I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an expert, and I don’t like to speak authoritatively on things that I’m not an expert in, so it’s possible I’m mistaken. Also I’ve had a drink or two, so that’s not helping, but here we go anyways.

In the article, the author quips on a tweet where they seem to fundamentally misunderstand how LLMs work:

I tabbed over to another tab, and the top post on my Bluesky feed was something along these lines:

ChatGPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information. You cannot use it as a search engine. LLMs only generate statistically likely sentences.

The thing is… ChatGPT was over there, in the other tab, searching the web. And the answer I got was pretty good.

The tweet is correct. The LLM has a snapshot understanding of the internet based on its training data. It’s not what we would generally consider a true index based search.

Training LLMs is a costly and time consuming process, so it’s fundamentally impossible to regenerate an LLM in the same order of magnitude of time it takes to make a simple index.

The author fails to address any of these issues, which suggests to me that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

I suppose I could conceded that an LLM can fulfill a similar role that a search engine traditionally has, but it’d kinda be like saying that a toaster is an oven. They’re both confined boxes which heat food, but good luck if you try to bake 2 pies at once in a toaster.