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0 pointsbsder2y ago0 comments

> If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and helps you understand its answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just want it's useful for today.

We used to just call that "a search engine". Remember that? Somebody would put up a website about their favorite pet topic and when the search engine unearthed it, that's what you got.

It was the ad-ification of search engines that killed that. So, AI allows us to go back to the Internet circa 2000? That's a big innovation? I mean, I'll take it, but that's a pretty low bar ...

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kalb_almas2y ago

> Somebody would put up a website about their favorite pet topic and when the search engine unearthed it, that's what you got.

The difference is that reading someone's blog post forces you to take their trajectory through the material and it might not go over the exact points you're curious or confused about. With a forum like StackOverflow you often have to settle for problems that are merely close enough to your own that the solutions apply to it.

Models like ChatGPT allow you to ask for blog posts on any topic on demand and then ask for follow-up blog posts about whatever aspect of the previous blog post you want to elaborate.

tracerbulletx2y ago

I am having good conversations with the thing about books as I read them and having it summarize parts I want to keep notes on and make knowledge graphs, and construct new worked examples and diving into specific topics and having significantly enhanced learning experiences with it as a partner literally every day for the last few months. So you're entitled to your opinion but it's simply not the same thing as a search engine.

Pearse2y ago

This is such a great use case thanks for sharing.

I spent some time talking to chatgtp about the history of art philosophy and technology, as if we were writing a book together.

I found it was great to just get a very broad overview and then ask questions about the things I wanted to know more about.

Not a groundbreaking way to use an LLM but I really enjoyed it.

I'm going to take your idea of talking to it about books too.

Spivak2y ago

I see that an an incredibly high bar. Even with all the resources of Google they (and everyone else) are losing the SEO war. These algos at their core fundamentally can't handle adversarial input and we've been making faster horses since AltaVista. Even if the only thing LLms are useful for is search that's still great.

bsderOP2y ago

> Even with all the resources of Google they (and everyone else) are losing the SEO war.

Google is choosing to lose the SEO war because they think it would impact their ad revenue.

Every site that takes longer than 100ms to load? Gone. Wipes out vast quantities of ad-infested sewage. Login required? Gone. Websites now have to choose between reach and subscribers and the ones that choose subscribers will have to get better. Javascript required to access content? Gone. No more ad bidding system at all and no vectors for spreading virii. Tracking stuff from Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/etc.? Gone. No more analytics tracking everybody.

We don't need AI to fix this. We need an alternative search engine. If "AI" is what gets us there, I'll take it. But it ain't "AI".

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