this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Well one benefit is finding out what to read. I can ask for the name of a topic I’m describing and go off and research it on my own.
Search engines aren’t great with vague questions.
There’s this thing called using a wide variety of tools to one’s benefit; You should go learn about it.
You search for topics and keywords on search engines. It's a different skill. And from what I see, yields better results. If something is vague also, think quickly first and make it less vague. That goes for life!
And a tool which regurgitates rubbish in a verbose manner isn't a tool. It's a toy. Toy's can spark your curiosity, but you don't rely on them. Toy's look pretty, and can teach you things. The lesson is that they aren't a replacement for anything but lorem ipsum
Buddy that's great if you know the topic or keyword to search for, if you don't and only have a vague query that you're trying to find more about to learn some keywords or topics to search for, you can use AI.
You can grandstand about tools vs toys and what ever other Luddite shit you want, at the end of the day despite all your raging you are the only one going to miss out despite whatever you fanatically tell yourself.
I'm still sceptical, any chance you could share some prompts which illustrate this concept?
Sure an hour ago I had watched a video about smaller scales and physics below planck length. And I was curious, if we can classify smaller scales into conceptual groups, where they interact with physics in their own different ways, what would the opposite end of the spectrum be. From there I was able to 'chat' with an AI and discover and search wikipedia for terms such as Cosmological horizon, brane cosmology, etc.
In the end there was only theories on higher observable magnitudes, but it was a fun rabbit hole I could not have explored through traditional search engines - especially not the gimped product driven adsense shit we have today.
Remember how people used to say you can't use Wikipedia, it's unreliable. We would roll our eyes and say "yeah but we scroll down to the references and use it to find source material"? Same with LLM's, you sort through it and get the information you need to get the information you need.
Wikipedia isn't to be referenced for scientific papers, I'm sure we all agree there. But it does do almost exactly what you described. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe has some great further reading links. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology has some great reads too. And for the time short: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology which also has Related Pages
I'm still yet to see how AI beats a search engine. And your example hasn't convinced me either
If you still can't see how natural language search is useful, that's fine. We can, and we're happy to keep using it.