ChatGPT Search • Hacker News Board

Re: ChatGPT Search

#261

Post by breck » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 6:59 PM UTC

short_sells_poo wrote: post #102

breck wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are making billions from subscriptions, why on earth would they want to switch to an ads business?

Because it is never enough. We see this time and time again. Once they are making billions, the people in charge will demand that they start making dozens of billions, and then hundreds. The growth must never cease, because the moment you stop growing, you can't sell the dream that supports ridiculous PE ratios anymore. Google was a very profitable business 10 years ago and the search was still decent. In the last de…

This is such a good rant, and I think you should develop it into an essay and I think there is an important catchy natural equation to mine here.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#262

Post by awongh » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 6:59 PM UTC

niam wrote: post #142

Genuine question: is there a present or planned value proposition for people like me who already have decent search skills? Or are these really for children/elders who (without making any normative claim about whether this is a good thing or not) can't be arsed to perform searches themselves? Does someone else have good search skills but mingle traditional search engines with LLMs anyways? Why? I use LLMs every day b…

I use LLMs as a kind of search that is slightly less structured. There are two broad cases:

1) I know a little bit about something, but I need to be able to look up the knowledge tree for more context: `What are the opposing viewpoints to Adam Smith's thesis on economics?` `Describe the different categories of compilers.`

2) I have a very specific search in mind but it's in a domain that has a lot of specific terminology that doesn't surface easily in a google search unless you use that specific terminology: `Name the different kinds of music chords and explain each one.`

LLMs are great when a search engine would only surface knowledge that's either too general or too specific and the search engine can't tell the semantic difference between the two.

Sometimes when I'm searching I need to be able to search at different levels of understanding to move forward.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#263

Post by freediver » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 7:02 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #252

freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

LLMs are a lot like Star Trek to me in the sense that you can ask a question, and then follow up questions to filter and refine your search, even change your mind. Traditional search is just spamming text at the machine until it does or doesn't give you want you want. That's the magic with LLMs for me. Not that I can ask and get an answer, that's just basic web search. It's the ability to ask, refine what I'm looking…

I agree that LLMs have opened modalities we didn't have before, namely:

- natural language input

- ability to synthesize information across multiple sources

- conversational interface for iterative interaction

That feels magical and similar to Star Trek.

However they fundamentally require trustworthy search to ground their knowledge in, in order to suppress hallucination and provide accurate access to real time information. I never saw someone having to double-check computer's response in Star Trek. It is a fundamental requirement of such interface. So currently we need both model and search to be great, and finding great search is increasingly hard (I know as we are trying to build one).

(fwiw, the 'actual' Star Trek computer one day might emerge through a different tech path than LLMs + search, but that's a different topic. but for now any attempt of an end-to-end system with hat ambition will have search as its weakest link)

Re: ChatGPT Search

#264

Post by ganeshkrishnan » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

I was thinking of the direction we are going and even wanted to write up a blog about it. IMO the best way forward would be if AI can have some logical thoughts independent of human biases but that can only happen if AI can reason unlike our current LLMs that just regurgitate historical data.

growing up, we had the philosophical "the speaking tree" https://www.speakingtree.in/

If trees could talk, what would they tell us. Maybe we need similarly the talkingAI

Re: ChatGPT Search

#265

Post by notkoalas » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 7:05 PM UTC

A lot of people are focusing on its reliance on existing SEO - but they say right in the post that they're integrating directly with data brokers more. They're subtly arguing for the elimination of a certain kind of middle man.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#266

Post by veber-alex » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 7:06 PM UTC

nextworddev wrote: post #5

I have turned bearish on Perplexity recently, this confirms it

I have been using Perplexity with the AI engine set to Claude 3.5 Sonnet for a month now, mostly for programming related questions, and it has been amazing. I mostly stopped using google.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#267

Post by ascorbic » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 7:07 PM UTC

blixt wrote: post #167

niam wrote: post #142

Genuine question: is there a present or planned value proposition for people like me who already have decent search skills? Or are these really for children/elders who (without making any normative claim about whether this is a good thing or not) can't be arsed to perform searches themselves? Does someone else have good search skills but mingle traditional search engines with LLMs anyways? Why? I use LLMs every day b…

What I really hope this helps solve is covering for the huge lag in knowledge cutoff. A recent example is where it went "oh you're using Go 1.23 which doesn't exist so that's clearly the problem in your Dockerfile, let me fix that". But I'm not keeping my hopes up, I doubt the model has been explicitly fine-tuned to double check its embedded knowledge of these types of facts, and conversely it probably hasn't even be…

I asked it about the UK government budget which was announced a few hours ago and it gave me a good, accurate summary.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#268

Post by seydor » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 7:07 PM UTC

I don't see a way for websites to monetize giving this content to openAI. This is not 2001 anymore, people should not expect to give away this information for nothing. I would be blocking openai bots ASAP

Re: ChatGPT Search

#269

Post by guluarte » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 7:07 PM UTC

I've been saying the biggest treat to google are LLMs

Re: ChatGPT Search

#270

Post by gmd63 » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 7:09 PM UTC

freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

> Legacy ad-based search has devolved into a wasteland of misaligned incentives, conflict of interest and content farms optimized for ads and algos instead of humans.

> Path forward requires solving the core challenge: actually surfacing the content people want to see, not what intermediaries want them to see

These traps and patterns are not inevitable. They happen by choice. If you're actively polluting the world with AI generated drivel or SEO garbage, you're working against humanity, and you're sacrificing the gift of knowing right from wrong, abandoning life as a human to live as some insectoid automaton that's mind controlled by "business" pheromones. We are all working together every day to produce the greatest art project in the universe, the most complex society of life known to exist. Our selfish choices will tarnish the painting or create dissonance in the music accordingly.

The problem will be fixed only with culture at an individual level, especially as technology enables individuals to make more of an impact. It starts with voting against Trump next week, rejecting the biggest undue handout to a failed grifter who has no respect for law, order, or anyone other than himself.