Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude can now search the web

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 758 posts

Re: Claude can now search the web

#501

Post by theshackleford »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #474
bobxmax wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite odd that people think of hallucinations as a dealbreaker for LLMs. Have they ever even met a human being?

The problem is that human beings are far more likely to know what they don't know. And we build a lot of our trusting work environments around that feature. An LLM cannot know what it doesn't know by definition.

> The problem is that human beings are far more likely to know what they don't know.

I’ve spent a career dealing with the complete opposite. People with egos who can just not bare to admit when they don’t know and will instead just dribble absolute shit just as confidently as an LLM does until you challenge them enough that they just decide to pretend the conversation never happened.

It’s why I, someone fairly mediocre have been able to excel because despite not being the smartest person in the room, I can at least sniff bullshit.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#502

Post by globular-toast »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #419
herdcall wrote: post #362

It badly hallucinated in my test. I asked it "Rust crate to access Postgres with Arrow support" and it made up an arrow-postgres crate. It even gave sample Rust code using this fictional crate! Below is its response (code example omitted): I can recommend a Rust crate for accessing PostgreSQL with Arrow support. The primary crate you'll want to use is arrow-postgres, which combines the PostgreSQL connectivity of the…

> I asked it "Rust crate to access Postgres with Arrow support" Is that how you actually use llms? Like a Google search box?

It's funny because many people type full sentence questions into search engines too. It's usually a sign of being older and/or not very experienced with computers. One thing about geeks like me is we will always figure out what the bare minimum is (at least for work, I hope everyone has at least a few things they enjoy and don't try to optimise).

Re: Claude can now search the web

#503

Post by fhd2 »

rank0 wrote: post #431
ldoughty wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea behind UBI is that people do jobs that they want to do...

Right! So everyone would choose to pursue passions/interests/leisure. We would be going into debt with no meaningful benefit to the taxpayer. Direct malinvestment.

This is drawing a line between "us" (tax paying citizens + the government) and "them" (people on benefits). I don't think it's that simple.

I imagine just like with existing benefits, the majority of people wouldn't feel great about being on UBI doing nothing, and they would pursue something that gives them a better social standing, a better sense of purpose, a good challenge, whatever motivates an individual. It's why lots of people do volunteer work, work on important open source software, and so on. Sure, there's outliers that actually proudly slack off, but you don't address specific problems with generic solutions.

But more importantly, having the _option_ to fall back on benefits means people need to take fewer risks to pursue their talents and likely be of more value to society than if they did whatever puts food on the table today. Case in point: People born into a family that can finance them through college are more likely to become engineers than people born into poor households. On the flip side, some people do white collar jobs vs something like being a medic to uphold their standard of living from the higher salary, not out of preference.

I think it would need careful management, but I believe there's every reason to be optimistic.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#504

Post by starttoaster »

prawn wrote: post #343
Toenex wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we already have Universal Basic Income, you just need to have a pointless job to collect it.

One suggested weakness of UBI is a lack of purpose. I wonder if the "solution" is somewhat as you implied: jobs without a strict return on investment. You get your stipend, but you're keeping your block clean by sweeping and mulching. They're getting theirs in exchange for cranking out sourdough at cost for the neighbourhood. Someone else gardens for elderly residents.

That sounds like a simpler life/role, not a pointless one.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#505

Post by moooo99 »

nextts wrote: post #453
birken wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI isn't "reading the web" though, they are reading the top hits on the search results, and are free-riding on the access that Google/Bing gets in order to provide actual user traffic to their sites. Many webmasters specifically opt their pages out of being in the search results (via robots.txt and/or "noindex" directives) when they believe the cost/benefit of the bot traffic isn't worth the user traffic they may…

Well you have no rights when you expose a server to the internet. Other than copyright of course.

> Well you have no rights when you expose a server to the internet.

Technically you don’t, but there are still laws that affect what you can legally do when accessing the web. Beyond the copyright issues that have been outlined by people a lot more qualified than me, I think you could also make the point that AI crawlers actively cause direct and indirect financial harm.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#506

Post by labrador »

sshine wrote: post #488
labrador wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame Elon Musk and his Nazi salutes and Hitler apologist retweets for that. It can't be much simpler to understand.

I’m happy you’re not near my car.

I'm not a moron. I don't blame Tesla car owners. I put the blame where it belongs: Elon Musk

Re: Claude can now search the web

#507

Post by szszrk »

eli wrote: post #146
HankWozHere wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi Assistant allows you to do search with LLM queries. So far I feel it bears reliable results. For instance - I tried couple of queries for product suggestions and came back with some good results. Whilst it’s a premium service , I find the offering to be of good value.

It's neat but I've found the value kinda variable. It seems heavily influenced by whatever the first few hits are for a query based on your question, so if it's the kind of question that can be answered with a simple search it works well. But of course those are the kinds of questions where you need it the least. I find myself much more often using their "Quick Answer" feature, which shows a brief LLM answer above th…

There is one more aspect of Kagi assistant that I don't see discussed here. I'd love to support some "mass tipping jar" service and/or "self hosted agent" that would benefit site owners after my AI actions spammed them.

You can simply just pass it a direct link to some data, if you feel it's more appropriate. It works amazingly well in their multistep Ki model.

It's capable of creating code that does analysis I asked for with moderate amount of issues (mostly things like it used the wrong file extracted from .zip, but it's math/code is in general correct). Scraps url/downloads files/unarchives/analyses content/creates code to produce result I asked/runs that code.

This is the first time I really see AI helping me do tasks I would otherwise not attempt due to lack of experience or time.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#508

Post by moooo99 »

wraptile wrote: post #470
scoofy wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It may not be very long before the big majority of web searches are via AI. If that happens, blocking AI will mean blocking most people too. If that happens a big majority of websites will go bankrupt and won't exist anymore to be searched. Problem solved!

big doubt on that and maybe that's a good thing? Let's be honest, right now most of the web is dominated by low effort spam. Taking money away from view farming would dramatically increase the web quality of the web. Suddently that guy who's really into "key gardening" doing research and publishing detailed results on his website actually has viewers — isn't this good? Especially since website hosting is close to bei…

> big doubt on that and maybe that's a good thing? Let's be honest, right now most of the web is dominated by low effort spam.

I think that is funny considering it is likely going to have the exact opposite effect.

Low effort blog spam is cheap to make. And it is often part of content marketing strategies where brand visibility is all that matters, so not much harm if the viability is directly on your site or in an AI chatbit interface.

Quality content on the other hand is hard to make. And there are two groups of people who make such content:

1. individuals or small groups that like to share for the sake of sharing. They likely won’t care about the AI crawlers stealing their content, although I think there is a big overlap between people who still run blogs and those who dislike AI.

2. small organizations that are dedicated to one specific topic and are often largely ad financed. These organizations would likely stop to exist in such an AI search dominated world.

> Especially since website hosting is close to being free these days.

It is under specific circumstances. The problem is that those AI crawlers don’t check by once in a while like Google does but instead they hit the site very frequently. For a static site this won’t be much of an issue except for maybe bandwidth. For more complex sites like - say - the GitLab instances for OSS projects, reality paints a different picture

Re: Claude can now search the web

#509

Post by sumedh »

klabb3 wrote: post #368
wongarsu wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, being in the cultural zeitgeist is a huge part of their current moat. To people in the street OpenAI is the company making LLMs. Sam has to make sure it stays that way

Fake it til you make it vibes. I understand why he would do it, what I find strange is that it inspires confidence in the market.

What are they faking?

Re: Claude can now search the web

#510

Post by UnreachableCode »

tcdent wrote: post #102

Searching the web is a great feature in theory, but every implementation I've used so far looks at the top X hits and then interprets it to be the correct answer. When you're talking to an LLM about popular topics or common errors, the top results are often just blogspam or unresolved forum posts, so the you never get an answer to your problem. More of an indicator that web search is more unusable than ever, but inte…

> web search is more unusable than ever

I’m curious why I’m seeing a lot of people thinking this lately. Google definitely made the algorithm worse for customers and better for ads, but I’m almost always able to find what I’m looking for in the working day still. What are other people’s experiences?

Post reply on HN