A concrete, concise answer that's often confidently incorrect.

I've had MS Copilot first tell me to use a Microsoft product that was retired nearly a decade ago, and when called out it told me to use one that didn't exist.

Also, the garbage web results are because of LLMs.

LLM gives you a concrete concise answer to your question while the search engine gives you dead links or spam.

LLM also very confidently gives you a wrong answer way too often. Just over the weekend I tinkered with diy-home automation gadget and fed a bunch of documents to duck.ai in hope that it could dig up protocol and electrical behavior of HAN port on our electric meter. The documentation is there, but it's recursively referenced to a crapload of different standards so the actual answer is pretty labour intensive to dig up manually.

LLM spat out an answer which seemed to make sense, but the solution it offered didn't work and when I asked for sources for spesific facts it just said that it doesn't have any and that it shouldn't have recommended such a solution in the first place, with apologies of course.

I'd much prefer the old school way of searching things, but that doesn't really exist anymore either. Search engines, google specially, are far less useful than they used to be. Part of the problem is LLM slop filling the whole internet but somehow I feel that's not the only reason.

LLMs give you sycophantic bullshit. Tell it it's wrong even if the response is correct and see what it does.

LLM gives you a concrete concise answer to your question

That may be true for basic, simple questions, but it is not true for medium or hard questions.

They will give an answer, yes, but often it's not answering what you asked, or giving the wrong answer.

Here's an example of a time where a single letter spelling error affected the outcome even though Google knew it was a typo. Yea, LLMs will give an answer but anecdotally it's correct less than half the time on any question of substance and at least 10%+ miss rate on simple questions.

Then you use a better search engine, not flock to an AI that has no real concept of what's true or false so just feeds you whatever looks right