Over the past few weeks, ChatGPT has dominated discussions in various online communities to an extent that some people believe that AI chat will kill traditional search engines as we know them now. From coming up with poems from scratch, and completing assignments, to even writing code, it seems that there is nothing that ChatGPT can not do.
For those not in the know, ChatGPT is an AI-powered chat bot. Like the Google Assistant but on steroids, for the lack of a better comparison. It is able to place things and people in their proper context and offer detailed information and responses when queried about them. It is, many opine, the first in a bust of products built off large language models, like Open AI’s GPT-3.5, on which it is based, that are ushering in a new “knowledge age”. Out with the information age, in with the knowledge age.
A new report from The Information now indicates that Microsoft, who had invested in OpenAI (Chat GPT owners) back in 2019, included an agreement to incorporate some aspects of GPT into Bing.
According to the publication, Microsoft hopes to add the new feature to its search engine before the end of March in a bid to make Bing more competitive against Google search.
Rather than providing links to information sites as search engines do at the moment, Bing could instead provide more humanlike answers. These answers would then be displayed similarly to how featured snippets are displayed on search engines, taking away the need for a user to click a link to a website in order to access the information they need.
Despite its revolutionary nature, ChatGPT still has a number of shortcomings. The first is that, unlike search engines, ChatGPT does not continuously scrap the web for new information. This means it can not provide real-time information. Therefore, if new discoveries are made, ChatGPT will still display wrong information until it is updated with the information.
To this extent, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is on record saying that, “it’s a mistake to be relying on [ChatGPT] for anything important right now.” Google, on the other hand, has said that the company will not launch its own rival to ChatGPT because of “reputational risk” The tech giant has issues with existing bias and factuality issues with the AI chatbots and is confident that the time to replace Search is not yet with us.
At the time of writing, ChatGPT is currently free for anyone to try out. Try it out here. However, OpenAI plans to eventually charge for the service, although they haven’t laid it out when they will convert it to a paid service. This might eventually leave Bing as the only way to access parts of ChatGPT for free.
