ChatGPT is the killer app. It’s a Google killer. It is better than the SEO listicle garbage filling the internet. Even if it’s not always accurate it’s still better in a lot of circumstances. There’s a reason Sundar rushed Bard out of the gate even though it is clearly inferior.
Step 1. Humans write copy for humans to buy their garbage, humans counter by tuning out and switching channels
Step 2. Humans write SEO copy for machines to rank them higher.
Step 3. LLM writes copy for machines to rank them higher.
Step 4. Human uses LLM to try to distill the LLM generated SEO spam for any remaining signal.
Also to your point:
> SEO listicle garbage filling the internet.
the feeling that the LLM is better than what you described is going to be very temporary, then the mountains of LLM generated bullshit is going to overwhelm even LLM to make meaningful sense of.
You're missing the point. If we want to know something, we won't even have to google it; we will just ask an LLM. There will be no market for websites full of it because we can just directly ask it to answer our questions.
The only "if" to all this is if we will destroy the LLMs by feeding them their own diarrhea. I expect a sort of natural selection here to play out, especially in the open source space. Ones that are trained on LLM generated blogspam will probably, I expect, get outperformed by ones that are trained on genuine information, or at the very least ones made using new techniques that adequately filter noise.
> If we want to know something, we won't even have to google it; we will just ask an LLM. There will be no market for websites full of it because we can just directly ask it to answer our questions.
> Ones that are trained on LLM generated blogspam will probably, I expect, get outperformed by ones that are trained on genuine information, or at the very least ones made using new techniques that adequately filter noise.
Yes, humans are notorious for only seeking out high quality, accurate data, especially when it conflicts with our priors.
To say nothing of our ability to assess the accuracy or truthiness of information in the first place (look at how many people take, on faith, that Chat GPT isn’t wrong as often as it is right).
That's also true of a web search engine; but an LLM can (in principle, not saying it's there yet) be able to spot inconsistencies in the source data, to notice disagreement.
It isn’t though. Like I said, if the model gets worse OpenAI can simply not release a new version.
You also have to consider the money angle. As using ChatGPT and other chatbots becomes more popular, people will stop producing garbage internet articles because they will be less popular and therefore less profitable. Bloggers who enjoy writing will continue to do so because it was never about the money, they just enjoy writing.
Further, the internet is only one small portion of information available to train on. There’s a lot of other data out there, including real-world conversations.
I understand what you are saying but to me it sounds very handwavy and (not to be disrespectful) naive.
How would LLM upstarts be able to counter the massive commercial interests? As with google they will also succumb to prefer money over usefulness at latest when they have a wide user base.
There is also an even less proven way of distinguishing spam from signal with LLMs.
And not updating a model means that they will be stuck in COVID-19 era forever.
I’ll push back on this, at least in its current iteration. I just asked it to list some restaurants near my apartment (major intersection in San Jose) and it wasn’t particularly close. While there are several restaurants less than half a mile from the intersection, ChatGPT listed restaurants from several miles away.
Given the “weights in a matrix” architecture of ChatGPT, I’m not sure it’s possible to store enough data to make the query practical to answer. Say there are a couple hundred intersections in my city. You have to store the token of “restaurant name” “close to” “intersection” for each intersection. I don’t know the size of Google’s Maps DB, but I would guess it’s several Gigabytes per city. From my understanding of the theory, you would need to store BOTH the LLM weights AND the Maps data for ChatGPT to have a shot at generating good answers for that type of query.
I’m happy to be wrong here. If I’m misunderstanding something, please let me know.
Well you’re right since ChatGPT isn’t hooked up to the internet, so certain queries aren’t good use cases. Adding maps info to a language model would be a pretty bad idea (even if it didn’t hallucinate) since it can change at any time, which would require more (expensive) training.
What Bing does is to use your query to search the web and use the top N search results in the context window for the chat.
However I’ll push back on your pushback. ChatGPT doesn’t need to be perfect to be a killer app. It is highly flawed. Maybe it was a bit to strident to say ChatGPT will kill Google search, but it’s strictly better for a lot of squishy queries that don’t have a factual basis.
How can I convince my boss to give me a raise? gets you a listicle on Google and a highly specific response on ChatGPT. And if some of the advice doesn’t apply, you can continue directing the conversation. It’s an idea generator, even if some of them are bad or don’t make sense.
Tangentially related, I had GPT-4 plan the sightseeing on my latest holiday.
It both picked out the interesting places of note, and then I asked it to plan them in such a way that made sense walking-wise (so I wasn't backtracking) and it did so without a hiccup.
You're not wrong at all, it doesn't know everything.
But it does know a lot of things and can be super useful. Personally i think search engine is a terrible use case, unless you use the Bing enabled version, or bing chat.
I've used it to write pretty complicated scripts where I had no idea what I was doing, rebuild crusty httpd configs from first principles, explain disassembled code, explain regular code, explain configs, read dmidecode and lspci for me and make a pcie slot report... It's bloody brilliant.
Other: read and translated my blood tests. Accurately!
It is not a direct replacement for search engines, but it will seriously dent their market share.
If you are looking for a location on the internet, use a search engine. LLMs do not memorise the data sources verbatim.
If you want to know how to do something, it will normally give you a better answer than you would find by googling around multiple blogs. No location on the internet needed.
Even though it is just a bare kernel (LLM), GPT-4 is a better teacher than any I've ever had. Who can I ask at 3AM on a Saturday night to explain ancient Greek philosophy using dwarf fortress mechanics? And iterate with infinite patience and focus on any follow up questions?
This is one of the most compelling use cases. It’s dramatically reduced research time on certain topics for me. If I have a “question” I don’t go to google first anymore.
I think we're just scratching the surface of apps. As we figure out how to integrate this technology in novel ways (not just "here's my app + AI!!!!"), it will open new doors.
Shameless self-promotion, I'm trying to build some of those intermediary pieces. I have authored an open source library[1] that lets businesses externalize LLMs to their users, so that users can use natural language to query their data in your database. The goal is to try to simplify UIs to have more natural language components, without needing to send your data to an LLM.
Adobe’s Firefly AI and other Adobe AI is the result of billions of dollars of investment over multiple years. Lousy source (sorry): See the number of Adobe authored 2 minute papers (YouTube channel) about AI based graphics over the years.
The rest of the examples shared are mostly just direct integrations with the GPT-4 API, which should be trivial for almost any startup to do. I.e. it’s very likely not going to be game-changing for a CRUD company like OP’s case.
There is a reason most creative professionals are screaming to the nine high heavens of hell for dear mercy, because they are in the best position to see the writing on the wall.
The current deconstruction of intellectual property rights is damning and must be rectified, but even putting that aside "AI" is still going to eliminate the vast majority of creative occupations because a supercomputer is still cheaper than a human on the payroll or invoice.
to me potential killer app is the search, you already now can find better answers fast in many verticals asking chatgpt than going through the tons of seo spam at google.
Health and medical queries are a big one for me. The top results in Google are the same cookie cutter responses from the same 5-10 domains. There is no expertise there - just an article ghost written by a freelance writer with a random doctor’s name attached to it.
With the right prompt, chatGPT gives me far better insight and can even point out academic papers to back its claims.
There are no health issues that anyone should ever be using Chat GPT for - the hallucinations are very real, and often severe. Not that you should be googling your symptoms either - there’s a reason we put medical folks through more than a few minutes of training.
LLMs are absolutely worthless for medical information.
I’ve gone to multiple doctors for my problems and most of them have only made it worse. Most doctors I’ve met get dumbfounded when the problem is anything more complex than a straightforward case.
And I say this as someone married into a family of doctors.
> LLMs are absolutely worthless for medical information.
chatgpt gives you initial hint/direction, and then you can research specifics by finding actual information in search engine and see if it is hallucinated or not.
I’ve used it to code, learn, generate tweet threads, create upwork job posts, summarize large amounts of text.
With the right prompt, its a far better search engine than Google, especially for coding and health related queries.
If you can be a Google killer, you don’t need any other killer apps.