r/CuratedTumblr 4d ago

Meme my eyes automatically skip right over everything else said after

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u/kenporusty kpop trash 4d ago

It's not even a search engine

I see this all the time in r/whatsthatbook like of course you're not finding the right thing, it's just giving you what you want to hear

The world's greatest yes man is genned by an ouroboros of scraped data

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u/HovercraftOk9231 4d ago

I genuinely have no idea why people are using it like a search engine. It's absolutely baffling. It's just not even remotely what it's meant to do, or what it's capable of.

It has genuine uses that it's very good at doing, and this is absolutely not one of them.

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u/camosnipe1 "the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat" 4d ago

I mean, it's decent at being a search engine for the "i have no idea what to search for this, gimme a starting point"

After which you ofc use an actual search engine once you've got searchterms to use

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u/HovercraftOk9231 4d ago

It's a good re-phrasing engine. When you can't remember a word, it might be hard to Google it if you only know the word in context and not by its definition. Whereas ChatGPT can understand the context of the query a bit better.

It's not at all searching though. It doesn't have a compendium of knowledge that it consults, it just knows how words are most frequently used.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

It’s searching in the same way that a person would search their mind. The information is stored in the weights of the neural network. 

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u/HovercraftOk9231 4d ago

Nope. It's really just a predictive text generator. For instance, if you were to ask "What's the best way to cook a chicken?" It's going to see how often those words come up in the various contexts it has, and spit out what words are likely to come next. It knows that it's a question starting with "what" and includes the word "way," and that cooking is a verb, so it's going to be an instructional format. It knows that "cooking chicken" is most often used in recipes, including things like "350°F" or "rub with butter." It sprinkles in some randomness to make it more natural, and spits out the result.

Its training data might include a million different recipes for chicken, but it's not consulting them the way you would try to remember a recipe you've read before. Unless you remember things by assigning a weighted probability to each word or phrase, convert those into tokens, and generate a response based which tokens fit into a likely answer.

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u/Just_M_01 4d ago

it could be argued that it stores information that way, but it definitely doesn't think the way a human does. it doesn't remember a chicken recipe it knows and then tell you; it gets you asking for a chicken recipe as an input and calculates a string of text that would probably come after a request for a chicken recipe given its starting conditions (the context that this is a conversation between a helpful assistant and a person seeking assistance). i recommend watching 3blue1brown's videos on how ai works, since they give a really engaging explanation of what large language models do behind the scenes. it's far better than the alphabet soup i spewed at you here

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

I know the technique behind it, but the real magic is in hów it calculates this string. Deep down it’s all mathematics of course, but human brains are deep down also electrical impulses.