Curiously, literally nobody on earth uses this workflow.
People must be in complete denial to pretend that LLM (re)search engines can’t be used to trivially save hours or days of work. The accuracy isn’t perfect, but entirely sufficient for very many use cases, and will arguably continue to improve in the near future.
That seems to be a big part of it, yes. I think in part it’s a reaction to perceived competition.
Frankly I've seen enough dangerous hallucinations from LLM search engines to immediately discard anything it says.
Versus finding the answer by clicking into the first few search results links and scanning text that might not have the answer.
They do it by going out and searching, not by storing a list of sources in their corpus.
Because when I ask chatgpt/perplexity things like "can I microwave a whole chicken" or "is Australia bigger than the moon" it will happily google for the answers and give me links to the sites it pulled from for me to verify for myself.
On the other hand, if you ask it to summarize the state-of-the art in quantum computing or something, it's much more likely to speak "off the top of its head", and even when it pulls in knowledge from web searches it'll rely much more on it's own "internal corpus" to put together an answer, which is definitely likely to contain hallucinations and obviously has no "source" aside from "it just knowing"(which it's discouraged from saying so it makes up sources if you ask for them).
If anything, I have the opposite problem. The sources are the best part. I have such a mountain of papers to read from my LLM deep searches that the challenge is in figuring out how to get through and organize all the information.
When it gives you a link, it literally takes you to the part of the page that it got its answer from. That's how we can quickly validate.
The reason why people don't use LLMs to "trivially save hours or days of work" is because LLMs don't do that. People would use a tool that works. This should be evidence that the tools provide no exceptional benefit, why do you think that is not true?
If they do, you’ll be in good company. That post is about the exact opposite of what people usually link it for. I’ll let Dan explain:
So yes, it is the opposite of why people link to it, which is to mock an attitude (which wasn’t there) of hubris and lack of understanding of what makes a good product.
It's why it caught the zeitgeist at the time and why it's still apropos in this conversation now.
None of those things are true. Which is the point I’m making. Go read the original conversation. All of it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Don’t skip Brandon’s reply.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9479
It is patently absurd to claim that someone who quickly understood the explanation, learned from it, conceded where they were wrong, is somehow “profoundly out-of-touch” and “lost all perspective”. It’s the exact opposite.
I agree with Dan that we’d be lucky if all conversations were like that.
If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations. (I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.)
It has no human counterpart in the same sense that humans still go to the library (or a search engine) when they don't know something, and we don't have the contents of all the books (or articles/websites) stored in our head.