Alright you know what, I’m not going to argue. You do you.
I just know that I’ve been underwhelmed with conventional search for about a decade, and I think that LLMs are a huge help sorting through the internet at the moment. There’s no telling what it will become in the future, especially if popular LLMs start ingesting content that itself has been generated by LLMs, but for now I think that the improvement is more significant than the step from Yahoo→Google in the 2000s.
I think you’re underselling it a bit though. It is far better than a modern search engine, although that is in part because of all of the SEO slop that Google has ingested. The fact that you need to think critically is not something new and it’s never going to go away either. If you were paying real-life human experts to answer your every question you would still need to think for yourself.
Still, I think the C-suite doesn’t really have a good grasp of the limits of LLMs. This could be partly because they themselves work a lot with words and visualization, areas where LLMs show promise. It’s much less useful if you’re in engineering, although I think ultimately AI will transform engineering too. It is of course annoying and potentially destructive that they’re trying to force-push it into areas where it’s not useful (yet).
Books. The models were trained on books. And it’s terrifying that 90% of people think you’re not real if you use a semicolon correctly.