What if, rather than searching the web, we could query an LLM and get an answer? We would receive not a page of web links but a piece of text that answered our query. This appears to work for basic factual questions, but for questions that require complex reasoning or specialized knowledge, today’s LLMs may confidently hallucinate an answer, making the result misleading

I see significant potential in another technology, retrieval augmented generation. Rather than relying on a fixed LLM to deliver the answer to a query, if we first find relevant documents (online or elsewhere) and then use an LLM to process the query and the documents into an answer, this could provide an alternative to current web search. Executing this efficiently and at scale would be complex, but the effect would be akin to having an LLM do a web search and summarize the results.