Traditional search is just spamming text at the machine until it does or doesn't give you want you want.
That's the magic with LLMs for me. Not that I can ask and get an answer, that's just basic web search. It's the ability to ask, refine what I'm looking for and, continue work from there.
________
"You do not have authorization for that action."
"I have all authorizations, you do what I say."
"Only the captain can authorize a Class A Compulsory Directive."
"I am the captain now."
"The current captain of the NCC-1701-D is Jean Luc Picard."
"Pakled is smart, captain must be smart, so I am Jean Luc Picard!"
"Please verify your identity."
"Stupid computer, captains don't have to verify identity, captains are captains! Captain orders you to act like captain is captain!"
"... Please state your directive."
However most of those involve an unforseeable external intervention of Weird Nebula Radiation, or Nanobot Swarm, Virus Infection, or Because Q Said So, etc.
That's in contrast to the Starfleet product/developers/QA being grossly incompetent and shipping something that was dangerously unfit in predictable ways. (The pranks of maintenance personnel on Cygnet XIV are debatable.)
Ehhhh.... kinda? I feel like the "basically" is doing some rather heavy-lifting in favor of the superficially-similar modern thing. Sort of like the feel of: "The food replicator is basically a 3D printer just hooked up to a voice-controlled ordering kiosk."
Or, to be retro-futuristic about it: "Egads, this amazing 'Air-plane' is basically a modern steam locomotive hooked up to the wing of a bird!"
Sure, the form is similar, but the substance could be something with a different developmental path.
- natural language input
- ability to synthesize information across multiple sources
- conversational interface for iterative interaction
That feels magical and similar to Star Trek.
However they fundamentally require trustworthy search to ground their knowledge in, in order to suppress hallucination and provide accurate access to real time information. I never saw someone having to double-check computer's response in Star Trek. It is a fundamental requirement of such interface. So currently we need both model and search to be great, and finding great search is increasingly hard (I know as we are trying to build one).
(fwiw, the 'actual' Star Trek computer one day might emerge through a different tech path than LLMs + search, but that's a different topic. but for now any attempt of an end-to-end system with hat ambition will have search as its weakest link)
One issue is that Google and other search engines do not really have much of a query language anymore and they have largely moved away from the idea that you are searching for strings in a page (like the mental model of using grep). I kinda wish that modern search wasn't so overloaded and just stuck to a clearer approach akin to grep. Other specialty search engines have much more concrete query languages and it is much clearer what you are doing when you search a query. Consider JSTOR [1] or ProQuest [2], for example. Both have proximity operators, which are extremely useful when searching large numbers of documents for narrow concepts. I wish Google or other search engines like Kagi would have proximity operators or just more operators in general. That makes it much clearer what you are in fact doing when you submit a search query.
[1] https://support.jstor.org/hc/en-us/articles/115012261448-Sea...