this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Most people use it as a search engine now that Google is shit.
For real. I’ve been using Google since 2000 and it now costs me substantially more cognitive load to find things than if I just ask a LLM.
I can't trust the output of an LLM but at least you can ask it to cite its sources so you can get the page that helped it come to that conclusion
If I ask an LLM something like “is there a git project that does <something I’d describe in natural language but not keywords>” or is there a Windows program that does X, it may make up the answers, but at least I can verify that via a search engine. If I try to Google that (that’s theoretical, I don’t use Google), I’m going to end up on a page full of ads that is filled with trap links that lead to malware, top 10 lists with the same repeated content and all the other shit the internet has become. I kind of don’t mind the hallucinations relative to the ads. What a time to be alive though.
Obviously it depends on the LLM, but ChatGPT Plus doesn't hallucinate with your example. What it does is provide a list of git projects / windows programs, each with a short summary and a link to the official website.
And the summary doesn't come from the website — the summary is a short description of how it matches your requirements list.
I've also noticed Bing has started showing LLM summaries for search results. For example I've typed a question into Duck Duck Go (which uses Bing internally) and seen links to reddit where the answer is "a user answered your question stating X, and another user disagreed saying Y".
I'm encountering hallucinations far less often now than I used to - at least with OpenAI based products.
You immediately start from a better place using an LLM vs searching raw. If I just need a link, I use DDG. When I need to research, I ask the latest gpt4-turbo model.
That’s a really good use case that I will need to start using. In a use case such as that where paid ads make the search engines unreliable, the LLM is at least going to be on the same footing if not better.