Well below turned out longer than I expected but here goes….
Honestly search being worse than AI is more than provider enshittification.
That’s part of it but as more and more stuff is uploaded to the internet that matches a query it’s a difficult thing to filter out without some sort of understanding of the content.
New isn’t always better. Freshness is a metric used by many engines and it’s shit.
Comprehension of the body of the content is a far better metric and LLMs that can parse content will win against dumb metrics like freshness or how good someone is at SEO.
I can do natural language queries, have the ai go off and find stuff, interpret the results and summarise in a usable form.
Like it or not that is a massive win for Gemini, ChatGPT and the like. They will cite sources that you can validate against.
I held off using them due to the hype and lack of confidence in what they can do but they’re like any other tool: hammers are good at driving nails but don’t work as screwdrivers and vice versa.
If you aren’t keeping an eye on the progress in this space at this point you’re really going to be left behind.
Avoiding hallucination is a thing and there are ways: choosing an appropriate model, prompting it with content to index etc.
Yes. Treating output as fact without any access to data specific to the field of query is a dead headed way to use them.
Reasoning models aren’t necessarily better if you want good results, depends what you are after: creativity vs indexes into real content.
I think that Apple need a boost in this space, by the same token I think their approach of small models processing specific data on device (not reasoning too much and not leaning too much on creativity, more assistance processing actual data you already have, eg contents of mail, calendar, documents etc.) is going to be a huge thing in the near future.
It’s what I’ve wanted from Siri for years. Not a dumb voice processor and “I can show you web results on your iPhone”.
More an ai assistant to monitor data being sent to me (email, calls, files, etc.) or generated by me and pull relevant details and help keep me on top of my responsibilities processing said inputs.
Things like “hey, bob sent you an email about a project last week that needs to be completed by the end of the month, it sounds important, so I’ve blocked out an hour of your time tomorrow to review it”.
Or
“While you were in work focus, you had 15 missed calls, 3 of which were important. I’ve scheduled time for you to follow up at 2pm”
Basically I see on device AI as being a personal assistant for people who aren’t c suite.
9to5mac.com
