Seems like very similar to just asking the model for a question and asking it to provide sources? Is this a realistic competitor to Google search and friends?
ChatGPT Search
841–850 of 1001 posts
Re: ChatGPT Search
#842Been 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…
Remember the semantic web where people annotate search pages with data? I think the "meta" keywords tag was the closest that ever got to adoption.
Guess why it failed? It was largely used as a way to trick search engines. Same reason as your vision of the perfectly honest and correct search engine and look chatbot will never be perfect. It's because people lie to search engines to spam and get traffic they don't deserve. The whole history of search is Google and others dealing with spam. Same goes for email. Google largely defeating spam made them the kings of the email world.
Everyone will need their own personal spam filter for the world for everything ones the artificial super intelligences fill the whole world with spam, scams and just plain old social engineering propaganda because we will be like helpless four year old children in the world of AI super intelligence without our AI parents to look out for us.
Your vision of the god system determining what is truth is like saying there will be a single source of truth for what is and is not a spam email. Not going to scale and not going to be perfect, but good enough with AI and technology. Really hope there's an opt-out though since Google had memoryholed most of the Internet.
Re: ChatGPT Search
#843Been 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…
Memory is only a con in some use cases. If the LLM goes down the wrong path, sometimes its impossible to get it to think differently without asking it to wipe its memory or starting a new session with a blank context.
Re: ChatGPT Search
#844Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously) Er, no, the meaning of the question is ambiguous, so I'm not sure "has a single truthful answer" is accurate. What does "can" mean? If you mean "permitted", then no. But if you mean can they vote anyway and get away with it? It's clearly happened before (as rare as it mig…
If they got away with it then how do you know it's happened?
Murphy's law, arguably. If you can imagine a way it could happen, it most probably did.
Re: ChatGPT Search
#845How do content creators get paid?
Re: ChatGPT Search
#846Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. With an LLM answering the que…
> Who Gets To Decide What Is True? Seems particularly to be a US based phenomenon. Unlike the more transparent manipulation seen under dictatorships... Where people generally recognize propaganda for what it is, even if they can’t openly challenge it—some in USA live within entirely new realities.
Definitely a US based phenomenon, but sadly like other US based things it spreads to other countries. I talk with friends in CA and EU who are seeing some of the junk we saw 10 years ago with "what is fact"
You would think common sense prevails...
Re: ChatGPT Search
#847Been 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 tend to be more pessimistic about the incentives getting fixed than others are. I also think the situation is more complex than some of the people replying to you.
(1) Search is already heavily AI driven, and Google is clearly going in that direction. Gemini is currently separate, but they'll blend it in with search over time, and no doubt search already uses LLM for some tasks under the hood. So ChatGPT search is an evolution on the current model rather than a big step in a new direction. The main benefit is you can ask the search questions to refine or followup.
(2) Aside from the economic incentives faced by search engines, there is the fact that algorithms are tuned toward a central tendency. The central tendency of question askers will always be much less informed than the most informed extreme. Google was much better when the average user was technical. The need to capture mobile searches is one force that made it return on average worse results. Similarly if Kagi has a quality advantage now, we need to be realistic about how much of that quality is driven by its users being more technical.
(3) I think micropayment schemes have generally asked several orders of magnitude more for a page view than users are willing to pay. As long as content creators value their content much more highly than consumers do, they'll stick with advertising which lets them overcharge and gives consumers less of an option to say no to the content.
Re: ChatGPT Search
#848Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean with "search about myself" here?
I just wrote my name and asked questions about who it is, what he does, what he writes about etc. I have a personal blog, and I wrote a master's thesis recently. I also have a pretty detailed partially public LinkedIn profile and GitHub so if it can dig around it will find out more than enough for me to assess its ability to provide information. I also have a relatively rare name, there's only five or so of us with m…
Ok, so not really like "what is the nature of self". I actually was more expecting something like your answer, but still asked as I would have been more interested to discuss more about other way to engage in such an inquiry.
Re: ChatGPT Search
#849How do content creators get paid?
When people click through to their website and see ads or buy product.
Re: ChatGPT Search
#850Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google instantly gives bad results, that's why.
People say this but I have not had the experience at all. Google results arent perfect, but the experience of Google is way better than any of these LLM search apps. I don't even know how anyone can disagree. You have to enter your query, wait for GPT to search, then wait for it to generate it response character by character and then you have to hope it what you want or you have to start over . Starting over on Googl…
Have you tried Kagi? I stopped using Google years ago.