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

351–360 of 415 posts

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#351

Post by noitpmeder »

smiley1437 wrote: post #256
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…

>If ever there was a cue for a career change or opportunity to make a whole lot of money, it's this. Don't ignore this one! You're still early enough to take advantage. Any suggestions on how to take advantage? Dive into ML development? Learn how to write prompts for AI engines? Invest in AI companies? Sadly OpenAI is private, but Microsoft is a monetizing partner I guess (Copilot)

I'd take a lot of this with a fairly large helping of salt. This poster obviously has a vested stake in this direction of technology working out.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#352

Post by noitpmeder »

the_black_hand wrote: post #266
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

RIP google. There's a joke that the best place to hide a murder is on page 2 of google search. The fact is GPT has at bare minimum parsed the top page of google and reasoned about the top results to give the best answer with as much context of why it reasoned so. GPT is basically a superset of google with added reasoning. I can't see it giving worse results than Google. Both will produce a bogus answer if you ask a b…

This comment is based on such a large amount of BS. Reasoning over facts, as a concept, is completely divorced from the function of these GPT models.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#353

Post by gloosx »

jddj wrote: post #346
gloosx wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>one perfect document based on millions of the documents this literally sounds like a super-lossy compression, who would ever want this? People want crystal-clear, lossless information from original source, not a compressed mess with random artifacts.

> who would ever want this? Anyone who has ever asked anyone to prepare a list of anything.

So they want indexation, in order to navigate the sources more effectively, which AI obscures and abstracts away (into cool funny neurons thou)

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#354

Post by amadeuspagel »

Awful article, probably has a lot of upvotes because people agree with the title.

> But the systems do not have any understanding of what they are producing, any communicative intent, any model of the world, or any ability to be accountable for the truth of what they are saying.

Same is true for search engines. (LLMs could include links to the relevant source material too, if that counts as accountability.)

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#355

Post by noitpmeder »

anonytrary wrote: post #335
WJW wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1. Does Google inform you that you have asked a bad or unproductive question? 2. Does Google guarantee the links it provides you with contain high quality and relevant information? 3. Does Google ensure that the #1 link contains the correct answer? I think we are forgetting that Google suffers from these problems too. A human who asks bad questions will continue to ask bad questions. AI should in general be trained t…

The crucial difference is that the Google search results page, by definition of it's function, cites every source.

GPT vomits up word soup. How should you expect to verify every factoid contained? As others have pointed out: if you ask GPT to cite its sources it will very happily, and authoritatively, spit back articles and authors that do not exist.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#356

Post by creatonez »

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…

> This model cut its teeth writing articles about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes

This is a different model, called GPT-3, released in 2020. ChatGPT has the same number of neurons, but is trained with both human feedback and web data, rather than just web data like GPT-3.

What you're saying still holds up, though -- ChatGPT still hallucinates information.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#357

Post by heavyset_go »

kosh2 wrote: post #347
heavyset_go wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents This is the "self-driving cars will obviously be better than human drivers given that they're trained on millions of humans' driving behavior" of chatbots. In my experience, this is a huge stretch and wishful thinking.

Self-driving cars are much more difficult than one might think because the AI has to interface with the real world, something that humans have evolved for over millions of years. Like others have said, worry more about every job that primarily interfaces with a computer.

Computers don't exist in a vacuum, what goes on in the computer is often determined by interfacing with the real world, reflecting real world intentions, observations, input, predictions, etc.

This generation of AI is great when the universe of values can be generalized. When the universe of values is literally the universe, it shows its limitations.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#358

Post by noitpmeder »

dpkirchner wrote: post #48
WJW wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These scores would mean nothing! At best it would score "how well does my answer fit to my model of the English language". At no point can the current architecture accurately grade "how correct is this answer in the context of the subject domain".

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#359

Post by k__ »

creatonez wrote: post #356
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This model cut its teeth writing articles about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes This is a different model, called GPT-3, released in 2020. ChatGPT has the same number of neurons, but is trained with both human feedback and web data, rather than just web data like GPT-3. What you're saying still holds up, though -- ChatGPT still hallucinates information.

Isn't ChatGPT just a conversational interface for GPT-3?

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#360

Post by oxfordmale »

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…

ChatGPT can give incorrect answers with a high degree of confidence. ChatGPT is overhyped. Undoubtedly, it is going to make an impact, however, it will be an incremental one. It may, for example, make online chatbots feel more natural. However, the current version will not replace Google.
Post reply on HN