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Comment by tracerbulletx | Hacker News Reader

I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases. If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and it helps you understand those answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just what it's useful for today.

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> If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and helps you understand its answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just want it's useful for today.

We used to just call that "a search engine". Remember that? Somebody would put up a website about their favorite pet topic and when the search engine unearthed it, that's what you got.

It was the ad-ification of search engines that killed that. So, AI allows us to go back to the Internet circa 2000? That's a big innovation? I mean, I'll take it, but that's a pretty low bar ...

> Somebody would put up a website about their favorite pet topic and when the search engine unearthed it, that's what you got.

The difference is that reading someone's blog post forces you to take their trajectory through the material and it might not go over the exact points you're curious or confused about. With a forum like StackOverflow you often have to settle for problems that are merely close enough to your own that the solutions apply to it.

Models like ChatGPT allow you to ask for blog posts on any topic on demand and then ask for follow-up blog posts about whatever aspect of the previous blog post you want to elaborate.

I am having good conversations with the thing about books as I read them and having it summarize parts I want to keep notes on and make knowledge graphs, and construct new worked examples and diving into specific topics and having significantly enhanced learning experiences with it as a partner literally every day for the last few months. So you're entitled to your opinion but it's simply not the same thing as a search engine.

This is such a great use case thanks for sharing.

I spent some time talking to chatgtp about the history of art philosophy and technology, as if we were writing a book together.

I found it was great to just get a very broad overview and then ask questions about the things I wanted to know more about.

Not a groundbreaking way to use an LLM but I really enjoyed it.

I'm going to take your idea of talking to it about books too.

I see that an an incredibly high bar. Even with all the resources of Google they (and everyone else) are losing the SEO war. These algos at their core fundamentally can't handle adversarial input and we've been making faster horses since AltaVista. Even if the only thing LLms are useful for is search that's still great.

> Even with all the resources of Google they (and everyone else) are losing the SEO war.

Google is choosing to lose the SEO war because they think it would impact their ad revenue.

Every site that takes longer than 100ms to load? Gone. Wipes out vast quantities of ad-infested sewage. Login required? Gone. Websites now have to choose between reach and subscribers and the ones that choose subscribers will have to get better. Javascript required to access content? Gone. No more ad bidding system at all and no vectors for spreading virii. Tracking stuff from Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/etc.? Gone. No more analytics tracking everybody.

We don't need AI to fix this. We need an alternative search engine. If "AI" is what gets us there, I'll take it. But it ain't "AI".

I didn’t say it wasn’t useful to some people, I just said it hadn’t revolutionized anything. Also, the Gartner hype cycle ends with the “Plateau of Productivity,” in which the technology is proven to be useful over the long term, so it is sort of implicit in my comment that I expect we will ultimately find lots of niches where LLMs are useful. Maybe you should have gotten ChatGPT to explain that to you before you made your flippant comment.

> lots of niches where LLMs are useful

Isn't this a bit of an oxymoron?

I feel like every comment on HN of mine now lately is just defending ChatGPT, but I don't think that's a reason to self-censor my comments... yet.

I was watching a car chase on youtube yesterday and used an LLM to tell me the city location based on a description of the news station logo. So that was a "niche" I guess. I also got it to teach me how to use the https://gene.iobio.io/ software as I was using it, and I'm pretty good at it now! I asked it to help me to understand the connotations of several similar sentences in another spoken language I'm learning. It's helped me with understanding property tax appraisal records. We use it at work daily to analyze code, it shortens research by 30% or so. Calling it "niche" is 100% correct: yes it's very good at its "niches" which happen to be... almost everything except math? Have it craft a choose-your-own-adventure detective story and get back to me, because that niche is surprisingly fun.

If you can predict the implications of this technology or make an insightful assessment beyond "we don't have flying cars yet" ... let me know.

> I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases. If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and it helps you understand those answers.

I actually use it and I find that that 99% is ridiculously high.

> The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use

There may be use cases where it isn’t wrong a lot, or you may jave a high tolerance before annoyance hits, or you may be failing to detect it being wrong, but that certainly doesn’t match my experience.

> I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases.

well then they wouldn’t be people now, would they?

your reaction is fair. and rare.

> your reaction is fair. and rare.

He read something he didn’t like and then attacked the person who said it by basically calling them an unthinking robot. It’s not fair and it’s incredibly common.

> by basically calling them an unthinking robot

speaking of comments both unfair and incredibly common… this gross oversimplification does a disservice to all parties involved.

op lamented a lack of introspection and a nastiness to judge a thing as useless or bad based upon an individual’s success or lack thereof with the thing.

if you found it offensive, perhaps it’s worth thinking on.

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