LLMs Causing Hallucinations: The Future of Web Browsing?

It is pathetic that Google uses Bard to search the internet and provide summary information. Now, some startups like Perplexity are selling their robots as their main product, which makes the situation even worse.

Recently, Bard supported by Gemini Pro surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 in the Hugging Face Chat Bot Arena leaderboard. Interestingly, Gemini Pro is only the second best model in Google's Gemini series, which increases people's expectations for the upcoming Gemini Ultra. In addition, a discussion on X also questioned whether it is correct to compare the LLM of the search engine with the original LLM.

There is no doubt that the issue of LLM and its illusions has been raised long ago, which hinders the ability of LLM output to be taken seriously and may become a prime example of misinformation. Connecting them to the internet makes sense for retrieving real-time information, while providing proper attribution to information sources can enhance credibility.

It is also worth noting that the lawsuit between The New York Times and OpenAI highlights the problem of retrieving information from the internet, as model creators may be sued for diverting traffic from the original website.

One issue pointed out is that LLM search is essentially conversational search, just referencing some blue links. "Conversational search is essentially dependent on the results of search engines. It will enhance but not replace old search engines. RAG is a lot of R and a little G," said Jia Yangqing, founder of Lepton.AI in an article on X.

However, when it comes to Google, it can be said to be experiencing the "innovator's dilemma," which means that alternatives to Google search are increasing, and although the company is making efforts to advance, it may be moving away from what it actually offers, which is providing accurate answers and references.

Dare Obasanjo pointed out on X that web search is great when you want to link to websites, but LLM is for answering questions. "LLM search doesn't replace Google search; it replaces the need to go to Google for answers," he added, jokingly saying that if your query can be easily answered by an ad, then go to Google. Honestly, this sounds like a very good business idea for Google.

Ultimately, who knows search better than Google? This explains why it still runs its AI features as an experiment rather than a mature search product. It even has the potential to kill startups like Perplexity with just a click of a button - simply by adding LLM search in the browser, just like it recently did on Chrome.