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Comment by bfeynman | Hacker News Reader

That's not an LLM problem, there's a physical divide between a physical stores operation and whatever its representation online is. Google tries to do this by tracking people and activity in locations to see if people are at a place or something but reality is there is not a clean interface to that other than contacting someone at the location.

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I believe Google's data is now based largely on restaurants updating Google directly with that info. You can see in some searches where there is a prompt for the business owner to register and update/correct the hours. In my neighborhood it's to the point where many won't even post hours on their website any more, you have to check Google, which is annoying as I try to use other search engines. Sometimes on Google I'll see "updated by business owner 12 days ago" or similar. I presume Yelp has a similar (but probably smaller) database of its own.

In any case the impact for LLMs is the same, it's unavailable to them (unless they are being developed inside Google!).

This seems like a specific area where a "Semantic Web" solution could work well - some HTML tags that are specific to hours of operation, which business owners would embed in their website.

UPDATE: It looks like there is some prior art on this idea, I am not sure how widely this is supported https://schema.org/openingHours

Google even tries to bridge that gap by having automated phone calls to places to confirm their hours.

In fact this past July Fourth weekend I saw so many highly rated restaurants close without updating their hours on Google or Yelp or anywhere else online.

This is the #1 thing that makes me boycott a restaurant. If you don’t care enough about your customers to spend 2 minutes updating your hours then I will never eat there again. It’s absolutely disrespectful to your users/customers.

It can't be perfect without something like sending drones all around to addresses, but theory it's well suited to an LLM to be better and faster than a human could do it - there's various unstructured chatter and news articles and such out there online around businesses closing, opening, etc.

But it's not JUST an LLM problem: it's also a search problem and a connection-making-problem ("if a new restaurant opened at that address, the old one is probably closed").

And then even if there was a ChatGPT browsing plugin that excelled at scraping all of the relevant up-to-date info off the internet, you'd still need some layers in between that and today's context-window limits.

As more stuff changes in the real world since the training corpus for today's publicly-exposed OpenAI models, we'll probably see some further disillusionment from people who thought there was a bit more magic there than there was. But "LLMs, but with more up to date info" isn't an impossible problem with today's tech (even if you only fake it with multiple agents, multiple steps, batch jobs behind the scenes, etc), it's just not a trivial one.

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