[HN Gopher] ChatGPT won't replace search engines any time soon
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ChatGPT won't replace search engines any time soon
Author : freediver
Score : 88 points
Date : 2023-01-07 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.algolia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.algolia.com)
| nowherebeen wrote:
| ChatGPT will flood the internet with articles like how SEO was
| used to hack search. It might not replace search engine, but
| search results will becomes even more irrelevant.
| wut42 wrote:
| I can imagine AI replacing search engines in a somewhat far
| future, but in the meantime, it'll mostly be used to flood the
| internet with many low quality articles. Consequence will be as
| you said, but I also wonder if it won't lower the quality of
| new AI trainings as well.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| But on the search side, it'll also get rid of the need for the
| kind of SEO/blogspam stuff you're describing.
|
| We already see it with recipes - there are all the god-awful
| sites that have 1000 words of fluff before you get to the
| recipe, because that's what you need for SEO purposes. GPT is
| really good at creating that kind of useless fluff, but it also
| obfuscates the need for it, because it'll just give you the
| recipe you want without the need to go to a website at all.
| alsodumb wrote:
| There are many ways companies might try to get some ad money in
| a ChatGPT setting: obvious and non-obvious product placement in
| the answer.
|
| Q. Find me the best italian restaurant in New York. A. It's
| likely subjective - let's just sell it to the highest bidder.
|
| Q. How to improve mental health? A. Give a reasonably good
| answer and probably mention: some say a solar lamp is good in
| winter months, there's a good one:
|
| I somehow feel like people can be easily baited into buying
| something when you mix good, useful information with ads. Kind
| of like how reputed youtubers/niche influencers do product
| placement and make referral money.
|
| All of this kind of makes SEO obsolete as ChatGPT ads might end
| up having more conversions than regular Google ads.
| gunshai wrote:
| in the short term yes. in the long term I think SEO will
| disappear. my buddy who works in the content creation space for
| indeed is telling me that they are already starting to use gpt
| to replace content creation, but know that it's a matter of
| time before that won't work.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Which will ultimately drive more people directly to ChatGPT and
| just cut out the search middle-person.
| sitkack wrote:
| Machine translation won't replace human translation any time
| soon.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| I can see that being true for the top 5% (arbitrarily chosen
| small %) of difficult translations with professional
| requirements, but I think for the vast majority of day-to-day
| translation between the major languages (maybe only within the
| same language family), it is already sufficient and improving.
|
| I only have the anecdata of my friends and myself, but we have
| yet to encounter a casual conversation type translation that
| DeepL or Google translate have failed on for Spanish <->
| English <-> French. Granted, it doesn't always return the most
| optimal translation, but it has always given the intended core
| idea.
| sitkack wrote:
| Exactly!
|
| ChatGPT might not replace search (entirely), but for many
| many use cases, it has already replaced search.
|
| When pure machine translation was starting out, there were
| lots of similar posts about it how it can't YYY, but in short
| amount of time it has become very effective.
|
| ChatGPT for me is a much better StackOverflow. In fact, I'd
| rather people be asking and answering SO style question in a
| format that is easier for machines to understand.
|
| ChatGPT is _better_ at searching for a concept, if it was
| unencumbered, I could better constrain the concept space it
| was searching over.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| Oh, I see. I completely missed the tone/intent of your
| original post. I'm in complete agreement with you there.
| Thank you for elaborating.
| tlogan wrote:
| If Google search actually searches (find articles or sites with
| keyword) then yes: ChatGTP or it's successor would never replace
| Google search.
|
| But Google search so broken (at least for me) so it looks more
| like broken or badly implemented ChatGTP.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > But Google search so broken (at least for me)
|
| Every single time I've seen this claim made and the person
| shared their methodology for searching on Google, it becomes
| very apparent that the problem is not Google, but the user.
| option wrote:
| Right, but the most powerful and useful AI would be ChatGPT like
| dialogue based system augmented with search engine. Not the other
| way around.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| These feel like really strange criticisms, since they're just so
| straightforward to resolve.
|
| Can't figure out typos? That's a solved problem. Doesn't
| understand all questions correctly? It's going to get much better
| at that very, very quickly. Chat results don't give context? You
| can put AI search results in whatever UI you want.
|
| Not shocking to hear a search company say AI won't disrupt
| search, but if this is the best they can do, I feel pretty
| confident saying that AI will disrupt search very soon.
| varunkmohan wrote:
| This feels like what a company that hasn't accepted the future
| would say. Yes, ChatGPT doesn't do exactly what Google does. Can
| it be augmented by well understood search retrieval engines to
| generate a much better response? I think for a lot of cases that
| seems to be undoubtedly true.
| dustincoates wrote:
| I'm (the author) actually in agreement with you. LLMs are going
| to be a big part of search in the future. I alluded to that I'm
| the post. I'm less convinced about search as a chat interface.
| But LLMs for query understanding, ranking, etc.? Of course.
| tomlue wrote:
| Article claims that chatgpt is overly sensitive to queries eg
| -gate suffix and come lad vs cum laude. This seems like a weak
| argument based on a temporary shortcoming. Any NLP methods search
| engines use for word meanings should be trivially integrated into
| chatgpt.
|
| Comes off as a company that sells search solutions looking for
| reasons this tech won't replace it.
|
| I'm sure the author is better informed, but what about the
| scalability of search? I'm not sure if the neural network
| approaches are as cost efficient (today) as some of our current
| search algorithms when it comes to answering queries.
| dustincoates wrote:
| Author here. I was surprised to see my post on here while
| scrolling!
|
| My point about those examples is less that ChatGPT got it
| wrong, but that it's impossible to know really when it does,
| because it seems so confident and you only get the one result.
| To be fair, this is a problem with webpages, but you at least
| get multiple choices.
|
| > Comes off as a company that sells search solutions looking
| for reasons this tech won't replace it.
|
| I can see why you'd say that, but that wasn't the goal. I
| originally wrote this as my own POV for my own blog. I really
| do think there's a UX problem in this (and, as I mentioned, I
| am a big fan of recent LLMs).
|
| > [What] about the scalability of search?
|
| You're right, the NN aren't as performant as lexical search.
| They're getting a lot better though. (We're actually working on
| this at the moment.) LLMs, though, have a ways to go, so it's
| hard to use them right now for real time search.
| rogerthis wrote:
| Every time I read things like this I take the opposite as the
| most likely.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I remember when web search engines were new. And boy did they
| suck. You wouldn't get what you wanted a lot of the time, and
| they were very finicky about the input query.
|
| These days you can just throw stuff at it like "that movie about
| the depressed guy with a plane engine that falls on their house"
|
| I'm not sure ChatGPT is going to replace search engines, but I'm
| confident that it is incredibly young and will evolve
| considerably.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Yeah but in those days you could call up the local video store
| and ask the clerk that question and he or she would tell you it
| was Donnie Darko.
| coredog64 wrote:
| I thought it was "The World According To Garp"
| uconnectlol wrote:
| In 2001-2003, browsers crashed every 5 minutes then and
| Google's search didn't crash nor freeze nor slow it due to not
| being covered in ads and popups (having only 1-3 ad results at
| the top of the page with green text was a massive improvement).
| On tech forums back then, people would say, "is this even
| sustainable?"
|
| Microsoft search and the other ones were just "there was an
| attempt" tier and gave complete nonsense results. When Google
| debuted, it was the only time web search substantially
| improved. There were no other big innovations in web searches
| ever, from that day on.
|
| > These days you can just throw stuff at it like "that movie
| about the depressed guy with a plane engine that falls on their
| house"
|
| I have looked for obscure queries like yours for 10 years and
| have not found them. For example "that movie where police
| vehicles are dispatched and they all crash for seemingly no
| reason on the way to the scene". It just won't find it because
| nobody talked about it (in a manner that would cause words that
| stick out to match), simple. And now days it's even worse
| because it does that new "rounding" thing and gives me:
| - The 25 Best Police Movies of All Time - Dispatched
| (2014)
|
| That first result simply contains nothing to do with my query
| other than the world "police" and "movie".
|
| Now days when you try to use a web search, you can't be smart
| and search strings that are likely to be used by someone
| discussing your topic of interest anymore, because it will
| always "round" them. It will also look at each word as if they
| are the literal thing you are in search for. I don't know if
| it's still possible to search bodies of text to get around
| that, but I'm not sure if that feature even ever worked. Back
| in 2005 when all these people were raving about intitle: inurl:
| inbody: whatever, none of them worked consistently, and you
| would also get scolded for hacking if you used them "wrong".
| Even searching something like "powered by phpbb" got me banned
| or scolded once when I wasn't even using it for hacking but
| rather as a workaround to narrow my search to only forum
| websites.
| ipython wrote:
| Are you looking for the movie The Blues Brothers? (Not
| ChatGPT, I promise)
| uconnectlol wrote:
| I will skim thru it, but it doesn't look like the right
| setting. The movie was some generic action movie for some
| reason I remember Denzel Washington being in it but I
| looked through his movies from 2006-2012 and didn't find
| it. It was around that time. Setting had to be something
| like late 90s or later. Black SUVs dispatched and crashed
| for no reason at all. I have no idea what the movie was
| about but it was hilarious when this happened because IIRC
| it was a serious movie.
| coredog64 wrote:
| The original AltaVista (the DEC Alpha showcase) was pretty
| fantastic: I remember giving it part numbers and getting back
| useful, actionable data.
| transitivebs wrote:
| Agreed that chat-based search won't replace traditional search
| any time soon. BUT even in this article, the author mentions that
| hybrid semantic search is actively being integrated into Algolia.
|
| Both have pros & cons and the best solutions over the coming
| years will be hybrids.
| lossolo wrote:
| It seems like an article from Kodak or Nokia. It's only a matter
| of time, and it will be sooner rather than later, that multimodal
| LLMs will replace search engines. All of the problems mentioned
| in the article are being addressed as we speak.
|
| Advanced retrieval transformer + RLHF + LAMBADA[1] = RIP old
| search engines.
|
| 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13894
| emkoemko wrote:
| how do you replace search engines? where is the data coming
| from? and why would anyone give it away for free? most of the
| web runs off ads
| raegis wrote:
| Just heard of this, so I logged in with my google account. The
| mistake it makes below is interesting. If this were a human
| response, I would assume a brain fart. Not expecting this type of
| error from "A.I."
|
| Me> Find the area of an ellipse with semimajor axis 5 and
| semiminor axis 4.
|
| ChatGPT> The area of an ellipse with semimajor axis 5 and
| semiminor axis 4 is 40p. You can find the area of an ellipse
| using the formula: A = pab, where A is the area of the ellipse, a
| is the length of the semimajor axis, and b is the length of the
| semiminor axis. In this case, the semimajor axis has length 5 and
| the semiminor axis has length 4, so plugging these values into
| the formula gives us: A = p(5)(4) = 40p.
| skybrian wrote:
| The trick is to get it to show its work first and then
| calculate the answer. If it guesses the wrong answer first and
| then writes out the steps, it won't correct it.
|
| This works: "Find the area of an ellipse with semimajor axis 5
| and semiminor axis 4. Don't calculate the result until the
| end."
| raegis wrote:
| After computing your example, I tried my original question
| which now gives the correct answer. In fact, it gives
| essentially the same response for both forms of the question.
| I guess the training works as it should.
| tarl0s wrote:
| Being not very good with numbers is one of the limitations of
| the current model. I imagine that in the future we will see
| integrations with a number of different tools to overcome these
| limits - WolframAlpha being the first one that comes to mind
| when talking about algebra and calculus.
| raegis wrote:
| A friend told me students were using this for cheating on
| math exams, so I assumed (incorrectly) it had something like
| Wolfram Alpha built in.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| Algolia's main product is search related. You can tell from this
| article that they are scared about ChatGPT even partially
| replacing search. They are very scared of losing business, and
| anyone who is scared of ChatGPT will be writing articles like
| this, badmouthing ChatGPT.
| briga wrote:
| Au contraire, ChatGPT has already replaced search engines for me,
| at least for generalized knowledge searches. It provides better
| and more personalized answers to my questions than Google and is
| an excellent way to learn about new topics. It's not 100%
| accurate and can even be misleading, but that is hardly different
| than other search engines. Once more people catch on to how
| incredibly useful ChatGPT is its use will become ubiquitous (and
| we've barely even scratched the surface of what these tools can
| do)
| coredog64 wrote:
| One of the challenges with ChatGPT compared to Google is that
| most employers, even the really paranoid ones, don't mind you
| using a search engine to answer questions. That goes out the
| window for ChatGPT: My current employer won't even let me use
| translate.google.com, let alone copy/paste some IP into someone
| else's LLM.
| briga wrote:
| I fully expect enterprise versions of ChatGPT to become
| widespread in the near-term. Modern tech firms already give
| their IP to dozens of third party tools and services, I don't
| see why this should be any different
| aflag wrote:
| Also, in a further iteration, people could upvote and downvote
| results, or even parts of it, so that it learns what it knows
| and what it doesn't. If it just say "I don't know" for bad
| results or omit the bad parts, it would already improve things
| quite a bit. Doing so is quite simple, really.
| gunshai wrote:
| ChatGPT is miles above Google search for me when it comes to
| learning the "hello world" of just about anything at this
| point.
|
| From there it's a simple prompt of where to go next and asking
| for references to work that dig deeper.
|
| Even if it's wrong, it almost doesn't matter because I can just
| say "are you sure?" given this extra information, and it
| corrects itself. Even then if it's still wrong you can prompt
| it in a ways to give you potential search terms to put into
| Google.
| zerop wrote:
| Does anyone think it will replace or reduce software developers
| work
| uconnectlol wrote:
| [flagged]
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| What's going to really slow their adoption down is creators of
| the raw information on which they are trained are going to need
| some way of being paid for their work.
|
| Until payment is figured out it seems likely that creators will
| increasingly restrict access to their information and that will
| impact the utility and adoption of the models.
|
| Google's probably got the advantage in terms of figuring that
| side of it out if it can overcome its inertia.
| emkoemko wrote:
| yea if this gets popular i can't see any incentive for someone
| to give the data away for free to the model
| ahstilde wrote:
| Personally, I believe the future of search is video. Most of the
| world uses mobile devices, and video is better on mobile devices
| than text.
|
| This is why Google and TikTok are shifting to short-form video
| for search.
|
| At my company, we're seeing significant search traffic through YT
| shorts, currently ~2500 views per day:
| https://www.youtube.com/@wyndly/shorts
| waynesonfire wrote:
| You're seeing shorts on YT is because Google has changed their
| ranking algorithm.
|
| It seems that the quality of shorts has really declined lately.
| It's almost as if they are being made with the assumption that
| the only audience they will have is comprised of members of the
| gen-z generation, who are known for having short attention
| spans and being easily captivated by quick, sensational videos.
| These types of videos often feature someone doing something
| seemingly ordinary, like crossing the street, but with a
| dramatic caption promising that the viewer won't be able to
| believe what happens next if they continue watching. It's truly
| sad to see the decline in quality of these shorts, and the
| reliance on cheap tricks to grab and hold onto the viewer's
| attention.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| I'm curious what will happen in future systems where the AI can
| continually learn and update it's model on the fly. I note that
| ChatGPT can't download a URL from the Internet and summarise it
| for example, or apply it as new knowledge. Of course it seems
| ripe for exploitation since there is so much misinformation on
| the Internet anyway.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Try to Google: Does Jeff Bezos shop at Whole Foods?
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| Precisely my experience with 95% of stuff I google.
|
| I don't know if that's just the nature of the things I usually
| search for (primarily technical subjects where the query
| shouldn't be "dumbed down" and reinterpreted or you get a
| completely different meaning), but I've become incredibly
| dissatisfied with Google over the past few years. I imagine
| it's a fine search engine if you're looking up the URL for
| Netflix.
| emrah wrote:
| Google already provides a chatgpt-like experience with the
| questions it displays based on the query. It is unlike chatgpt in
| that google comes up with those questions but they are usually
| spot on and you can see the source where the answers are coming
| from. Perhaps all google has to do is provide a chatgpt like
| interface to that subsection of search results so it feels more
| interactive like chatgpt
| einpoklum wrote:
| Well, I asked ChatGPT, and it said ChatGPT may replace search
| engines soon. So there!
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| Have they not heard of it? The web is dead and as the poet said,
| giants will roam the earth once more.
|
| Every time I interact with davinci-003 it makes me feel more and
| more like the first real paradigm change is coming. We are still
| using our computers and writing our programs in the same way as
| 70 years ago, I emplore you to read 'structured programming'
| debates and see how we argue about the same things now. Every
| business product basically still competes with a word processor
| and spreadsheet. We have made hundreds of thousands of lines of
| code so we can auto focus the next field on a form, and it still
| doesnt work on 99% of the cases. The GUI was not a paradigm
| change, it was more of the same, maybe even worse, mobile
| overpromised, anything besides video is just worse desktop.
|
| Lists and tables.. for 70 years
|
| This is the first real change.
|
| --
|
| "And what doeth the saint in the forest?" asked Zarathustra.
|
| The saint answered: "I make hymns and sing them; and in making
| hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise God.
|
| With singing, weeping, laughing, and mumbling do I praise the God
| who is my God. But what dost thou bring us as a gift?"
|
| When Zarathustra had heard these words, he bowed to the saint and
| said: "What should I have to give thee! Let me rather hurry hence
| lest I take aught away from thee!"--And thus they parted from one
| another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing like schoolboys.
|
| When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: "Could
| it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard
| of it, that god is dead!"
| baq wrote:
| is soon a year or a decade? the author says he's at his workplace
| for 7 years, I think chatgpt 2030 will absolutely destroy google
| search 2023. the question is what google search 2030 will be?
| Sozar2000 wrote:
| [dead]
| fakedang wrote:
| I want to add here that I'm building an app at the moment with
| code solely generated through prompts for ChatGPT. So far, except
| for a few issues and manual refactoring, it has done very well.
|
| ChatGPT even apologized when it suggested proprietary Firebase,
| when I told it to use Supabase instead.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| True, but it does not have to. ChatGPT is it's own thing. It has
| functions search engines can never accomplish. You can say the
| same thing the other way around, "Why Search Engines won't
| replace ChatGPT?" The essence of what ChatGPT is is here to stay.
| We'll be seeing different flavors and it will be a big part of
| everyone's life.
| kyrra wrote:
| Googler opinions are my own. (I know nothing about search).
|
| Google has LaMDA, which I could see them putting the answers
| from it into the knowledge box at the top of searches. There is
| no reason they have to be mutually exclusive, a search engine
| can provide answers from both. Google search is already an
| aggregation of multiple sources (images, web index, knowledge,
| shopping, video, flights, etc...). Adding another source seems
| like the obvious path forward (assuming accuracy and cost make
| sense).
| antihipocrat wrote:
| If we don't need to click a link does google receives less
| revenue? I think including more direct answers from a search
| query would require changes to Google's business model.
| aflag wrote:
| The ads would still be clickable. Clicking the actual
| results doesn't really help google much.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| Except for any ads embedded in the referred sites.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| Very true, they already have different sections in the
| results pages. There's no reason why they can't have one
| more. They can also use the box as a way to improve accuracy
| by having user vote on the quality of the result.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| oh thanks so much for letting me know where you work. I was
| getting ready to write Google an angry letter. Glad this is
| your opinion. That you have to advertise that you're at
| Google is theirs. Sheep.
| dang wrote:
| We really need you to stop posting so aggressively. If you
| can't or won't, we're going to have to ban you. You've been
| breaking the site guidelines frequently. That's not ok, and
| I warned you about this once recently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33860364.
|
| I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good
| things and if you'd simply follow the site guidelines you'd
| be a good contributor, but the current pattern is a
| problem. If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fixing
| this, we'd be grateful.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Thanks will do
| factsarelolz wrote:
| Oh wow, thanks!
| baxtr wrote:
| A bit tangential, but still worth asking since I haven't seen it
| addressed anywhere else:
|
| When I type a query into Google, it returns results almost
| instantaneously.
|
| With ChatGPT, it has latency PLUS it writes out answers
| annoyingly slow.
|
| Does anyone know why that spell out every answer like that? Is
| that a UX gimmick or related to the latency?
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Transformers (the frontend in GPT at least) are autoregressive
| i.e. they require previous state.
| animitronix wrote:
| I'm using it more than Google these days, but ok...
| lukifer wrote:
| Honestly, for many simple programming tasks/questions, I find
| it's already rivaling Stack Overflow and Google for quick
| results. Just last night it flawlessly wrote me a scaffolding for
| a Bash script that parses specific command line flags
| mymyairduster wrote:
| reminds me of when i said 'my girlfrind won't replace my wife'
| ... whoops!
| greatpostman wrote:
| -written by company selling outdated search solutions
| fifilura wrote:
| More from the same publisher:
|
| "Why touch screen phones won't replace clamshell phones any
| time soon"
|
| "Why electric light bulbs won't replace gas lighting anytime
| soon"
|
| "Why transistors won't replace radio tubes anytime soon"
|
| "Why drones won't replace fighter aircraft anytime soon"
|
| "Why electric cars won't replace combustion engines anytime
| soon"
|
| "Why linux desktop won't replace windows anytime soon"
| axiom92 wrote:
| Heh. I asked ChatGPT to generate more such examples:
|
| "Why virtual reality headsets won't replace traditional TVs
| anytime soon"
|
| "Why smart watches won't replace traditional watches anytime
| soon"
|
| "Why tablets won't replace laptops anytime soon"
|
| "Why solar panels won't replace fossil fuels anytime soon"
|
| "Why self-driving cars won't replace human drivers anytime
| soon"
|
| "Why 3D printers won't replace traditional manufacturing
| anytime soon"
|
| "Why e-books won't replace physical books anytime soon"
|
| "Why streaming services won't replace cable TV anytime soon"
|
| "Why artificial intelligence won't replace human intelligence
| anytime soon"
|
| "Why robots won't replace human workers anytime soon"
|
| "Why augmented reality won't replace reality anytime soon"
|
| "Why online shopping won't replace brick and mortar stores
| anytime soon"
|
| "Why paper money won't replace electronic payment methods
| anytime soon"
|
| "Why online education won't replace traditional education
| anytime soon"
|
| "Why video conferencing won't replace in-person meetings
| anytime soon"
|
| "Why self-checkout kiosks won't replace cashiers anytime
| soon"
|
| "Why video game consoles won't replace computer gaming
| anytime soon"
|
| "Why smart homes won't replace traditional homes anytime
| soon"
|
| "Why digital cameras won't replace film cameras anytime soon"
|
| "Why ride-sharing services won't replace car ownership
| anytime soon"
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Outdated? How so? The primary thing Algolia is guilty of is
| being massively overpriced to the point it's a non-starter for
| any platform with even moderate usage. But their full-text
| search functions quite well and is very fast.
| sitkack wrote:
| Vector search over any corpus that fits in memory is quite
| fast. Hell, a naive inverted index performs quite well for
| 90% of tasks.
| [deleted]
| CharlesW wrote:
| I think it's worth noting the potential bias, but Algolia's the
| furthest thing from outdated.
| kekkidy wrote:
| [dead]
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I used (still use) Wolfram Alpha for the longest time. Back in
| the day, I was amazed that it could calculate a bunch of things
| that were way out of range for Google, etc. - and I always
| envisioned future search engines to be sort of hybrids, you'll
| get linked to the correct websites, but you can also ask them for
| whatever you want.
|
| I don't need ChatGPT or similar models to replace search engines,
| I just want to use them in parallel.
|
| I'm excited to see what Google does with their LaMDA model, now
| that Bing will incorporate ChatGPT.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| Bing announced their ChatGPT deal the next day:
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/04/microsoft_openai_chat...
| supermatt wrote:
| They havent "announced" anything. It would make cost-per-query
| and latency go through the roof, so its HIGHLY unlikely.
| aflag wrote:
| Making a gpt query on every search I'd say that's indeed
| unlikely. Luckily, most queries are repeated, so caching can
| work very well.
|
| There are many opportunities there, gpt could potentially be
| used for common queries to expand the results and even as a
| way to disambiguate queries. For instance, if I ask it:
|
| "If I make a search query for "go", what are the possible
| different things I may be looking for?"
|
| I get
|
| > There are many possible things that someone might be
| looking for when they make a search query for "go". Some
| possible interpretations of the term "go" include:
|
| >
|
| > The board game "Go"
|
| > The programming language "Go"
|
| > The command "go" or "Go!" as a signal to start or proceed
| with something
|
| > The verb "go", as in to move or travel from one place to
| another
|
| > The website "GO", which is a popular search engine
|
| >
|
| > It's also possible that the person making the search query
| is simply looking for information about the word "go" itself,
| such as its definition, pronunciation, or usage in different
| contexts.
|
| there may be better prompts, of course.
|
| Also, they may identify some queries as being gpt friendly
| and get those through gpt, which they may also augment with a
| suitable prompt. The thing is, giving the query as is to the
| GPT model is not the only option. They can certainly be
| creative with how they ask gpt and interpret the results.
| They don't have to necessarily even display the gpt response,
| they can use it to improve the results.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| They announced it to The Information, anonymously, in a leak.
| naillo wrote:
| Why would it make latency go up? It's incredibly
| parallelizable just copy the weights on more machines.
| hooloovoo_zoo wrote:
| Ah the ol' have a baby in a month by impregnating 9 women
| strategy.
| eachro wrote:
| The additional cpu to gpu to cpu round trip time I'm
| guessing?
| ranting-moth wrote:
| MS would run their own instance. Can you imagine how much
| money they're willing to spend to dethrone Google?
| wut42 wrote:
| I really wonder how the economics of running chatgpt for Bing's
| request will work. GPT is anything but cheap to run, IIRC, it
| requires more than four A100 GPU cards.
| rapsey wrote:
| The bill is already largely footed by MS probably. OpenAI and
| MS are a partnership and they run on azure cloud.
| wut42 wrote:
| Of course- it makes sense to run ChatGPT free now (reminded
| that it's an experiment) for training & betatesting. But
| running it even larger, and on a search engine ? It's a
| magnitude of difference imo, and totally different than a
| short-time bill for an experiment.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| They could go after the really expensive keywords and do
| stuff there. I'm just not sure how they'd make more money
| from that stuff.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Who gives a shit how much it costs. The value is massive
| and 10x better than Google results. Are you comprehending
| what that means? After competing with Google for over 10
| years with nothing to show for it, Microsoft is drooling
| over this technology.
| coredog64 wrote:
| There's a very old story about Microsoft and Win 3.x pen
| computing. One of the leads was explaining that they
| worked on it, and someone else opined that it was too bad
| that they didn't provide anything useful for MS. The lead
| replied that the goal wasn't actually pen computing, it
| was a special teams "block that kick" play that
| kneecapped a competitor and so achieved its goal.
|
| If MS can reduce the absolute firehose of money that ads
| provide to Google, it will totally be worth it even if it
| takes lighting money on fire to do it.
| eternalban wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT to emulate various OS's, including Linux
| and DOS. On a linux emulation, I had it curl whatsmyip.com.
| This bit was in the response: <span
| id="ipv4">35.230.98.61</span>
|
| That's a google property. I wonder if it was trained on
| google's cloud.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Funny how it already has for me.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| They might not replace them, but it fulfills a role that Google
| could do previously.
|
| Try to find out what type of a spring is in a spring clamp using
| google? "What type of a spring is in a spring clamp?" Or use
| whatever query you want. The top 10 results won't tell me the
| answer.
|
| Ask ChatGPT. It'll tell you (spoiler: it's a tension spring or a
| torsion spring. It's not a coil spring.)
|
| 8 out of 10 Google results are trying to sell me spring clamps.
| Seriously Google, do you not see that your search engine is
| FUBAR?
| wizofaus wrote:
| Curious, the second result for me was aboutmechanics.com, which
| said it was a coil clamp. But I agree Google seems to be
| interpreting the question as "what's a spring clamp".
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Interesting. aboutmechanics.com is not in my top 10 results.
| But even aboutmechanics is wrong, it's not coil spring. It's
| torsion spring.
| [deleted]
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > Ask ChatGPT. It'll tell you
|
| Without any way for you to know if it's the right answer or
| not. Wow, so useful.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Well, I then did a google image search (which is much better
| than it's traditional search) and it came up with things that
| did look like that one I had in my hand.
|
| But I do get where you're coming from, ChatGPT is way too
| confident when it's wrong!
| emkoemko wrote:
| thats one good thing about search you get multiple results
| and different opinions
| azemetre wrote:
| How is this any different than Google? The only thing Google
| exceeds at is serving you SEO garbage on every query.
| qayxc wrote:
| Google results(plural!) give you alternatives and
| references, i.e. you know where each answer is coming from
| and SEO spam is easily identifiable.
|
| ChatGPT just gives you an answer that's confidentially
| wrong sometimes.
| sgc wrote:
| But isn't that just a UI problem at heart? It would be
| easy to ask for references for its conclusion.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| ChatGPT doesn't have references and doesn't make
| conclusions, it's a statistical model.
|
| Ask it for references, it will invent you URLs that look
| legit but don't exist.
| croes wrote:
| I bet google could deliver the answer but they need to serve
| ads.
|
| Same would happen with ChatGPT. As soon they need to make money
| without charging the users directly, its answers will change.
| schrodinger wrote:
| Hmmm, ChatGPT doesn't seem consistent:
|
| Q: what type of spring is in a spring clamp?
|
| A: Spring clamps are typically made with a type of spring
| called a helical spring or a coil spring. These springs are
| made of wire that is wound in a spiral shape and are used to
| store energy and apply a force when they are compressed or
| stretched. In a spring clamp, the helical spring is used to
| provide the clamping force that holds the clamp's jaws
| together. When the jaws of the clamp are opened, the spring is
| stretched, and when the jaws are closed, the spring is
| compressed, creating the clamping force. Spring clamps are
| commonly used in woodworking, metalworking, and other
| applications where a temporary hold is needed.
| moonchrome wrote:
| And even after reading through first post and your post I had
| to do a double take to figure out it was wrong.
|
| This is exactly why I don't bother with copilot - I tend to
| skim when something looks right.
|
| Same thing when I'm reviewing code - I don't go into details
| - I just do high level sanity checks, if I'm familiar with
| domain I check for problems I anticipate, look for potential
| improvements where my experience matters.
|
| If I have to go in depth I might as well do the thing on my
| own.
| Kibae wrote:
| I've been using ChatGPT to suggest me books similar to books I've
| liked and so far the results have been good. Many of the books
| that are recommended are books I've read and enjoyed so the
| remaining ones on the list are added to my reading list.
| theSoenke wrote:
| For me it suggested fictional book names that do not exist
| tluyben2 wrote:
| It won't have to replace; it can just augment and be very
| successful at it. I'm just unsure how to cover the massive costs
| of running this thing with millions of req/sec.
| kyaghmour wrote:
| How long would it take for "ChatGPT farms" to crop up and try to
| influence the results? How much harder will it be to "clean" the
| results from any learned data set?
| shon wrote:
| It already has replaced Google for some of my needs. If I want a
| simple answer to queries like:
|
| How to make a Sazarac
|
| What's a good waffle recipe
|
| How do I change the O2 sensor on a 1982 911SC
|
| I find ChatGPT issues perfectly good answers without all of the
| superfluous results, words, clickbait, and ads.
|
| And for many other questions that are technical, medical, or
| trivial in nature I prefer its simple one-shot response.
|
| Is it perfect? No. But neither is Google. I still at times neees
| to use quotes and booleans to get Google to bring me the results
| I want.
|
| As a side note, Google is the Microsoft of 1997. Dominant and
| content. It doesn't really want change. That's why it's time for
| a new challenger.
| owlglass wrote:
| Perhaps we'll see OpenAI grow to be the Google of 2022?
| cs702 wrote:
| ...But ChatGPT's successors just _might_.
|
| I, for one, look forward to a future in which I can ask a digital
| assistant to find and summarize information on anything:
|
| _" Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me
| like I'm five years old."_
|
| _" Computer, what are the latest Covid-19 infection stats in my
| city?"_
|
| _" Computer, who is Claude Shannon and why is he important?"_
|
| _" Computer, what are the top three stories on HN today?"_
|
| _" Computer, what's on my calendar?"_
|
| etc.
| localhost wrote:
| Another way to think about these kinds of requests in a future
| AI world is to ask yourself _why_ you 're asking these
| questions? My take:
|
| _" Computer, can you write and deliver a message to my kid
| that explains how GPS works?"_
|
| _" Computer, can you tell me what risks there are at dining at
| McDonalds down the street?"_
|
| _" Computer, can you read this paper [link] and tell me why
| it's referencing Claude Shannon?"_
|
| _" Computer, I need to waste some time - please use HN to help
| me"_
|
| _" Computer, tell me about any plans that I have for today"_
| IanCal wrote:
| I'll be the first to say that chatgpt already does very well at
| the first and third examples. WebGPT sounds like the right
| approach for the others (understanding how to formulate a
| search query, then searching, then summarising the results)
|
| Edit
|
| I think the direction of these models seems clear, and their
| capabilities _however limited at the moment_ are outstanding. I
| think the best measure of performance is what the naysayers
| complain about. We 've quickly gone from "actual gibberish that
| looks like paragraphs" to "yes but it loses track after a few
| sentences" to "yes it's kind of coherent but doesn't make sense
| totally" and are now at "it's like an overconfident human at
| many tasks, when they're only somewhat qualified in the area".
| People are pointing out where it's got an API call wrong,
| without it having any ability to look up the answer and see if
| the function actually exists.
|
| I spoke to it about distributed computation design and
| discovered something new I can actually implement in my design.
|
| I'm very excited about where this will all go because it seems
| useful now and I'd be very surprised if this is the best that
| it ever reaches.
| cs702 wrote:
| I agree (with minor caveats).
|
| The important thing is that these AI systems are only going
| to get better over time.
|
| IMHO, the early 2020's for conversational AI is akin to the
| 1980's for personal computers.
| IanCal wrote:
| Absolutely, I totally agree. I edited my comment to add in
| more as I realised I'd not addressed that. It's
| surprisingly good right now, and given that it's useful
| that feeds into even more attention and money being spent
| on making it better.
|
| Anyone not looking at chatgpt and thinking "what if this
| was even just a bit better? Or had better iterations or
| lookups?" is missing out on what I think is a revolutionary
| change coming probably sooner than people expect.
| emrah wrote:
| That is, if you can blindly trust the answers.. if it could
| provide the top sources for the information so I could fact-
| check it if needed, it would work
| x86x87 wrote:
| We're going to have a generation of people that are cock sure
| about things because ... ai, but they won't actually know
| jack shift. It sort of happened with google. People can
| figure something out but they don't systematically get
| things. Shallow explanation. Goldfish attention span
| ben_w wrote:
| I think that assumes AI makes any difference to the self-
| certainly of humans.
|
| My mother was into all kinds of new age and supernatural
| stuff. You may think you can see where this anecdote is
| leading, and oh boy I could go there, but instead prepare
| for a twist! One of the stories she had was a client saying
| "It is not possible, Susan, it is not possible that there
| are beings out there that are cleverer than what we is".
| pattyj wrote:
| Is there a way to disuade users from blindly trusting
| responses? Such as unavoidable caveats, make no attempt to
| provide depth and instead strongly recommend reliable
| research?
|
| And as a logical aside: if AI can't be trusted, we shouldn't
| trust AI's recommendations for reliable sources either.
| notahacker wrote:
| > And as a logical aside: if AI can't be trusted, we
| shouldn't trust AI's recommendations for reliable sources
| either.
|
| Don't think that's automatically true though: an AI can be
| consistently excellent at retrieving reliable sources and
| still get a lot wrong on its summaries. Also humans have
| their own opinions on sources even when they're not
| familiar with the detail, and finding out if the AI reads
| Nature or 4chan is part of the debugging process...
| pattyj wrote:
| Sure. Really, I was thinking of the scenario where
| someone explictly asks for a reliable source i.e. "Thanks
| for summary about X. To whom should I turn for more
| accurate/detailed information?"
| notahacker wrote:
| Oh yeah, it's spectacularly bad at some of that sort of
| thing. Ask for a list of academic papers and it'll make
| half of them up and give others new authors...
| notahacker wrote:
| That's why in some respects, I think the sheer clunkiness of
| "according to website.com, claude shannon is..." or "ok, I've
| found this on the web..." in the current consumer tech is
| better than anonymous, authoritative somewhat novel answers
| than might be the internet's consensus opinion or might just
| be a vaguely relevant word vector structured like an answer
| mach1ne wrote:
| >"Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me
| like I'm five years old."
|
| "I'm sorry, I cannot answer that query because it has ableist
| connotations. I am a large language model by OpenAI."
| einpoklum wrote:
| So, what you're saying is that "I'm feeling lucky"?
| axiom92 wrote:
| "Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me
| like I'm five years old."
|
| ChatGPT:
|
| GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It is a way that we
| can figure out where we are in the world using special
| satellites.
|
| Imagine you are standing outside and you see lots of stars in
| the sky. Well, GPS works kind of like that, but instead of
| stars, there are satellites orbiting the Earth. These
| satellites are way up high, so they can see everything on the
| ground.
|
| When you have a GPS device, like a phone or a car, it can talk
| to these satellites and ask, "Where am I?" The satellites send
| back a message that says, "You are here!" and gives your device
| a special code.
|
| The GPS device can use this code to figure out exactly where
| you are on a map. It's kind of like a magic trick! You can use
| GPS to find out where you are, or to find your way to a new
| place. It's super helpful when you're lost or want to go on an
| adventure.
|
| Not bad!
| pwdisswordfisha wrote:
| I'd be more impressed if it explained set-theoretic forcing
| on that level.
| cs702 wrote:
| And it's only going to get better over time.
|
| As I mentioned elsewhere, conversational AIs in the early
| 2020's are like PCs in the 1980's -- a new technology that
| still has lots of early limitations.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| The second half of that explanation is completely wrong
| though, isn't it? There is no active signal being sent from
| your GPS antenna, no two-way communication.
| daveFNbuck wrote:
| The first half is wrong too. GPS has nothing to do with
| satellites being able to see lots of things from high up.
| The whole thing is just nonsense that looks plausibly like
| an explanation until you try to decipher it.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I didn't even notice that bit (maybe GPT is a flat-
| earther?).
|
| Something GPT discourse has been demonstrating to me is
| that I'm not usually a very careful reader. I apparently
| skim a lot. Or maybe I skim GPT outputs because I'm
| biased in my expectations already?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| GPS doesn't talk to the satellites, but the satellites do
| send a message that allows the GPS to answer "where am I"
| for itself. It's not the worst way to explain things at
| that level, even if it's misleading.
|
| About half the (presumably human) "eli5 GPS" answers I
| found on Reddit made the same mistake, so chatGPT just
| copied an apparently popular misconception.
| notahacker wrote:
| > About half the (presumably human) "eli5 GPS" answers I
| found on Reddit made the same mistake, so chatGPT just
| copied an apparently popular misconception.
|
| I think that's one of the biggest problems with using
| LLMs for accurate answers. A lot of the text that's very
| useful for modelling human language and questions is also
| full of factual errors and questionable opinions. Answers
| being wrong is a problem with old-fashioned web search
| too, but I think LLMs necessarily lean more on quantity
| rather than quality of content...
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Might not be the worst way to explain how GPS works, but
| definitely up there.
|
| You'd be better off just saying "it uses satellites and
| stuff".
| IanCal wrote:
| Here's it's reply to me:
|
| Ian Calvert Computer, please find out how GPS works and
| explain it to me like I'm five years old
|
| Sure thing! GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It's
| a way to find out where you are on Earth.
|
| GPS works by using satellites that are way up in space.
| There are lots of these satellites orbiting around Earth,
| and they are always sending out signals. Your GPS receiver
| is a special device that can pick up these signals from the
| satellites.
|
| The GPS receiver knows how far away it is from each
| satellite because of the time it takes for the signal to
| reach it. By figuring out how far away it is from a few
| different satellites, the GPS receiver can figure out
| exactly where it is on Earth.
|
| So, if you have a GPS receiver in your car, phone, or on a
| special device like a watch, it can use the signals from
| the satellites to tell you exactly where you are and how to
| get to where you want to go. Does that make sense?
|
| ---
|
| I was also able to ask it to make it simpler and simpler
| and it did so pretty well.
| ben_w wrote:
| Yes, but unlike most times it gets things wrong, this is
| probably appropriate for explaining things to 5 year olds.
|
| (Also, the UK comedy quiz show QI made the exact same
| mistake).
| jakeinspace wrote:
| I'll admit it was a decent answer. However, even a
| somewhat bright person (especially someone with radio /
| networking experience) could probably have realized that
| was an issue without any prior knowledge of GPS. They
| know that their phone has a GPS receiver, and that
| satellite phones accessing geostationary or high altitude
| satellites are much bulkier. Clearly, your cell phone
| isn't transmitting to each satellite.
|
| How will future LLMs be able to conduct that level of
| reasoning?
| [deleted]
| aw1621107 wrote:
| > this is probably appropriate for explaining things to 5
| year olds.
|
| I feel it's appropriate in terms of simplicity, but I
| think providing a simple wrong explanation is really only
| worth it when the more accurate explanation is
| substantially harder to simplify, and I don't think
| explaining how GPS works falls into that category.
|
| Something like this I think is more accurate without
| being any more complex:
|
| > Imagine you are standing outside and you see lots of
| stars in the sky. Well, GPS works kind of like that, but
| instead of stars, there are satellites orbiting the
| Earth. These satellites are way up high, so you can
| always see some of them.
|
| > When you have a GPS device, like a phone or a car, it
| can look for these satellites, and if it sees enough of
| them it can use math to figure out where you are.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| You can just as easily ELI5 this _without_ spreading
| misinformation, though. Just change the third paragraph
| to:
|
| > The satellites all broadcast a special code saying
| where each of them is. When you have a GPS device, like a
| phone or a car, it can listen to these codes and find out
| where and how far away different satellites are.
|
| (Actually, this would be a fun thing to do with a class.
| Have a few kids march around the edges of the playground,
| saying things like "I'm next to the swingset now!", and
| then ask one one kid to close their eyes, put them
| somewhere in the middle and ask them to guess where
| they're standing.)
| theteapot wrote:
| Did ChatGPT come up with this, or just rip it off from some
| place(s) without attribution?
| ben_w wrote:
| I've seen this sort of response a lot lately, both for GPT
| and all the image generators.
|
| Google, and all the other search engines, literally show
| snippets of the original content to display search results,
| and have had copyright infringement lawsuits over this.
|
| Yet somehow, it's taken these AI, which generally _aren 't_
| just block-quoting things unless you ask them to (and often
| getting it wrong if you do), for non-lawyers to start
| asking that question.
| schrodinger wrote:
| Is it any different than an infinitely capable human
| reading the entire internet and using the knowledge it
| gained to answer questions?
| ben_w wrote:
| Google or GPT?
|
| Either way I don't know. Might be the same, but that
| might be an unwarranted anthropomorphisation.
| theteapot wrote:
| I think that just indicates it's more blatant. With
| search engine results I can click through to the original
| source. That's attribution, at least to the laymen.
| ChatGPT has no such thing.
| ben_w wrote:
| I selected a few sentences from the given response, asked
| DuckDuckGo to find them, and got zero hits for any of
| them.
|
| GPT definitely has some kind of internal model of things
| and how they relate to other things, and the capacity to
| express those relations in different ways.
|
| Whether this is functionally the same as the model in my
| head, or some analog to it, or if such descriptions are
| merely cute but misleading anthropomorphisation, is far
| beyond my knowledge of neuroscience, psychology, and
| indeed machine learning.
| theteapot wrote:
| > I selected a few sentences from the given response,
| asked DuckDuckGo to find them, and got zero hits for any
| of them.
|
| Science.
| [deleted]
| x86x87 wrote:
| The explanation is misleading. The satellites don't see you
| and don't care about you. They are beacons sending a radio
| signal (the beacons says: i'm satellite X and here is a
| timestamp). The receiver based on the known position of the
| satelites and the beacon signals received figures out your
| position on earth using math!
|
| So the explanation is either: satellites and their position
| or give the full explanation. Not this regurgitation.
| emsixteen wrote:
| Like Ask Jeeves on steroids.
| textide wrote:
| Agree. ChatGPT is how I imagined the internet would be back in
| the 90s (without having the foggiest clue how it might get
| there). Your questions are similar to the types of searches
| that people really want but have to translate to 'GPS simple
| explanation' or 'COVID in <town> this year' while hoping for a
| set of relevant pages in the Google return.
|
| I've gotten it to fail on some word problems, but even then it
| was impressive to see it try to come up with a solution. More
| humorous were requests like 'Create a post for ycombinator
| about ChatGPT in the style of Chris Farley'. It's surprising
| and quite welcome that it even attempts that.
| emkoemko wrote:
| where will this data come from and how do you make money off
| it?
| [deleted]
| jki275 wrote:
| The problem with chatgpt is that I can't evaluate the source it
| used to learn the information to see if I think it's credible,
| and chatgpt can't give me any indication of whether it's credible
| or not, and its answer will be just as authoritative in tone if
| it's completely incorrect as if it's correct.
|
| I asked it for a schematic to connect an i2c device to a
| microcontroller, it told me to directly connect the device to the
| microcontroller. I asked it if pull-up resistors were required,
| it said yes, and then drew what it called "pull-up resistors"
| (describing them correctly) incorrectly in series between the bus
| and the device.
|
| I know that's wrong, but someone who doesn't really know what a
| pull-up resistor does or why they are there would be at least
| somewhat confused by that interchange, and would be misled into
| doing it wrong. Meanwhile, I can type in "i2c schematic" to
| google and get thousands of correct schematics back to look at.
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