But it can’t do that.
It can do a lot of other things, useful or just fun. But it’s not a virtual professor that knows the correct answer to any question.
But, it is completely incapable of saying "I don't know the answer to that" and will spew the wrong answer to anything. For fun I have arguments with ChatGPT that it is just making things up and it should just tell me "I don't know" and it will happily say "I'm sorry, you are right. Here is the right answer <insert made up fact>" and it will do so generating random garbage indefinitely.
The problem is that I can't trust it to provide facts any better than asking my bull-shitting co-worker who is convinced he is right about everything and when called out says "yeah, that's what I was saying, <insert contradictory thing>"
Today, first of all, you have to be careful to ignore all the fake search results that are actually ads.
Then there’s the problem of spam sites. References to what you want from Pinterest, but no way to get to the original source. Copies of Stack Overflow answers (or whatever primary source) on some scam domain that steals content to show ads. But it ranks very close to the primary source. Gotta ignore that.
My new favorite is Google ignoring what I’m actually searching for. I can search for “objective-c library to do X without Y”.
Google will helpfully give me pages and pages of “swift library to do X”. That is a much more popular search, so clearly that’s what I meant. Forget Objective-C. Forget without Y. Just dozens of tutorials on the far easier/more popular thing I’m NOT doing.
At this point in many ways it’s worse than the old keyword-based search engine like HotBot. They at least tried to find what I asked for instead of guessing what I probably meant based on popularity.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s kind of amazing that I can search Google for “the female comedian who was in a movie with a dinosaur” and the first result is about Tammy and the T-Rex, a truly awful movie with Whoopi Goldberg.
But that’s offset by seemingly simple searches that go sideways for no discernible reason.
I want 2007 Google back.
Edit: and don’t forget the ways they bent the market. Why does every recipe have a 5+ paragraph story to go with it? Because without that Google penalizes the page for having “no content”. So now all recipe sites are terrible, because they have to be to get visitors.
The SEO mess was indirectly caused by Google PageRank and other related optimizations.
Maybe we want 2007 Internet instead?
The AI world will inevitably lead to "content optimization", so the Chatbots that will be asked "questions about life" (as of Today, where people usually search on Google "I have fever/depression/a turbulent child/tomatoes in my fridge, what should I do?") will more frequently answer specific products.
Instead of promoting a single website (Current SEO strategy), content producer will be tempted to produce many texts on a great variety of sources, to reinforce the model on a specific subject.
Time will tell if in 2035, we will want 2023 ChatGPT.
I meant something along the lines of “I want Google to be as effective today as 2007 Google was in its era.”
I know Google and especially their ads are responsible for a huge chunk of what I dislike about today’s Google and the web.
ChatGPT 2026 being trained (probably unknowingly) on the output of ChatGPT 2023 is going to be ‘fun’.
Google actually gets this one wrong. "Tammy/Tanny and the T-Rex" starred Denise Richards and Paul Walker. You're thinking of "Theodore Rex". Both were in fact truly awful, although I have a soft spot for the dinosaur making a phone call gag.
In my opinion, "AI-assisted interactive Web search" absolutely a killer app for LLMs, and will be a huge step forward in our ability to quickly consume the huge amounts of information out there. The fact that it's a "chat" is useful only insofar as the chat history gets absorbed into the prompt, and it allows you to advance the search incrementally and iteratively using natural language queries.
The fact that the output is designed to feel "chatty" to some extent is immaterial. Chatbots, as you point out, are not a killer app, and fixating on the "chat" aspect as anything other than a means of interactivity is missing the point. People mostly don't want or care about simulating real human interactions in general. They just want more useful, more efficient interactions with their machine. Any perception of chattiness is best used in order to serve that goal, and should not in my opinion be a goal in and of itself.
That said, it's a shame that Ask.com isn't running this, otherwise we'd be able to call it Ask Jeeves 2.0. Now we have... Bing Chat? Poor Cortana!
The GPT-4-powered Chatbot agent in Bing. But I think GP is pointing out that, since the models underlying ChatGPT (both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) are trained on a wide corpus including substantial content from the public web, even when they aren’t integrated into something like the new Bing, they are inherently a kind of (potentially somewhat stale) AI web search on their own.
Mad because (pre ChatGPT) I had been getting better results for a little while than with Google, and also mad because I expect Google will soon screw up their search engine in the same way.
What I'm referring to is that popular queries suddenly seem to have a much larger "shadow" making it impossible to search for anything remotely similar.
This was already a degenerative disease degrading Google search, but what I assume is the AI infusion to Bing seems to have taken it to a new level.
Do they? I saw someone recommend using ChatGPT to learn how something worked earlier today on HN. And there were replies that agreed.
A ton of people seem excited about AI search. Google is bad enough without it at this point. But to me it feels like those helper chatbots that appeared everywhere a few years ago, redux.
Sure they have a more realistic tone and can understand questions far better than basic pattern matching. But it still doesn’t work.
I switched to DuckDuckGo about 2 months ago. The results seem about 95% as good as Google for most things, without all the ads and nonsense.
I have a hard time seeing today’s AI, impressive as it is in many ways, making search results more accurate. If they wanted to do that I feel like Google has a ton of low hanging fruit to fix already instead of hasty “features” to try and not look “behind”.