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Comment by tifadg1 | Hacker News Reader

I now only google when I need to sometimes verify that what chatgpt is suggesting isn't BS and I'm immediately reminded that google is barely better between SEO content farms, SEO SO scrappers, legacy information from 10 years ago. And that's with ads blocked.

Between chatgpt+ for general guidelines and copilot for specific implementation details, programming feels very fun and alive. And I'm very skeptical to subscribing, but chatgpt provides so much mental relief getting some answers immediately that I'm ecstatic being able to use/pay for it.

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I still cant believe google thought they could ruin the internet like that and continue to dominate search

To be fair, it has worked well for them for at least half a decade. It’s only now they are paying the price.

Greed is a hell of a drug.

The response speed of GPT isn't fast enough for me to want to use it like Google. Even with plus.

The response speed of Bard is much better in my experimentation. The creativity of the output on Bard is lacking, though.

That's good to hear. I was concerned it might just be a hard limitation in the early days, tech wise.

Can Bard output quality code like GPT? I'm in Canada so couldn't use Bard sadly.

If you ask it to "write code to do X", then it will say that it can't write code. I think this was hardcoded.

But I asked Bard: "Can you implement fibonacci in Go", and it outputted valid code. And then I asked it "what if I wanted to avoid recursion", to which it replied with valid Go code that used a for loop. But it also suggested me another very bogus way of doing it, by using a "function pointer", which was very bad. F(x) would output x.

So, don't expect ChatGPT level of quality just yet, but I think it will get there pretty fast.

I've found Bard to be very responsive too. Though you could argue it's not getting the same amount of traffic ChatGPT is.

That said, I don't expect Google to rest on its laurels. Sure, OpenAI is executing swiftly these days, but I think they've been prepared far too long for this. I expect Bard to become much better very soon... then will the AI wars truly begin.

Even though Google returns results instantly, for most things I still have to evaluate and click links and skim them for the information I want. Sometimes I have to do multiple searches (like one for retinol and another for beta-carotene in the following example).

Yesterday I heard about retinol (vitamin A) mentioned in a nutrition podcast. I know carrots are high in vitamin A, but I didn't think they had retinol, so I wanted to learn more about that.

I whipped out my phone and asked GPT-3 "retinol vs. the vitamin A in carrots" (something I know you usually can't ask Google).

A few seconds later, I learned that retinol is vitamin A's final form in the body, thus you get it directly from animal products, and beta-carotene—found in plants—is a precursor to retinol in the body.

I do these kinds of searches all day. One thing faster about GPT as well is that I don't have to consider the "query engineering" to make Google return what I want, I just ask GPT a question streamed from my consciousness.

Yeah for questions with absolute answers that can be summarized like that it's perfect. Basically what Wolfram Alpha offered with quant data.

Although my partner is a lawyer and she sometimes asks it to summarize cases (without providing the full source material manually) and it sometimes invents entire details in the cases in a very persuasive way. So you always have to be careful and double check if it's important.

Code and case summaries couldn't be much different. With code you get compile time validation, run time validation, (hopefully) test validation, and you can generally look at a block of code and say "seems like this should work" or "this makes no sense". You get none of that with facts of a case.

SEO garbage is such a problem these days that, if I were Google, more than using AI as a new frontend for search, I'd be trying to find a way to use it to defeat SEO.

OpenAI should sell a feed of AI generated responses for search engines to consume and flag AI generated content.

SEO for AI will be worse. Their output is a probabilistic distribution conditioned on the text is has read, so you can place text that heavily biases the output. Usually figuring out what this is can be kind of hard, but since OpenAI lets you query GPT-4 for credits, you can just mine what these special phrases are.

just wait till chatGPT starts including ads in results.

not just 'including', but 'integrating'. A chill ran down me when I read this and realized the awful inevitable truth of it.

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