| > It is the most incredible technology ever created by this point in our history imo and the cynicism on HN is astounding to me. TBH, I still think LLMs have a long way to go to catch up to the technology of wikipedia, let alone the internet. LLMs at their peak are roughly a crappy form of an encyclopedia. I think the interactivity really warps peoples perspective to view it as more impressive, but it's difficult to piece together any value as a knowledge-store that is as impressive as clicking around the internet from 20 years ago. Wikipedia has preserved this value the best over the years. It's quite frustrating how quickly obviously LLM-generated content has managed to steal search results with super-verbose content that doesn't actually provide any value. EDIT: I suppose the single use case of "there's some information I need to store offline but that won't be on wikipedia" is a reasonable case, but what does this even look like? I don't use LLMs like that so I can't provide an example. Here's an example: I was trying to figure out details about applying to a visa last week in a certain country. I googled the problem I was having, and the top five results or so were pages that managed to split the description of the problem I was having into about 5 sections of text, and introduced the text indicating that there should be a solution (thereby looking to search results like I might find the solution if I clicked through), but didn't provide any actual content indicating how to approach the problem, let alone solve it. And, of course, this is driving revenue to some interest somewhere despite actively clogging up the internet. Meanwhile, the actual answer was on another country's FAQ—presumably written by a human—on like page three of the search results. At least old human-generated content would waste your time before answering your question, aka "why does this recipe have a 5000 word essay before the ingredient list and instructions" problem. |
Wikipedia articles sometimes have a lot of jargon, making the information useless unless you have a prior understanding of the subject matter.