In your example, if I told that at random about 30% of the results were made up, you would not consider that a time saver. In fact it would be total time waster since you would have to vet every single entry. People think since 70% is accurate, only 30% work is needed but not if you don't know which 30% is bogus. You would need to check the entire work using conventional means including perhaps a 'regular' search engine.
The LLM won’t revolutionize search as it is today for factual queries. They’re Clippy 2.0. It’s great people are finding use for the models, but I wish this search story would be balanced out a bit.
I was laid off recently, and I’m using the LLM to write a bunch of cover letters. I give it my resume, a blurb about the company and job and a bit about what I like about work, and it outputs a cover letter. I don’t like writing BS cover letters where I pretend I majored in the company mission and my whole life has been teaching me their values. GPT can do that for me though- and yes I fact check but I’m fact checking against my resume and personal opinions which I obviously know quite well.
The ability of an LLM to generate decent content (provided you're an attentive editor or the users of the content aren't too discerning) could be huge for Office365, but that's irrelevant to any potential threat to Google, since Docs is of very little importance to Google's revenues and strategy in a market where Office is completely dominant and has always had a more full-featured product.
True. And also, keep in mind ... it doesn't truly have to be _better_ than Google search. You just need to start and maintain a _social trend_ so that the mainstream public _chooses_ it over Google. People use Google because it's the first and only option that comes to mind -- they haven't actually compared its accuracy to anything else in a long time (the audience of Hacker News is of course an exception).
There are a few types of search queries that people seem to do, factual lookups ("who is the exec of abc?"), but also generally treat the search engine as the entryway to the internet ("I need a teaching plan about Ukraine"). We'll see that LLM fall flat for facts (assuming people care), but they can supplant some of the general traffic. Realistically, its a bad fact search replacement, but it could be a great tool to put next to a search bar, making a better "starting place for accessing the internet".
With the teaching plan example, the original user was probably going to make a query for a template (or 5), then copy+paste, then do 10-100 queries learning all about Ukraine history and culture, then rewrite that into the template, editing down to manageable size, then send to peers to edit and review, then format for distribution. That could be dozens of Google searches. Now, one or two AI queries, and they have a template, basic written text, and can focus on a couple queries for fact checking. Oh, and since they used bing to do the AI part, they may just stick with bing for the fact check part. Google was irrelevant in that whole flow instead of getting dozens of queries over a day before, but if that feature was moved to Office365, then they may never have used bing for search while still killing a chunk of google's traffic.
The danger to google is not equal to the opportunity to bing. If 5-10% of traffic never reaches a google search, that's a huge chunk of google's revenue, even if it doesn't translate to searches on a different engine. Think of the potential impact an AI code generator could have on StackOverflow. When I need to pick up a new language, I often query "how to append to an array in python" in a search engine, but a LLM (or large-code-model) built into my IDE could supplant that query entirely. I
Almost 100% next iteration will sport a fact checker, powerful style and format controls, and a much larger context. The development of advanced fact checkers will have a big impact on anything propagated online.
It's not going to write me something I'll hand to an editor. But for certain things, it could definitely give me a head start relative to a blank sheet of paper.
imagine where we'll be just two papers down the line!
There are largely three groups of people
1) ChatWhat?
2) It only makes bullshit!
3) OMG, this amazing, and scary and amazing, and useful. Oh wow...
