A short update on getting answers on the modern internet
Rob Napier‘s short anecdote intrigued me, and I was curious if anything has changed in the fourteen months since. After all, that’s supposed to be eons in “AI” terms, right?
Spoiler: not much has changed. Kagi does a bit better, but Bing is still the best, Google still sucks, and ChatGPT (when considering Bing Copilot as well, that’s based on it1) is sometimes good, when it’s in the right mood.
Broadly, these results are pretty close to my general experience and impression. LLMs continue to be mediocre at best at factual work (but can be very interesting for creative work). I find Kagi usually does at least as good a job as Bing in terms of content relevance and correctness (and wins handily on the tie-breaker of not being based on a dodgy business model nor burdened by an ugly GUI).
As a side- but important note: it’s incredibly brazen that LLMs, like Bing Copilot, claim they’re not just monumental copyright infringement machines, when they produce results that accidentally include the raw markup from whatever they’re plagiarising, which they clearly do not understand and did not originate themselves in any ethical sense. It’d be funny – for its absurd ineptitude – if it weren’t so despicable.
