Large Language Models are not a search engine
cyberneticforests.substack.com
Large Language Models are not a search engine
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Large Language Models are not a search engine
#2No, but when paired with a search api, they absolutely are
Re: Large Language Models are not a search engine
#3No, but when paired with a search api, they absolutely are https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://www.phind.com/
"Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a home-made megaphone using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone". Seriously?
Re: Large Language Models are not a search engine
#4Considering most search engines are close to useless these days, I'd say major LLMs are doing a good job nonetheless.
Re: Large Language Models are not a search engine
#5Except they kinda are? LLMs are just word models built from a corpus of the internet. There are examples of GPT3 regurgitating reddit comments in full given the right prompt.
Certainly I find LLMs replace a lot of searches for me and google/microsoft is right to eat its own breakfast to get ahead of it.
Re: Large Language Models are not a search engine
#6“…the outcomes of Large Language Models are not designed to be true — they are merely designed to be statistically likely.”
yep!
Re: Large Language Models are not a search engine
#7Except they kinda are? LLMs are just word models built from a corpus of the internet. There are examples of GPT3 regurgitating reddit comments in full given the right prompt. Certainly I find LLMs replace a lot of searches for me and google/microsoft is right to eat its own breakfast to get ahead of it.
Agreed, I don't see why the abundance of pages that come up in searches these days with a paragraph of text and a long scroll of ads are doing any better than the generalizations LLMs are trained to make.
I think it's also worth pointing out the more advanced LLMs are exceptionally accurate (despite being imperfect and not without bias) and highly available. That's not a peg below your average search result.
Re: Large Language Models are not a search engine
#8“…the outcomes of Large Language Models are not designed to be true — they are merely designed to be statistically likely.” yep!
A search engine does not return a true answer. It returns a set of possibilities ranked by likelihood.
An LLM is just an aggregation of search results.
Re: Large Language Models are not a search engine
#9Modern LLMs are empirically a great way to compress vast amounts of text.
Being able to ask one of the better open tunes a question I would normally ask Google makes it possible to work from anywhere in a way that hasn’t been true since I was a kid.
Big, overfunded, ethically and legally dubious data-vacuum black box APIs are and should be controversial.
Stack Overflow and much else in 30-70Gb on my MacBook Pro on a beach is strictly awesome. That should not be controversial.
cc Scott Wiener and the thugs paying.
Re: Large Language Models are not a search engine
#10They aren't, but that's what the customers want. They don't care about all this generative stuff, what they really care about is getting answers to questions. This is the expectation and whoever cracks this reliably will be the next Google.