- Reply guys emitting "but chatgpt searches for you idiot" is hilarious for this reason But even the more serious argument (that search-like affordances emerge from LLMs' scale and compression as sort of chaotic indices) misses that it redefines search beyond recognition to the end user, breaking it
- I've seen this post come up several times in my feed and each time, grown frustrated by all of the "Um, actually..." replies. Whether or not these models perform a web search before generating text does not change the fundamental problem Leckie is getting at here.
- More concretely, web search isn't about finding information; it's about finding *citations* and information. It continues the basic chain of custody of information necessary to recorded knowledge from Works Cited to "well Jim said and he knows." LLMs are specifically powered by not doing citation.
