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ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

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Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#81

Post by monsieurbanana »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #63
jakeinspace wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second half of that explanation is completely wrong though, isn’t it? There is no active signal being sent from your GPS antenna, no two-way communication.

GPS doesn't talk to the satellites, but the satellites do send a message that allows the GPS to answer "where am I" for itself. It's not the worst way to explain things at that level, even if it's misleading. About half the (presumably human) "eli5 GPS" answers I found on Reddit made the same mistake, so chatGPT just copied an apparently popular misconception.

Might not be the worst way to explain how GPS works, but definitely up there.

You'd be better off just saying "it uses satellites and stuff".

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#82

Post by aw1621107 »

ben_w wrote: post #41
jakeinspace wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second half of that explanation is completely wrong though, isn’t it? There is no active signal being sent from your GPS antenna, no two-way communication.

Yes, but unlike most times it gets things wrong, this is probably appropriate for explaining things to 5 year olds. (Also, the UK comedy quiz show QI made the exact same mistake).

> this is probably appropriate for explaining things to 5 year olds.

I feel it's appropriate in terms of simplicity, but I think providing a simple wrong explanation is really only worth it when the more accurate explanation is substantially harder to simplify, and I don't think explaining how GPS works falls into that category.

Something like this I think is more accurate without being any more complex:

> Imagine you are standing outside and you see lots of stars in the sky. Well, GPS works kind of like that, but instead of stars, there are satellites orbiting the Earth. These satellites are way up high, so you can always see some of them.

> When you have a GPS device, like a phone or a car, it can look for these satellites, and if it sees enough of them it can use math to figure out where you are.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#83

Post by IanCal »

cs702 wrote: post #21
IanCal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the first to say that chatgpt already does very well at the first and third examples. WebGPT sounds like the right approach for the others (understanding how to formulate a search query, then searching, then summarising the results) Edit I think the direction of these models seems clear, and their capabilities however limited at the moment are outstanding. I think the best measure of performance is what the n…

I agree (with minor caveats). The important thing is that these AI systems are only going to get better over time. IMHO, the early 2020's for conversational AI is akin to the 1980's for personal computers.

Absolutely, I totally agree. I edited my comment to add in more as I realised I'd not addressed that. It's surprisingly good right now, and given that it's useful that feeds into even more attention and money being spent on making it better.

Anyone not looking at chatgpt and thinking "what if this was even just a bit better? Or had better iterations or lookups?" is missing out on what I think is a revolutionary change coming probably sooner than people expect.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#84

Post by wut42 »

rapsey wrote: post #76
wut42 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder how the economics of running chatgpt for Bing's request will work. GPT is anything but cheap to run, IIRC, it requires more than four A100 GPU cards.

The bill is already largely footed by MS probably. OpenAI and MS are a partnership and they run on azure cloud.

Of course- it makes sense to run ChatGPT free now (reminded that it's an experiment) for training & betatesting. But running it even larger, and on a search engine ? It's a magnitude of difference imo, and totally different than a short-time bill for an experiment.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#85

Post by gunshai »

nowherebeen wrote: post #8

ChatGPT will flood the internet with articles like how SEO was used to hack search. It might not replace search engine, but search results will becomes even more irrelevant.

in the short term yes. in the long term I think SEO will disappear. my buddy who works in the content creation space for indeed is telling me that they are already starting to use gpt to replace content creation, but know that it's a matter of time before that won't work.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#86

Post by KRAKRISMOTT »

baxtr wrote: post #79

A bit tangential, but still worth asking since I haven’t seen it addressed anywhere else: When I type a query into Google, it returns results almost instantaneously. With ChatGPT, it has latency PLUS it writes out answers annoyingly slow. Does anyone know why that spell out every answer like that? Is that a UX gimmick or related to the latency?

Transformers (the frontend in GPT at least) are autoregressive i.e. they require previous state.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#87

Post by notahacker »

pattyj wrote: post #66
emrah wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, if you can blindly trust the answers.. if it could provide the top sources for the information so I could fact-check it if needed, it would work

Is there a way to disuade users from blindly trusting responses? Such as unavoidable caveats, make no attempt to provide depth and instead strongly recommend reliable research? And as a logical aside: if AI can't be trusted, we shouldn't trust AI's recommendations for reliable sources either.

> And as a logical aside: if AI can't be trusted, we shouldn't trust AI's recommendations for reliable sources either.

Don't think that's automatically true though: an AI can be consistently excellent at retrieving reliable sources and still get a lot wrong on its summaries. Also humans have their own opinions on sources even when they're not familiar with the detail, and finding out if the AI reads Nature or 4chan is part of the debugging process...

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#88

Post by IanCal »

jakeinspace wrote: post #32
axiom92 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me like I'm five years old." ChatGPT: GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It is a way that we can figure out where we are in the world using special satellites. Imagine you are standing outside and you see lots of stars in the sky. Well, GPS works kind of like that, but instead of stars, there are satellites orbiting the Earth. These satellites are way…

The second half of that explanation is completely wrong though, isn’t it? There is no active signal being sent from your GPS antenna, no two-way communication.

Here's it's reply to me:

Ian Calvert Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me like I'm five years old

Sure thing! GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It's a way to find out where you are on Earth.

GPS works by using satellites that are way up in space. There are lots of these satellites orbiting around Earth, and they are always sending out signals. Your GPS receiver is a special device that can pick up these signals from the satellites.

The GPS receiver knows how far away it is from each satellite because of the time it takes for the signal to reach it. By figuring out how far away it is from a few different satellites, the GPS receiver can figure out exactly where it is on Earth.

So, if you have a GPS receiver in your car, phone, or on a special device like a watch, it can use the signals from the satellites to tell you exactly where you are and how to get to where you want to go. Does that make sense?

---

I was also able to ask it to make it simpler and simpler and it did so pretty well.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#89

Post by wolfgang42 »

ben_w wrote: post #41
jakeinspace wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second half of that explanation is completely wrong though, isn’t it? There is no active signal being sent from your GPS antenna, no two-way communication.

Yes, but unlike most times it gets things wrong, this is probably appropriate for explaining things to 5 year olds. (Also, the UK comedy quiz show QI made the exact same mistake).

You can just as easily ELI5 this without spreading misinformation, though. Just change the third paragraph to:

> The satellites all broadcast a special code saying where each of them is. When you have a GPS device, like a phone or a car, it can listen to these codes and find out where and how far away different satellites are.

(Actually, this would be a fun thing to do with a class. Have a few kids march around the edges of the playground, saying things like “I’m next to the swingset now!”, and then ask one one kid to close their eyes, put them somewhere in the middle and ask them to guess where they’re standing.)

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#90

Post by Eisenstein »

Waterluvian wrote: post #57

I remember when web search engines were new. And boy did they suck. You wouldn’t get what you wanted a lot of the time, and they were very finicky about the input query. These days you can just throw stuff at it like “that movie about the depressed guy with a plane engine that falls on their house” I’m not sure ChatGPT is going to replace search engines, but I’m confident that it is incredibly young and will evolve c…

Yeah but in those days you could call up the local video store and ask the clerk that question and he or she would tell you it was Donnie Darko.
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