| > For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it More convenient than traditional search? Maybe. Quicker than traditional search? Maybe not. Asking random questions is exactly where you run into time-wasting hallucinations since the models don't seem to be very good at deciding when to use a search tool and when just to rely on their training data. For example, just now I was asking Gemini how to fix a bunch of Ubuntu/Xfce annoyances after a major upgrade, and it was a very mixed bag. One example: the default date and time display is in an unreadably small "date stacked over time" format (using a few pixel high font so this fits into the menu bar), and Gemini's advice was to enable the "Display date and time on single line" option ... but there is no such option (it just hallucinated it), and it also hallucinated a bunch of other suggestions until I finally figured out what you need to do is to configure it to display "Time only" rather than "Data and Time", then change the "Time" format to display both data and time! Just to experiment, I then told Gemini about this fix and amusingly the response was basically "Good to know - this'll be useful for anyone reading this later"! More examples, from yesterday (these are not rare exceptions): 1) I asked Gemini (generally considered one of the smartest models - better than ChatGPT, and rapidly taking away market share from it - 20% shift in last month or so) to look at the GitHub codebase for an Anthropic optimization challenge, to summarize and discuss etc, and it appeared to have looked at the codebase until I got more into the weeds and was questioning it where it got certain details from (what file), and it became apparent it had some (search based?) knowledge of the problem, but seemingly hadn't actually looked at it (wasn't able to?). 2) I was asking Gemini about chemically fingerprinting (via impurities, isotopes) roman silver coins to the mines that produced the silver, and it confidently (as always) comes up with a bunch of academic references that it claimed made the connection, but none or references (which did at least exist) actually contained what it claimed (just partial information), and when I pointed this out it just kept throwing out different references. So, it's convenient to be able to chat with your "search engine" to drill down and clarify, etc, but a big time waste if a lot of it is hallucination. Search vs Chat has anyways really become a difference without a difference since Google now gives you the "AI Overview" (a diving off point into "AI Mode"), or you can just click on "AI Mode" in the first place - which is Gemini. |
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I asked ChatGPT and Claude your XFCE question, and they both gave better answers than Gemini did (imo). Why would you blindly believe what someone else tells you over what you observe with your own eyes?