isn’t it kind of ridiculous to want to make missiles out of pipe that people are trying to give you to provide essential things like water? how fucked up of a person do you have to be to be like oh look at this pipe I can make missiles out of it instead of getting clean water.
Oh yes, Israel just put the temptation to dig up irrigation, sewage and water lines to make homemade rocket systems because they, checked notes didn’t spontaneously die like we’ve been demanding them too.
But the second half of the article, where he says that AI chatbots will replace Google search because they give more accurate information, that simply is not true.
I already go to ChatGPT more than Google. If you pay for it then the latest version can access the internet and if it doesn’t know the answer to something it’ll search the internet for you. Sometimes I come across a large clickbait page and I just give ChatGPT the link and tell it to get the information from it for me.
ChatGPT powers Bing Chat, which can access the internet and find answers for you, no purchase necessary (if you’re not on edge, you might need to install a browser extension to access it as they are trying to push edge still).
It often brings up bad solutions to a problem and checking the sources it references shows it regulary misses the gist of these sources.
There sources it selects are often not the ones I end up using. They are starting point, but not the best starting point.
What it is good for is for finding content when I don’t know the terminology of the domain. It is a starting point ready to lead me astray with exquisitely written content.
That’s what’s usually gets said about lots of alternative fusion energy generation methods that later turn out to be impossible to have net-positive energy generation.
And this is just one example. Another example: tons of medical compounds end up dropper at the medical testing stage because of their nasty side effects or it turns out their “positive” effects are indistinguisheable from the placebo effect.
The point being that you can’t actually extrapolative from “neat concept that shows potential” even to merelly “will works”, much less to “will be a great success”.
PS: Equally, one can’t just say it’s not going to be a great success - being a “neat concept that shows potential” has a pretty low informational content when it comes to predicting the future, worse so when there are people monetarilly heavilly invested into it who have a strong interest in making it look like a “neat concept that shows potential” whilst hiding any early stage problem.
You are mixing sci-fi level of cutting edge basic research (fusion), with commercial products (chatgpt). They are 2 very different type of proof of concepts.
And both will likely revolutionize human society. Fusion will simply commercially become a thing in 30/50 years. AI has been on the market for years now. Generative models are also few years old. They are simply becoming better and now new products can be built on top of them
This specific tech you seem to be emotionally invested in is no different from the rest in this sense because it still faces in the real world the very same kind of risks and pitfalls as the rest - there are possible internal pitfalls inherent to every new technology (i.e. a problem we never knew about because we never used it with so many people in the real world before, becomes visible with widespread use) and there are possible external pitfalls inherent to how it fits in the complex world we live in (i.e. it turns out the use cases don’t make quite as much economic sense as was first tought or it indirectly generates more problems than it solves).
Such Process and Fit risks are true for every early stage “revolutionary” tech (i.e. we never did it before, now that we do it, we discover problems we were not at all aware of before) and is why the bean counters rarelly put money in revolutionary and instead go mainly for incremental improvements on proven tech. At times one or more of such “we had no idea this could happen problems” turn out to be surmountable, sometimes they’re not.
In the case of LLMs, the two risky problems from what I’ve heard are in how LLMs being trained in material which includes LLM-generated material actually get worse and the other is the so-called Hallucinations, which are really just the natural side effect of them being Language Models hence all that they do is generate compositions of language tokens that pass for human generated language, with no reasoning involved hence cannot validate through inductive or deductive reasoning said “compositions of language tokens”.
Unless you want to deny decades of History in Tech, you can’t logically extrapolate from an early “looks light it migh be a success” to “it will be a success”, especially the era of overhype we live in.
People who do so aren’t smart enough to use internet anyway. With or without AI it wouldn’t change anything for them, they stay stupid and will continue acting stupid
It depends what you’re using it for as to whether you need to fact check stuff.
I’m a software developer and if I can’t remember how to do an inner join in SQL then I can easier ask ChatGPT to do it for me and I will know if it is right or not as this is my field of expertise.
If I’m asking it how to perform open heart surgery on my cat, then sure I’m probably going to want several second opinions as that is not my area of expertise.
When using a calculator do you use two different calculators to check that the first one isn’t lying?
Also, you made a massive assumption that the stuff OP was using it for was something that warranted fact checking.
I can see why you would use it. Why would I want to search Google for inner joins sql when it is going to give me so many false links that don’t give me the info in need in a concise manner.
Even time wasting searches have just been ruined. Example: Top Minecraft Java seeds 1.20. Will give me pages littered with ads or the awful page 1-10 that you must click through.
Many websites are literally unusable at this point and I use ad blockers and things like consent-o-matic. But there are still pop up ads, sub to our newsletter, scam ads etc. so much so that I’ll just leave the site and forego learning the new thing I wanted to learn.
They also aren’t valuable for asking direct questions like this.
There value comes in with call and response discussions. Being able to pair program and work through a problem for example. It isn’t about it spitting out a working problem, but about it being able to assess a piece of information in a different way than you can, which creates a new analysis of the information.
It’s extraordinarily good at finding things you miss in text.
Yeah. There’s definitely tasks suited to LLMs. I’ve used it to condense text, write emails, and even project planning because they do give decently good ideas if you prompt them right.
Not sure I’d use them for finding information though, even with the ability to search for it. I’d much rather just search for it myself so I can select the sources, then have the LLM process it.
I found it more tempting to accept the initial answers I got from GPT4 (and derivatives) because they are so well written. I know there are more like me.
With the advent of working LLMs, reference manuals should gain importance too. I check them more often than before because LLMs have forced me to. Could be very positive.
I found it more tempting to accept the initial answers I got from GPT4 (and derivatives) because they are so well written. I know there are more like me.
With the advent of working LLMs, reference manuals should gain importance too. I check them more often than before because LLMs have forced me to. Could be very positive.
They'll need to make money with a cheap cost-per-sale, so they'll put ads on the site. Then they'll put promoted content in the AI chat, but it's okay because they'll say it's promoted. Eventually it won't even say it's promoted and it will just be all ads, just like every other tech company.
Why? Because monetization leads directly to enshittification, because the users stop being the customers.
When I tried it it was never able to give me the sources of what it said. And it has given me way too many made up answers to just trust it without reasons. Having to search for sources after it said something has made me skip the middle man(machine).
Yeah, because people selling AI products have a great track record on predicting how their products will develop in the future. Because of that, Teslas don’t have steering wheels any more, because Full Self Driving drives people incident-free from New York to California since 2017.
The thing with AI development is, that it rapidly gets to 50% of the desired solution, but then gets stuck there, not being able to get consistently good enough that you can actually rely on it.
I don’t really understand what it means. If the product is unreliable people won’t use it, and everything will stay as it is now. It’s not a big issue. But It is already pretty reliable for many use cases.
Realistically the real future problem will be monetization, not features
Well, here's the thing. How often are you willing to dismiss the misses because of the hits? Your measure of unreliability is now subject to bias because you're no longer assessing the bot's answers objectively.
I don’t expect to be 100% correct. I have realistic expectations built on experience. Any source isn’t 100% reliable. A friend is 50% reliable, an expert maybe 95. A random web page probably 40… I don’t know.
I built up my strategy to address uncertainty by applying critical thinking. It is not much different than in the past. By experience, chatgpt 4 is currently more reliable than a random web page that comes in the first page of a Google search. Unless I exactly search for a trustworthy source, such as nhs or guardian.
The main problem is the drop in quality of search engines. I usually start with chatgpt 4 without plugins to focus my research. Once I understand what I should look for, I use search engines for focused search on official websites or documentation pages.
The issue with reliability is a completely different one between web search and AI.
If you search something on Google, there are quite a few ways you can judge the quality of the answer with “metadata” around it. If you find a scientific paper, it’s probably more reliable than a post on a parents forum. If the source is a quality newspaper or Wikipedia, that’s also more on the reliable side, but some conspiracy theorist website is not. And if the source is some kind of forum or Q&A site, wrong answers often have comments under them that correct the error.
Also, you can follow multiple links and take a wider sample on the topic that way.
With AI that’s not possible. Whether it is wrong or correct, the AI will give you an answer in the exact same format, with the same self-confident tone. You basically need to know the correct answer to know whether the answer is correct.
Sure, you can re-roll and ask it again, but that doesn’t make the result more likely to be correct.
For example, I asked ChatGPT which Harry Potter chapter is the longest. It happily gave me a chapter, but it wasn’t the longest. So I asked again and again and again, and each time it gave me a new wrong answer, every time with made-up word counts.
This is the reason I am suggesting people to give a try to perplexity.ai to understand how these tools will work in the near future. And why I don’t understand the reason I am downvoted for that.
Current “free” chatgpt was created as a proof of concept, not as a finished, complete solution for humanity issue. What we have now is a showcase of llm, for openai to improve the product via human feedback, for everyone else to enjoy what is it already now a very useful tool.
But this kind of LLM is intended to be a building block of the future solutions. To enable interactivity, summarization, analysis features within larger product with many features.
If you don’t have paid version of chatgpt, again, try perplexity.ai with the copilot feature, to see a (still imperfect, under development) proof of concept of the near future of AI assisted research.
And more tools will come, that will make easier to navigate the huge amount of information that is the main issue of modern internet.
This is the reason I am suggesting people to give a try to perplexity.ai to understand how these tools will work in the near future. And why I don’t understand the reason I am downvoted for that.
Current “free” chatgpt was created as a proof of concept, not as a finished, complete solution for humanity issue. What we have now is a showcase of llm, for openai to improve the product via human feedback, for everyone else to enjoy what is it already now a very useful tool.
But this kind of LLM is intended to be a building block of the future solutions. To enable interactivity, summarization, analysis features within larger product with many features.
If you don’t have paid version of chatgpt, again, try perplexity.ai with the copilot feature, to see a (still imperfect, under development) proof of concept of the near future of AI assisted research.
And more tools will come, that will make easier to navigate the huge amount of information that is the main issue of modern internet.
I’d say they at least give more immediately useful info. I’ve got to scroll past 5-8 sponsored results and then the next top results are AI generated garbage anyways.
Even though I think he’s mostly right, the AI techbro gameplan is obvious. Position yourself as a better alternative to Google search, burn money by the barrelful to capture the market, then begin enshitification.
In fact, enshitification has already begun because; responses are comparatively expensive to generate. The more users they onboard, the more they have to scale back the quality of those responses.
If you try “copilot” option, you get the full experience. It’s pretty neat because it allows for brainstorming.
It is still a very “preliminary version” experience (it often gets stuck in a small bunch of websites), because the whole thing is just few months old. But it has a lot of potential
because they give more accurate information, that simply is not true.
From my experience with BingChat, it’s completely true. BingChat will search with Bing and summarize the results, providing sources and all. And the results are complete garbage most of the time, since search results are filled with garbage.
Meanwhile if you ask ChatGPT, which doesn’t have Internet access, you get a far more sophisticated answer and correct answer. You can also answer follow up questions.
Web search is an absolutely terrible place for accurate information. ChatGPT in contrast consumes all the information out there, which makes it much harder for incorrect information to slip in, as information needs to be replicated frequently to stick around. It can and often is still wrong of course, but it is far better than any single website you’ll find.
And of course all of this is still very early days for LLMs. GPT was never build with correctness in mind, it was build to autocomplete text, everything else was patchwork after the fact. The future of search is AI, no doubt about that.
Chatgpt flat out hallucinates quite frequently in my experience. It never says “I don’t know / that is impossible / no one knows” to queries that simply don’t have an answer. Instead, it opts to give a plausible-sounding but completely made-up answer.
A good AI system wouldn’t do this. It would be honest, and give no results when the information simply doesn’t exist. However, that is quite hard to do for LLMs as they are essentially glorified next-word predictors. The cost metric isn’t on accuracy of information, it’s on plausible-sounding conversation.
Ask chatgpt “tell me the biography of the famous painter sndrtj” to see how good the bot is at hallucinating an incredible realistic story that never happened.
You don’t even have to make stuff up to get it to hallucinate. I once asked chat gpt who the original bass player was for Metallica was, and it repeatedly gave me the wrong answer, and even at one point said “Dave Ellefson.”
Even if AI magically got to the point of providing accurate and good results, I would still profoundly object to using it.
First, it's a waste of resources. The climate impact of AI is enough of a reason why we should leave it dead until we live in a world with limitless energy and water.
Second, I don't trust a computer to select my sources for me. Sometimes you might have to go through a few pages, but with traditional search engines at least you are presented with a variety of sources and you can use your god given ability of critical thinking.
The climate change has become the new CP go to argument to condone the stupidest reasoning. Just like blocking Torrent sites to prevent CP, let’s block AI to prevent climate change.
Of course there are always challenges, especially with how results are ranked. I have been extremely dissatisfied with the development of search engines for years now. I find Duckduckgo to at least be less bad than Google. Currently I'm checking out Kagi, which at least lets me rank sources myself. Still on the fence though - it does seem to flirt more with AI than with transparency, which has me worried.
But absolutely, it's not that I think the current state of search engines is great either - it just seems to me everything is getting worse and the Internet has entered a death spiral between AI and the enshittification of social media.
Then again, maybe I just reached that age where you start hating everything.
That’s LLMs, which is what is necessary for Chat-AI (the first “L” in there quite literally stands for Large).
Remove the stuff necessary to process natural human language and those things tend to be way smaller, especially if they’re just trained using the user’s own actions.
I mean most top searches are AI generated bullshit nowadays anyway. Adding Reddit to a search is basically the only decent way to get a proper answer. But those answers are not much more reliable than ChatGPT. You have to use the same sort of skepticism and fact checking regardless.
Most of the results after the first page on Google are usually the same as the usable results, just mirrored on some shady site full of ads and malware.
I dunno. There have been quite a few times where I am trying to do something on my computer and I could either spend 5 minutes searching, refining, digging through the results…or I can ask chatgpt and have a workable answer in 5 seconds. And that answer is precisely tailored to my specifics. I don’t have to assume/research how to modify a similar answer to fit my situation.
Obviously it’s dependent on the types of information you need, but for coding, bash scripting, Linux cli, or anything of that nature LLMs have been great and much better than Google searches.
Okay but the problem with that is that LLMs not only don’t have any fidelity at all, they can’t. They are analogous to the language planning centre of your brain, which has to be filtered through your conscious mind to check if it’s talking complete crap.
People don’t realise this and think the bot is giving them real information, but it’s actually just giving them spookily realistic word-salad, which is a big problem.
Of course you can fix this if you add some kind of context engine for them to truly grasp the deeper and wider meaning of your query. The problem with that is that if you do that, you’ve basically created an AGI. That may first of all be extremely difficult and far in the future, and second of all it has ethical implications that go beyond how effective of a search engine it is.
Sure but if that becomes the norm then a huge segment of the population will believe the first thing the bot tells them. You might be okay, but we’re talking about an entire society filtering its knowledge through an incredibly effective misinformation engine that will lie rather than say “I don’t know”, because that simple phrase requires a level of self-awareness that eludes a lot of actual people, much less a chatbot.
That’s already a problem. The thing j think about is what will serve me better. Google or chat AI. The risk of bad information exists with both. But an AI based search engine is something that will be much better at finding context, retiring results geared towards my goals and I suspect less prone to fuckery because AI must be trained as a whole
Except we already know that LLMs lie and people in general are not aware of this. Children are using these. When you as a person have to sift through results you get a sense of what information is out there, how sparse it is, etc. When a chatbot word-vomits the first thing it can think of to satisfy your answer, you get none of that, and perhaps you should be aware of that yourself. You don’t really seem to be, it’s like you think the saved time is more important than context, which apparently I have to remind you - the bot doesn’t know context.
When you say:
an AI based search engine is something that will be much better at finding context
It makes me think that you really don’t understand how these bots work, and that’s the real danger.
We’re talking in this thread about this wider systemic issue, not just what suits you personally regardless of how much it gaslights you, but if that’s all you care about then you do you I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Lie is a weird way to describe it. They hallucinate answers which is give you an answer they based on probabilities. Its not lying its just lacking in data to give an accurate and correct a answer which will get better with more training and data. Everything else we have so far gets worse. Google isn’t what it was 15 years ago.
I use chatgpt every day to find out answers over google. Its better in almost every single way to get information from and I can only imagine what it’s capable of once it can interface with crawlers.
Did you read my last little bit there? I said it depends on the information you are looking for. I can paste error output from my terminal into Google and try to find an answer or I can paste it into chatgpt and be, at the very least pointed in the right direction almost immediately, or even given the answer right away vs getting a stackoverflow link and parsing the responses and comments and following secondary and tiertiary links.
I absolutely understand the stochastic parrot conundrum with LLMs. They have significant drawbacks and they are far from perfect, but then neither is are Google search results. There is still a level of skepticism you have to apply.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is the idea that LLMs and websearching is a zero sum affair. They don’t replace each other. They compliment each other. Imo, google is messing up with their “ai” integration into Google search. It sets the expectation that it is an equivalent function.
I suspect that client-side AI might actually be the kind of thing that filters the crap from search results and actually gets you what you want.
That would only be Chat-AI if it turns out natural language queries are better to determine the kind of thing the user is looking for than people trying to craft more traditional query strings.
I’m thinking each person would can train their AI based on which query results they went for in unfiltered queries, with some kind of user provided feedback of suitability to account for click-bait (i.e. somebody selecting a result because it looks good but it turns out its not).
Maybe this is the equivalent of defending ethical capitalism, but an ad-supported model can enable poor users to access content they couldn’t afford if it were paid.
If you are too poor to consume the advertised items/services then the actual customers of those products/services are paying for your access. I personally use an ad-blocker, but I only hate ads because they can be a vector for malware.
That is a problem, because what I tell people all the time is that your data is money. Ad services also serves as a tracking service, and as such gets paid from two directions: from advertisers and mass collection of data.
The problem with both is that they have been devalued in a race to the bottom, mostly thanks to ads swarming the web in the early 2000s.
This also solidifies Google’s monopoly, because now all advertiser’s have to go through them, as well as Meta or other social networking platforms - which all have their own tracking and ad services.
I'd really like it if we stopped blaming the corporation and start blaming the people that make the decisions there and the people that implement those decisions. From the CEO's to the programmers. Put their names everywhere, show the world who actually ruined it. Google was the best resource humanity had to access information. Now, more often than not, I can not find anything related to my search. The search algorithm they used 20 years ago was better than this new junk.
I’d rather we build something better ourselves than hoping that companies turn “good”. A whole lot of the modern Internet’s problems are simply the result of leaving everything up to big companies instead of building our own better stuff. In the software world we have Open Source, Linux, GNU and all that, in the content world we have Creative Commons and for online services we have basically nothing. No licenses, rules or even best practices. Worse yet, whenever there is some effort in that direction, it’s often fundamentally broken (e.g. Signal requiring a phone number, Fediverse giving full control to the server not the user, etc.).
PS: If you want old school Google, try kagi.com. It’s expensive, but the closest thing to good search we have at the moment.
Kagi is fantastic. It’s worth every penny and imo paid search means they are incentivized to provide the best results. Unlike Google, who is an advertising company masquerading as a search engine. When you sell ads, and you make money for displaying them, where do your loyalties lie? The best results, for me, aren’t their goal. It’s the “how can we show this guy an ad he’ll click on?”. Is it the best result, no. Does Google get paid, yes.
I use Kagi and it’s great. But I’d also throw in a big honourable mention for Qwant. Imo it’s better than DDG. Throw in some NextDNS ad blocking and you’ll practically never see ads in your search again.
I agree with most of what you said except I don't expect companies to turn good. They don't do good or evil, they do profit by whatever means. It's intrinsic!
I'd like to help build some shit, got any recommendations? I can do the type type beep boop as long as that neural net is left out. Fuck that black box shit. I think it is the real reason for the shit algorithms these days. Which leads me to my next point. I get the exact same results from Kagi as I do from DDG. They are identical >90% of the time. Kagi does provide features that are worth paying for but I want better results, they existed before.
Once upon a time I could search for something incredibly specific and find an obscure forum with the answer. These days all I get, even with Kagi is the same results from SEO optimized garbage to AI generated dribble.
I really do not understand why Kagi is so promoted here. I really have not found it to be any better.
The problem with DDG is that it is just marketing on top of Bing. It doesn’t improve the Bing search results in any way, adds no new features and has no ambitions to build its own index. Never quite understand why it got popular in the first place when you can just use Bing instead and get literally the exact same thing.
Kagi is much closer to Google, bigger index and more up to date results than Bing, it has a lot of old features Google removed over the years, it removes a lot of the SEO spam that fills up Google and so on. It feels like modern version of Google without the enshittification. And yes, you can find most of the sites in any other search engine just as well, everybody is searching the same Web after all. It’s not magic, it can’t fix everything that is broken with the Web, but Kagi is a much cleaner more user focused experience.
What makes Kagi interesting in the end that going from Google to any of the alternatives always felt like a downgrade, Kagi is the only one I ever tried that felt like an upgrade.
I’d also argue there’s a lot more shit and garbage on the internet that google needs to sift through. Tons of duplicate pages, ad infested websites and whatnot.
SEO optimised webpages are often also ad infested, clickbait webpages.
But yes. I’m using duckduckgo because it actually gives me better search results than google most of the time. So the non-personalized results are better than their personalized results.
Chatgpt has also given me better results when searching for tooling. Looking for wiki alternatives is just page after page of fucking confluence. At least chatgpt manages to list different wiki tools (including confluence ) but I don’t have to go through the first 90 google pages.
I need a “distinct” checkbox in my search engine. And a plugin that rates pages based on ad presence and how clickbaity the article looks. Maybe that’s a good idea for a new fucking search engine all together.
There is nothing better than lazy internet mob attacking individuals for shit they don’t like, while don’t knowing the whole picture.
(For anyone who thinks this is above is a good idea, please think about the guy who created Minecraft, made a huge success and then got depressed by just reading comments from all the kids who didn’t like something about the game)
telegraph.co.uk
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