I always tell people that if they want learn more about the hype to just try and use it to do actual work. Almost no one ever does, but when they do it becomes almost immediately clear how limited it is and what it is and isn’t good for.
If you ask it what the facts are, it just gives you a load of nonsense.
That said, I can’t really use ChatGPT as a search engine, but I did plug it into a self-hosted telegram bot and I do ask it some basic questions from time to time - telegram is a good UI for it.
I usually need someone to explain something to me. And I used Google before to land on a site where I could find the explanation (e.g. how to use a library). ChatGPT can explain most things I need and I can skip Google and the other sites. But it's indeed not a search engine, if you need factual information then your best bet is to find the documentations, articles, databases, etc.
Not really sure why you are so fixated on the echo chamber thing. We are on the internet! The biggest echo chamber humanity has ever built.
Because it's a layer of abstraction, mate. One known to get things wrong, because it's an LLM. If I write a post about Richard Stallman's opinions on paedophilia and Jeffrey Epstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Controversies), and it incorrectly tells you that Stallman associated directly with Epstein, or is a paedophile himself, that would not be accurate to the source.
At least with a Google search result you can go more directly to the source. If the scientific method is getting to the truth, why on Earth would you put an obstacle in front of it?
If someone tells me x, am I going to believe them? No. So, why would I believe an LLM if it isn't presenting sources to me that are 1:1 in accuracy to the information it presents to me?
Alright, but most people aren't looking for accuracy relative to the source material.
They're looking for code that does a specific thing, or food that tastes a certain way.
> If the scientific method is getting to the truth, why on Earth would you put an obstacle in front of it?
Possibly because they aren't doing science. They may be doing software development or baking instead.
Given that it hallucinates in particular over measurements/specs/stats, I'd be extremely sceptical of taking a recipe from it, whether that's generated and original or coming from a known source.
Baking requires very specific measurements, the slightest mistake and it won't turn out well in most cases. Again, why go via an LLM and not a search engine to the actual source? It makes zero sense, especially if it only returns text and you can't see what the recipe produces if it's an existing thing.
I believe the argument presented (possibly in a separate thread) was that search engines have degraded to the point where what they show you is worse than LLM output.
Put another way: People who don't pick up these tools and learn how to be effective at them will increasingly be at a significant performance disadvantage from people at their skill level who do pick them up.
You're trusting that it is secure and sensible in its output too.
But even if it was just boilerplate, I'd have had to apply it, and that takes time to do. I've started dozens of projects over the 28 years in this industry - I have a very good idea of how long it takes both me and a typical developer to do what I've had it do, and it's far faster.
And no, I'm not trusting it to be "secure or sensible" at all, no more than I trust a developer. But overall the quality of what it has produced all of which I've reviewed the same way I would with code delivered by a developer, has overall been of good quality. That does not mean free of bugs, any more than human developers write flawless code on first try, but it does mean I've had it write cleaner code than a whole lot of people I've worked with who'd take many times as long and cost a hell of a lot more.
I would much rather have a "rubber ducky" that I can try and explain my thought process to, and then it can try to question me and poke holes in my thinking. I think my expectations on AI are pretty realistic and I don't really expect it to ever be ever *thinking* in the way I associate with the word, not with today's SoA at least. In that respect I'm just not particularly interested in it generating code, but that also may come down to our individual preferences for how we write code.
At any rate, my issue is that it fails at the "rubber ducky" position I mentioned earlier. It's not really able to follow a train of thought that I have, in a reasonably competent way, and every time I have tried to do work with it I just end up feeling silly for anthropomorphizing something that I know isn't really, even if for a second. Just my $0.02 though, I'm glad so many people seem to like it and am happy for them.
How do you know if they don't? Do you expect them to report back to a throwaway comment on HN? The sentiment is shifting on HN, that much is clear, just like it shifted with crypto.