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Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

I recently asked gpt to give me a markdown table of the continents, their landmass and their populations. I checked the numbers and they matched wikipedia.

Google gave me listicles instead...

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I recently asked ChatGPT to multiply 2 numbers together. Every search engine I tried yielded a product, except ChatGPT which gave me an excuse.

They're useful in their own right, but you can't fool yourself into believing either one cannibalizes the other.

curious what the excuse was.

To be fair to ChatGPT though, all the search engines first recognize that the query is trying to perform an arithmetic calculation, then pass it on to a calculator. ChatGPT already understands what is being asked, it would be trivial to perform the next step, pass it on to a calculator and return the right answer.

The fact that you felt the need to check Wikipedia shows why LLMs can't replace search, at least not in their current form.

> I recently asked gpt to give me a markdown table of the continents, their landmass and their populations. I checked the numbers and they matched wikipedia.

But there is no reason to think that it will be correct, structurally. While you can find examples that work, the AI does not know the truth. An AI does NOT have an understanding of populations, locations, etc.

Google didn’t return answers, but it directed you to sites with answers. Those sites were like curated by hand by a human who does understand the meaning of the data

Why didn't Wolfram Alpha disrupt Google? GPT is just passed a threshold of user friendliness?

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