If instead of building LLMs, tech companies had spent billions of dollars designing new competing search engines that had no ads but might take a few minutes to run and cost a few cents per query, would the result have been more or less useful?
Rather less useful to me personally as a software developer.
Besides that, I feel like this question is maybe misleading? If ex. Google built a new search engine that could answer queries like its current AI-powered search summaries, or like ChatGPT, wouldn’t that have to be some kind of language model anyway? Is there another class of thing besides AGI that could perform as well at that task?
(I assume you’re not suggesting just changing the pricing model of existing-style search engines, which already had a market experiment (ex. Kagi) some years ago with only mild success.)
I think that would require text comprehension too. I guess it’s an interesting question if you can build an AI that can comprehend text but not produce it?
My impression is that the decline of search engines has little to do with search ads. It has more to do with a decline in public webpage authoring in favor of walled gardens, chat systems, etc.: new organic human-written material that once would have been on a public forum site (or home page!) is today often instead in an unindexable Discord chat or inside an app. Meanwhile, spammy content on the public Web has continued to escalate; and now LLMs are helping make more and more of it.
But most of LLMs’ knowledge comes from the public Web, so clearly there is still a substantial amount of useful content on it, and maybe if search engines had remained good enough at filtering spam fewer people would have fled to Discord.
If instead of building LLMs, tech companies had spent billions of dollars designing new competing search engines that had no ads but might take a few minutes to run and cost a few cents per query, would the result have been more or less useful?
Rather less useful to me personally as a software developer.
Besides that, I feel like this question is maybe misleading? If ex. Google built a new search engine that could answer queries like its current AI-powered search summaries, or like ChatGPT, wouldn’t that have to be some kind of language model anyway? Is there another class of thing besides AGI that could perform as well at that task?
(I assume you’re not suggesting just changing the pricing model of existing-style search engines, which already had a market experiment (ex. Kagi) some years ago with only mild success.)
I am thinking it would NOT answer like its current AI-powered search summaries, but would rather order actual search results but VERY intelligently.
I think that would require text comprehension too. I guess it’s an interesting question if you can build an AI that can comprehend text but not produce it?
My impression is that the decline of search engines has little to do with search ads. It has more to do with a decline in public webpage authoring in favor of walled gardens, chat systems, etc.: new organic human-written material that once would have been on a public forum site (or home page!) is today often instead in an unindexable Discord chat or inside an app. Meanwhile, spammy content on the public Web has continued to escalate; and now LLMs are helping make more and more of it.
But most of LLMs’ knowledge comes from the public Web, so clearly there is still a substantial amount of useful content on it, and maybe if search engines had remained good enough at filtering spam fewer people would have fled to Discord.
More useful. It would save us the step of having to check for hallucinations when doing research.