I wrote a longer version of this comment, but why would you ask ChatGPT to summarize an earnings report, and at the very least not just give it the earnings report?
I will be so so disappointed if the immense potential their current approach has gets nerfed because people want to shoehorn this into being AskJeeves 2.0
All of these complaints boil down to hallucination, but hallucination is what makes this thing so powerful for novel insight. Instead of "Summarize lululemon quarterly earnings report" I would cut and paste a good chunk with some numbers, then say "Lululemon stock went (up|down) after these numbers, why could that be", and in all likelihood it'd give you some novel insight that makes some degree of sense.
To me, if you can type a query into Google and get a plain result, it's a bad prompt. Yes that's essentially saying "you're holding it wrong", but again, in this case it's kind of like trying to dull a knife so you can hold it by the blade and it'd really be a shame if that's where the optimization starts to go.
According to the article Microsoft did this. In their video product demo. To showcase its purported ability to retrieve and summarise information.
Which, as it turns out, was more of an inability to do it properly.
I agree your approach to prompting is less likely to yield an error (and make you more likely to catch it if it does), but your question basically boils down to "why is Bing Chat a thing?". And tbh that one got answered a while ago when Google Home and Siri and Alexa became things. Convenience is good: it's just it turns out that being much more ambitious isn't that convenient if it means being wrong or weird a lot
I mean I thought it was clear enough that, I am in fact speaking to the larger point of "why is this a product"? When I say "people" I don't mean visitors to Bing, I mean whoever at Microsoft is driving this
Microsoft wants their expensive oft derided search engine to become a relevant channel in people's lives, that's an obvious "business why"
But from a "product why", Alexa/Siri/Home seem like they would be cases against trying this again for the exact reason you gave: Pigeonholing an LM try to answer search engine queries is a recipe for over-ambition
Over-ambition in this case being relying on a system prone to hallucinations for factual data across the entire internet.
It was my mistake holding HN to a higher standard than the most uncharitable interpretation of a comment.
I didn't fault a user for searching with a search engine, I'm questioning why a search engine is pigeonholing ChatGPT into being search interface.
But I guess if you're the kind of person prone to low value commentary like "why'd you search using a search engine?!" you might project it onto others...
I'd excuse the misunderstanding if I had just left it to the reader to guess my intent, but not only do I expand on it, I wrote two more sibling comments hours before you replied clarifying it.
It almost seems like you stopped reading the moment you got to some arbitrary point and decided you knew what I was saying better than I did.
> If the question is rather about why it can look it up, the equally obvious answer is that it makes it easier and faster to ask such questions.
Obviously the comment is questioning this exact permise: And arguing that it's not faster and easier to insert an LM over a search engine, when an LM is prone to hallucination, and the entire internet is such a massive dataset that you'll overfit on search engine style question and sacrifice the novel aspect to this.
You were so preciously close to getting that but I guess snark about obvious answers is more your speed...
For starters, don't forget that on HN, people won't see new sibling comments until they refresh the page, if they had it opened for a while (which tends to be the case with these long-winded discussions, especially if you multitask).
That aside, it looks like every single person who responded to you had the same exact problem in understanding your comment. You can blame HN culture for being uncharitable, but the simpler explanation is that it's really the obvious meaning of the comment as seen by others without the context of your other thoughts on the subject.
As an aside, your original comment mentions that you had a longer write-up initially. Going by my own experience doing such things, it's entirely possible to make a lengthy but clear argument, lose that clarity while trying to shorten it to desirable length, and not notice it because the original is still there in your head, and thus you remember all the things that the shorter version leaves unsaid.
Getting back to the actual argument that you're making:
> it's not faster and easier to insert an LM over a search engine, when an LM is prone to hallucination, and the entire internet is such a massive dataset that you'll overfit on search engine style question and sacrifice the novel aspect to this.
I don't see how that follows. It's eminently capable of looking things up, and will do so on most occasions, especially since it tells you whenever it looks something up (so if the answer is hallucinated, you know it). It can certainly be trained to do so better with fine-tuning. This is all very useful without any "hallucinations" in the picture. Whether "hallucinations" are useful in other applications is a separate question, but the answer to that is completely irrelevant to the usefulness of the LLM + search engine combo.
I will be so so disappointed if the immense potential their current approach has gets nerfed because people want to shoehorn this into being AskJeeves 2.0
All of these complaints boil down to hallucination, but hallucination is what makes this thing so powerful for novel insight. Instead of "Summarize lululemon quarterly earnings report" I would cut and paste a good chunk with some numbers, then say "Lululemon stock went (up|down) after these numbers, why could that be", and in all likelihood it'd give you some novel insight that makes some degree of sense.
To me, if you can type a query into Google and get a plain result, it's a bad prompt. Yes that's essentially saying "you're holding it wrong", but again, in this case it's kind of like trying to dull a knife so you can hold it by the blade and it'd really be a shame if that's where the optimization starts to go.