The problem with search is not that our answers aren't summarized well, it's that the quality of information returned for those searches is getting increasingly worse, and we are getting increasingly worse at categorizing or filtering that information in any useful way. And LLMs pulling information in and summarizing it for me is... not helpful? It's summarizing the same garbage, except now sometimes it also summarizes it wrong.
But it's not even an issue with the quality (although the quality of information from LLMs is also pretty over-hyped I think). Conceptually, I don't know that this is a product that I would ever want. I can't think of any time where I've sat down to do a search on Google or DuckDuckgo and thought, "You know what I want? I want these results presented to me in a less structured format using natural language and with less granular knowledge about where each specific statement is coming from."
At least Bing seems to be trying to do inline citations in some of its answers, which is a step up over Google's AI announcement, I guess?
Maybe I'm just in the minority on that. Users seem to like this a lot. But my ideal version of the Internet is one that decreases the number of abstractions and layers and summaries between myself and primary data rather than increasing them. My ideal Internet is a tool that makes it easier for me to actually find things, not a tool that increases the layers between me and the raw source/information that I'm looking for. I already have enough trouble needing to double-check news summaries of debates, events, and research. Getting another summary of the summaries doesn't seem helpful to me?
I can think of some ways where I might use an LLM in search, even really exciting ways where maybe it could help with categorization or grouping, but it doesn't seem like Google/Bing are interested in pursuing any of that. I look at both the Bing and Google announcements and just think, "why are you making it worse?" But who knows, maybe the actual products will sell me on the concept more.
The first is a little more mundane: LLM embeddings. OpenAI currently offers an API that turns sentences into coordinates for a point in some 1536-dimensional conceptual space such that two points are close together if they are conceptually close together. This is insanely powerful. For example, you can generate captions for a bunch of images and store the embeddings for them. Then, you can look for a "picture of a rabbit eating a carrot" by turning that phrase into a 1536-dimensional point and looking for the nearest points around it. Basically, it blows open search technology for everyone. You no longer have to deal with synonyms, idiomatic phrases that mean similar things, misspellings etc - the problems you'd run into when trying to implement simple text search using traditional techniques. It all gets simplified to generating coordinates in some hyperspace and looking for nearest neighbors. This is a total game changer.
The second direction is ChatGPT. Sure, if you want to read a detailed analysis of the demographic situation in China, you'd prefer an article written by an expert. You would still use a search engine, pick a search result and do things the way you do them today. However, there's an entire collection of things that can be answered directly by ChatGPT. For example "how many mins should I hard boil an egg" or "Can I take NyQuil when I'm stoned" or anything else where you really just want a single sentence answer. Today, you launch a browser, search for what you want, skip past the first 10 advertisements, look for a site that seems reasonably reputable, click through all the GDPR warnings, scroll past the banner ads and the SEO optimizing bullshit text to find that one sentence that you wanted all along. Or, you could ask ChatGPT and get an answer instantly. (assuming chatGPT is good enough eventually).
It's hard to predict which of these two technologies will disrupt the current status quo in search. Neither might. But we haven't ever been this close to a level playing field in search since the 1990s. The excitement is hard to resist.
> there's an entire collection of things that can be answered directly by ChatGPT. [...] assuming chatGPT is good enough eventually
I am a lot less impressed with this. And I know I'm an outlier and plenty of people are shocked at how good GPT is at this kind of problem, so I am constantly second-guessing myself and thinking to myself, "are we using the same product?" Because I think ChatGPT produces really bad quality information. It's cool, it's wildly impressive, it's a massive achievement and an incredible milestone for AI, but 'cool' is different from 'useful.'
Leaving aside the problem that answering simple questions is a very small subset of what search is used for, and isn't on its own probably a big enough category of questions to make me change search engines, the bigger problem is that the current state of ChatGPT seems to be wildly inconsistent about what it knows and what it doesn't know and I don't have a way to pre-predict what categories of information it's safe to ask about. And the only way for me to verify the answers it gives me are to... double check its work with a real search.
I would not advise anyone to ask ChatGPT for advice about what drugs are safe to take while high, that seems profoundly unwise to me.
So it's a bit like Instant Answers. Google has been trying to auto-answer questions for ages, and in practice the only time it's ever been useful for me is when it's extremely predictable and when I know that a category of question will only ever have its answer pulled from one site and where I know what the format of that answer will be.
Unpredictability is generally a quality that I try to avoid any time that I am using a computer. One of the primary strengths of a computer to me is specificity and predictability. And so the bar here is really high. The question I ask myself is, "would I want to replace a search engine with a human assistant?" And I think the answer is no, I feel like that would be missing the point of what a search engine is. And ChatGPT gives worse answers than a human assistant would, and its sources/knowledge is just as unpredictable as a human's would be if not worse. So, I also don't want to replace my search engine with ChatGPT.
It could get more accurate in the future, and if it does then maybe my opinion will change then, but... it's hard for me to get excited about using a worse product today on the promise that it might get better in the future. And I guess it's accurate enough that a bunch of people keep telling me that they're saving time when they use it, so maybe I don't understand what I'm talking about. But I just don't see how people are reaching that conclusion unless they're either asking questions where they don't actually care about the accuracy or unless they're just rolling the dice and trusting that ChatGPT won't accidentally poison them when they ask what drug combinations they can take.
First, you have people who don’t have any idea about how any of this works and are generally far removed from the tech communities. They did not see this coming. To this community, ChatGPT is a fascinating toy. It’s not perfect, but at this point everyone is conditioned to believe that thinks will somehow get better. This group is excited.
Second, you have the tech community who is skeptical. This group of people sees everything that’s wrong with ChatGPT and see the magnitude of work needed for anything to even start approaching Google as a credible threat. This group is generally confused by the excitement going around because it doesn’t seem warranted, and worse, the excitement is being seen in people who should know better. There’s a range of responses from being dismissive to feeling like they’re being gaslighted.
Third, you have the people who are filling up the YC summer 23 applications. They’re all looking for big unsaturated markets to build a pitch deck around. ChatGPT looks like a very promising sign post that says “look for ideas here” to this group. They are excited. Most of them will fail. But if anyone survives and manages to thrive, where will they be 10 years from now? How about FDA approved chatbots integrated with a blood pressure monitor and thermometer that can take a first pass at routine prescription refills at 1/100th the cost of an equivalent doctors appointment? How about live translation of television events synthesized back to the original speaker’s voice? How about video game engines that can synthesize music loops dynamically to keep up with the gaming pace of that particular gaming session?
Sure you might say, but none of that “dethrones google”. My response to that is - what role does a text based internet play in daily life 10 years from now? Everything on the internet today went something along this path: primary research -> classrooms -> textbooks -> niche blogs/forums -> mainstream websites.
10 years from now, would you bet against primary research -> ChatGPT ingress -> widely deployed ChatGPT model? What role do ad driven websites play in this chain? What role does a search engine play in this chain?
Sure, it doesn’t make the internet nor search engines obsolete. But it changes how we do things. Potentially in a very big way.