this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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This is what I've seen many people claim. But it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines. Why is that information unavailable to search engines, but is available to LLMs? If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn't that same effort have been invested in Google Search?
I'd rather a world where 10 companies can compete with google search with AIs, than where they dump money into a monopoly.
If you don't feel like discussing this and won't do anything more than deliberately miss the point, you don't have to reply to me at all.
The content is not unavailable to search engines. AI LLMs simply are better at surfacing it. I don't know what point you were trying to make that I missed, it wasn't on purpose, I assure you.
Ok, but how exactly? Is there some magical emergent property of LLMs that guides them to filter out the garbage from the quality content?
Yeah. Money. Google has an incentive to make search results less accurate to get you to click around and interact with more ads. As it currently stands, AI models aren't inserting advertisements; though I suspect that's only a matter of time.
And that's more or less what I was aiming for, so we're back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:
The point is that there isn't something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven't found AI to be superior at all, but that's a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.
That's kind of how things work you know.
Yeah, would you say the original iPhone is any good today? No. Because everything got better. That's how things work. AI of today, in 20 years is probably going to be considered to suck.
That's how that works. When things are better than other things, we consider them good.