I don’t get the hype around LLM, it is a terrible way to search

I'll be playing devil's advocate here just for a moment (despite the huge ecological, moral, political and economical costs) :

• what LLM does provide is a looser linguistic interface. That means instead of searching for exact words, one can approximately search for the "idea". That means instead of hitting just the right keywords that an expert might know, one can describe a partial solution, a very rough guess of what the problem might be, and possibly get a realistic sounding answer. It might be wrong yet it might still be a step in the right direction.

So... yes I also don't think the hype is justified but IMHO it's quite clear that providing a solution that makes an interface easier to get some OK-looking result would appeal to masses. That means a LOT of people get their hopes up about potential empowerment and a few people ride that bubble making money on promises.

PS: for people interested in the topic but wanting to avoid the generative aspect I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_search is a good starting point.

Have you tried perplexity.ai? Using it to do some programming and it's quite good so far. It's basically LLM + Search Engines.

You can also use it to use different models (not just with ChatGPT).

Sometimes even run the code itself (Python for my case) and see if it's valid.

Can't say I have the same experience. Other than for old niche content, the sources cited from asking perplexity.ai (I just use it since it's free, no idea how it compares to others) tend to be exactly what I'm after.

Completely terrible. An AI "search" takes as much electricity as hundreds to thousands of normal searches.

'AI" is TERRIBLE for climate change because they're increasing demand for electricity so much that they're keeping coal plants going that were even scheduled for decomissioning because they use A LOT of power.