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Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

That's a great comparison because I believe the same trajectory of voice recognition will be followed by these chatbots.

Everyone is pissing in their pants over this new natural language interface, but in a few years we're gonna collectively realize this is just search but worse.

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Why would it be the same as voice? Siri/Alexa etc didn't do anything different than convert speech to text and text to speech. You get the same response typing it into a search bar. I never really used voice assistants because I'm fine just typing my query.

This is a clearly different paradigm.

No it's not. You're just searching into the training data space and getting opaque results. It's a downgrade.

Some happy path examples are getting hyped, and the investors are falling in line, as in every classic tech bubble. But to think that we can go from processing and generating natural language to AGI if we do it harder is preposterous.

ChatGPT is a downgrade to Siri?

I'm not really sure how to respond to that assertion. I audibly giggled, so there's that.

A downgrade from plain search. But I'm glad you're amused, not that I find that a very respectful response in conversation.

What made it so much fun was that I could do it while driving the car. Or that the kids could do it before they could type, or even read.

It can answer questions that have never been asked before. Search can't.

You're thinking of older chatbots. Search can absolutely return valid results to queries that have never been made before.

Search can return valid results that you will have to synthesize yourself into the answer. LLMs integrated with tools can return the answer directly. This is a significant advantage over search.

You still have to not only synthesize the answers these models return, but now also first analyze the answers for the relevant parts, and then perform searches to validate them.

LLMs can show their work in their output, making the validation easier. Search cannot answer the question to begin with.

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