So LLM embedding are an actual useful thing that could actually improve search. Categorization is a real problem that AI could help solve (particularly with search queries). But that's not a new category of search, it's just a question of whether the current LLMs would be better than whatever Google is currently using to make the same inferences. And the direction Bard and Bing seem to be going with these giant models is the conversational direction, and where that's concerned:

> there's an entire collection of things that can be answered directly by ChatGPT. [...] assuming chatGPT is good enough eventually

I am a lot less impressed with this. And I know I'm an outlier and plenty of people are shocked at how good GPT is at this kind of problem, so I am constantly second-guessing myself and thinking to myself, "are we using the same product?" Because I think ChatGPT produces really bad quality information. It's cool, it's wildly impressive, it's a massive achievement and an incredible milestone for AI, but 'cool' is different from 'useful.'

Leaving aside the problem that answering simple questions is a very small subset of what search is used for, and isn't on its own probably a big enough category of questions to make me change search engines, the bigger problem is that the current state of ChatGPT seems to be wildly inconsistent about what it knows and what it doesn't know and I don't have a way to pre-predict what categories of information it's safe to ask about. And the only way for me to verify the answers it gives me are to... double check its work with a real search.

I would not advise anyone to ask ChatGPT for advice about what drugs are safe to take while high, that seems profoundly unwise to me.

So it's a bit like Instant Answers. Google has been trying to auto-answer questions for ages, and in practice the only time it's ever been useful for me is when it's extremely predictable and when I know that a category of question will only ever have its answer pulled from one site and where I know what the format of that answer will be.

Unpredictability is generally a quality that I try to avoid any time that I am using a computer. One of the primary strengths of a computer to me is specificity and predictability. And so the bar here is really high. The question I ask myself is, "would I want to replace a search engine with a human assistant?" And I think the answer is no, I feel like that would be missing the point of what a search engine is. And ChatGPT gives worse answers than a human assistant would, and its sources/knowledge is just as unpredictable as a human's would be if not worse. So, I also don't want to replace my search engine with ChatGPT.

It could get more accurate in the future, and if it does then maybe my opinion will change then, but... it's hard for me to get excited about using a worse product today on the promise that it might get better in the future. And I guess it's accurate enough that a bunch of people keep telling me that they're saving time when they use it, so maybe I don't understand what I'm talking about. But I just don't see how people are reaching that conclusion unless they're either asking questions where they don't actually care about the accuracy or unless they're just rolling the dice and trusting that ChatGPT won't accidentally poison them when they ask what drug combinations they can take.