<story><title>AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines</title><url>https://iai.tv/articles/all-knowing-machines-are-a-fantasy-auid-2334</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WJW</author><text>What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the future) is that there is no way to know if you&amp;#x27;ve actually asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early on, though that seems to have been fixed (although that may have been just through hardcoding).</text></item><item><author>gukov</author><text>The way I see it:&lt;p&gt;- Today&amp;#x27;s search engines will give you links to millions of documents&lt;p&gt;- ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents&lt;p&gt;To me, that&amp;#x27;s a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO &amp;amp; ad spam that&amp;#x27;s plaguing Google and others currently.&lt;p&gt;I wasn&amp;#x27;t ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for something like ChatGPT.&lt;p&gt;Google has an issue on their hands and is probably working overtime to lobby the threat of ChatGPT away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krisoft</author><text>&amp;gt; It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early on&lt;p&gt;Oh it tried to convince me that four is not larger than one. :) It went like this:&lt;p&gt;At first I asked ChatGPT to summarise J.C. Owen’s contribution to geometric constraint solving. It gave me an answer which might be even correct. It sounded correct anyway. Then I have asked for a worked example of his method used on a toy geometric constraint system. It run into problems with that. Chiefly that the system is selected was under constrained.&lt;p&gt;When I asked about that it insisted that it is well constrained. It even volunteared the info that for a system to be well constrained it needs as many variables as constraint equations. Then it told me that the system it generated has 4 variables and 1 equation.&lt;p&gt;As a last question I asked if “Is four larger than 1?” and it resolved the seeming contradiction by telling me that in the context of geometric constraint solving four is not larger than one. One does learn a new thing every day. :)</text></comment>
<story><title>AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines</title><url>https://iai.tv/articles/all-knowing-machines-are-a-fantasy-auid-2334</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WJW</author><text>What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the future) is that there is no way to know if you&amp;#x27;ve actually asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early on, though that seems to have been fixed (although that may have been just through hardcoding).</text></item><item><author>gukov</author><text>The way I see it:&lt;p&gt;- Today&amp;#x27;s search engines will give you links to millions of documents&lt;p&gt;- ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents&lt;p&gt;To me, that&amp;#x27;s a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO &amp;amp; ad spam that&amp;#x27;s plaguing Google and others currently.&lt;p&gt;I wasn&amp;#x27;t ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for something like ChatGPT.&lt;p&gt;Google has an issue on their hands and is probably working overtime to lobby the threat of ChatGPT away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RBerenguel</author><text>Or you have asked correctly (or not, that&amp;#x27;s hard to tell from the onset) and has given you a non-factual answer. For example, I asked ChatGPT for what would be the best introductory book for a subject (added some more conditions to make it pretty clear-cut). It recommended me a book that sounded reasonable in title, with existing authors in the field… but the book didn&amp;#x27;t exist, at all.</text></comment>