"Aaron Halfaker, who led the machine-learning research team at the Wikimedia Foundation for several years (and who now works for Microsoft), told me that search-engine summaries at least offer users links and citations and a way to click back to Wikipedia. The responses from large language models can resemble an information smoothie that goes down easy but contains mysterious ingredients. “The ability to generate an answer has fundamentally shifted,” he says, noting that in a ChatGPT answer there is “literally no citation, and no grounding in the literature as to where that information came from.” He contrasts it with the Google or Bing search engines: “This is different. This is way more powerful than what we had before.”"