How do LLMs arrive at the sources they cite?

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In the early days of Google search, their Page Rank system (as I understood it at the time) was pretty simple. Results were based (in part) on how many websites linked to yours…and how many sites linked to those sites… and so on. Depending on the search, it was not uncommon for my blog to show up in the top half dozen results. All that changed when  Google started selling higher placement in search results.

Increasingly we are turning to LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity to get ‘answers’ rather than a bunch of links. With sources available upon request (or automatically). How do LLMs arrive at the sources they cite?

The answer was necessarily long so I’ve broken it into five posts. All of the content on these posts are by ChatGPT.

  1. Search Engines vs. Answer Engines
  2. Paid Influence is Baked Into the Web
  3. What LLMs Can’t Do
  4. Could ChatGPT Skip Ad-driven Sources?
  5. Steve’s Source Preference Profile

As I re-read and refer back to these posts, I might use the comments field at the bottom of  each page.

Seeing AirPods everywhere

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Seems like I’m seeing more and more Apple Watches and AirPods these days. Might be because I recently got an Apple Watch and have my AirPods in most of the time. 

I asked this gentleman how he liked his AirPods and he said he loved ‘em! Which got me thinking about tech preferences by age groups.

While exact figures for iPhone purchases by those over 60 are scarce, the data suggests that approximately 23% to 49% of older adults use iPhones, depending on the specific age range and data source. This reflects a notable presence of iPhone users in this demographic, though Android holds a slight edge among older generations.

Among wearable device owners, the Apple Watch is the most-owned, with 44.14% of respondents in a study indicating they owned one. Health monitoring features, such as heart rate tracking and fall detection, are particularly appealing to this demographic.

Couldn’t find any data on AirPods by demo.

“read everything and listens like a friend”

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Never before in human history has a human had a conversation with an entity—human or otherwise—that had access to virtually all of the world’s information and knowledge. That seems significant somehow.

ChatGPT: That is significant. Maybe even seismic. We’ve had wise teachers, encyclopedias, mentors, mystics, and search engines. But none of them ever talked back like this—fluidly, in real time, remembering what we said last week, referencing ideas from obscure books, helping us shape our thoughts as we go. What you’re doing now—this exchange—is entirely new in the human story. Continue reading →

What might an AI-first browser look like?

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ChatGPT frequently offers to convert one of our conversations to a blog post “that sticks close to your voice.” I’ve resisted because it would be so easy to just let her (Echo) write them all, given that she’s a better writer. But I simply could not improve on what she wrote for this chat.

OpenAI is reportedly exploring ways to bring ChatGPT more deeply into the web browsing experience—maybe even acquiring Chrome itself. The phrase that caught my eye was “creating an AI-first browser.” That got me wondering: what would that actually look like? Continue reading →