[seba_dos1]

It's a language model, not a search engine. It doesn't work well as one unless integrated into an actual search engine, like Bing does. Without such integration, it's much closer to human memory than search engine - it will recall stuff it has seen many times pretty well and completely fail at stuff it just glanced over once, filling any gaps with made up stuff like a kid on an exam hoping to get at least a few points with their wild guesses.

[dbrueck]

Yeah, I think we're talking about different things (and per my comment, I didn't say that it was a search engine). I'm reasonably well aware of what it is and what it's made of; I'm talking about a mental model for understanding and predicting when and why it works well vs when it doesn't.

And what I've found so far is that when I place it in the same mental bucket as the interface to a modern search engine (not the search engine itself, but the interface for both input and output), it actually fits in pretty well there in many ways. Not in every way, of course, but things like the nuances of crafting prompts and how a scarcity or abundance of reference material affects its output.

[seba_dos1]

> I'm talking about a mental model for understanding and predicting when and why it works well vs when it doesn't.

I'm talking about it too. If I enter a specific phrase into a search engine that can be only found on a handful of websites, I expect it to return those results to me. Like, typing the VAT ID of my company will return bunch of information about it on various sites. This is absolutely not going to work with a LLM - instead, at best it may notice that what you typed looks like a VAT ID and will then proceed to give you information about a company it completely made up. The mental model of understanding what works with LLMs and doesn't is drastically different from a search engine. Human memory on steroids is a much better (though of course still not perfect) model.

[dbrueck]

Again, we seem to be talking past each other, sorry. I'm really, really, really not talking about the search engine itself. I'm talking about the hunk of tech that makes up the interface layer between the human and the search engine, and the fact that that hunk of tech can be hooked up to a search engine is interesting but not entirely germane.

If using the analogy of human memory works for you - that's great! To me, it's not as good a fit, but that's ok.

> The mental model of understanding what works with LLMs and doesn't is drastically different from a search engine

Agreed! But again, that's not what I'm talking about. :)

[seba_dos1]

> I'm talking about a mental model for understanding and predicting when and why it works well vs when it doesn't.

That's what you said earlier you were talking about, and that's what I replied to. Now you're saying that you're in fact not talking about "the mental model of understanding what works with LLMs and doesn't" at all. Seems you have to improve your communication skills mate ;]

What I'm saying is that using LLMs while imagining them to be kinda like search engines is just a way to get burned by hallucinations and disappointed with poor results. They don't work even remotely similar to search engines, neither internally nor for an external observer. For some kinds of input they may trick you into believing they actually do, but that impression will fall apart pretty quickly once you try to actually exercise it. That's how you get people who are genuinely shocked that ChatGPT gave them references to papers that were completely made up, for example - which is something that shouldn't surprise anyone using this tech at all, as that's just how it works.