> I use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search.
Extremely subsidized agentic search is very superior to Google at the moment, and of course it is. Google is a public company. The AI summary model has to work instantly, is likely as dumb as a 8T param model, and gives you incorrect details constantly. This sucks so much for Google. If you click on "AI Mode," suddenly the facts become more accurate.
Of course, if I want a real answer I happen to go to claude.ai, set it to a the best model, wait for a minute, and use many watts of energy. Slow agentic search that takes many seconds, and is greatly subsidized, is certainly better. This should not be a surprise, should it?
I think it was on a sub like r/singularity that I saw a post along the lines of "of course most people think that 'AI' sucks, as normies are interacting with 8T param models."
tone: genuinely confused about the world, not criticizing
Your comment about watts stuck out to me. I became curious how much power we might be talking about.
I’m into Claude for $20/mo (petty bourgeois tier), let’s assume for sake of examination this is only paying for power, infrastructure already amortized
Price of grid power approx $0.15/kWh
$20 / ($0.15/kWh * 30 days) = 4.4 kWh per day.
This same amount of energy can lift a 2-ton SUV 1/2 mile into the air. To me this seems astounding.
If only half the $20 pays for power it’s still quite impressive.
I've found LLMs useful for surfacing popular recommendations. I also get the overwhelming feeling that it's all very early days still when the machine mixes together whatever was crawled into the weights with a web search or two and dumps it into a markdown blurb.
I totally agree with the above that a more polished and less obvious use of LLMs integrated back into search engines may be more useful, but will definitely be more usable.
"You get a Gemini summation including several links."
Who does "you" refer to
Me, I don't get a Gemini summation (Tested with old version of Chrome)
As such I do not believe that "Google search is basically Gemini now"
I believe Google search is still scanning through a doclist to find which documents, if any, contain words parsed from a query. These documents are pointed to by the URLs I get in the SERPs
A typical US user using a typical browser with typical settings gets an AI summary above search results.
If this doesn’t describe you, then ymmv. Talk to your government or turn down your content filtering or reset the default settings in your browser, if you want to see what we see.
I encountered multiple people in HN that had Apple Vision Pro. How many people here use Linux? Have flagship model phones? Drank soylent? Microdosed LSD?
Extrapolating based on what you see on HN doesn’t make sense.
Bottom line up front: LLM unlocks the power of a workstation for normal people.
Google Search ate the internet because everyone was using it. Some people said "free search isn't a business model, look what happened to yahoo"... and those people were wrong; not because they misunderstood the economics, but because they misunderstood what people needed.
Google Search reduced the friction of using the internet for normal people - suddenly the internet could be accessed with plain language, simple phrases, no networking knowledge or domain expertise required.
LLM is doing the same thing - reducing friction. Tradesmen and small businesses are building company landing pages and doing SEO by themselves. Businesses in every industry are programming applications in-house to unshackle themselves from SaaS systems. Entrepreneurs can build automated systems to handle mundane processes and get back to pulling the levers that actually move the needle. An LLM can level up your employees on the software they're already using.
The economic potential is only beginning to be realized.
Bottom line — all evidence gathered by modern interface design shows that most people don’t like conversing with their computers for anything more than a few single sentence commands. And people hate being forced to use chatbots with the fire of a thousand suns. If people chose their tools based on what engineers determined was the superior usage strategy or technology, nobody would use centralized social media, or MS Windows, unencrypted text chat, email without pgp, etc etc etc
Hi I am enjoying this conversation, but I am not understanding you.
> If people chose their tools based on what engineers determined was the superior usage strategy or technology, nobody would use centralized social media, or MS Windows, unencrypted text chat, email without pgp, etc etc etc
You're using this as an example of how normal people behave, but that CS/SWE's would advise against? I am having a hard time understanding how you connect this to LLM / chatbot to drive the argument that general purpose LLM's are over valued.
Extremely subsidized agentic search is very superior to Google at the moment, and of course it is. Google is a public company. The AI summary model has to work instantly, is likely as dumb as a 8T param model, and gives you incorrect details constantly. This sucks so much for Google. If you click on "AI Mode," suddenly the facts become more accurate.
Of course, if I want a real answer I happen to go to claude.ai, set it to a the best model, wait for a minute, and use many watts of energy. Slow agentic search that takes many seconds, and is greatly subsidized, is certainly better. This should not be a surprise, should it?
I think it was on a sub like r/singularity that I saw a post along the lines of "of course most people think that 'AI' sucks, as normies are interacting with 8T param models."
tone: genuinely confused about the world, not criticizing