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by ryeights 33 days ago
In what sense is an LLM analogous (much less reducible to) a search engine?
1 comments

Search engine: crawl the entire Internet and create an index. When you ask it a question it uses that index to point you to an answer among all the information it crawled.

LLM: crawl the entire Internet and train a model. When you ask it a question, it uses that model to spit out an answer. Worse than a search engine though, if it can't come up with a good answer it just makes shit up

Both use the same sources of information. Neither can produce a (correct) answer that doesn't exist somewhere in that information source

I think you need a stronger analogy than "they both take questions and produce answers," especially since search engines don't answer questions.