[FabCH]

Claude Sonnet 5 Medium more or less on the timestamp of the comment:

Prompt: Who won the 2026 World Cup?

Answer: Spain won the 2026 World Cup, beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time in the final at MetLife Stadium on July 19. Ferran Torres scored the only goal in the 106th minute, coming on as a substitute in the 62nd minute. It’s Spain’s second World Cup title, having also won in 2010.

Prompt: Nearby BBQ places open now?

Answer: (a geolocation permission request prompt for the browser followed by) Right in [redacted] both [redacted] (4.6 stars, open until [redacted]) and [redacted] ([redacted]) are close and currently open.

A bit further out but highly rated: [redacted]

Seems like LLM does a good job on those questions…

[krupan]

Did it do a Google search to learn all that up to date information?

[ssl-3]

Almost certainly. That's OK, isn't it? Folks have been Googling things poorly for as long as there has been a Google to Google with, and now they have bots that do it on their behalf.

The only issue is that the eyeballs stayed with the LLM, which allows it to hold a position that is potentially very powerful. This is particularly problematic with people who believe that computers are infallible.

[janalsncm]

The point of this thread is that you cannot replace search engines with an LLM. If your example is an LLM using a search engine as a tool call, you have not replaced the search engine. It’s still there.

[ssl-3]

Yes. An external search engine is still there, for now.

But the user doesn't necessarily know anything about that, and they don't necessarily care.

If/when the time is reached when external search engines are no longer present in the LLM loop, it seems likely that regular folks won't even notice this shift. As long as the answer-making machine keeps making answers, they won't have any reason to pay attention to this kind of back-end minutiae at all.

[krupan]

I love where this is going. Where does the answer-machine get it's answers in this scenario? How do we double check the answer-machine's answers?

[ssl-3]

> I love where this is going. Where does the answer-machine get it's answers in this scenario?

It gets its answers from an archive of whatever used to be the Internet, and the last remaining publication: The Costco Flyer.

> How do we double check the answer-machine's answers?

That's the best part: We don't!

[8note]

you have changed the monetization model for the search engine though

and maybe you really need the index and not the engine?