<story><title>Ask HN: Are we sure LLMs are that useful in a web search application?</title><text>Idly chatting with the search box doesn&amp;#x27;t strike me as the most productive use of my time.&lt;p&gt;Instant answers or whatever they&amp;#x27;re called already produce direct answers plus they cite sources and provide links which is what everyone seems to think is the solution to the &amp;quot;LLMs make stuff up&amp;quot; problem.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention they&amp;#x27;re faster and cheaper to run.&lt;p&gt;Only truly practical use case I can think of is summarizing articles or writing them which makes more sense as a word processor or browser add-ons</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>bbor</author><text>This is a perfect example of the popular view on here, and in my humble naive opinion it’s completely mistaken. The point isn’t “can an LLM replace google” the point is “can robots that can speak English and use logic improve the search experience” which I think basically everyone would answer “yes” to. Complaining that it gets stuff wrong when not hooked up to a web of resources to cite is, IMO, completely missing the point.&lt;p&gt;Also OP (not so much you) is way too caught up in the “chat” aspect - that is the first exciting UX that got popular, but these are much, much more than chatbots. Pretending that they’re human&amp;#x2F;conscious&amp;#x2F;in a conversation is fun, but having an invisible partner that knows you and tailors your search results… that’s powerful.&lt;p&gt;For example, you’ll never have to add “Reddit” again, or at least you’ll only have to tell it once. An LLM can easily identify the kind of questions where you want forum posts, read thousands of posts in a second, summarize all their content, and label each link with other information that helps you decide which threads to read in full.&lt;p&gt;I can’t wait!</text></item><item><author>agentultra</author><text>I think there are plenty of people that remain skeptical of their utility for this application.&lt;p&gt;People who want to get rich will tell you it&amp;#x27;s the next greatest thing that will revolutionize the industry.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I&amp;#x27;ve been annoyed at how confidently &lt;i&gt;wrong&lt;/i&gt; ChatGPT can be. Even when you point out the error and ask it to correct the mistake it comes back with an even-more-wrong answer. And it frames it like the answer is completely, 100% correct and accurate. Because it&amp;#x27;s essentially really deep auto-complete, it&amp;#x27;s designed to generate text that sounds &lt;i&gt;plausible&lt;/i&gt;. This isn&amp;#x27;t useful in a search context when you want to find sources and truth.&lt;p&gt;I think there are useful applications for this technology but I think we should leave that to the people who understand LLM&amp;#x27;s best and keep the charlatans out of it. LLM&amp;#x27;s are really interesting and have come a long way by leaps and bounds... but I don&amp;#x27;t see how replacing entire institutions and processes by something that is only well understood by a handful of people is a great idea. It&amp;#x27;s like watering plants with gatorade.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tensor</author><text>As someone who understands how these models are built and what they do, let me just say that almost all of what you think these models can do is wrong.&lt;p&gt;For one, you can&amp;#x27;t just &amp;quot;hook up&amp;quot; a language model to some other task, or to the web. ChatGPT is specifically built and trained to have good conversations. The fact that it can sort of appear to do other things is a happy coincidence.&lt;p&gt;To do any of what you want, new algorithms need to be built, and none of that is &amp;quot;easy&amp;quot;. And finally, these models take A LOT of cpu time. They are not going to be reading thousands of posts in a second without serious and expensive compute hardware backing it, and that level of compute isn&amp;#x27;t remotely feasible to give out to individual users.&lt;p&gt;Even chatGPT, which is doing a fraction of the tasks you are listing, costs millions of dollars worth of hardware a day. The only reason it exists for free is because Microsoft has donated all that time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Are we sure LLMs are that useful in a web search application?</title><text>Idly chatting with the search box doesn&amp;#x27;t strike me as the most productive use of my time.&lt;p&gt;Instant answers or whatever they&amp;#x27;re called already produce direct answers plus they cite sources and provide links which is what everyone seems to think is the solution to the &amp;quot;LLMs make stuff up&amp;quot; problem.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention they&amp;#x27;re faster and cheaper to run.&lt;p&gt;Only truly practical use case I can think of is summarizing articles or writing them which makes more sense as a word processor or browser add-ons</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>bbor</author><text>This is a perfect example of the popular view on here, and in my humble naive opinion it’s completely mistaken. The point isn’t “can an LLM replace google” the point is “can robots that can speak English and use logic improve the search experience” which I think basically everyone would answer “yes” to. Complaining that it gets stuff wrong when not hooked up to a web of resources to cite is, IMO, completely missing the point.&lt;p&gt;Also OP (not so much you) is way too caught up in the “chat” aspect - that is the first exciting UX that got popular, but these are much, much more than chatbots. Pretending that they’re human&amp;#x2F;conscious&amp;#x2F;in a conversation is fun, but having an invisible partner that knows you and tailors your search results… that’s powerful.&lt;p&gt;For example, you’ll never have to add “Reddit” again, or at least you’ll only have to tell it once. An LLM can easily identify the kind of questions where you want forum posts, read thousands of posts in a second, summarize all their content, and label each link with other information that helps you decide which threads to read in full.&lt;p&gt;I can’t wait!</text></item><item><author>agentultra</author><text>I think there are plenty of people that remain skeptical of their utility for this application.&lt;p&gt;People who want to get rich will tell you it&amp;#x27;s the next greatest thing that will revolutionize the industry.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I&amp;#x27;ve been annoyed at how confidently &lt;i&gt;wrong&lt;/i&gt; ChatGPT can be. Even when you point out the error and ask it to correct the mistake it comes back with an even-more-wrong answer. And it frames it like the answer is completely, 100% correct and accurate. Because it&amp;#x27;s essentially really deep auto-complete, it&amp;#x27;s designed to generate text that sounds &lt;i&gt;plausible&lt;/i&gt;. This isn&amp;#x27;t useful in a search context when you want to find sources and truth.&lt;p&gt;I think there are useful applications for this technology but I think we should leave that to the people who understand LLM&amp;#x27;s best and keep the charlatans out of it. LLM&amp;#x27;s are really interesting and have come a long way by leaps and bounds... but I don&amp;#x27;t see how replacing entire institutions and processes by something that is only well understood by a handful of people is a great idea. It&amp;#x27;s like watering plants with gatorade.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pwinnski</author><text>If the point isn&amp;#x27;t how an LLM replace a search engine, then why is Bing using an LLM to replace their search engine?&lt;p&gt;When you ask whether speaking English and using logic can improve the search experience, I wonder what you consider the most important parts of the search experience? I think many people, most of the time, might say that &amp;quot;accurate information&amp;quot; is their highest expectation, with &amp;quot;a pleasant conversation&amp;quot; somewhere below that. Delivering a plausible-sounding and pleasant answer that&amp;#x27;s completely wrong is... well, that&amp;#x27;s not a search engine I can depend on, is it?&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re hypothesizing a few things at the end that sound great! It&amp;#x27;s completely unclear whether any of those things will actually end up happening, so I think the focus on what is available today, with Chat-GPT and Bing, is more apt than a focus on what could be.</text></comment>