I was once very good at advanced Google search queries but they seem to no longer respect such queries - either showing irrelevant results or none at all (that should exist).
I don’t love LLMs, but they seem to not make up stuff very often these days and usually cite links to what they summarized. Sometimes the tone of the summary is slightly wrong “algorithm X was designed for Y” (when I know it wasn’t) but it’s otherwise very close to the mark.
What does amaze me, is the LLM seems to “understand” my question with very little context — I would have to give a human many more details about goals/intent.
I know damn LLMs are not capable of thought and are just a glorified search engine, but they do it well. Perhaps all my education made me little more…
I used to mock Sci-Fi movies where characters lazily dictated questions to the computer and it gave high quality answers.
We’re living in that world now.
The vast majority of original content is now in one or another social network or on discord. News articles are an exception, though the news has its own problems. Some wikis still exist and are actively maintained, of course, but not a ton. If it's a topic that's academically studied you might find information in papers, but those have poor web visibility and are better located with specialty tools. LLMs seem to be quite good at locating papers, though.
Ah, but they are! Kagi is light years better than Google, and is a worthy replacement. You do have to pay for it, but I get my money's worth.
Though I will say I get much better results from the LLMs I pay for than the free ones with Google or DuckDuckGo, which seem to be way way way more prone to just make crap up based on your search and cite web pages that, when followed, don't have the claim being made in the AI search results at all. By contrast every "source" link I've followed in the for-money AIs has 100% backed what the AI said it backed. Don't judge by the free AIs the search engines put out, those things are probably starved of resources and are nearly useless.
(Which I did not intend as a commentary on Google's plans here, but it is a data point of interest... that pressure to cut costs on the "free" services is quite directly at odds with providing quality AI services for the forseeable future.)
Same here. The free version probably gets orders of magnitude less of a compute budget, though, so I am not really surprised.
What I find really surprising though is how many people still have only ever used the free version of any LLM, even those that are heavy users and could easily afford it. It seems like a pretty big and basic product marketing mistake to me to limit capabilities instead of usage time in the free version! How are people supposed to learn what they'd get if they were to pay?
And I’ve tried Google’s once or twice and seen it used once or twice, and used ChatGPT exactly once, last week, and I was not at all impressed by any of them. Their output, for what I’ve personally seen, has been nonsense, obvious, or unverifiable.
An increasing number of studies are indicating a reliance on "AI" leads to deleterious cognitive effects. I felt this acutely myself.
I've noticed a significant boost to my recall since shunning "AI" as much as possible.
You can't do something like this with search.
I've been trying to use LLMs for things and it makes mistakes all the time. Just this week i had multiple instances of various LLMs basically saying "just run the software with --flag-that-fixes-your-problem" or "edit the config and add solve-your-issue=true" hallucinating non-existant options. Even if i manually link the relevant documentation pages it will still just make basic mistakes. and if im having to read the documentation myself anyway to fix the AI's mistakes, why is the AI even in the loop.
its infecting search too, because blogspam/slop articles are managing to make their way into search results by just making up untrue information, claiming software can do things it cant, or has options that don't exist.
It's baffling that people have become so devoted to them as a source of information given how inaccurate they are. I've learned not to trust anything they say, ever, especially when it comes to technical subjects.
Using google search, will return roughly infinite recipe sites. The sites were generated to spam AI generated recipes surrounded by advertisements. None of them are really any good because they were generated by a script and not looked at by a human until I come along and click. The standard is for all recipes to have at least 10-15 screenfulls of vertical spam wrapped by ads for recipe pages. The internet, at least using Search, is now useless for food recipes. I would have better, faster luck driving to the public library and looking in a physical cookbook; at least those recipes were probably tested at least once by humans unlike the advertising spam sites. Nobody has 45 minutes to watch 44 minutes of filler material surrounded by ads on Youtube either. If you want to cook food, the internet is near dead at this time, unfortunately.
AI search will plagiarize the "Original Nestle Toll House" recipe from the back of every bag of chocolate chips ever made. Its a good recipe and I've baked them many times over the decades.
I wish the internet were more useful, but the people in charge of it don't want it to be useful; here have some ragebait and doomscroll while watching the ads.
I don't comprehend how the average person gets any useful information out of Google.