lot of things, but the accuracy is hit and miss. Can this be fixed? Then this is the future. If it can’t, because this is a fundamental property of these systems then it won’t be a usefull replacement of search.

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