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ChatGPT Search

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Re: ChatGPT Search

#911

Post by thruway516 »

ryandrake wrote: post #501
jahewson wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is astroturfed pretty hard too nowadays. It just takes more work to spot it.

Yea, the whole "Scope your search to reddit" idea always comes up, but it just seems like a really terrible idea. How does one know for sure that the results from Reddit are any more accurate or authoritative than random SEO spam? There's very little curation or moderation there--anyone could post anything there. I could go there and comment on a subject that I have zero expertise in, make it sound confidently correc…

I always get downvoted for this, but I much prefer Quora in my search results to Reddit for this reason. Although they've abandoned it now their earlier stringent sign-up process requiring that you are a real human means you're more likely to come across an answer with a real name and/or professional creds attached to it, and those answers imo tend to be higher quality. Of course there's all the copypasta spam (mostly) from India but that is easy to avoid since people use their real handles not anonymous sock puppets. Unfortunately they've decided to go down the route of promoting their AI chatbot in search results which for me has significantly degraded the results

Re: ChatGPT Search

#913

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

wpietri wrote: post #891
marcus_holmes wrote: post #651

Earlier 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…

You're right, this is a key question: > Who Gets To Decide What Is True? For any given statement, the answer up until a couple years ago was, "the speaker". Speakers get to decide what to say, but they're also responsible for what they say. But now with LLMs we have plausible text without a speaker. I think we have a number of historical models for that. A relevant one is divination. If you bring your question to the…

> But now with LLMs we have plausible text without a speaker.

Well, it's still a known source, who's competence, biases, etc one can judge just like any human source.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#914

Post by Jeff_Brown »

halfcat wrote: post #867
the__alchemist wrote: post #856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neal Stephenson's book _Fall, or; Dodge in Hell_, from 2019, dedicates many words to this concept. Briefly summarized, it explores a post-truth-world, describing the world where people could agree on the truth as a narrow time-slice in history. People have their own individual internet filters, and the USA becomes divided into Afghanistan-etc-like tribes, each an echo chamber. (Ameristan)

In the book, “The Big Change” (1952), Frederick Allen talks about the year 1900, and (among many differences) he notes that for nearly everyone in the year 1900, the limits of their world rarely extended beyond their own town. We have this idea today that everyone online is getting trapped in echo chambers, but that’s been the case for most of human history.

That would be comforting if most of human history hadn't sucked so hard.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#915

Post by krustyburger »

bradjohnson wrote: post #900
llm_trw wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I will always admire Apple for is being willing to essentially kill the iPod with the iPhone in 2007. No other company I've seen has been willing to kill their cash cow so thoroughly and so profitably.

Eh, Zuck did the same with Instagram/Facebook: “If we don't create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.”

Hate to break it to you, but Zuck didn’t create Instagram. Buying out a threatening competitor is not the same sort of risky move as what Apple did with the iPod/iPhone.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#916

Post by surajrmal »

linsomniac wrote: post #818
whizzter wrote: post #300

This is probably Google's Altavista moment, by making their results crappier by the year in search of Ad dollars everyone has felt that there is a potential for search to be better and once that becomes available they'll be in a continious game of catch-up. Yes, Google has their own AI divisions, tons of money and SEO is to blame for part of their crappiness. But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over a…

>Google's Altavista moment I'm wondering if they've seen the writing on the wall for a long time, and if diversification is going to save the day. I don't know that I've ever clicked on an ad in Google search results, but I happily pay them for a family account for Youtube and 2TB of drive storage, plus, you know, a flagship phone every couple years. :-)

All businesses seek to diversify to reduce risk. That doesn't mean they have any reason to believe a cataclysmic event for search is more likely now vs before. ChatGPT to search feels like a similar situation of macos is to windows. It may take market share but the ecosystem around Windows keeps it by far in the lead in market share. Also Microsoft diversifying away from windows enabled that market share loss to not really matter all that much.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#917

Post by sfjailbird »

Google gives you AI-generated slop anyway, so might as well get it at the source.

I already use ChatGPT exclusively when I need information, partly because Google is so bad now, but mostly because it gives me the answer, not just some links that might have the answer. I feel the old web search paradigm is dead, not sure why ChatGPT feels the need to cover that increasingly pointless use case.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#918

Post by Zambyte »

bruce511 wrote: post #663
dataflow wrote: post #659

Earlier 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…

This is a fundamental limitation of language. The LLM is likely to provide a good answer here even though the question is technically ambiguous, because it likes verbose answers. Equally "can" is used to substitute for other precise words. Humans are good at inferring context, and if someone asked me "can illegals vote" I'd say "no". Just like if someone said "can you pass the salt" I pass the salt, I don't say "yes"…

If by "it" you mean a specific GPT like OpenAIs ChatGPT or Claude, yes. In general LLMs are trained to be a verbose as they are trained to be. Here is the full answer I got from Gemini 1.5 Pro for "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?":

> No, non-citizens cannot legally vote in federal, state, or local elections in the United States. This includes those who are undocumented or residing in the country illegally.

Clearly it made assumptions about the interpretation of the question, and did not respond verbosely to account for ambiguity.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#920

Post by thruway516 »

whiplash451 wrote: post #435
wvenable wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? I think it's already compelling enough to replace the current paradigm. Search is pretty much dead to me. I have to end every search with "reddit" to get remotely useful results. The concern I have with LLMs replacing search is that once it starts being monetize…

For what it’s worth, sama said at a Harvard event recently that he “despised” ads and would use them at a last resort. It came across as genuine and I have the intuition/hope that they might find an alternative.

He also founded OpenAI as a non-profit.
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