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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

#321

Post by tsimionescu »

the_black_hand wrote: post #266
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

RIP google. There's a joke that the best place to hide a murder is on page 2 of google search. The fact is GPT has at bare minimum parsed the top page of google and reasoned about the top results to give the best answer with as much context of why it reasoned so. GPT is basically a superset of google with added reasoning. I can't see it giving worse results than Google. Both will produce a bogus answer if you ask a b…

> but GPT will never produce a bogus answer when google has the correct one.

What are you basing this assumption on? GPT can always generate a bogus answer, because its only notion of whether an answer is good or not is whether your prompt + that answer are statistically similar to text in its training corpus. The more text from the training corpus it resembles the better GPT will think the answer is. For more obscure topics, this means that the chances of it hallucinating based on similar sounding much more popular topics increases greatly.

This way of working also means that facts that appear more in the training corpus have a higher chance of being part of the model's outputs. For example, if the training corpus was not carefully curated to exclude vaccine conspiracy theories, there would be a good chance that the answer GPT gives to "autism is caused by ___" would be "vaccines", as this would likely be the most common answer in its training corpus. In contrast, Google's algorithms have more sophisticated biasing especially for these kinds of sensitive topics to ensure that more high-confidence sources are likelier to be top results, even if they are a minority of all the pages on the internet on that topic.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#322

Post by rasz »

silisili wrote: post #243
riku_iki wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are using Google incorrectly. You need to add "reddit" at the end of all your queries.

You're not wrong. If Reddit built a useable search, my Google use would drop by 2/3.

reddit search cant even find my own post when Im logged in :)

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#323

Post by rasz »

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…

1 its not "him"

2 you gave openai your personal information?

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#324

Post by tsimionescu »

est wrote: post #221
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The problem with ChatGPT as a replacement for Google is that it was not designed to produce accurate facts But chat bots could be designed to do that, no? Are there any siginificant technical barrier to prevent so?

Yes: accruing a large and diverse enough training set where true and false facts are correctly labeled. The GPT models require enormous amounts of text to be trained on, so manually adding true/false labels to every part of every sentence is impossible (and automatically doing it would require exactly the AI we are trying to train).

A revolution in this area would require some entirely new training algorithm that can reach GPT-levels of fidelity while using magnitudes less training material. An even bigger GPT model trained on even more text is not going to do much in approaching a solution to this problem.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#325

Post by anonytrary »

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…

This is a great way to formulate the difference. In my mind, Google does search, which is not the same as synthesis. ChatGPT is a synthesis engine. I think there is room for engines like ChatGPT to also return links to the training documents that were most relevant to producing an answer. At that point, it would be doing search and synthesis at the same time.

I am not sure if neural networks have been trained to do this yet, but it would be very cool to see a network that produces both generated output and the most relevant input data that led to that output, by somehow keeping track of the influence certain inputs have on various learned features and internal structure of the network. I think of this as an index.

You make a good point about SEO. SEO is going to be obsolete in the near future. The SEO game is basically an adversarial attack on Google, which Google itself actually promotes and encourages website builders to do! In the future, we are going to look back on the cat-and-mouse game of SEO and see it as primitive and antithetical to the goal of search.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#326

Post by bulbosaur123 »

echelon wrote: post #104
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These are early days. Everything is going to move faster than you can keep up. You'll see head-turning headlines on a daily basis. Next year will see AI begin to disrupt so many businesses you'd thought were absolutely impenetrable. I don't think anything is safe anymore. By the end of the decade, I think even manufacturing and robotics will be automated. Everyone from McDonalds to Apple and Ford will feel the pressu…

> (If ever there was a cue for a career change or opportunity to make a whole lot of money, it's this. Don't ignore this one! You're still early enough to take advantage.)

Details?

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#327

Post by notahacker »

mc32 wrote: post #32

The big drawback chatGPT has is that on many topics it walks on eggshells. It can’t give me a direct answer. It couches the answers in nonsensical caveats. Adding stilted context that really does not add value to an answer and actually makes the search more tedious. If I ask it the male female breakdown for crime statistics it begins to get defensive and gives me general answers. I can prod it to finally give me gove…

I'd say caveating statistics or advice it doesnt actually understand and frequently misinterprets or makes up is the most consistently valuable part of its answers...

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#328

Post by tsimionescu »

alisonatwork wrote: post #176
lolinder wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Google is terrible at its job and produces garbage most of the time. That's the only reason why an LLM chatbot is seen by anyone as a viable replacement. But at the very least Google always gives you the source, which allows you to read it for yourself and judge its trustworthiness. No such option for ChatGPT.

I can't count the number of times I've clicked through to a link expecting to find more context than the excerpt on the search page and that content isn't there. Instead I get trapped in a sea of circular SEO spam that all promises to give me the answer I originally searched for but ends up leading me nowhere except to other article summaries with content I didn't even want to read about. Where's the source? A good c…

> I can't count the number of times I've clicked through to a link expecting to find more context than the excerpt on the search page and that content isn't there.

Excellent: this quite quickly tells you that the search result was wrong. So you quickly got very relevant context and can tell at a glance that there is no source. You don't get any such context when GPT provides an invalid answer.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#329

Post by tsimionescu »

tr3ntg wrote: post #147
lolinder wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Google is terrible at its job and produces garbage most of the time. That's the only reason why an LLM chatbot is seen by anyone as a viable replacement. But at the very least Google always gives you the source, which allows you to read it for yourself and judge its trustworthiness. No such option for ChatGPT.

The highest placed links on Google are basically guaranteed to: 1) Not be the actual source of content 2) Not link to the original source

For most programming questions at least, the highest placed result links are StackOverflow answers related to your query (if any exist, of course). I would say this alone invalidates your "virtually guaranteed" claim.
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