I have heard that these LLMs are really good as coding assistants, so good point. I shouldn’t dismiss that. I don’t think they’re good at music, and really the art isn’t that good either, but I’m sure people without artistic training like being able to make images and songs. Not sure it’s worth the cost, since it’s all built on plagiarism and so massively wasteful.
As for web searches, really? I don’t think they’re trustworthy. They can, and do, make shit up. No, that’s not the same as the boomerism of saying “anyone can edit Wikipedia so you can’t trust it” because Wikipedia has quality control. LLMs don’t. There’s literally nothing stopping it from spitting out lies and so it’s up to the user to double check whatever the LLM spits out, which means I might as well just search through results myself. And if you don’t always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.
If it wasn’t for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I’ve seen since the iphone.
If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web! AI summarization is only “useful” in the sense that the search engines have destroyed themselves in their search for profitability, google is garbage now and we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.
So really, the problems that are causing AI slop to pollute search results are the same problems that made search engines so bad over the past ten years.
If we demonetized and de-enshitified the search engines by nationalizing google I don’t think AI result summaries would be useful at all.
Do I get things wrong? Sure, never said I was perfect either, if someone tells me I got a stat or a figure or something wrong, great!
The question for me is: is it wrong enough to make the results completely unreliable, and the answer to that is no, more often than not it provides accurate information.
If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web!
That’s not accurate to me, AI/SEO search results are still a minority of results that I get, most of the time I get close to what I’m looking for, but AI search summarisation is essentially the next level of search for me:
Dogpile/Altavista/AskJeeves > Google > AI powered search summarisation
I get essentially what I’m looking for directly, why click on a page with 47 ads, a video pop up or something else when all I’m looking for is:
Is it a complete replacement? Not yet, Ecosia is still my daily driver having used it 25,000+ times in the last year but AI is making a serious dent in how often I use it.
we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.
I would keep an eye on that, the gains in AI have been massive in the last few years, and we’re starting to potentially see a turning point with DeepSeekv3 being created on a fraction of the cost and power of other models
DeepSeek (Chinese AI co) making it look easy today with an open weights release of a frontier-grade LLM trained on a joke of a budget (2048 GPUs for 2 months, $6M).
For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16K GPUs…
*This could turn out to be wrong hence why I’m keeping an eye on it
**I’m absolutely certain a whole lot of execs are stunned right now they’re spending billions when something that cost millions came up right next to them
DeepSeek is really interesting! Leave it to China to solve some of AIs biggest problems - if we can have these models without needing football fields of compute powered by nuclear plants then it would totally change my perspective on the industry. As it is they’re just too wasteful to justify their utility, but if DeepSeek just leapfrogged that problem then I have no complaints.
I have heard that these LLMs are really good as coding assistants, so good point. I shouldn’t dismiss that. I don’t think they’re good at music, and really the art isn’t that good either, but I’m sure people without artistic training like being able to make images and songs. Not sure it’s worth the cost, since it’s all built on plagiarism and so massively wasteful.
As for web searches, really? I don’t think they’re trustworthy. They can, and do, make shit up. No, that’s not the same as the boomerism of saying “anyone can edit Wikipedia so you can’t trust it” because Wikipedia has quality control. LLMs don’t. There’s literally nothing stopping it from spitting out lies and so it’s up to the user to double check whatever the LLM spits out, which means I might as well just search through results myself. And if you don’t always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.
If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web! AI summarization is only “useful” in the sense that the search engines have destroyed themselves in their search for profitability, google is garbage now and we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.
So really, the problems that are causing AI slop to pollute search results are the same problems that made search engines so bad over the past ten years.
If we demonetized and de-enshitified the search engines by nationalizing google I don’t think AI result summaries would be useful at all.
When did the web ever present itself as a completely factual and never wrong? There’s plenty of evidence of wikipedia being wrong on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia
Do I get things wrong? Sure, never said I was perfect either, if someone tells me I got a stat or a figure or something wrong, great!
The question for me is: is it wrong enough to make the results completely unreliable, and the answer to that is no, more often than not it provides accurate information.
That’s not accurate to me, AI/SEO search results are still a minority of results that I get, most of the time I get close to what I’m looking for, but AI search summarisation is essentially the next level of search for me:
Dogpile/Altavista/AskJeeves > Google > AI powered search summarisation
I get essentially what I’m looking for directly, why click on a page with 47 ads, a video pop up or something else when all I’m looking for is:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/do-you-have-a-basic-egg-on-toa-pkpsq9WwSMm5G8ICsmDnbw#0
Is it a complete replacement? Not yet, Ecosia is still my daily driver having used it 25,000+ times in the last year but AI is making a serious dent in how often I use it.
I would keep an eye on that, the gains in AI have been massive in the last few years, and we’re starting to potentially see a turning point with DeepSeekv3 being created on a fraction of the cost and power of other models
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/deepseeks-new-ai-model-appears-to-be-one-of-the-best-open-challengers-yet/
*This could turn out to be wrong hence why I’m keeping an eye on it **I’m absolutely certain a whole lot of execs are stunned right now they’re spending billions when something that cost millions came up right next to them
DeepSeek is really interesting! Leave it to China to solve some of AIs biggest problems - if we can have these models without needing football fields of compute powered by nuclear plants then it would totally change my perspective on the industry. As it is they’re just too wasteful to justify their utility, but if DeepSeek just leapfrogged that problem then I have no complaints.