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by pcmaffey 723 days ago
A search engine does not return a true answer. It returns a set of possibilities ranked by likelihood.

An LLM is just an aggregation of search results.

2 comments

No, that misses the nuance entirely. An LLM returns one answer that it thinks is likely to be true. A search engine returns many answers one of which is either certainly true or (depending on what you're searching) is the literal source of truth.

There is a world of difference between these two results.

Ultimately the problem is that a single repository of all verifiably true human knowledge just doesn't exist and both search engines and LLMs are copes to deal with this fact.

a set of possibilities ranked by likelihood… written by humans who have the capacity to be interested in truth.