Speaking as a local LLM enthusiast, it’s still unreliable and is “googling” something behind the scenes to get answers. And it’s not like a human poking around, internally it’s looking at a wall of webpages and “hoping” to hit something right.
But to answer your question Perplexity is similar, and perplexica is the open source equivalent. There are also researcher “agent” scripts that will script LLM calls.
I get that, and for sure always need to verify it’s results, but SEO has turned looking information up into a slog of AI articles and lists.
I very rarely am able to find the answers to my questions anymore. And I say that as someone who has always joked that my job was a professional Googler. Whereas I used to be able to search key words or vague snippets of something from memory or lookup a hyper-specific question and find a solid answer within a couple minutes, now the first 2 pages are ads and “websites” with “articles” that are just vessels for more ads.
Using something like ChatGPT gets me a little closer to that old level of access. The hand that feeds I suppose…
Just remember to take anything AI says with a grain of salt. TBH I’d suggest digging deeper into how LLMs work at a high level so you can understand just how they can be confidently “wrong”
Oh I understand how they work, I actually made an AI chatbot for a client of mine. Now, to be fair, it was mostly just fiddling with and fine-tuning a prompt in a WordPress plugin. It’s called AI Engine by Meow Apps. Super cool plugin, but It was the most frustrating project of my life because despite being given clear and consistent instructions, and having a dedicated database to pull answer from, it still just made shit up. I set the temperature to .1 and it lost all personality and still made shit up.
Finally got it to a usable place where it basically was just walking the user through a quiz but, yeah, I definitely take it with a grain of salt lol
Speaking as a local LLM enthusiast, it’s still unreliable and is “googling” something behind the scenes to get answers. And it’s not like a human poking around, internally it’s looking at a wall of webpages and “hoping” to hit something right.
But to answer your question Perplexity is similar, and perplexica is the open source equivalent. There are also researcher “agent” scripts that will script LLM calls.
I get that, and for sure always need to verify it’s results, but SEO has turned looking information up into a slog of AI articles and lists.
I very rarely am able to find the answers to my questions anymore. And I say that as someone who has always joked that my job was a professional Googler. Whereas I used to be able to search key words or vague snippets of something from memory or lookup a hyper-specific question and find a solid answer within a couple minutes, now the first 2 pages are ads and “websites” with “articles” that are just vessels for more ads.
Using something like ChatGPT gets me a little closer to that old level of access. The hand that feeds I suppose…
Anyways, that’s for the tip. I’ll check it out!
How capitalism ruined internet
Just remember to take anything AI says with a grain of salt. TBH I’d suggest digging deeper into how LLMs work at a high level so you can understand just how they can be confidently “wrong”
Oh I understand how they work, I actually made an AI chatbot for a client of mine. Now, to be fair, it was mostly just fiddling with and fine-tuning a prompt in a WordPress plugin. It’s called AI Engine by Meow Apps. Super cool plugin, but It was the most frustrating project of my life because despite being given clear and consistent instructions, and having a dedicated database to pull answer from, it still just made shit up. I set the temperature to .1 and it lost all personality and still made shit up.
Finally got it to a usable place where it basically was just walking the user through a quiz but, yeah, I definitely take it with a grain of salt lol