this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Due to the nature of our work, my firm has had early access to most LLMs including Bard (now Gemini). I might be short on imagination but I honestly cannot see how LLM general search implementations can ever be fixed. There is too much garbage data for any system to be able to intelligently parse and the results of our tests were laughable. Now, if you offer LLM search that is restricted to curated datasets like "The Library of Congress" or peer reviewed scientific papers, I can see the value in that. You'll probably still have to triple check your results, but at least it can get you 80% of the way there rather than sending you in the wrong direction.
EDIT: For context, our clientele are all enterprises with very large, mission critical systems. They are not the type to use some buggy trinket just because it's new and cool.
yes, I find Gemini actually not bad when it comes to my specific use case of showing generic examples for R programming, so I can figure out the syntax for my actual code. I don't try to have it generate actual code for me because my topic of marine biogeochemistry is far too specific for it to have any idea how to work with it. Unlike ChatGPT, which often makes up nonsense functions or hallucinates whole packages, Gemini seems to do ok. I also found it pretty good for generating images of natural subjects. It did the best job of generating a pic of a giant clam of any image generator I've tried. I would never trust factual information from Gemini. So like Google+, it's a pretty good product that in no way should be shunted into search results, Google Docs and other places where its output is not relevant, yet that is exactly the trap Google is falling into again.
With Gemini you can let it show you search results for (some) of its statements. It's useful for cross-checking: I was, for example, researching plastics recycling and there was a claim that seemed untrue and corporate. The automagic search/source function for that statement led me to a blog post of some consortium/lobbying group of manufacturers. After telling that to Gemini it apologized and compiled a list of different view points for that specific statement.
I was pretty impressed with that, and I find it very useful for researching topics I know basically nothing about. Of course it's not the sole source of truth.
Every time. It'd be funny if it didn't mean people constantly being punished and losing their jobs for errors made at the executive level.
Exactly this. We need to figure out making machines that can reason first and then we can have THEM sort the data and figure out what to feed the data pool.
But if we have a computer that can reason, we don't need LLMs at all.