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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

#161
but chat is not a search engine, so it will not replace them but it will make them obsolete. I dont see any of this obstacles as substantial. conversational systems will take us back to the original, "bladerunner" concept of technology as something that gives us answers, not something that gives us the books to find the answers

The main hurdle for openAI is that it must find a way to link back to the web so that people have an incentive to keep creating content for their training sets. But it seems this could be fixed if the model provides direct links to e.g. buy stuff in its answers.

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

#162
ChatGPT is already chipping away at my Google searches. I'm more and more just starting there for coding related questions.

I've had chatgpt help me with the following just this week among other things.

- solved a complex issue with scaling and transformations using pixijs upon providing a code example. The solution was 99% there and saved me hours of debugging.

- refactored JavaScript to the async/await pattern

- simplified a complex nested logic in c# with citations

- scaffolded a MySQL create table statement upon providing several c# classes. Again saved me the tedious steps of typing them out.

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

#163
post #25
post #6

...But ChatGPT's successors just might . I, for one, look forward to a future in which I can ask a digital assistant to find and summarize information on anything: "Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me like I'm five years old." "Computer, what are the latest Covid-19 infection stats in my city?" "Computer, who is Claude Shannon and why is he important?" "Computer, what are the top three storie…

"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…

Except for having nothing to do with how GPS works. The satellites essentially broadcast what time it is and your reciever uses the delay between broadcast and reception to calculate where/when it is.

Explain like Im five means break it down, not lie about the complicated bits.

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

#164
post #161

but chat is not a search engine, so it will not replace them but it will make them obsolete. I dont see any of this obstacles as substantial. conversational systems will take us back to the original, "bladerunner" concept of technology as something that gives us answers, not something that gives us the books to find the answers The main hurdle for openAI is that it must find a way to link back to the web so that peop…

Yeah, I agree. I do think Microsoft is capable of messing it up and blowing their first mover advantage. They have messed a whole lot of things up over the years. But they haven't messed up Github, VS Code, Typescript, several other things (IMO anyway).

It'll be interesting to see how hard they try to stick to the Bing vision versus what they should do, which is replace it with something conversational.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> About half the (presumably human) "eli5 GPS" answers I found on Reddit made the same mistake, so chatGPT just copied an apparently popular misconception. I think that's one of the biggest problems with using LLMs for accurate answers. A lot of the text that's very useful for modelling human language and questions is also full of factual errors and questionable opinions. Answers being wrong is a problem with old-fas…

It is better at doing "translations" from one "language" to another "language". While it does know stuff and can answer questions about what it knows, that isn't its strength.

If you can do "here is the structured data, summarize it and make sure to present this information" it can do that quite well.

So far I've played with GPT doing a zero shot classification of HN titles and CSV hourly weather data to summary. In each case, it has done quite well.

Neither of those are things about what it "knows."

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

#166
post #88

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.

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…

Interesting, the one you got id basically correct.

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

#168
post #41

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).

[deleted]

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

#169
post #25
post #6

...But ChatGPT's successors just might . I, for one, look forward to a future in which I can ask a digital assistant to find and summarize information on anything: "Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me like I'm five years old." "Computer, what are the latest Covid-19 infection stats in my city?" "Computer, who is Claude Shannon and why is he important?" "Computer, what are the top three storie…

"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…

>Not bad!

Its terrible. This is totally not how GPS works, I.E. the terminal never sends a message to the satellite. This is the danger of early LLMs, a large amount of their output is false and there is no way to tell unless you are already an expert.

This makes them basically useless except for a toy.

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

#170

ChatGPT is already chipping away at my Google searches. I'm more and more just starting there for coding related questions. I've had chatgpt help me with the following just this week among other things. - solved a complex issue with scaling and transformations using pixijs upon providing a code example. The solution was 99% there and saved me hours of debugging. - refactored JavaScript to the async/await pattern - si…

How did you do #1) ? I am curious. Did you past the code and ask GPT to analyze it ?
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