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Comment by MSFT_Edging | Hacker News Reader

How can search(the utility, not the business model) possibly be dead?

AI models can't possibly contain everything to the depth one might require on a niche topic. Additionally, the less training data available, the more egregious the hallucinations become.

I've worked on some pretty niche things where the only way to get actual info is painstaking manual search queries based on a tree of keyword combinations. Those barely come up because search is (practically) dead, but when I'd ask AI the same questions or to find the same queries, it would simply make up confident answers.

AI is only truly helpful for the common denominator of very well documented and often discussed topics.

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The business model, not the utility.

… it would simply make up confident answers. Dunno if you've used Google recently, but it will very confidently provide simply useless search results, pages and pages and pages of useless search results.

I look at using LLMs as like using another programming language. My C++ skills are not going to be directly useful in Rust or OCaml. I need to learn a new paradigm.

I'd ask AI the same questions. This is the crux. You really have to learn how to write (engineer) good prompts and you have to check what the LLM wrote. You use 'confidently' as a disparaging word. I think LLMs clear writing is quite useful in the reduction phase.

LLMs are perfect? No, just way better than Google.

To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful has become To serve an ad and call it a day.

> it will very confidently provide simply useless search results, pages and pages and pages of useless search results.

I had assumed that this degredation of search with useless results was an attempt to drive more people towards its even more useless AI products/results.

"AI with search" needs to be differentiated from "AI not using search". Perplexity is designed around search, which has pros (when searching) and cons (when there are a lot of followup prompts, Perplexity is more likely to lose context)

Search will fold into AI. ChatGPT already searches for answers on given prompts.

There will no longer be a reason to interact with a search engine directly for most people, AI will decide by itself if it retrieves from memory or performs a search.

Okay great so ChatGPT will give me 5 confidently incorrect search results.

What a colossally stupid waste of energy. We could have had our answers, with a decent search engine.

I actually look down on LLM hopefuls. Just so irredeemably up their own ass. When the bubble collapses they should be sent off to their own island where they can sell the same coconut back and forth between themselves.

Saying that a natural language based interface will replace dedicated graphical UIs makes no sense to me.

It will never be as intuitive or efficient, not even mentioning the reliability.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and no LLM is going to change that.

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