Comment by distortedsignal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by distortedsignal | Hacker News Reader

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distortedsignal

I’ll push back on this, at least in its current iteration. I just asked it to list some restaurants near my apartment (major intersection in San Jose) and it wasn’t particularly close. While there are several restaurants less than half a mile from the intersection, ChatGPT listed restaurants from several miles away.

Given the “weights in a matrix” architecture of ChatGPT, I’m not sure it’s possible to store enough data to make the query practical to answer. Say there are a couple hundred intersections in my city. You have to store the token of “restaurant name” “close to” “intersection” for each intersection. I don’t know the size of Google’s Maps DB, but I would guess it’s several Gigabytes per city. From my understanding of the theory, you would need to store BOTH the LLM weights AND the Maps data for ChatGPT to have a shot at generating good answers for that type of query.

I’m happy to be wrong here. If I’m misunderstanding something, please let me know.

Well you’re right since ChatGPT isn’t hooked up to the internet, so certain queries aren’t good use cases. Adding maps info to a language model would be a pretty bad idea (even if it didn’t hallucinate) since it can change at any time, which would require more (expensive) training.

What Bing does is to use your query to search the web and use the top N search results in the context window for the chat.

However I’ll push back on your pushback. ChatGPT doesn’t need to be perfect to be a killer app. It is highly flawed. Maybe it was a bit to strident to say ChatGPT will kill Google search, but it’s strictly better for a lot of squishy queries that don’t have a factual basis.

How can I convince my boss to give me a raise? gets you a listicle on Google and a highly specific response on ChatGPT. And if some of the advice doesn’t apply, you can continue directing the conversation. It’s an idea generator, even if some of them are bad or don’t make sense.

Tangentially related, I had GPT-4 plan the sightseeing on my latest holiday.

It both picked out the interesting places of note, and then I asked it to plan them in such a way that made sense walking-wise (so I wasn't backtracking) and it did so without a hiccup.

You're not wrong at all, it doesn't know everything.

But it does know a lot of things and can be super useful. Personally i think search engine is a terrible use case, unless you use the Bing enabled version, or bing chat.

I've used it to write pretty complicated scripts where I had no idea what I was doing, rebuild crusty httpd configs from first principles, explain disassembled code, explain regular code, explain configs, read dmidecode and lspci for me and make a pcie slot report... It's bloody brilliant.

Other: read and translated my blood tests. Accurately!

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