AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

Re:AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines by godelski on Sunday December 25, 2022 @11:09PM (#34134494)

Because to make it focus on always producing accurate results (or rather a very low false positive rate) you need to dramatically change and tune the model. Which is much harder than what Google does because it means you'd also need to vet a lot of facts as well (by weighting certain sources, not individually). Or allowing it to search the internet (which also comes with other issues and if it is using Google to do that then it doesn't really kill Google). I do think Google's knowledge graph is more in line with what you're actually thinking. Lots of Google searches can be done without actually clicking links.

There's also the ethical question. For example, duckduckgo will show you stack overflow answers. Google could easily do this but they have already gotten flack for displaying answers and taking away clicks from sites, which means reduced ad revenue for the resource actually being used. We could make even stronger arguments about services like ChatGPT in their current form, let alone the one we're talking about.

If we think a bit further in the future there's another extension that might not be what we want. Suppose our model contains all current human knowledge and can accurately give you answers and even produce paragraphs at will. This kills off a lot of websites. Is this a good thing? Suppose we incorporate an image generator along similar lines and now we have text and image search. That's a huge centralization force. There are a lot of great benefits to this that I don't want to downplay, but we should also think about if this is actually what we want because there are downsides too.

I thought I should also add that I had an at length discussion of these LLMs being Stochastic Parrots (an how we know they are) in a thread from 2 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34113011

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines by prox on Monday December 26, 2022 @02:17AM (#34135505)

What we want is not what we get unless it makes bank. Nobody (generalizing here) works to better humanity, they work to get money. if it aligns well that’s just shear luck. The world needs a lot more people who want see the world to succeed.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines by godelski on Monday December 26, 2022 @03:23AM (#34135782)

I think this is a highly pessimistic view. While I know many that are profit motivated and I won't argue that this isn't the majority, I know many people that just want to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. I'll tell you that personally my dream is to just be able to research and not worry about constraints like publishing (I'd rather open blog) or computational constraints (don't need a data center. A few dozen A100s is more than enough). There are a lot of people like me and a lot that would be like that if they didn't have financial constraints. Having this dream is a privilege and even I didn't have it when I was living paycheck to paycheck.

So I think if you want to see more people with my dream then push towards a post scarce world. We'll still have plenty of resource constraints, but it does change the game a lot. I think you'll see more artists as well. A new renaissance. But I fear the transitionary period might be quite difficult and disruptive. I do think such a future has a fairly good probability of happening within many of our lifetimes and almost guaranteed if we actively pushed for it (or solved adjacent problems like HLI).

So don't be so pessimistic. There's millions of people out there that are interested in pushing the bounds of human knowledge because that's what they want. I'd argue that physicists and mathematicians wouldn't exist if this weren't true. They get paid shit for extremely difficult work. We could say the same about many sciences. While not all of these people are in it for bettering humanity (just for pursuing knowledge) it often aligns and there is a decent portion who believe this is the point of science and our purpose, as humans, in life.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines by prox on Monday December 26, 2022 @10:54PM (#34144908)

While I see what you are saying and there are people doing the good work, when I read of companies circumventing the Russian embargo knowing full well their stuff gets turned into weapons, and people without thought buying the cheapest shit from amazon and alibaba made in dire circumstances, I am not so sure, or at least, do not see enough awareness for a treshold changing outcome. Some play the economic game on a criminal level, and some profit without giving back and without scruples.

[ Parent | on HN ]