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by flail 28 days ago
Fundamentally, yes, it is a different "search engine."

BTW, as critical as I can be to AI, using an argument that something didn't work 3 years ago, so it must be crap, doesn't work in this context. 3 years ago, AI could barely generate several lines of consistent code. Now, it generates working apps with a prompt (it's another discussion how good the code is, but still).

I guess 3 years ago, Gemini couldn't tell how many r's are in the word refrigerator.

Same for research. At some point, I switched from ChatGPT and Gemini to Perplexity as it promised AI-powered search. It worked visibly better. Until it didn't, as GPT and Gemini models made a leap.

Back to the point, as long as we understand that, for now, it's all just a probabilistic machine generating the most likely output, no one should expect bulletproof answers. Search was/is way more deterministic than LLMs.

1 comments

> 3 years ago, AI could barely generate several lines of consistent code

Nah, not really. The same summer I made a self-modifying AI programmer. Or more precisely, GPT-4 made it. I copy pasted the classes from the chat one by one.

(I also told it what was wrong with the previous attempt at such a system, so it designed around that.)

That model was also scary good at deobfuscation.

I think it did have that issue about randomly saying the opposite of facts though (the fact but stated in the negative for some reason).