I think you’re underselling it a bit though. It is far better than a modern search engine, although that is in part because of all of the SEO slop that Google has ingested. The fact that you need to think critically is not something new and it’s never going to go away either. If you were paying real-life human experts to answer your every question you would still need to think for yourself.
Still, I think the C-suite doesn’t really have a good grasp of the limits of LLMs. This could be partly because they themselves work a lot with words and visualization, areas where LLMs show promise. It’s much less useful if you’re in engineering, although I think ultimately AI will transform engineering too. It is of course annoying and potentially destructive that they’re trying to force-push it into areas where it’s not useful (yet).
It is far better than a modern search engine, although that is in part because of all of the SEO slop that Google has ingested. The fact that you need to think critically is not something new and it’s never going to go away either.
Very much disagree with that. Google got significantly worse, but LLM results are worse still. You do need to think critically about it, but with LLM blurb there is no ways to check for validity other than to do another search without LLM, to find sources, (and in this case why even bother with the generator in the first place), or accept that some of your new info can be incorrect, and you don’t know which part.
With conventional search you have all the context of your result, you have the reputation of the website itself, you have the info about who wrote the article or whatever, you have the tone of article, you have comments, you have all the subtle clues that we learnt to pick up on both from our lifetime experience on the internet, and civilisational span experience with human interaction. With the generator you have zero of that, you have something that is stated as fact, and everything has the same weight and the same validity, and even when it sites sources, those can be just outright lies.
With the ‘autocomplete-like’ nature of current LLMs the issue is precisely that you can never be sure of any answer’s validity. Some approaches try by giving ‘sources’ next to it, but that doesn’t mean those sources’ findings actually match the text output and it’s not a given that the sources themselves are reputable - thus you’re back to perusing those to make sure anyway.
If there was a meter of certainty next to the answers this would be much more meaningful for serious use-cases, but of course by design such a thing seems impossible to implement with the current approaches.
I will say that in my personal (hobby) projects I have found a few good use cases of letting the models spit out some guesses, e.g. for the causes of a programming bug or proposing directions to research in, but I am just not sold that the heaviness of all the costs (cognitive, social, and of course environmental) is worth it for that alone.
Alright you know what, I’m not going to argue. You do you.
I just know that I’ve been underwhelmed with conventional search for about a decade, and I think that LLMs are a huge help sorting through the internet at the moment. There’s no telling what it will become in the future, especially if popular LLMs start ingesting content that itself has been generated by LLMs, but for now I think that the improvement is more significant than the step from Yahoo→Google in the 2000s.
I think you’re underselling it a bit though. It is far better than a modern search engine, although that is in part because of all of the SEO slop that Google has ingested. The fact that you need to think critically is not something new and it’s never going to go away either. If you were paying real-life human experts to answer your every question you would still need to think for yourself.
Still, I think the C-suite doesn’t really have a good grasp of the limits of LLMs. This could be partly because they themselves work a lot with words and visualization, areas where LLMs show promise. It’s much less useful if you’re in engineering, although I think ultimately AI will transform engineering too. It is of course annoying and potentially destructive that they’re trying to force-push it into areas where it’s not useful (yet).
Very much disagree with that. Google got significantly worse, but LLM results are worse still. You do need to think critically about it, but with LLM blurb there is no ways to check for validity other than to do another search without LLM, to find sources, (and in this case why even bother with the generator in the first place), or accept that some of your new info can be incorrect, and you don’t know which part.
With conventional search you have all the context of your result, you have the reputation of the website itself, you have the info about who wrote the article or whatever, you have the tone of article, you have comments, you have all the subtle clues that we learnt to pick up on both from our lifetime experience on the internet, and civilisational span experience with human interaction. With the generator you have zero of that, you have something that is stated as fact, and everything has the same weight and the same validity, and even when it sites sources, those can be just outright lies.
I think you really nailed the crux of the matter.
With the ‘autocomplete-like’ nature of current LLMs the issue is precisely that you can never be sure of any answer’s validity. Some approaches try by giving ‘sources’ next to it, but that doesn’t mean those sources’ findings actually match the text output and it’s not a given that the sources themselves are reputable - thus you’re back to perusing those to make sure anyway.
If there was a meter of certainty next to the answers this would be much more meaningful for serious use-cases, but of course by design such a thing seems impossible to implement with the current approaches.
I will say that in my personal (hobby) projects I have found a few good use cases of letting the models spit out some guesses, e.g. for the causes of a programming bug or proposing directions to research in, but I am just not sold that the heaviness of all the costs (cognitive, social, and of course environmental) is worth it for that alone.
Alright you know what, I’m not going to argue. You do you.
I just know that I’ve been underwhelmed with conventional search for about a decade, and I think that LLMs are a huge help sorting through the internet at the moment. There’s no telling what it will become in the future, especially if popular LLMs start ingesting content that itself has been generated by LLMs, but for now I think that the improvement is more significant than the step from Yahoo→Google in the 2000s.
Obviously, that would require reading and engaging with my response, and you clearly decided to not do both even before I wrote it