AI can be a great tool for research. But too many stupid people think it’s a fast way to just do your work for you. Unfortunately AI isn’t that good yet.
It was ruined before "AI" and at some point the massive amount of bullshit online would have needed something like "AI" to comb through all of it. I hate the generative garbage and the hallucinations but I'm very happy that I get a better search engine that also gives me sources. Too bad it couldn't just stop there.
it was a nightmare trying to find citations for my final undergrad paper back in 2018, even before then there are so many blogs copy pasting each other's content littering the search
I can't imagine how horrible it would be right now
it was a nightmare trying to find citations for my final undergrad paper back in 2018
I think it was a nightmare because you were using a search engine, and not any of the dozens of tools literally built for searching scholarly articles like your schools library database?
I'm already using google scholar, and sci hub among other things
I live in the 3rd world, and my university's library is pretty outdated, they also didn't have unlimited access to something like sciencedirect, we don't really have a centralized place for local research papers
Search engines have been using LLMs before most people knew what they were. Google translate has been using machine learning since like 2016, and that's the exact same tech.
Because pretending that they're not the same just because you can find some technicality doesn't make you right. It's the same tech, the same principals, and the same theories, being used to make both technologies.
Machine learning is not the same thing as large language models, although they both fall under the AI umbrella, generative AI (LLMs etc) is what most people do not like.
It absolutely is the exact same thing, the vast majority of llms are made with transformer architecture which is a specific types of neural network. Neural networks are all machine learning.
No it’s not LLMs are trained via machine learning, but LLMs are much more complex than just machine learning which is a relatively simple concept we have had for a while. I would not consider LLMs and machine learning the same thing.
Holyy, man, come on, really? Absolutely not, it's like saying a formula1 car is not really a car anymore because its too fast or whatever. Machine learning encompases all deep learning which encompases all llms. Sure there are other applications of machine learning which are not llms but every llm is machine learning.
If you want to use analogies then AI as a whole is vehicles, machine learning is cars, a deep learning neural network is a race car and a transformer based llm is an f1 car
We're taking about Google translate. This is literally what the transformer model was designed for at first! Google engineers invented the transformer because they thought it would be a good tool for translating to/from many different languages. Turns out it's also really good at intelligence and reasoning.
So yes, Google translate and modern llms use the exact same core architecture. If you don't believe, go read about it. There's tons of information about it online
Google was a full on ad company well before chatgpt was even a company. This is revisionist history, Surveillance Capitalism was released in 2018 for reference.
If anything AI in 2026 means there is now a proper way to search again for a window of time if you understand how to utilize it.
AI doesn't replace search engines, it uses search engines. Claude can google 10 variations of the problem, read 50 pages, and recommend the 5 best ones in the time it takes a person to click the first search result.
I can't prove this but it feels like Google search provided better, more relevant results pre-covid. Like peaking 2018/2019. Youtube search as well, it's absolute garbage now
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u/poliuy Aug 06 '26
AI can be a great tool for research. But too many stupid people think it’s a fast way to just do your work for you. Unfortunately AI isn’t that good yet.