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Comment by kweingar | Hacker News Reader

Ok but what exactly is the benefit of using ChatGPT for that? It is more than a year and a half out of date.

It doesn’t know the Thai place’s current hours and doesn’t automatically surface a one-click link to their menu or reviews.

Why would I use ChatGPT to get the IRS phone number when I could use just as little effort typing it into a search engine and going to their actual .gov site with no risk of hallucinations?

When I’m using a new library, often I want an overview of the types and functions it surfaces. Why would I use an outdated and possibly halluciniated answer (that takes 30 seconds or more to generate) instead of clicking on the link in Google and having a nice document full of internal links appear instantly?

I don’t want to use the chatbot for the sake of using the chatbot. I want to use it when it’s better than what I already have. Sometimes it is better, and in those cases I use it a lot!

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Here is my experience using ChatGPT to find local Indian restaurants. The responses took about 90 seconds in total to generate and gave me very little information. Why would anybody use ChatGPT instead of a search engine for this kind of thing?

https://ibb.co/pdzdncZ https://ibb.co/LRP6McY

Compare to Google/Bing which took about 5 seconds to type in the query and return these results.

https://ibb.co/1R48Bwc https://ibb.co/P4XGXxW

Because the average American is considered to have a readability level equivalent to a 7th/8th grader (12 to 14 years old). They lack the critical thinking skills to from from search results to prioritized list. :-/

For decades, the standard was 6th grade. I believe that was part of the APA guidelines.

But at least Americans have been getting stupider, on average. IMO, now I think you need to write at the 4th or 5th grade level.

Reframed as "Why would anybody use ChatGPT instead of a search engine for this kind of thing" today? You're correct - ChatGPT is missing some bells and whistles such as real-time data, your location, how many times you've visited the websites of certain restaurants, and so on. However, so do 'search engines' in their base implementation of indexing and ordering links to other websites. I think you'll see some technical limitations (real-time data) overcome and user-focused implementations and features of AI/LLMs emerge over the next year. At that point, I think your initial question becomes more relevant in a general way.

Which is why Bing has the best head start. They have an MVP of combining up to date data from search and the latest in LLMs.

I used it last night on a search that was roughly:

"find the top 10 restaurants in mid-town Manhattan that would be good for brunch with friends that have kids. Include ratings from NY Times and Yelp" Then I further refined with "Revise search to include 5 example entries and a highlight any known specials. Include the estimates walking time from <my location>. Provide a link to a reservations website."

It basically auto-populated a spreadsheet, that I could easily review with my wife. I would need to visit several websites to scrape all the information together in one place.

Yeah for questions like this ChatGPT sounds like someone who's being paid by the word.

Always says 200 words where 30 would suffice.

I asked it to generate a travel plan including restaurants for a trip I’m considering. What it generated included some places that were now closed, but it was an excellent starting point, and it beat my usual approach of a Google search of the area and tapping random places in the area.

Solved problem. The solution is NOT ChatGPT, it’s something like Bing or Phind that is a hybrid of traditional search and LLM.

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