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AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

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Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#311

Post by alvah »

charcircuit wrote: post #286
alvah wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely one of the purposes of a search engine is to assist the journey from generic to specific. I don’t see how filling page 1 for generic queries with non-specific DR90+ behemoths helps.

It's hard to do. If you were a search engine and someone searched "dog" what websites would you return? You can't really tell what the user wants.

Of course it’s hard. My point is that the current version of the algorithm gives undue weight to factors other than what the user wants.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#312

Post by franze »

I needed to write an official letter today.

I could have written it myself, but that would take some effort.

I could google it, scroll past the ads. Click on the first result, hope it is kinda what I need. On that page scroll past the ads and SEO blabla-text. Copy the information that I need. Paste it in a doc. Rewrite it to what I need. Fill in my information.

I went to ChatGPT told him what kind of letter I need. Told him what personal information it should put in. Got a good enough text back. Told it what to correct. Copy pasted it and formatted it a bit. Done.

way better experience then with Google.

Google is in trouble, and they know it.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#313

Post by instagraham »

All of these criticisms fail to address a big elephantine question: Are these hurdles insurmountable?

If ChatGPT's model fails to differentiate or understand the question of credibility, how tough would it be to build classifiers that could do a 75% decent job?

If AI presentation of knowledge is imperfect - well, fine. But is human presentation or selection perfect for that matter? Criticising a thing for imperfection is not a viable take.

If ChatGPT's knowledge is limited, how tough would it be to plug it into larger and larger datasets, including the live internet itself?

It's like there's a wall between the people who see the potential of this and the people who feel so threatened by it that they refuse to look over the wall.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#314

Post by singularity2001 »

prox wrote: post #291
singularity2001 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to all the naysayers I think a future version of GTP will be trained to evaluate its own certainty and express this verbally. Probably through an extra training channel.

It has no concept of certainty, unless it was embedded in the original data. What you are describing is an more general AI. This is a language model. I like to think of it of a cognitive intelligence: the ability to process input and compare it to a stunning array of trained data that will have many parallels to reality but has no concept of it.

It can be trained some form of trustfulness, and a measure of certainty is intrinsically part of the model (compare with image to text models etc "70% cheetah 10% dog")

In any case it can be trained to assert confidence via a side channel

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#315

Post by kderbyma »

mc32 wrote: post #141
Levitz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't technically block words from being searched, but it does hide sites intentionally. It won't show you kiwifarms. It used to hide 8ch (which now is not even 8ch anymore, the new version can be found). It won't show you 4chan's /pol/ board. I'm sure there's more.

This is true. They do hide some legal sites (i.e. not banned or prohibited content) that they or vocal interest groups push back on but it's really miniscule in scope compared to chatGPT. ChatGPT is like the parent of a 5 year old who tries to hide reality from a child --except the people using chatGPT are not five year-olds. It's very passive aggressive. It's almost as though it were built by very pious religious pe…

yeah for a language model it sure did have a lot of opinions all the while professing to have none...and once a session gets stuck in a rut, it turns into a moody defensive model which then gets a bit funny sometimes.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#316

Post by tsimionescu »

317070 wrote: post #306
vineyardmike wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As the authors of the article discuss, it has no model of reality to understand that citations are not just a form of words and symbols put together. Which is the exact same issue that plagues it for the answer it’s generating a citation for. I believe that it can be trained to improve this, and I believe it can be nearly solvable but I don’t believe it’s a solvable problem. It can be trained to get facts mostly ri…

The problem is mostly solved though. ChatGPT doesn't have the feature to cite its sources, but some other models do https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-safer-dialogue-agents

I honestly doubt very much that a reinforcement learning based approach can scale to the breadth of facts that such a model would need to know about. Is there any reason that using a rewards-based approach to cover one set of facts would in any way generalize to a completely different area of expertise (say, rewards for true facts in mathematics generalizing to questions about literary criticism, or new world cultures), or would you have to include (manually curated) rewards for all areas?

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#317

Post by anonytrary »

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…

I don't think anyone who has played enough with ChatGPT is championing the notion that ChatGPT itself will replace Google. They are more so steel-manning the argument that Google might not be the best interface for search.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#318

Post by tsimionescu »

joe_the_user wrote: post #270
elicksaur wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you are probably right. It has no guardrails for generating a true citation. When you ask it for citations, its programming generates the form of citation. As the authors of the article discuss, it has no model of reality to understand that citations are not just a form of words and symbols put together.

Indeed and it gave several other actual citation with seemingly correct summaries. And it's definitely less prone to obvious bs than just a few weeks ago. For a lot of general things, it gives a summary paragraph that's seems a distillation of standard information - the main problems seem to appear when these "scripts" lack consistency. Edit: Once it "learns" to get citations right, you'll have to dig into those to s…

> Once it "learns" to get citations right, you'll have to dig into those to see if it's right. It's easy to see that arms not looking good.

But that's fundamentally not possible for the model as is, not in the sense you would normally think of citations at least. If it were to give an honest answer on "why did you say that Obama was born in Chicago", the model would generate training set example with propositions like Obama was born in ____, ___ was born in Chicago, ____ was ____ in ____ and so on - because that is how it learns.

Instead, to generate what you would actually want as citations, it would have to have a way to look up the statement it just produced in a corpus of "citeable materials" and find the closest match, based on some entirely different ML model most likely (presumably something similar to Google's search algos).

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#320

Post by anonytrary »

franze wrote: post #312

I needed to write an official letter today. I could have written it myself, but that would take some effort. I could google it, scroll past the ads. Click on the first result, hope it is kinda what I need. On that page scroll past the ads and SEO blabla-text. Copy the information that I need. Paste it in a doc. Rewrite it to what I need. Fill in my information. I went to ChatGPT told him what kind of letter I need. T…

The key thing to understand about Google (the search product) is that it does search somewhat well but it is extremely bad at synthesis. When it comes to big data, synthesis is just as important as search. The UX with traditional 2000-era search engines involves the user being given a library's worth of information rabbit holes to dig through. With synthesis engines, the UX is completely different and they might even be solving different user problems.

As per your example, nobody currently uses Google as a way to draft letters, but rather as a way to learn how to draft letters. I think the distinction is pretty key in understanding the difference between the two problem spaces. I would think that "write me a letter" is a problem that isn't in Google's domain. I do not think synthesis engines will necessarily replace search engines, but the two will both be useful.

The premise of Google's interaction design is that you will be taken to an external resource. Google in recent years has started adding widgets and blurbs at the top of the search results for common things like stocks, covid-cases chart, weather, etc. but this synthesized content isn't their primary focus and are likely hard-coded to a large extent.

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