> I would have expected the commentariat here at HN to display way more skepticism about language models as a replacement for search.
Because plenty of people don't see it necessarily as a replacement for search, but as a useful adjunct.
More to the point though, why do people always want to define the "HN commentariat" as some monolithic bunch? I've seen tons of comments and articles on the front page pointing out many issues with LLMs, from attribution, to confident bullshitting, to bias issues. Heck, there was plenty of discussion about a big proposed reason for Google's stock crash yesterday was due to the ad Google used to highlight questions their LLM can answer gave a confidently incorrect response.
Whenever I see comments that treat the rest of the HN audience like some monolithic group, especially in the face of plenty of evidence to the contrary, I feel like, ironically, the poster is saying "Why don't you all agree with me?"
I work really hard not to do this, and have more than once posted a message like yours.
However, my point here was that at the time of posting, the comment threads for this HN post were largely devoid of any skepticism about LM+search, and were completely dominated by a calm acceptance that it was all inevitable. And I wasn't trying to say "all of HN believes <X>", but rather "I would have expected there to be more voices in the comment thread expressing skepticism, because I know there are some smart people here"
Google's Bard demo certainly tweaked the situation by the end of the day.
Because plenty of people don't see it necessarily as a replacement for search, but as a useful adjunct.
More to the point though, why do people always want to define the "HN commentariat" as some monolithic bunch? I've seen tons of comments and articles on the front page pointing out many issues with LLMs, from attribution, to confident bullshitting, to bias issues. Heck, there was plenty of discussion about a big proposed reason for Google's stock crash yesterday was due to the ad Google used to highlight questions their LLM can answer gave a confidently incorrect response.
Whenever I see comments that treat the rest of the HN audience like some monolithic group, especially in the face of plenty of evidence to the contrary, I feel like, ironically, the poster is saying "Why don't you all agree with me?"