If you strip all the facts from a mathematician you get me... I don't need another me: I already used Google, and I already failed to find what I need. What I actually need is someone who can realize that my problem is a restatement of an existing known problem, just using words and terms or a occluded structure that don't look anything like how it was originally formulated. You very often simply can't figure that out using Google, no matter how long you sit in a tight loop trying related Google searches; but, it is the kind of thing that an LLM (or a human) excels at (as you can consider "restatement" a form of "translation" between languages), if and only if they have already seen that kind of problem. The same thing comes up with novel application of obscure technology, complex economics, or even interpretation of human history... there is a reason why people who study Classics "waste" a ton of time reading old stories rather than merely knowing the library is around the corner. What makes these AIs so amazing is thinking of them as entirely replacing Google with something closer to a god, not merely trying to wrap it with a mechanical employee whose time is ostensibly less valuable than mine.
> What makes these AIs so amazing is thinking of them as entirely replacing Google with something closer to a god
I guess that way of thinking may foster amazement, but it doesn't seem very grounded in how these things work or their current capabilities. Seems a bit manic tbf.
And again, enabling web search in your chats doesn't prevent these models from doing anything "integrative reasoning", so-to-speak, that they can purportedly do. It just helps ensure that relevant facts are in context for the model.
Yeah, but like, "relevant facts" is a big part of reasoning? I don't get anywhere near as good results on anything I want from the dumber models, and I almost never get good results from Google searches as, as I said, I already did that. To put it into engineering, people come to me for security stuff, and I've spent my life working in that field, so I just know things that I'd never be able to find with a Google search if I didn't already know the thing I am looking for (and often I can't recover a reference even if I do remember).
I frankly feel people don't spend enough time with ChatGPT 4.5... like, if you haven't yet found use cases that it can do that the other models can't even come close to, are you really using AI effectively?
