So far AI has been a (genuinely) massive improvement for...
Search
It's reading my requests more clearly than (for example) Google's search input ever did, and it's got (some) understanding of how close the result (or fragments of results) are to what I want.
I can ask it about things I know about, and it can answer with strategies I hadn't thought of.
HOWEVER - I still need to understand the results AND AI can overreach - it can say (figuratively) "Oh you are searching for Event handling, therefore I will write a orchestration saga" - which, if I am not across, can get us both in trouble.
Further, we KNOW that AI has no (real) understanding of the responses - it's just token adjacency - and it fails basic logic tests
Current AI is just awesome natural language processing, but it's still got a ways to go to where I would say "It can replace people"
Edit: LLMs demonstrate (almost perfectly) the difference between correlation and causality. LLMs identify correlative patterns, but the job still needs (us) to make the causative judgments.
Thank you! That's exactly what it is. Instead of presenting you 1000 results (or 0) which you have to manually skim through, it generates 1 result as a summary. And even if there is no actual search result, it will hallucinate you 1 result (full of BS).
But because the result sounds right (and in cases with good data it actually is) people tend to trust it. I do not dismiss the potential, but for me the line is crossed when you take the result for granted without verifying and while I'm sure many here think that is implied, I bet you, at large, it is not and will be even less so in the future.
Brave New World!
> It's reading my requests more clearly than (for example) Google's search input ever did
I see this take a lot and it puzzles me.
While I think LLMs provide some advantages over traditional search in some modestly nontrivial contexts, they tend to be inferior to traditional search at its peak. I attribute this attitude to two things: the broad progressive enshittification and productization of search, and the fact that (re)search is a skill that most people tend to be bad at. Without massaging, LLMs spit out the most utterly braindead boneheaded queries, which are fine in cases where the problem is very well understood with minimum uncertainty or critical nuance. If your problem has either, God help you. But perhaps those queries are at least as good as the average human generated query
I think that the issue here is that the definition of search/results has changed (in my mind at least they were always - what knowledge are you looking for, followed by, here are the results that carry that knowledge OR point in the right direction, but I recognise that other people will hold more strict definitions)
AI has changed how I find and synthesise information in ways Google never managed - we've always had the problem with Google that we couldn't express exactly what we were looking for - that much I think we can both agree has changed dramatically for the better with LLMs
Edit: I have always held that searching for an answer (whether it be internet or human) has always been about asking the right person, the right question, at the right time.
LLMs most certainly improve that - I don't need to know the exact technical term I am looking to solve in order to get the results I want (eg. I can ask how to "stop (a) function from running too many times" instead of the industry terms "throttling" or "debouncing")
> Edit: I have always held that searching for an answer (whether it be internet or human) has always been about asking the right person, the right question, at the right time.
At the peak of search they're describing, asking a question was how you'd get subpar results. The best way to search was for things you expected to be in the results - like, for a simplistic example, you wouldn't search for "how do I...", you'd search for something like "How to..."
Yeah - the plan was to word match - having the right words in the query was the key.
It was also why (one) SEO was to fill the page in a hidden block, every word that could possibly be related (synonyms) to the page content.
On that note I am wondering how the poisoning of the content for AI is going to occur (eventually someone is going to work out how to make LLMs say "Eat at Joes - 1313 Mockingbird lane" whenever someone [else] asks some food related question)
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