ChatGPT has really gone viral. Responses from OpenAI’s new chatbot have flooded social media feeds since its launch about a week ago. Within five days, ChatGPT crossed one million users, according to to OpenAI.
Why did it capture our imaginations so much? That’s because ChatGPT directly addresses our anxieties and mythologies about technology — both how it can help us and how it can hurt us, said Lori Witzel, director of TIBCO’s Thought Leadership Group.
“Western first-world culture has a long history of myths—Pygmalion, Pinocchio, Frankenstein—in which the creator’s creativity comes to life,” Witzel said. “Artificial intelligence technologies designed to produce human-like products … fit these narratives and also raise concerns about whether our tools will replace us.”
As more than a million people talk to ChatGPT, AI’s ability to create poems and edit code, as well as, in my case, “What’s a good recipe for French toast?”
That’s, of course, the kind of question traditionally asked of Alphabet-owned Google ( GOOG , GOOGL ), whose search capabilities have long been the only bar in town for most Internet users. Some think pieces quickly emerged, asking whether ChatGPT could really challenge Google.
It’s worth investigating what ChatGPT’s limitations look like. First, ChatGPT is currently only taught up to 2021, so it cannot control or address current events. After all, it’s a chatbot, and the goal is to talk to you — but not necessarily accurately.
“The fact that ChatGPT generates grammatically correct text is partly amazing,” said Reza Zadeh, founder and CEO of AI computer vision company Matroid and assistant professor at Stanford University. “It’s not something they focus on accuracy. Right now, talking to you is something that needs to be done, giving non-serious answers … It’s like we’re moving the goalposts to criticize him.”
However, this does not change the fact that ChatGPT can eventually be used to spread disinformation.
“While ChatGPT is a big milestone in chatbots that work with large language models, among the many challenges that ChatGPT presents is the inability to tell a user when you’re wrong unless you already know the answer,” he said. Credo AI.
“OpenAI has made this limitation clear that ChatGPT sometimes writes answers that sound reasonable but are wrong and nonsensical… One immediate risk that worries me is the rise of AI-driven disinformation, especially on social media and search engines,” he said.
Finally, it is useful to reframe ChatGPT. It’s not a search engine – it’s like an incredibly verbally intelligent person who can sometimes speak with complete confidence about things they know very little about.
“While we’re excited about what ChatGPT can provide, we still understand there’s a problem — it doesn’t know the difference between the truth and the lie,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, a former Google executive and now the founder of Neeva. can and will create a story on the spot. You should think of ChatGPT as an idea generator. It’s amazing to point you in all kinds of directions, especially in art and poetry.”
“Think of ChatGPT as distilling the Internet into this big language model,” Ramaswamy said. “No one in their right mind should look at a tweet and believe it, just as no one should look at ChatGPT’s speech and believe it at face value.”
For now, don’t bet on ChatGPT replacing Google
So will ChatGPT replace Google? Hold your horses, at least until then, experts say.
Nima Schei, founder and CEO of Hummimgbirds AI, said, “ChatGPT replacing Google Search is like a lemon farm replacing a lemon silo by planting lemon trees that will potentially become a lemon farm – it’s possible, but not possible in the short term.” “Google Search has its own advantages, especially the amount of data they have and the greater resources they have to collect data. However, ChatGPT has a superpower, creating human-level two-way communication, which overcomes the limitations of Google Search in capturing human intelligence.”
Witzel agrees, adding that ChatGPT is fundamentally limited for now.
“Since ChatGPT doesn’t search the web, I’m not sure it will replace Google Search, although it can supplement or augment web-based search like Google Search,” he said.
In the long term, there is another point of interest – Microsoft (MSFT) is investing $1 billion in OpenAI. According to Zadeh, Microsoft also owns the Bing search engine, so there may be an eye towards some kind of integration.
However, there is still a fundamental question – how do people want to search? Do they just want a straight answer or do they want a world of options to go through? It’s also complicated, according to Pat Condo, founder and CEO of independent search engine Seekr.
“I believe both options are very important – it all depends on the purpose or what the user is looking for,” he said. “Sometimes people want answers like ‘is it going to rain’ or ‘how far is the pharmacy from my hotel?’ Other times, people want to research, read, and understand available information on a wide range of topics. Mobile searches are focused on specific answers versus desktop searches where a user is researching the best backpack for hiking, for example.”
In conclusion, experts say that even though Chat GPT is a phase, it will not replace Google Search tomorrow. However, the rise and popularity of ChatGPT signals a change, with all the associated promises and pitfalls, a glimpse of where online search tools may be headed in the future.
“While ChatGPT is still a research release with many limitations, it can already play with the imagination of where AI is going—which is exciting, but also serves as a call to action to regulators that we need more safeguards to reduce risk and protect society from its possible and probable harm,” Singh said.
Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Technical Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @agarfinks.
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