Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.
Larry Page
The ultimate version of Google
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Have you tried one of the better LLM systems? Not Google’s half-baked rushjob, but LLAMA, BING, or any of the university projects that serve as front ends to the internet.
There’s a reason the bots have conversational interfaces and it is precisely what you pointed out. Classic search engines work best if you know what you want and how to build a boolean query. The so-called google-foo. But the bot interfaces *ask* questions in reply to a prompt. They are like therapists using questions to “read minds”. Still way short of Asimov’s MULTIVAC but early steps toward an information management system that returns what we want, not just what we ask it for.
Also, the key phrase above is ” information management system”. The reason Microsoft is so gung-ho on “AI” is to bring it to corporate computer systems; databases, accounting, personnel systems. To have the software reduce the experience and expertise the employees need to do their jobs. To do them faster and more efficiently. To do more work with less employees, which is necessary because as the boomers retire, the available labor pool is shrinking. (GenX and Millenials are smaller generations than the boomers. Even if the educational system could produce skilled workers, the bodies don’t exist.) If a corporate function requires four people to meet demand but you can only find three they can either overwork the three or pay MS to tweak their software so that three people can do it. Microsoft is going to rake it in. So are the top robot tool manufacturers, like CATERPILLAR.
Absent enough humans, the economy will adjust with automation, physical and “mental”.
Finally, American demographics are generally healthy. But other countries, particularly in Europe, aren’t. And they don’t have high tech companies to help bridge the gaps. Guess who they’ll have to pay.
Page is, if anything, too focused on the one trick his company knows and is missing, yet again, entire markets.
The 21st century is about to get even more divided, this time between the “AI” rich and the “AI” poor.
So naive… I don’t know how many times I have watched people trying to find something – and they don’t know what they want. Even a mind-reading AI would be stumped.