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At this point, we don't know how useful it will turn out to be. While we are trading anecdotes, here's mine. I asked chatGPT who the Exec team of a medium sized company I knew, was. It confidently stated seven names. Turns out three of them it categorized under a different title and another three never even worked at the company! I would hardly call this a bootstrappble result.

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.



You’re not using it right. LLM fundamentally don’t know s*t about this company’s exec team. Maybe some names are statistically close to the company name in vector-space but no guarantee (as you discovered).

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.


But the whole point of these debates is a discussion about whether Bing is going to eat Google's lunch in search, which very much is about finding out about things like companies' exec teams.

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.


> But the whole point ... is ... in _search_ (not content generation)

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).


> whether Bing is going to eat Google's lunch in search,

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


An analogue of Jevons' law applies here.

I doubt you hand wrote cover letters by making dozens of search queries (similarly, I doubt people devise teaching curricula by learning the history of Ukraine through a series of Google queries). But when you weren't taking the time to write them yourself, I bet you had more time free to search for jobs, or do general internet browsing using Google as your gateway to the internet...

People having more time free to browse the internet is unlikely to be a threat to Google's business, even in the highly unlikely scenario Google is incapable of advancing its existing AI products beyond their current state


I think of these tools as "first draft writers". You can't rely on OpenAI's GPT models to do your research for you or replace knowledge of a particular domain, but they significantly accelerate the initial content drafting process. Then you edit and fact-check and adapt, as you would anyway, but you've cut out much of the time-consuming grind of getting words on the page.


There is something that I find deeply unsatisfying about this. For me, the first draft is as much about working through the problems space and considering possibilities. If I rely on a chat bot, then I am more apt to become anchored to whatever the chat bot spits back out at me. Even if what it produces is good enough, I do not benefit from the drafting process in the way that I would if I did it myself. Sometimes maybe this is a good enough shortcut but I generally don't believe in shortcuts.


Actually it works not as the first draft, or the final draft - it is the middle draft. In stage one you just drop a bunch of bullet points, ideas, short notes. In stage 2 the model writes your article or paper. In stage 3 you fix it.

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 more like a pre-draft from what I've seen. But for an area I know, I can absolutely see something like ChatGPT throwing 500 words down on some topic and generating some explanatory boilerplate about something like what a service mesh is. I'll take out some things that I don't quite agree with, give it more of a "voice," maybe add some data/quotes/links/etc.

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.


first draft does set the direction


In my experience a domain expert (myself in my domain) can quickly validate the answers. It can make a multi-hour task a multi-minute task.


I also got false positives when I asked for facts. This is what classical search is for. But what chat feature in Bing is — a context aware coherent text generation machine with an amazing online feature to modify and bend its content to your wishes. Its also not bad at summarizing articles. But hey, if this is just the beginning I bet in a couple of years it will match your standards as well.


with lang-chain and tooling, these problems will likely quickly shrink.

imagine where we'll be just two papers down the line!


Everyone in this thread replying to npalli gets it. I am getting more and more skilled in using it everyday. I feel like I have a third lobe of my brain.

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...


I think there's also a pretty big group of us who find that it is today a moderately useful tool for certain types of things but isn't really transformative in general.


You’re not using ChatGPT correctly.


As the saying goes, you’re holding it wrong.


In the context of replacing a search engine, it is the correct use.




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