alt Hacker NewsI use it the same way. The feeling is that I'm back in ~2010 when Googling stuff felt like a superpower. I could find anything back then.
Of course, it didn't last long, and trying to Google now is an exercise in pain and frustration. Lots of people have complained about the various things Google and marketers have done to get there, idk, I just don't like how it works now.
Top LLMs feel amazingly good at rapidly surfacing info online, and as I go through the references they're usually pretty good. I guess the same forces as before will apply, and there will be some window of opportunity before it all goes away again.
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I wonder when LMMs and services like chatgpt become as bloated as search engines are today, with their own equivalent of SEO/SEM tools and other unwanted stuff distracting and disturbing accuracy, even if one finally stops hallucinating.
There will be a race between the attempts monetize online LLM services like this and the development of consumer owned hardware that can enable local LLMs with sufficient power to deliver the same service but ad free.
Combined with RAG a self hosted LLM will definitely be able to deliver a more impartial and therefore better solution.
If you do a web search and find a random blog post full of spelling errors and surrounded by ads, you're not going to trust that at the same level as a Stack Overflow post with a hundred upvotes, or an article with a long comment thread on HN.
But an LLM digests everything, and then spits out information with the same level of detail, same terminology, and same presentation regardless of where it came from. It strips away a lot of the contextual metadata we use to weigh credibility and trust.
Sure, you can follow references from an LLM, but at that point you're just using it a fuzzier form of web search.