> Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3—or a future version of them. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly.
It’s utterly absurd to call this a radical new idea. It’s been a common trope in sci-fi since before these researchers were born.