Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

iai.tv

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 415 posts

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#111

Post by dinkumthinkum »

seydor wrote: post #91
mc32 wrote: post #32

The big drawback chatGPT has is that on many topics it walks on eggshells. It can’t give me a direct answer. It couches the answers in nonsensical caveats. Adding stilted context that really does not add value to an answer and actually makes the search more tedious. If I ask it the male female breakdown for crime statistics it begins to get defensive and gives me general answers. I can prod it to finally give me gove…

i imagine openAI will do anything to keep it public for now. But i wouldn't pay for a version that is basically crippled to kindergarten level

I’m not sure this is a case of bring crippled or a purposeful design. It is not thinking. It has consumed all kinds of political articles and it is generating responses in a predictive manner. It is not thinking about what you actually want to know.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#112

Post by echelon »

lolinder wrote: post #108
echelon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are early days. Everything is going to move faster than you can keep up. You'll see head-turning headlines on a daily basis. Next year will see AI begin to disrupt so many businesses you'd thought were absolutely impenetrable. I don't think anything is safe anymore. By the end of the decade, I think even manufacturing and robotics will be automated. Everyone from McDonalds to Apple and Ford will feel the pressu…

I'm not questioning the AI revolution, I'm questioning the applicability of large generative language models to information retrieval. We need a different kind of model for that, not just a few tweaks here and there to this one.

Given everything we've seen in the last year alone, I'd not gamble against that kind of model being just around the corner.

I can think up architectures I could draw on a napkin that could do this. Focused research teams will nail this.

It's coming.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#114

Post by alar44 »

Yeah, but they will be. I use it exclusively instead of Google for fact finding. Yes, you can't find a restaurant with it. But it's incredible for teaching programming and general known knowledge.

I cannot understand why the tech crowd has blinders on for AI. I'm 40 years old and have been a programmer since I started playing with BASIC since I was in elementary school.

The shit GPT is doing, I thought I'd never seen in my lifetime.

Maybe people are afraid of being replaced, or not being "special magical beings". Y'all are biological robots. You need to accept that.

AI is going to trounce humans in literally everything in a matter of a few years.

Maybe it's an existential problem, I don't know, but I feel everyone is missing the forest for the trees.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#115

Post by dinkumthinkum »

gkoberger wrote: post #47

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.

ChatGPT itself is an experimental application of a research program a lot older than that.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#116

Post by accurrent »

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…

One of the use cases I have for google is just as a sort of fuzzy grep. This is often useful for finding solutions to obscure bug reports on open source projects. Similarly, I often use google to search for things like flights, reviews, business operating hours, weather and hotels. This is entirely diffrent from chatGPT. I think viewing both as competitors to each other is weird.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#117

Post by sillysaurusx »

lolinder wrote: post #86
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…

The problem with ChatGPT as a replacement for Google is that it was not designed to produce accurate facts, and it shows. This model cut its teeth writing articles about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes[0] for goodness sake! It's a language model, and a very impressive one at that, but language is used to express falsehoods and fiction just as regularly as it is used to express truth. This doesn't mean that it…

Neither was Wikipedia. But it works well enough.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#118

Post by grugagag »

rtkwe wrote: post #70
enlyth wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users want, but they are optimizing for the more common user who structures queries more like natural language (e.g. "How can I tie my shoelaces so they don't get untied easily") instead of what me or you would query ("secure shoelace knots") I'm surprised there hasn't been a separation of some sort of more technical search engine for developers and the classic Goo…

We used to have just Internet grep but it was awful because sites just slammed tons of keywords into invisible text to get fake traffic. That's what spawned the original innovation at Google of PageRank and thus the SEO wars started. Going back to that wouldn't solve the issue with modern search.

If we only had a downvote or don’t show me results from this source this problem would be solved. Google didn’t want to give us that feature because of … different incentives, no other reason comes to mind. I’ve witnessed google search become worse and worse and now it’s barely useful

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#119

Post by charcircuit »

Gigachad wrote: post #109
charcircuit wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Google stink? I've never had an issue with. What query does it struggle with?

It sucks for things that can be monetised. Searching info on products for example. Just because SEO spammers are too good. text generators will make this problem so much worse because the spam will look exactly like the hand made content.

query: "apple watch"

1st result: https://www.apple.com/watch/

Google worked perfectly for me when I wanted to buy a product.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#120

Post by seydor »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #111
seydor wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i imagine openAI will do anything to keep it public for now. But i wouldn't pay for a version that is basically crippled to kindergarten level

I’m not sure this is a case of bring crippled or a purposeful design. It is not thinking. It has consumed all kinds of political articles and it is generating responses in a predictive manner. It is not thinking about what you actually want to know.

It has been trained with human feedback on top which i guess is possible to add/remove at will
Post reply on HN