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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

Describes my general experience with AI across the board. Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. It’s like I’m talking to a genius toddler. With ChatGPT losing 5 billion dollars on 3.7B in revenue this is unsustainable. It feels like the dotcom bubble all over again.

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This is true, but fairly or unfairly, asking a question to a chat bot feels like “opting in” to the possibility that the answers you get will be hallucinated garbage, in a way that doing a Google search does not. It’s a tough problem for Google to overcome— the fact that they will be held to a higher standard—- but that’s what it is: we have already learned to accept bullshit from LLMs as a fact of life, whereas on the top of Google results it feels like an outrage.

I have been a paying ChatGPT user for awhile. It’s simply a matter of saying “verify that” and it will give you wen citations

It invents citations too, constantly. You could look up the things it cites, although at that point, what are you actually gaining?

And I’m not saying this makes them useless: I pay for Claude and am a reasonably happy customer, despite the occasional bullshit. But none of that is relevant to my point that the bots get held to a different standard than Google search and I don’t see an easy way for Google to deal with that.

Do you pay for ChatGPT? The paid version of ChatGPT has had a web search tool for ages. It will search the web and give you live links.

ChatGPT has had web search for exactly 58 days. I guess our definitions of 'ages' differ by several orders of magnitude.

The paid version has had web access for at least a year

March 23rd 2023

https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/

That’s 666 days.

So you are off by over “one order of magnitude”

A plugin? You’re joking.

It’s a “plug in” built into the paid version of ChatGPT, run by default and created by OpenAI.

This isn’t a third party obscure plug in.

All “tools” use a plug in architecture

You're a troll, and I'm done feeding you.

What part is “trolling”? Paid users have been able to use ChatGPT using the built in web browsing plug in for over a year just by saying “please provide citations” or “verify that”.

What you say has been around for a few weeks has literally been around for paid users for over a year

Aren’t those citations sometimes entirely made up? Like the lawyers who used it for a case and it cited ones that never happened?

No, ChatGPT has had a web search tool for paid users forever. It actually searches the web and you can click on the links

I really do think hallucinated references are a thing of the past. Models will still make things up, but they won't make up references.

ChatGPT with web search does a good job of summarizing content.

> we have already learned to accept bullshit from LLMs as a fact of life, whereas on the top of Google results it feels like an outrage.

Sort of. Top results for any kind of question that applies to general population - health, lifestyle, etc. - are usually complete bullshit too. It's all pre-AI slop known as content marketing.

> genius toddler

I think it's closer to a well spoken idiot.

A cat who can talk.

What are you using it for?

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